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single night’s sleep over Hades, but poor Bertha Rochester bothers me a bit.”
    We went and sat down at our desks.
    “Maybe that’s it,” replied Bowden, idly filling in the Owl crossword. “Perhaps you secretly want to be held accountable for her death. I heard Crometty talking to me for weeks after his murder—I thought I should have been there to back him up— but I wasn’t.”
    “How are you getting along with the crossword?”
    He passed it over and I scanned the answers.
    “What’s a ‘RILK’?” I asked him.
    “It’s a—”
    “Ah, there you are!” said a booming voice. We turned to see Victor Analogy striding across from his office. Head of the Swindon Litera Tecs since who knows when, he was a sprightly seventy-something with a receding hairline and a figure that guaranteed the part of Santa Claus at the SpecOps Christmas party. Despite his jocular nature he could be as hard as nails on occasion and was a good buffer between SO-27 and Braxton Hicks, who was strictly a company man. Analogy guarded our independence closely and regarded all his staff as family, and we thought the world of him. We all said our good mornings and Victor sat on my desk.
    “How’s the PR stuff going, Thursday?”
    “More tedious than Spenser, sir.”
    “That bad, eh? Saw you on the telly last night. Rigged, was it?”
    “Just a little.”
    “I hate to be a bore, but it’s all important stuff. Have a look at this fax.”
    He handed me a sheet of paper, and Bowden read over my shoulder.
    “Ludicrous,” I said, handing the fax back. “What possible benefit could the Toast Marketing Board get from sponsoring us?”
    Victor shrugged.
    “Not a clue. But if they have cash to give away we could certainly do with some of it.”
    “What are you going to do?”
    “Braxton’s speaking to them this afternoon. He’s very big on the idea.”
    “I bet he is.”
    Braxton Hicks’s life revolved around his precious SpecOps budget. If any of us even thought of doing any sort of overtime, you could bet that Braxton would have something to say about it—and something in his case meant “no.” Rumor had it that he had spoken to the canteen about giving out smaller helpings for dinner. He had been known as “Small Portions” in the office ever since—but never to his face.
    “Did you find out who’s been forging and trying to sell the missing ending to Byron’s Don Juan ?” asked Victor.
    Bowden showed him a black-and-white photo of a dashing figure climbing into a parked car somewhere near the airship field. He was extravagantly dressed according to “the Byron Look”—it was quite popular, even amongst non-Byrons.
    “Our prime suspect is a fellow named Byron 2 .”
    Victor looked at the picture carefully, first through his spectacles, then over the top of them.
    “Byron number two, eh? How many Byrons are there now?”
    “Byron 2620 was registered last week,” I told him. “We’ve been following Byron 2 for a month, but he’s smart. None of the forged scraps of Heaven and Earth can be traced back to him.”
    “Wiretap?”
    “We tried, but the judge said that even though Byron 2 ’s surgery to make his foot clubbed in an attempt to emulate his hero was undeniably strange, and then getting his half sister pregnant was plainly disgusting, those acts only showed a fevered Byronic mind, and not necessarily one of intent to forge. We have to catch him inky-fingered, but at the moment he’s off on a tour of the Mediterranean. We’re going to attempt to get a search warrant while he’s away.”
    “So you’re not that busy, then?”
    “What had you in mind?”
    “Well,” began Victor, “it seems there have been a couple more attempts to forge Cardenio. I know it’s small beer for you two but it helps Braxton with his damnable statistics. Would you go and have a look?”
    “Sure,” replied Bowden, knowing full well I would concur. “Got the addresses?”
    He handed over a sheet of paper and bade us