Call it an aesthetic judgement. One admits beauty to consummate sadism, but this confused pudding of cruelty was an offence. Dez and Georgie, at least, wobbled with sentimental notions: blue-collar fellowship; the Queen; family; Mum; graft; this sceptred isle. Match days would find these two Englishmen in full voice on the terraces, open-armed, in tears. By contrast Terry had depth but lacked the courage and vision that might have usefully plumbed past it and out into the world of others. His imagination would stick forever at himself. I had a bizarre little image of him sitting on the toilet, face slack from absorption in his own schemes—then I was moving.

Fast. Laughably too fast for them. Georgie was dead before the other two even noticed. I’d torn his throat out (redundantly since I’d already broken his neck) and still had most of its wet tubing in my left hand as I approached Terry and Dez. There was nothing to be said. For me this was just the relief of walking out of a bad play. Dez tried to run. Terry sat down somewhat in slow motion, mouth open, then made an attempt to get up on noodle legs. I took one bite out of Dez’s midriff as his life slipped away, swallowed, got a flash of a cobbled street corner and a plain blond woman’s moist frowning face—but stopped. I’d fed to saturation already. You ingest a life, trust me, it fills you. Terry watched everything like someone who couldn’t quite assimilate the surprise party even after everyone had jumped out and shouted surprise. He did say, as I stood over him trailing the warm sausages of Dez’s intestines, Please. Please .

Harley, their victim, had dragged himself a few feet away and stalled. I squatted next to him. He was at the pitch of fear that resembles calm. I very gently eased the gag from his mouth, pressed my finger, my awful hybrid finger— shshsh —against his lips. He nodded, or shuddered in revulsion, at any rate didn’t make a sound. I found his trousers in the doorway of the tomb, brought them to him. His face was a mob of glistening swellings. The left eye was plum-fat and gummed shut. The right tried to watch me. Untying his hands took a wearying while, what with my hands. His three broken fingers made getting the trousers on a dreamy labour. I daren’t risk helping him with them. He was too close to the edge of himself. I remained on my haunches a few feet away. It occurred to me that I hadn’t thought past ridding him of his attackers. Had he run or walked or crawled away I suppose I would have let him, though it would have meant immediate flight for me (this night’s work was bad enough now that I’d killed on my own doorstep) but he didn’t. He struggled to his feet, took three or four steps, then collapsed, unconscious.

The sky said maybe half an hour till dawn. I hadn’t made much of a mess, considering. Quickly I got bodies and gore into the Cortina. The sleeve of Dez’s shirt made a fuse, worked into the tank with a twig. By the grace of the random universe a stainless steel Ronson was in Terry’s pocket. I picked Harley up, slung him over my shoulder, lit the sleeve and ran.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

5

I PHONED HARLEY from the Zetter’s lobby.

“They’re not onto me,” he said. “I just got a call from Farrell. They didn’t know you were here. They weren’t following you, they were following the other chap. Wasn’t even the London unit. It was one of the French. I could have been at home in bed , I hope you realise.”

My young man, Paul Cloquet, had been under WOCOP’s Paris surveillance for a month. “Lightweight stuff,” Harley said. “He’d been clocked in the wrong place once too often. Plus he was having it off with Jacqueline Delon, apparently.” Jacqueline Delon is heiress to the Delon Media fortune, also a compulsive occultist and borderline wacko. I saw her once in the flesh ten years ago leaving the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai. She would have been in her mid-thirties then, a lean, immaculately cosmeticised redhead in a tight-fitting green dress, big sunglasses, a thin-lipped mouth suggesting outer amusement over inner boredom. I’d imagined alluring espresso breath and slight constipation, psyche a compressed mass of Freudian maggots. Her father, who’d started in shipping, was a renowned Sadean debauchee. Allegedly she’d inherited his tastes as well as his fortune. “The French agent wasn’t even supposed to be in the UK,” Harley said. “He was supposed to call and let us take over from Portsmouth. But this is the French. They think we’re all incompetent queers.”

“You mean ‘They think we’re all incompetent queers.’ ”

“Hilarious. Anyway, fuck knows how but it turns out Cloquet had been watching you in Paris and followed you here. Fancied making a name for himself with a big scalp. My guess is he’s a rejected WOCOP applicant with a pomme frite on his shoulder. The French operative followed him here and ended up, vicariously, as it were, following you.”

“That’s not possible,” I said. “If this knob had been following me in Paris I’d have known. He’s not very good.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Ice cubes clinked in a glass. Harley sipped, swallowed. Around me the Zetter’s lobby was warm and softly lit. The murmur and tinkle of the still-serving bar was a great reassurance. Two crisp-bloused young women were stationed at reception. When I’d walked in they’d smiled at me as if my arrival was a wholesome erotic surprise. The point of civilisation is so that one can check in to a quality hotel. “Well, he managed it somehow, Jacob, I assure you. I’ve just got off the phone with Farrell at HQ. The French agent identified you and—belatedly—called us. Trust me, WOCOP knows you’re here, but only as of ten minutes ago.”

I wasn’t convinced, but Harley sounded exhausted and I couldn’t bring myself to worry him further. It was true I’d been preoccupied in Paris. One of my companies was involved in a large takeover and I’d had too much contact with my human proxies for comfort. It was just possible, I told myself, that I might, with a headful of irritating practicalities, have missed a tail, even the moron with the Magnum. The bullets of which, Harley had also confirmed, were pure Mexican silver. Whoever Cloquet was, he knew the nature of his quarry.

“Obviously we oughtn’t meet face-to-face for a while,” Harley said.

“What while? In twenty-seven days I’ll be dead.”

Quiet on his end. Remorse on mine.

“Don’t you trust me anymore, Jake?”

“I’m sorry. Forget it.”