Jasper Fforde - The Eyre Affair

‘Let me speak to him,’ I demanded, my voice rising.

‘I might tell him you called when he wakes up.’

‘Do you want me to come round and bang on the door?’ I asked, my voice rising further. Bowden looked at me from the other side of the desk with an arched eyebrow.

‘Listen here, you stupid bitch,’ said Daisy in a hushed tone in case Landen heard, ‘you could have married Landen and you blew it. It’s all over. Go and find some geeky LiteraTec or something—from what I’ve seen all you SpecOps clowns are a bunch of weirdos.’

‘Now just you listen to—‘

‘No,’ snapped Daisy. ‘You listen. If you try anything at all to interfere with my happiness I’ll wring your stupid little neck!’

The phone went dead. I quietly returned the receiver to its cradle and took my coat from the back of the chair.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Bowden.

‘The shooting range,’ I replied, ‘and I may be some time.’

Bowden placed the ad in the Swindon Globe. It was two days before we all sat down in Victor’s office to compare notes.

‘We’ve had seventy-two calls,’ announced Victor. ‘Sadly, all enquiries about rabbits.’

‘You did price them kind of low, Bowden,’ I put in playfully.

‘I am not very conversant in matters concerning rabbits,’ asserted Bowden loftily. ‘It seemed a fair price to me.’

Victor placed a file on the table. ‘The police finally got an ID on that guy you shot over at Sturmey Archer’s. He had no fingerprints and you were right about his face, Thursday—it wasn’t his own.’

‘So who was he?’

Victor opened the file.

‘He was an accountant from Newbury named Adrian Smarts. Went missing two years ago. No criminal record; not so much as a speeding fine. He was a good person. Family man, churchgoer and enthusiastic charity worker.’

‘Hades stole his will,’ I muttered. ‘The cleanest souls are the easiest to soil. There wasn’t much left of Smarts by the time we shot him. What about the face?’

‘They’re still working on that. It might be harder to identify. According to forensic reports Smarts wasn’t the only person to wear that face.’

I started.

‘So who’s to say he’ll be the last?’

Victor guessed my concern, picked up the phone and called Hicks. Within twenty minutes an SO-14 squad had surrounded the funeral parlour where Smarts’s body had been released to his family. They were too late. The face that Smarts had been wearing for the past two years had been stolen. Security cameras, unsurprisingly, had seen nothing.

The news of Landen’s upcoming wedding had hit me pretty badly. I found out later that Daisy Mutlar was someone he met at a book signing over a year earlier. She was pretty and beguiling, apparently, but a bit overweight, I thought. She had no great mind either, or at least, that’s what I told myself. Landen had said he wanted a family and I guessed he deserved one. In coming to terms with this I had even begun reacting positively to Bowden’s sorry attempts to ask me out to dinner. We didn’t have much in common, except for an interest in who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays. I stared across the desk at him as he studied a small scrap of paper—with a disputed signature scrawled upon it. The paper was original and so was the ink. The writing, sadly, was not.

‘Go on, then,’ I said, recalling our last conversation when we were having lunch together, ‘tell me about Edward De Vere, the Earl of Oxford.’

Bowden looked thoughtful for a moment.

‘The Earl of Oxford was a writer, we can be sure of that. Meres, a critic of the time, mentioned as much in his Palladis Tamia of 1598.’

‘Could he have written the plays?’ I asked.

‘He could have,’ replied Bowden. ‘The trouble is, Meres also goes on to list many of Shakespeare’s plays and credits Shakespeare with them. Sadly that places Oxford, like Derby and Bacon, into the front-man theory, according to which we have to believe that Will was just the beard for greater geniuses now hidden from history.’

‘Is that hard to believe?’

‘Perhaps not. The Red Queen used to believe four impossible things before breakfast and it didn’t seem to do her any harm. The front-man theory is possible, but there’re a few more things in favour of Oxford as Shakespeare.’

There was a pause. The authorship of the plays was something that a lot of people took very seriously, and many fine minds had spent lifetimes on the subject.

‘The theory goes that Oxford and a group of courtiers were employed by the court of Queen Elizabeth to produce plays in support of the government. In this there seems some truth.’

He opened a book and read from an underlined passage.

‘“A crew of courtly makers, noblemen and Gentlemen, who have written excellently well, as it would appear if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest, of which number is first that noble Gentleman, the Earl of Oxford.”‘

He snapped the book shut.

‘Puttenham in 1598. Oxford was given an annual grant of a thousand pounds for just such a purpose, although whether this was for writing the plays or another quite different project it is impossible to tell. There is no positive evidence that it was he who actually penned the plays. A few lines of poetry similar to Shakespeare’s do survive, but it’s not conclusive; neither is the lion shaking a spear on Oxford’s coat of arms.’

‘And he died in 1604,’ I said.

‘Yes, there is that. Front-man theories just don’t seem to work. If you think Shakespeare might have been a nobleman anxious to remain anonymous, I should forget it. If someone else did write the plays I should be looking at another Elizabethan commoner, a man of quite staggering intellect, daring and charisma.’

‘Kit Marlowe?’ I asked.

‘The same.’

There was a commotion on the other side of the office. Victor slammed down the phone and beckoned us over.

‘That was Schitt; Hades has been in touch. He wants us in Hicks’s office in half an hour.’