'Of course,' replied Stiggins, 'we met at your reception.'
'How have you been?' asked Bowden.
Stiggins stared back at him. It was a pointless human pleasantry that Neanderthals never troubled themselves with.
'We have been fine,' replied Stig, forcing the standard answer from his lips. Bowden didn't know it but he was only rubbing Stiggins's nose deeper in sapien-dominated society.
'He means nothing by it,' I said matter-of-factly, which is how Neanderthals like all their speech. 'We need your help, Stig.'
'Then we will be happy to give it, Miss Next.'
'Mean nothing by what?' asked Bowden as we walked across to a bench.
'Tell you later.'
Stig sat down and watched as another SO-13 Land Rover turned up, followed by two police cars to disperse the now curious crowd. He pulled out a carefully wrapped package of grease-proof paper and unfolded it to reveal his lunch – two windfall apples, a small bag of live bugs and a chunk of raw meat.
'Bug?'
'No thanks.'
'So what can we do for the Literary Detectives?' he asked, attempting to eat a beetle that didn't really want him to and was chased twice around Stig's hand until caught and devoured.
'What do you make of this?' I asked as Bowden handed him a picture of the Shaxtper cadaver.
'It is a dead human,' replied Stig. 'Are you sure you won't have a beetle? They're very crunchy.'
'No thanks. What about this?'
Bowden handed him a picture of one of the other dead clones, and then a third.
'The same dead human from a different viewpoint?'
'They're all different corpses, Stig.'
He stopped chewing the uncooked lamb chop and stared at me, then wiped his hands on a large handkerchief and looked more carefully at the photographs.
'How many?'
'Eighteen that we know of
'Cloning entire humans has always been illegal,' murmured Stig. 'Can we see the real thing?'
The Swindon morgue was a short walk from the SpecOps office. It was an old Victorian building which in a more enlightened age would have been condemned. It smelt of formaldehyde and damp and the morgue technicians all looked unhappy and probably had odd hobbies that I would be happier not knowing about.
The lugubrious head pathologist, Mr Rumplunkett, looked avariciously at Mr Stiggins. Since killing a Neanderthal wasn't technically a crime no autopsy was ever performed on one – and Mr Rumplunkett was by nature a curious man. He said nothing but Stiggins knew precisely what he was thinking.
'We're pretty much the same inside as you, Mr Rumplunkett. That was, after all, the reason we were brought into being in the first place.'
'I'm sorry—' began the embarrassed chief pathologist.
'No, you're not,' responded Stig, 'your interest is purely professional and in the pursuit of knowledge. We take no offence.'
'We're here to look at Mr Shaxtper,' said Bowden.
We were led to the main autopsy room, where several bodies were lying under sheets with tags on their toes.
'Overcrowding,' said Mr Rumplunkett, 'but they don't seem to complain too much. This the one?'