The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next 1)

“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 parlor 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 onto 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 White Queen used to believe six 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 favor 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.”

23.

The Drop

I was to make the drop. I’d never held a case containing £10 million before. In fact, I wasn’t then and never have. Jack Schitt, in his arrogance, had assumed he would capture Hades long before he got to look at the money. What a sap. The Gainsborough’s paint was barely dry and the English Shakespeare Company weren’t playing ball. The only part of Acheron’s deal that had been honored was the changing of the motorway services’ name. Kington St. Michael was now Leigh Delamare.

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