“I’ll just ask you this once,” he said. “So I know I did ask.”

I waited. Someone pushed a cleaning cart past the door. Outside, London was set in frowning concentration, dourly focused on getting through the economic migraine. Heavy on me was the weight of the world’s ability to keep going, producing day after unique day, heaving up wars and conversations, bloodily popping out babies and silently swallowing the dead. The collective human unconscious can’t stand it, the thought of stuff going on forever, so has decided (collectively, unconsciously) to bring the planet to an end. Eco-apocalypse isn’t accident, it’s deep species strategy.

“Don’t do this,” Harley said. “Don’t leave me to myself. I haven’t got what it takes for suicide. You know that. What’s another decade to you? I’ll be dead by then. Just stay.”

“I can’t.”

“You’re a selfish cunt, do you know that?”

“Yes.”

Again he opened his mouth, saw the futility, let it go. He pulled out a wrinkled white hanky and dried his eyes. Very slowly put the glass down and stubbed out the cigarette. When he looked at me I saw his fear of everything beyond this moment. The future held a horror—himself—and he wouldn’t look until he had to, until he had no choice, until I was gone. His face shivered like the water on the flat roofs.

“So what?” he said. “We just say good-bye?”

“We just say good-bye.”

“You’ve got another week. You’ll change your mind.”

“Come here.”

He felt like an old man in my arms, skin and bones in a baggy suit, thinned hair and the smell of scalp. Something medicinal too, tiger balm or Vicks. Out of habit I searched my feelings, turned up sadness, regret, something like loss but also undeniably boredom and a kind of impotence of the heart. My inner voice repeated, enough, enough, enough .

At the door I turned and looked at him. He had nothing to say, or too much. He just stared, wet-eyed, hands heavy, filling as I watched with the sand of his future. Every act of leaving feels like a victory. The thrill of this one was tiny, faint, dud, almost nothing.

Harley remained still, unblinking. Leaving him alone with his conscience was like leaving a child alone with a paedophile.

“You’ve been a good friend to me,” I said. He didn’t respond. I turned, opened the door, stepped out into the hall and closed it behind me.

18

I HAD IMAGINED, crossing the border into Clwyd under a low sky of dark cloud, that finding the exact spot I was attacked a hundred and sixty-seven years ago wouldn’t be easy. I’d pictured hours poring over Ordnance Survey maps and picking local octogenarian brains, flailing in bogs, getting lost in the woods. But this is the twenty-first century. I simply hired a car and drove north from London, then west through Snowdonia National Park to Beddgelert (the dd pronounced as a voiced th in Welsh), a village some five miles south of Snowdon and a comfortable three-mile walk from Beddgelert Forest, where after only a single afternoon exploring I found the clearing in which Charles and I had made our camp all those years ago. From there the twenty paces to the stream, the site of the attack, the line the Hunt or Servants of Light had ridden. I sat on a rock by the bank and smoked a cigarette. That’s all there was to it.

Beddgelert hasn’t much to offer so I booked myself into the Castle Hotel in Caernarfon, a half hour’s drive northwest of the forest, overlooking the unsavoury waters of the Menai Strait.

Five days to kill before dying.

All the practical work was done long ago. The companies pass under the control of their boards. A percentage of profits stream to the charities. Real estate sale proceeds likewise. Personal wealth (I’ve off-loaded the art, the trinkets, the antiquities over the last fifty years) will be divided among certain individuals known to me (though I’m not known to them) by virtue of some outstanding quality: compassion, talent, kindness, humour, conscience. Some of it will go to ordinary folks I just happen to have met and liked. None of it will go to the families of people I’ve killed and eaten for the simple reason that finding out where the money came from (a possibility, no matter how many precautions) would drive them insane, since they wouldn’t want to part with it but would have to and would end up hating the dead person.

There are probably a dozen things you could think of to do if you only had five days left to live. I doubt they’d include visiting the Inigo Jones Tudor Slateworks, or the Caernarfon Air Museum, or Foel Animal Park, or the Sea Zoo. Nonetheless, partly in an act of self-ridicule, partly out of unexpected vacuity, I spent a day taking them in. I ate an ice cream in the drizzle. Fed coins into a delirious fruit machine. Drank a cup of tea in a café full of damp pensioners. I brought this journal up to date. All feeble distraction from the quickening Curse, which, indifferent to the winsome farewell drama, foreplayed my blood in obedience to the swelling moon. And on the subject of swelling and blood, my libido was going nuts. I had thought, given the near failure of my last date with Madeline and the days of sexual quiescence in Cornwall (nothing, not even a hand job), that desire was finally done with me. Thanatos advances, Eros retreats. Not so. By the end of my second day I was walking around in a more or less permanent gurn. To join a queue was to risk arrest.

Pocket Internet consultation revealed Caernarfon served by not one but four escort agencies, with which I made do until, around midnight of Day Three, incredulously taxied two hundred miles at my expense and toting a Louis Vuitton overnight bag, Madeline arrived. I’d promised her triple time and a generous sayonara bonus. Yes, I was Going Away.

“You are so one can short of a six-pack, babes,” she said, when I opened the door. “What are you do ing here?”

“Dying. Here’s some champagne. Drink it and get into bed.”

“Crikey. Can I take my coat off first?”

“If you think it’s necessary, but please hurry.”

Maddy wasn’t the only thing up from London. I’d practically advertised my departure from the capital, so naturally WOCOP surveillance had followed. I’d clocked agents everywhere, though Grainer and Ellis declined to show themselves. I wondered what they thought I was doing, this swanning, this insouciance. To them it must look like prep for the biggest fugitive sleight of hand in history. Visibility this brazen could only be the dummy to an extraordinary escape. God alone knew what machinations they imagined I had planned.