'It is a dead human,' replied Stig. 'Are you sure you won't have a beetle? They're very crunchy.'

'No thanks. What about this?'

Bowden handed him a picture of one of the other dead clones, and then a third.

'The same dead human from a different viewpoint?'

'They're all different corpses, Stig.'

He stopped chewing the uncooked lamb chop and stared at me, then wiped his hands on a large handkerchief and looked more carefully at the photographs.

'How many?'

'Eighteen that we know of

'Cloning entire humans has always been illegal,' murmured Stig. 'Can we see the real thing?'

The Swindon morgue was a short walk from the SpecOps office. It was an old Victorian building which in a more enlightened age would have been condemned. It smelt of formaldehyde and damp and the morgue technicians all looked unhappy and probably had odd hobbies that I would be happier not knowing about.

The lugubrious head pathologist, Mr Rumplunkett, looked avariciously at Mr Stiggins. Since killing a Neanderthal wasn't technically a crime no autopsy was ever performed on one – and Mr Rumplunkett was by nature a curious man. He said nothing but Stiggins knew precisely what he was thinking.

'We're pretty much the same inside as you, Mr Rumplunkett. That was, after all, the reason we were brought into being in the first place.'

'I'm sorry—' began the embarrassed chief pathologist.

'No, you're not,' responded Stig, 'your interest is purely professional and in the pursuit of knowledge. We take no offence.'

'We're here to look at Mr Shaxtper,' said Bowden.

We were led to the main autopsy room, where several bodies were lying under sheets with tags on their toes.

'Overcrowding,' said Mr Rumplunkett, 'but they don't seem to complain too much. This the one?'

He threw back a sheet. The cadaver had a high-domed head, deep-set eyes, a small moustache and goatee. It looked a lot like William Shakespeare from the Droeshout engraving on the title page of the first folio.

'What do you think?'

'Okay,' I said slowly, 'he looks like Shakespeare, but if Victor wore his hair like that, so would he.'

Bowden nodded. It was a fair point.

'And this one wrote the Basil Brush sonnet?'

'No; that particular sonnet was written by this one.'

With a flourish Bowden pulled back the sheet from another cadaver to reveal a corpse identical to the first, only a year or two younger. I stared at them both as Bowden revealed yet another.

'So how many Shakespeares did you say you had?'

'Officially, none. We've got a Shaxtper, a Shakespoor and a Shagsper. Only two of them had any writing on them, all have ink-stained fingers, all are genetically identical, and all died of disease or hypothermia brought on by self-neglect.'

'Down-and-outs?'

'Hermits is probably nearer the mark.'

'Aside from the fact that they all have left eyes and one size of toe,' said Stig, who had been examining the cadavers at length, 'they are very good indeed. We haven't seen this sort of craftsmanship for years.'