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I could see Victor Analogy looking through a file with another officer. I walked to where he could see me and waited for him to finish.
“Ah, Next! Welcome to the office. Give me a moment, will you?”
I nodded and Victor carried on.
“. . . I think Keats would have used less flowery prose than this and the third stanza is slightly clumsy in its construction. My feeling is that it’s a clever fake, but check it against the Verse Meter Analyzer.”
The officer nodded and walked off. Victor smiled at me and shook my hand.
“That was Finisterre. He looks after poetry forgery of the nineteenth century. Let me show you around.”
He waved a hand in the direction of the bookshelves.
“Words are like leaves, Thursday. Like people really, fond of their own society.”
He smiled.
“We have over a billion words here. Reference mainly. A good collection of major works and some minor ones that you won’t even find in the Bodleian. We’ve got a storage facility in the basement. That’s full as well. We need new premises but the Litera Tecs are a bit underfunded, to say the least.”
He led me around one of the desks to where Bowden was sitting bolt upright, his jacket carefully folded across the back of his chair and his desk so neat as to be positively obscene.
“Bowden you’ve met. Fine fellow. He’s been with us for twelve years and concentrates on nineteenth-century prose. He’ll be showing you the ropes. That’s your desk over there.”
He paused for a moment, staring at the cleared desk. I was not supernumerary. One of their number had died recently and I was replacing him. Filling a dead man’s shoes, sitting in a dead man’s chair. Beyond the desk sat another officer, who was looking at me curiously.
“That’s Fisher. He’ll help you out with anything you want to know about legal copyright and contemporary fiction.”
Fisher was a stocky man with an odd squint who appeared to be wider than he was tall. He looked up at me and grinned, revealing something left over from breakfast stuck between his teeth.
Victor carried on walking to the next desk.
“Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prose and poetry are looked after by Helmut Bight, kindly lent to us by our opposite number across the water. He came here to sort out a problem with some poorly translated Goethe and became embroiled with a neo-Nazi movement attempting to set Friedrich Nietzsche up as a fascist saint.”
Herr Bight was about fifty and looked at me suspiciously. He wore a suit but had removed his tie in the heat.
“SO-5, eh?” asked Herr Bight, as though it were a form of venereal disease.
“I’m SO-27 just like you,” I replied quite truthfully. “Eight years in the London office under Boswell.”
Bight picked up an ancient-looking volume in a faded pigskin binding and passed it across to me.
“What do you make of this?”
I took the dusty tome in my hand and looked at the spine.
“The Vanity of Human Wishes,” I read. “Written by Samuel Johnson and published in 1749, the first work to appear in his own name.”
I opened the book and flicked through the yellowed pages. “First edition. It would be very valuable, if—”
“If?—” repeated Bight.
I sniffed the paper and ran a finger across the page and then tasted it. I looked along the spine and tapped the cover, finally dropping the heavy volume on the desk with a thump.
“—if it were real.”
“I’m impressed, Miss Next,” admitted Herr Bight. “You and I must discuss Johnson some time.”
“It wasn’t as difficult as it looked,” I had to admit. “Back in London we’ve got two pallet-loads of forged Johnsonia like this with a street value of over three hundred thousand pounds.”
