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substitute got spilled across not the fake, but one of the volumes of a real first edition which we'd obtained—on the pretext of potential purchase—to study in the production of the copy. Whatever the drug-induced phantoms had done to my forger's mind, the turps had done real damage to the morocco leather cover of the original. It left us with a number of options. We could pay the seventy-eight-thousand asking price to the vendor; we could replace and age-simulate the damaged cover before returning it; or we could replicate two copies and keep the genuine but damaged item and retain it for sale in a couple of years' time.

    We chose the latter option, even though it set back our trading plans: hence my milk-round visits to Ellis, Antonia and Otto. As a legitimate dealer it was easy enough for me to stall the vendor of the authentic copy; I just didn't want the extra time to allow my buyers to either go off the boil, or even to discover there was "another" copy on the market at the same time. As any salesman will tell you, the art of selling is the art of closing.

    Forging rare books is not like forging Art. The original print run for the first edition of Pride and Prejudice is uncertain. Perhaps 1500 copies were produced. Where do all these copies go? Book lovers are notorious hoarders. Even assuming three-quarters of the copies were used for lighting fires and stuffing Victorian dolls, no one is surprised when a house-clearance turns up an extra couple of copies for auction. Unlike a singular painting by Turner, or a Constable.

    Naturally, a book has to cross a certain price threshold before faking becomes lucrative. The Pride and Prejudice edition, like many books from that period, was published in three individual volumes: the materials alone required to replicate and age the paper and to season the binding, not to mention access to museum-effect print machinery, will set you back several thousand pounds. Plus the multiplicity of skills required dangerously expands the number of people who know what you're up to. So you need a genius who can do the lot.

    "I'm a donkey. I'm so sorry, William." Ian Grimwood was a remarkable painter, sculptor and printer, and no hee-haw. Sadly no one, or at least no paying person, shared his artistic visions.

    "Accidents happen," I said, clearing a space for myself to sit down in his chaotic studio in Farringdon.

    He sat rubbing a large, scarred hand across the dome of his shaved head. I'm sure that he would never be the sort of man to apply kohl or eye-liner, but, exaggerated by the baldness of his head, it always seemed that way. His grey eyes had a glitter like a rime of frost on a winter pavement. "I wish you hadn't told me all about those boys and girls."

    He meant GoPoint. The homeless. He'd negotiated me down when I told him what I was doing with my share of the loot. I'd tried to get him to stay with his fairly priced original pitch but he wouldn't. He'd been homeless himself once, he told me. I could believe it. He was the working-class hero that Ellis kept pretending to be. Unlike Ellis he carried the wounds, the way an old boxer carries every single punch he took in the ring, the way an old political campaigner carts an economy of hope.

    "That's the trouble with this game, Stinx," I said. I held up my hands. I had some dye or paint on my fingers. "It gets you all moral. It's horrible."

    He threw me an oily rag. "I hope you keep schtum about my good deeds. I've got my reputation to think about."

    "Not back on the marching powder, are you, Stinx?"

    "Who you been talking to? It wasn't coke, it was crystal meth. A moment of stupidity. A tiny indiscretion. Won't happen again, Your Honour. And I mean it."

    "You serious?"

    "Serious. I 'ad a dark night of the soul, William." He looked out of the big, dirt-smeared windows of his studio. It was a converted Gothic warehouse and we could see the roofs and chimneys of Clerkenwell sweeping away from us. "Lucy left me