“Welcome to Swindon Breakfast with Toad,” announced the TV presenter as we walked in, “with myself, Warwick Fridge, and the lovely Leigh Onzolent—”

“Hello.”

“—bringing you two hours of news and views, fun and competitions to see you into the day. Breakfast with Toad is sponsored by Arkwright’s Doorknobs, the finest door furniture in Wessex.”

Warwick turned to Leigh, who was looking way too glamorous for eight in the morning.

She smiled and continued, “This morning we’ll be speaking to croquet captain Roger Kapok about Swindon’s chances in the SuperHoop-88 and also to a man who claims to have seen unicorns in a near-death experience. Network Toad’s resident dodo whisperer will be on hand for your pet’s psychiatric problems, and our Othello backwards-reading competition reaches the quarterfinals. Later on we talk to Mr. Joffy Next about tomorrow’s potential resurrection with St. Zvlkx, but first the news. The CEO of Goliath has announced contrition targets to be attainable within—”

“Morning, daughter,” said my mother, who had just walked into the kitchen. “I never thought of you as an early riser.”

“I wasn’t until junior turned up,” I replied, pointing at Friday, who was eyeing the porridge pot expectantly, “but if there’s one thing he knows how to do, it’s eat.”

“It’s what you did best when you were his age. Oh,” added my mother absently, “I have to give you something, by the way.”

She hurried from the room and returned with a sheaf of official-looking papers.

“Mr. Hicks left them for you.”

Braxton Hicks was my old boss back at Swindon SpecOps. I had left abruptly, and from the look of his opening letter, it didn’t look like he was very happy about it. I had been demoted to “Literary Detective Researcher,” and it demanded my gun and badge back. The second letter was an outstanding warrant of arrest due to a trumped-up charge over possession of a small amount of illegally owned bootleg cheese.

“Is cheese still overpriced?” I asked my mother.

“Criminal!” she muttered. “Over five hundred percent duty. And it’s not just cheese, either. They’ve extended the duty to cover all dairy products—even yogurt.”

I sighed. I would probably have to go into SpecOps and explain myself. I could beg forgiveness, go to the stressperts and plead posttraumatic stress disorder or Xplkqulkiccasia or something and ask for my old job back. Perhaps if I were to get handy with a nine iron, it might swing things with my golf-mad boss. Outside SpecOps was not a good place to be if I wanted to hunt Yorrick Kaine or lobby the ChronoGuard for my husband back; it would help to have access to all the SpecOps and police databases.

I looked through the papers. I had apparently been found guilty of the cheese transgression and fined five thousand pounds plus costs.

“Did you pay this?” I asked my mother, showing her the court demand.

“Yes.”

“Then I should pay you back.”

“No need,” she replied, adding before I could thank her, “I paid it out of your overdraft—which is quite big now.”

“How . . . thoughtful of you.”

“Don’t mention it. Bacon and eggs?”

“Please.”

“Coming up. Would you get the milk?”

I went to the front door to fetch the milk, and as I bent down to pick it up, there was a whang-thop noise as a bullet zipped past my ear and thudded into the doorframe next to me. I was about to slam the door and grab my automatic when an unaccountable stillness took hold, like a sudden becalming. Above me a pigeon hung frozen in the air, the wingtip feathers splayed as it reached the bottom of a downstroke. A motorcyclist on the road was balancing impossibly still, and passersby were now as stiff and unmoving as statues—even Pickwick had stopped in midwaddle. Time, for the moment at least, had frozen. I knew only one person who had a face that could stop a clock like this—my father. The question was, where was he?

I looked up and down the road. Nothing. Since I was about to be assassinated, I thought it might help to know who was doing the assassinating, so I walked down the garden path and across the road to the alley where de Floss had hidden himself so badly the previous day. It was here that I found my father looking at a small and very pretty blond woman no more than five foot high who was time frozen halfway through the process of disassembling a sniper’s rifle. She was probably in her late twenties and her hair was pulled back into a pony tail held tight with a flower hair tie. I noted with a certain detached amusement that there was a lucky mascot attached to the trigger guard and the stock was covered with pink fur. Dad looked younger than I, but he was instantly recognizable. The odd nature of the time business tended to make their operatives live nonlinear lives—every time I met him, he was of a different age.

“Hello, Dad.”

“You were correct,” he said, comparing the woman’s rigid features with those on a series of photographs, “it’s an assassin, all right.”

“Never mind that for the moment!” I cried happily. “How are you? I haven’t seen you for years!”

He turned and stared at me. “My dear girl, we spoke only a few hours ago!”

“No we didn’t.”

“We did, actually.”

“We did not.”

He stopped, stared at me for a moment and then looked at his watch, shook it and listened to it, then shook it again.

“Here,” I said, handing him the chronograph I was wearing, “take mine.”

“Very nice—thank you. Ah! I stand corrected. Three hours from now. It’s an easy mistake to make. Did you have any thoughts about that matter we discussed?”

“No, Dad,” I said in an exasperated tone. “It hasn’t happened yet, remember?”

“You’re always so linear,” he muttered, returning to his job comparing the pictures to the assassin. “I think you ought to try and expand your horizons a bit—Bingo!”

He had found a picture that matched my assassin and read the label on the back.

“Expensive hit woman working in the Wiltshire-Oxford area. Looks petite and bijou but as deadly as the best of them. She trades under the name ‘The Windowmaker.’ ” He paused. “Should be Widowmaker, shouldn’t it?”

“But I heard that the Windowmaker was lethal,” I pointed out. “A contract with her and you’re deader than corduroy.”

“I heard that, too,” replied my father thoughtfully. “Sixty-seven victims—sixty-eight if she was the one that did Samuel Pring. She must have meant to miss. It’s the only explanation. In any event, her real name is Cindy Stoker.”

This was unexpected. Cindy was married to Spike Stoker, an operative over at SO-17 whom I had worked with a couple of times. I had even given him advice on how best to tell Cindy that he hunted down werewolves for a living—not the choicest profession for a potential husband.

“Cindy is my assassin? Cindy is the Windowmaker?”

“You know her?”

“Of her. Wife of a good friend.”

“Well, don’t get too chummy. She tries and fails to kill you three times. The second time with a bomb under your car on Monday, then next Friday at eleven in the morning—but she fails and you, ultimately, choose for her to die. I shouldn’t really be telling you this, but like we discussed, we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

“What bigger fish to fry?”

“Sweetpea,” he said, giving me his stern “Father knows best” voice, “I’m really not going to go through it all again. Now I have to get back to work—there’s a timephoon brewing in the Dark Ages, and if we don’t sort it out, we’ll be picking anachronisms out of the time line for a century.”

“Wait—you’re working at the ChronoGuard?”

“I’ve told you all about this already! Do try and keep up—you’re going to need all your wits about you over the next week. Now, get back to the house, and I’ll start the world up again.”

He wasn’t in a very chatty mood, but since I would be seeing him later and would find out then what we had just discussed, there didn’t seem a lot of point to talking anyway, so I bade him good-bye, and as I walked up the garden path, time returned to normal with a snap. The pigeon flew on, the traffic continued to move, and everything carried on as usual. Time had stopped so completely that everything my father and I had talked about occupied no time at all. Still, at least this meant I wouldn’t have to be constantly looking over my shoulder if I knew when she would try to get rid of me. Mind you, I wasn’t looking forward to her death. Spike would be severely pissed off.

“What was that noise when you were at the door, Thursday?”

“Probably a car backfiring.”

“Funny,” she said, “I could have sworn it was a high-velocity bullet striking wood. Two eggs or one?”

“Two, please.”

I picked up the newspaper, which was running a five-page exposé revealing that “Danish pastries” were actually brought to Denmark by displaced Viennese bakers in the sixteenth century. “In what other ways,” thundered the article, “have the dishonest Danes made fools of us?” I shook my head sadly and turned to another page.

Mum said she could look after Friday until tea, something I got her to promise before she had fully realized the implications of nappy changing and seen just how bad his manners were at breakfast. He yelled, “Ut enim ad veniam!” which might have meant “Look how far I can throw my porridge!” as a spoonful of oatmeal flew across the kitchen, much to the delight of DH-82, who had learned pretty quickly that hanging around messy toddlers at mealtimes was an extremely productive pastime.

Hamlet came down to breakfast, followed, after a prudent gap, by Emma. They bade each other good morning in such an obvious way that only their serious demeanor kept me from laughing out loud.

“Did you sleep well, Lady Hamilton?” asked Hamlet.

“I did, thank you. My room faces east for the morning light, you know.”

“Ah!” replied Hamlet. “Mine doesn’t. I believe it was once the box room. It has pretty pink wallpaper and a bedside light shaped like Tweety Pie. Not that I noticed much, of course, being fast asleep—on my own.”

“Of course.”

I followed her down to Mycroft’s workshop. Alan had kept Mum’s dodos trapped in the potting shed all night and even now threatened to peck anyone who so much as looked at him “in a funny way.”

“Pickwick!” I said sternly. “Are you going to let your son bully those dodos?”

Pickwick looked the other way and pretended to have an itchy foot. To be honest, she couldn’t control Alan any more than I could. Only half an hour previously, he had chased the postman out of the garden accompanied by an angry plink-plink-plink noise, something even the postman had to admit “was a first.”

Mum opened the side door to the large workshop, and we entered. This was where my uncle Mycroft did all his inventing. It was here that he had demonstrated, amongst many other things, translating carbon paper, a sarcasm early-warning device, Nextian Geometry and, most important to me, the Prose Portal—the method by which I first entered fiction. Mother was always nervous in Mycroft’s lab. Many years ago he’d developed some four-dimensional paper, the idea being that you could print on the same sheet of paper again and again, isolating the different overprintings in marginally different time zones that could be read by the use of temporal spectacles. By going to the nanosecond level, a million sheets of text or pictures could be stored on one sheet of paper in a single second. Brilliant—but the paper looked identical to a standard sheet of 8½-by-11—and it had been a long contentious family argument that my mother had used the irreplaceable prototype to line the compost bucket. It was no wonder she was careful near his inventions.

“What did you want to show me?”

She smiled and led me to the end of the workshop, and there, next to my stuff that she had rescued from my apartment, was the unmistakable shape of my Porsche 356 Speedster hidden beneath a dust sheet.

“I’ve run the engine every month and kept it MOTed for you. I even took it for a spin a couple of times.”

She pulled the sheet off with a flourish. The car still looked slightly shabby after our various encounters, but just the way I liked it. I gently touched the bullet holes that had been made by Hades all those years ago, and the bent front wing where I had slid it into the river Severn. I opened the garage doors.

“Thanks, Mum. Sure you’re all right with the boy Friday?”

“Until four this afternoon. But you have to promise me something.”

“What’s that?”

“That you’ll come to my Eradications Anonymous group this evening.”

“Mum—”

“It will do you good. You might enjoy it. Might meet someone. Might make you forget Linden.”

“Landen. His name’s Landen. And I don’t need or want to forget him.”

“Then the group will support you. Besides, you might learn something. Oh, and would you take Hamlet with you? Mr. Bismarck has a bee in his bonnet about Danes because of that whole silly Schleswig-Holstein thingummy.”

I narrowed my eyes. Could Joffy be right?

“What about Emma? Do you want me to take her, too?”

“No. Why?”

“ . . . er, no reason.”

I picked up Friday and gave him a kiss. “Be good, Friday. You’re staying with Nana for the day.”

Friday looked at me, looked at Mum, stuck his finger up his nose and said, “Sunt in culpa qui officia id est laborum?”

I ruffled his hair, and he showed me a booger he had found. I declined the present, wiped his hand with a hanky, then went to look for Hamlet. I found him in the front garden demonstrating a thrust-and-parry swordfight to Emma and Pickwick. Even Alan had left off bullying the other dodos and was watching in silence. I called out to Hamlet, and he came running.

“Sorry,” said the Prince as I opened the garage doors, “just showing them how that damn fool Laertes gets his comeuppance.”

I showed him how to get into the Porsche, dropped in myself, started the engine and drove off down the hill towards the Brunel Centre.

“You seem to be getting on very well with Emma.”

“Who?” asked Hamlet, unconvincingly vague.

“Lady Hamilton.”

“Oh, her. Nice girl. We have a lot in common.”

“Such as . . . ?”

“Well,” said Hamlet, thinking hard, “we both have a good friend called Horatio.”

We motored on down past the magic roundabout, and I pointed out the new stadium with its four floodlit towers standing tall amongst the low housing.

“That’s our croquet stadium,” I said. “Thirty thousand seats. Home of the Swindon Mallets croquet team.”

“Croquet is a national sport out here?”

“Oh, yes,” I replied, knowing a thing or two about it, since I used to play myself. “It has evolved a lot since the early days. For a start the teams are bigger—ten a side in World Croquet League. The players have to get their balls through the hoops in the quickest possible time, so it can be quite rough. A stray ball can pack a wallop, and a flailing mallet is potentially lethal. The WCL insists on body armor and Plexiglas barriers for the spectators.”

I turned left into Manchester Road and parked up behind a Griffin-6 Lowrider.

“What now?”

“Haircut. You don’t think I’m going to spend the next few weeks looking like Joan of Arc, do you?”

“Ah!” said Hamlet. “You hadn’t mentioned it for a while, so I’d stopped noticing. If it’s all right with you, I’ll just stay here and write a letter to Horatio. Does ‘pirate’ have one t or two?”

“One.”

I walked into Mum’s hairdresser. The stylists looked at my hair with a sort of shocked numbness until Lady Volescamper, who along with her increasingly eccentric mayoral husband constituted Swindon’s most visible aristocracy, suddenly pointed at me and said in a strident tone that could shatter glass:

“That’s the style I want. Something new. Something retro—something to cause a sensation at the Swindon Mansion House Ball!”

Mrs. Barnet, who was both the chief stylist and official gossip laureate of Swindon, kept her look of horror to herself and then said diplomatically, “Of course. And may I say that Her Grace’s boldness matches her sense of style.”

Lady Volescamper returned to her FeMole magazine, appearing not to recognize me, which was just as well—the last time I went to Vole Towers, a hell beast from the darkest depths of the human imagination trashed the entrance lobby.

“Hello, Thursday,” said Mrs. Barnet, wrapping a sheet around me with an expert flourish, “haven’t seen you for a while.”

“I’ve been away.”

“In prison?”

“No—just away.”

“Ah. How would you like it? I have it on good authority that the Joan of Arc look is set to be quite popular this summer.”

“You know I’m not a fashion person, Gladys. Just get rid of the dopey haircut, would you?”

“As madame wishes.” She hummed to herself for a moment, then asked, “Been on holiday this year?”

“And that,” said Hamlet as soon as I came within earshot and making a thrusting motion with his hand, “was when I cried, ‘A rat, a rat!’ and killed the unseen old man. Hello, Thursday—goodness—that’s short, isn’t it?”

“It’s better than it was. C’mon, I’ve got to go and get my job back.”

“Job?” asked Hamlet as we drove off, leaving a very indignant traffic warden who wanted to know what had happened next.

“Yes. Out here you need money to live.”

“I’ve got lots,” said Hamlet generously. “You should have some of mine.”

“Somehow I don’t think fictional kroner from an unspecified century will cut the mustard down at the First Goliath—and put the skull away. They aren’t generally considered a fashion accessory here in the Outland.”

“They’re all the rage where I come from.”

“Well, not here. Put it in this grocery bag.”

I screeched to a halt. “What?”

“That, over there. It’s me!”

Before I could say anything, Hamlet had jumped out of the car and run across the road to a coin-operated machine on the corner of the street. I parked the Speedster and walked over to join him. He was staring with delight at the simple box, the top half of which was glazed; inside was a suitably attired mannequin visible from the waist up.

“It’s called a WillSpeak machine,” I said, passing him a shopping bag. “Here—put the skull in the bag like I asked.”

“What does it do?”

“Officially it’s called a ‘Shakespeare Soliloquy Vending Automaton,’ ” I explained. “You put in two shillings and get a short snippet from Shakespeare.”

“Of me?”

“Yes,” I said, “of you.”

For it was, of course, a Hamlet WillSpeak machine, and the mannequin Hamlet sat looking blankly out at the flesh-and-blood Hamlet standing next to me.

“Can we hear a bit?” asked Hamlet excitedly.

“If you want. Here.”

I dug out a coin and placed it in the machine. There was a whirring and clicking as the dummy came to life.

“To be, or not to be,” began the mannequin in a hollow, metallic voice. The machine had been built in the thirties and was now pretty much worn out. “That is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind—”

Hamlet was fascinated, like a child listening to a tape recording of his own voice for the first time. “Is that really me?” he asked.

“The words are yours—but actors do it a lot better.”

“Actors?”

“Yes. Actors, playing Hamlet.”

He looked confused.

“I don’t understand.”

“Well,” I began, looking around to check that no one was listening, “you know that you are Hamlet, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet?”

“Yes?”

“Well, that’s a play, and out here in the Outland, people act out that play.”

“With me?”

“Of you. Pretending to be you.”

“But I’m the real me?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Ahhh, “ he said after a few moments of deep thought, “I see. Like the whole Murder of Gonzago thing. I wondered how it all worked. Can we go and see me sometime?”

“I . . . suppose,” I answered uneasily. “Do you really want to?”

“Of course. I’ve heard that some people in the Outland think I am a dithering twit unable to make up his mind rather than a dynamic leader of men, and these ‘play’ things you describe will prove it to me one way or the other.”

I tried to think of the movie in which he prevaricates the least. “We could get the Zeffirelli version out on video for you to look at.”

“Who plays me?”

“Mel Gibson.”

Hamlet stared at me, mouth open. “But that’s incredible!” he said ecstatically. “I’m Mel’s biggest fan!” He thought for a moment. “So . . . Horatio must be played by Danny Glover, yes?”

“No, no. Listen: the Lethal Weapon series is nothing like Hamlet.”

“Well,” replied the Prince reflectively, “in that I think you might be mistaken. The Martin Riggs character begins with self-doubt and contemplates suicide over the loss of a loved one but eventually turns into a decisive man of action and kills all the bad guys. Same as the Road Warrior series, really. Is Ophelia played by Patsy Kensit?”

“No,” I replied, trying to be patient, “Helena Bonham Carter.”

He perked up when he heard this. “This gets better and better! When I tell Ophelia, she’ll flip—if she hasn’t already.”

“Perhaps,” I said thoughtfully, “you’d better see the Olivier version instead. Come on, we’ve work to do.”

The WillSpeak Hamlet stopped clicking and whirring and sat silent once more, waiting for the next florin.