'Good to see you, Major. I had a tip-off that this address might hold a few copies of the banned books.'

I passed him a scrap of paper and he read it eagerly.

'The Albert Schweitzer Memorial Library? We'll be on to it right away.'

And he saluted smartly once again, turned on his heel and was gone.

I made my way up to the LiteraTecs' office and found Bowden in the process of packing Karen Blixen's various collections of stories into a cardboard box.

'Hi!' he said, tying up the box with string. 'How are things with you?'

'Pretty good. I'm back at work.'

Bowden smiled, put down the scissors and string and shook my hand.

'That's very good news indeed! Heard the latest? Daphne Farquitt has been added to the list of banned Danish writers.'

'But . . . Farquitt isn't Danish!'

'Her father's name was Farquittsen, so it's Danish enough for Kaine and his idiots.'

It was an interesting development. Farquitt's books were pretty dreadful but burning was still a step too far. Just.

'Have you found a way to get all these banned books out of England?' asked Bowden, running some tape across a box of Out of Africas. 'With Farquitt's books and all the rest of the stuff that's coming in, I think we'll need closer to ten trucks.'

'It's certainly on my mind,' I replied, having not done anything about it at all.

'Excellent! We'd like to take a convoy through as soon as you give the word. Now, what do you want me to brief you on first? The latest Capulet versus Montague drive-by shooting or which authors are next up for a random dope test?'

'Neither,' I replied. 'Tell me everything you know about cloned Shakespeares.'

'We've had to put that on "low priority". It's intriguing, to be sure, but ultimately pointless from a law-and-order point of view – anyone involved in their sequencing will be too dead or too old to go for trial.'

'It's more of a BookWorld thing,' I responded, 'but important, I promise.'

'Well, in that case,' began Bowden, who knew me too well to think I'd waste his time or my own, 'we have three Shakespeares on the slab at the moment, all aged between fifty and sixty – put those Hans Christian Andersen books in that box, would you? If they were cloned it was way back in the poorly regulated days of the thirties, when there was all sorts of nonsense going on, when people thought they could engineer Olympic runners with four legs, swimmers with real fins, that sort of thing. I've had a brief trawl through the records. The first confirmed WillClone surfaced in 1952 with the accidental shooting of a Mr Shakstpear in Tenbury Wells. Then there's the unexplained death of a Mr Shaxzpar in 1958, Mr Shagxtspar in 1962 and a Mr Shogtspore in 1969. There are others, too—'

'Any theories as to why?'