These and other practicalities (wrapping and tying the body, finding stones and junk to weight it, downloading the shipping lanes and working out where to make the drop) did what it’s their job to do in the face of death: demanded small actions that stopped you giving yourself entirely to the loss. Nonetheless reality kept refreshing its page for me, this new version without Cloquet in it. There’s nothing so mundane it can’t speak the new absence: a teaspoon; a TV ad; the shadow of a bird passing overhead. For a short while a sore formed where murder rubbed against bereavement. Vestigial circuitry said killing and eating people disqualified me from grief. But wulf did what it does: Simply insisted. Simply burned through. Simply defied. The same shrugging, grinning continuance. The nature of life. The nature of the beast.

We waited until after midnight then took the Sirius (a thirty-five-foot cabin cruiser cop-show education said was normally home to bikini’d escorts tanning between drug lord blow-jobs) out into the Tyrrhenian Sea. Lucy, whose Henley-on-Thames family had had boats, drove, though Walker had been given the basics by the bandit at the rental office. Trish was with me, Madeline and the kids in the stern, a luxurious snug of waxed walnut and cream leather, chrome fittings and trim. Madeline hadn’t officially cancelled her Spanish arrangements but it was known between us she’d stay with us now for the kill. (The kill? Oh, yes. Have no illusions. The hunger treats everything apart from its own gratification with egalitarian indifference. Depressed? Heartbroken? Bereaved? It’s all one to wulf. Full moon rises. You change. You need what you need, so you do what you do. The kill—like the show—must go on.)

“D’you think he’d hate being buried at sea?” Madeline asked me. It was much cooler on the water, half an hour out from the harbour. We’d passed the dark little islands: Zannone, Ponza, Palmarola, Ventotene and tiny Santo Stefano. The sky was black and star-crammed and low. It felt artificial, like a planetarium. The sudden nearness to it and the smell of the water had woken us back up to the honourable alive finiteness of our bodies, bare hands and throats and faces and the fresh salt air around them. “I mean I know it’s the safest thing,” Madeline said, “but it seems so fucking lonely.”

I’d had the same thought. I didn’t recall Cloquet ever stating burial preferences, but the sea seemed wrong for him, somehow. You tell yourself not to be stupid—the dead don’t care because the dead can’t care (unless of course they’re the dead you’ve eaten, who find a curious cramped afterlife in you)—but still, some people you can imagine happy enough in a coffin being gradually reclaimed for the earth by bugs, others going into the fire and sighing away in a quick consummation, some—equipped with robust atheism or black humour—content to become the freshman prank-fodder of medical science. What I couldn’t imagine was Cloquet being okay all alone in billions of tons of dark water, the prey of fish, big and small.

Which thinking brought Quinn’s book back. Death. Spirits. Gods. Underworlds. Afterlives. The possibility of someone, somewhere, knowing what it was all about. The hope of seeing Jake again, albeit in hell.

“I don’t like it, either,” I said to Madeline. “But I don’t think we have a choice.” A land burial was too risky. Bodies got found. Inquests got opened. Questions got asked. And we didn’t have time.

“I know it’s not going to make any difference to him,” Madeline said, lighting a Winston for something to do. “I know that. I just … I don’t like the thought of him all alone down there. In the dark.”

Lucy had said it would take us a couple of hours to reach the coordinates Walker had picked, almost equidistant from the Italian mainland, Sardinia to the northwest and Sicily to the southeast, but the whole day since the morning had hung in dream or imaginal time. The twins were quiet again, after the brief excitement of Going On The Boat. It had sidelined the other fact, temporarily. But the pack mood had dragged them back to it. When I’d told them Cloquet was gone—dead, I made myself use the word—they’d both wanted to see him. Maddy and I cleaned and covered him as best we could but there was no disguising the violence of his death. Zoë didn’t cry until she took his hand and found it cold. She knows what death is, of course. She’s watched me kill. She’s eaten the flesh, lapped the blood, gnawed the bones. But that’s them. The humans. I doubt she’d ever had Cloquet in the same category, even though that’s what he was. We’re like those racists who exempt their favourite Indian waiter: No, not you, Raj. You’re all right. Lorcan had startled me by asking: Where will he go?—until I realised it wasn’t a metaphysical question. He meant: Where will you put him? He’s a very practical child—but he’s not altogether cold. Denial kept coming and going in his face like the sun going in and out of cloud.

Now, as Lucy cut the engine and the boat came to unrestful rest on the swell, both children drew close to me, one at each leg. Walker and Lucy came down from the upper deck. Madeline tossed her cigarette into the water. Comedy, of course, lives for serious moments. Manhandling the corpse with its weights onto the gunwale we could feel the sprites of farce dying to get a look-in, the misbalance that would see us dropping him prematurely, or one of the chained stones crashing onto someone’s foot.

“Does anyone want to say anything?” Walker asked. He, Trish and Lucy had stepped back a little. Only Maddy and I held the body in place. What was there to say? Here we commit to the waves the body of Paul Cloquet, abused child, former male model, drug-addict, lately human familiar and conspirator to werewolf murder …

“I know it doesn’t count for much,” Lucy said, “but at least it’s a beautiful night.”

Which turned out to be all the eulogy he needed. For a few moments Madeline and I kept our hands on the body, then, feeling each other knowing it was now, now, let’s let him go, oh God, goodbye, goodbye, sorry, sorry, I love you (impossible in the moment’s meld to separate our thoughts or the feeling of fracture in her my our chest)—we let him go. Pushed gently, firmly, until the weight rolled, passed its fulcrum (we shared a horror-flash of his eyes suddenly opening under the tarp, Where am I? What the fuck)—then dropped the dozen feet into the sea.

22

THE OBSCENITY AND sadness and inevitability over the next two days was that we didn’t talk about what it could or would or did mean that Madeline was sticking around for the kill. She tried. Not out loud, not even face to face. I was in the bath the morning after the “funeral” (wulf drives me there with its lashings-out and rakings and swipes) dosed up with codeine and grass and scotch. I felt her outside the door. She had her back and palms flush to the wall. I thought how good her trim waist would feel to Walker in his hands.