relatives. There’s a solicitor in Holborn, but since I’ve no intention of getting involved in a homicide investigation there’s little point in contacting him. Instead I wear my deceased friend’s clothes and drink his supply and pass the tight-wound time with his books. Of late I’ve found myself leaning, at idle moments, on his bone-handled cane.
I have little truck with my minders, who’ve been schooled to keep shtoom, and in any case I’m not disposed to chat. A few words exchanged with the arrival of cigarettes or firewood, but otherwise I remain mute and they talk among themselves, quietly, over their headsets. There’sa man stationed on every floor. The miserable roof detail rotates, since no one wants it. I’ve offered to take a turn myself (the Hunger with no fresh air is a soft close hell) but no dice. Sorry, chief, can’t be done. This is Russell, the one responsible for lopping off Laura Mangiardi’s head back in Cornwall, who has an appealing liveliness and who is by now so bored that he
Outside, London goes about its business like a virile degenerate old man. By the fire’s light I sit in the window seat with a straight Macallan (two bottles remain from a case of twelve) and a Camel, watching the traffic—sudden halts and surges like blood through a complex valve—and the self-involved comings and goings of humans. As always most are full of energy, riddled with their own details, asimmer with schemes and regrets, fears, secrets, hungers, sins. Occasionally love. A very young dark-haired couple came out of a deli, not dreamily or holding hands or in any way obviously rapt but deep in conversation and glimmering with the shared wealth of each other. My in- love heart tautened to see it. In love. Oh, indeed I have the condition. Verily, reader, I am fully, absurdly sick. Life, grinning like a great white, is enjoying the joke: Years of incrementally getting ready for death and now all he wants is life. Come on, Jake, you’ve got to laugh.
I can’t. Not with my in-love heart on perpetual pleading duty, inwardly audible at every gap in my self- distraction:
My inner dead are asleep, sleeping very badly, dreaming of release. Love, it appears, has the power to force them under. They toss and turn. Their murmur builds, threatens a swarm into wakefulness, dies back. Love’s crude spell holds them down, just. Arabella’s ghost endures in seared wakefulness, knowing something’s over. I keep turning away from her. I keep turning my face away. For the first time in a hundred and sixty-seven years a hundred and sixty-seven years ago doesn’t seem like yesterday. For the first time in a hundred and sixty-seven years the present matters more than the past.
It’s seemed, these thirteen days, that I’ve left real time behind, drifted into a suspension or loop where seconds bulge and minutes warp, taking their normal shape only when I hear Talulla’s voice on the phone.•
It’s seemed. Until a couple of hours ago. Ellis has been.
I was pouring myself a drink when the library door opened and he entered, smelling of wet London. He had a painful-looking stye on his left eye and was wearing an excess of ChapStick. The effect was of a creepily humanised waxwork. “Wouldn’t mind keeping you company with one of those, Jake,” he said, before taking the armchair opposite the couch, which received him with a leather gasp. “It’s miserable out there.” I poured a second Scotch and handed it to him, suppressing a shudder when our fingertips met at the glass. “Jiminy,” he said, after slug and lip-smack. “That’s better.”
The impulse to do violence to the man was powerful, reflexive and held absolutely—Talulla on her bunk, eyes wide in the TV light, trying to see through the wall, the night, the unknown miles, to me—in check. I put another log on the fire, pokered it a bit, pointlessly, then sat down on the couch, facing him. Obedience. You keep her alive with obedience.
“Okay,” he said. “Operational instructions. Two days from now, on Wednesday morning at nine a.m. precisely you ring the WOCOP office in Marylebone on this—here: It’s a completely clean phone with a trace blocker. Don’t mix it up with the other one. Grainer will be at the office. You won’t get him, obviously, you’ll get the usual bullshit from whoever’s on reception. You tell them to give Grainer the message to call you on the clean number in one hour, then you hang up. Grainer will call.”
“How do you know?”
“Jeez, Jacob, just
“Okay, okay.”
“I’m under pressure, dude.”
“Okay. I’m sorry.”
He closed his eyes for a moment. Held the heel of his hand against the stye. “When he calls you, you set the meet. Full moon’s Friday, moonrise 18:07. This you know, obviously. Don’t let him change the location. Wales. Your forest, okay? We’re set up for that. You head out for the Pyrenees or someplace and we’re screwed. Got it?”
“Got it. When do I see Talulla?”
No reply. The blood drained from my scalp. My knees and hands were adrenaline-rich, giddily ready to do something. There was nothing I could do. “I have to see her,” I said. Then added, with no need to pretend careful desperation, “Please. For God’s sake.”
Ellis exhaled, heavily. The brightness, the look of heightened sensuality, was, I now saw, exhaustion. I hadn’t realised he was so near the edge. “Oy, Jake,” he said, shaking his head, like a benevolent rabbi I’d disappointed with my weak will. “Impatience. Seriously. I know this is hard for you …” He glazed over. Drifted a moment. Went through something in his impenetrable interior … “Actually I
The feel of the poker I’d used was still phantomly there in my hand. Perfect for splintering a human skull. I didn’t move.
“Okay, listen,” he said. “The hotel you stayed at in Caernarfon, the Castle Hotel. You’re booked in there Thursday night. Same room. The room that overlooks the street. You get there Thursday and wait for my call. You stay in the room. You don’t go anywhere or see anyone. No hookers, nothing.”
Again I thought of Maddy—or Poor Maddy, as she’s become in my lately sentimentalised memory, her terrible comprehension (and flawed denial) when Grainer had said, He’s a werewolf, honey. On the back of which flashback something suddenly nagged—but I had no time for it.
“You’ll bring her to the room?” I said.
“No, Jake, we won’t bring her to the room. You just check in and wait.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Ellis. Seriously. I’m not—” I stopped. Ellis sat very still, the awful long-fingered white hands at rest on his knees. “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry. The feelings. God dammit.”
He rolled his head on his neck a couple of times, easing tension. I held my tongue between my teeth. To my good fortune Russell appeared in the doorway. Ellis looked up.
“Land Rover went past again, sir,” Russell said. “You told us to let you know.”
“Okay,” Ellis said. “Get a trace on the plate. It’s probably nothing.”
“On it, boss.”
“And tell Chris I’m coming out, will you?”
“Roger that.”
“What Land Rover?” I asked, after Russell had gone.
“It’s nothing,” Ellis said. “Been seen twice. Now three times. Probably just a local resident. These guys are
