'I'd like Mel Gibson to play me,' said Zhark thoughtfully.

'I don't think Gibson does bad guys,' I told him. 'You'd probably be played by Geoffrey Rush or someone.'

'That wouldn't be so bad. Is that cake going begging?'

'Help yourself.'

Zhark cut a large slice of Battenberg, took a bite and continued:

'Okay, here's the deal: we managed to get the Polonius family to attend arbitration over their unauthorised rewriting of Hamlet.'

'How did you achieve that?'

'Promised Ophelia her own book. All back to normal – no problem.'

'So . . . I can send Hamlet back?'

'Not quite yet,' replied Zhark, trying to hide his unease by pretending to find a small piece of fluff on his cape. 'You see, Ophelia has now got her knickers in a twist about one of Hamlet's infidelities – someone she thinks is called Henna Appleton. Have you heard anything about this?'

'No. Nothing. Nothing at all. Not a thing. Don't even know anyone called Henna Appleton Why?'

'I was hoping you could tell me. Well, she went completely nuts and threatened to drown herself in the first act rather than the fourth. We think we've got her straightened out. But while we were doing this there was a hostile takeover.'

I cursed aloud and Zhark jumped. Nothing was ever straightforward in the BookWorld. Book mergers, where one book joined another to increase the collective narrative advantage of their own mundane plotlines, were thankfully rare but not unheard of. The most famous merger in Shakespeare was the conjoinment of the two plays Daughters of Lear and Sons of Gloucester into King Lear. Other potential mergers such as Much Ado about Verona and A Midsummer Night's Shrew were denied at the planning stage and hadn't taken place. It could take months to extricate the plots, if indeed it was possible at all. King Lear resisted unravelling so strongly we just let it stand.

'So what merged with Hamlet?'

'Well, it's now called The Merry Wives of Elsinore, and features Gertrude being chased around the castle by Falstaff while being outwitted by Mistress Page, Ford and Ophelia. Laertes is the king of the fames and Hamlet is relegated to a sixteen-line sub-plot where he is convinced Dr Caius and Fenton have conspired to kill his father for seven hundred pounds.'

I groaned.

'What's it like?'

'It takes a long time to get funny and when it does everyone dies.'

'Okay,' I conceded, 'I'll try and keep Hamlet amused. How long do you need to unravel the play?'

Zhark winced and sucked in air through his teeth in the way heating engineers do when quoting on a new boiler.

'Well, that's the problem, Thursday. I'm not sure that we can do it all. If this had happened anywhere but the original we could have just deleted it. You know the trouble we had with King Lear? Well, I don't see that we're going to have any better luck with Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.'