“What for?” I asked.

I heard the shick of Harley’s malachite Zippo and his first intemperate drag. “That’s what we’re not clear on,” he said. “He claims he’s a free agent with a grudge against werewolves, but he’s been fornicating with Jacqueline Delon for the last year so it can’t be that simple. Trouble is he’s somewhat gaga. High as a kite when we picked him up. Farrell told me he’d enough coke on him to get a horse airborne. My guess is even cleaned up he’s borderline psychotic. In any case Madame Delon’s the last person to be ordering a hit on a werewolf. She loves you lot.” He caught himself. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Bad choice of words.”

“Forget it,” I said. I sniffed my Scotch. It was supposed to be Oban but it didn’t taste right. “What about the WOCOP agent tracking him? Did you talk to him?”

“Broussard,” Harley said. “He’s back in France. I didn’t speak to him, but Farrell did. Story confirmed: He was keeping an eye on Cloquet, went out of his jurisdiction, realised Cloquet was tailing you , and rather sheepishly called us in. Jake, seriously, stop worrying. I’m fine. We’re fine. No one knows.”

I’d left my room to call Harley in case Ellis had planted a bug I’d been unable to find, though I’d spent two hours looking. Perhaps I was being paranoid. Either way I felt tired, suddenly, weighed down again by the saddlebags of if s and then s, the swag of dead currency. There’s an inner stink comes up at times of all the meat and blood that’s passed down my gullet, the offal I’ve buried my snout in, the guts I’ve rummaged and gorged on. Harley’s crispness reminded me we weren’t seeing this the same way.

“Okay, listen,” he said, as if with clairvoyance. “We’ve got to get you sorted. It’s going to take me a week, maybe ten days to get a solid out in place. That’s lousy, I know, but in this climate everything’s got to be quadruple-checked. I’m thinking—”

“Harley, stop.”

“Jake, I’m not going to keep having this argument.”

“Funny, isn’t it, how now that it’s come to this we both always knew it would come to this?”

“Please don’t.”

One develops an instinct for letting silence do the heavy lifting. In the three, four, five seconds that passed without either of us speaking, the many ways the conversation could go came and went like time-lapse film of flowers blooming and dying. When it was over all the relevant information was in. Paradoxically, it renewed our licence to pretend.

“Fuck you, Jake,” Harley said. “This is how it’s going to work. I’m getting you an out anyway. If you’re still bent on this absurd suicidal melodrama when the time comes then you needn’t avail yourself of it. But it’ll be there. It’ll be there.”

Pity and irritation curdled, gave me an inkling of the energy I’d need to fight him. Well, let be. He needed this for himself. I was secondary. This is what I’ve reduced him to: a human whose raison d’être is keeping a werewolf alive.

“Okay,” I said.

“I should bloody well think so.”

“O kay I said.”

“Well, for God’s sake. Why do you keep sniffing, by the way?”

“I ordered Oban. I think they’ve given me Laphroaig.”

“The crosses you bear, Jake. You ought to get an award.”

We discussed immediate logistics. Naturally the Zetter was being watched. WOCOP had tried to get an agent in but an international pharmaceutical sales conference had started today and the hotel was full, would be for the next forty-eight hours. The manager knew me and could be trusted to run light interference but staff would be susceptible to bribes. We had to assume my movements were marked.

“Which suits us,” Harley said.

“Because?”

“Because you’re getting out of the city tomorrow and surveillance is going with you. I can’t set up an out with the whole organisation watching London. I’m good, but I’m not God . I need their attention elsewhere.”

This is how it is: You come alert, wait, feel a piece fall into place, know the joy of aesthetic inevitability. I said: “Fine.”

“What, no tantrum?”

“There’s something I need to do. I’ll want peace and quiet. Do you care where I go?”

“What do you need to do?”

I don’t tell that part of the story . She’d looked into my eyes and said, It’s you. It’s you .

“Set the record straight,” I said. “Does Cornwall give you enough room to manoeuvre?”

“Cornwall’s what I was thinking.”

“We should change phones again.”

“No time. Have to trust to luck.”

“I don’t even know if the trains are running.”

“Every hour from Paddington or Waterloo. There’s a four-by-four booked for you at the Alamo office in St. Ives. Use the Tom Carlyle ID. There’s something else you should know.”

“What?”

“Someone hit one of Mubarak’s places in Cairo three months back. Guards neutralised with rapid-acting tranx. No forced entry, an inside job.”

Housani Mubarak, Eyptian dealer in stolen antiquities. At one time or another half the Middle Eastern market’s passed through his hands.

“Point is,” Harley continued, “they left everything in place. Took one small box of worthless crap formerly of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Mubarak’s in a state. Can’t get past the fact there was nothing valuable in the box.”

“So what was in the box?”

“Quinn’s book.”

For a moment I didn’t speak. Suffered a second dreary surge of pity and irritation. Painful to see how far Harley was willing to reach. “Harls,” I said, gently. “Please don’t be ludicrous.”

Quinn’s book, if it ever existed, was the journal of Alexander Quinn, a nineteenth-century archaeologist who had, in Mesopotamia in 1863, allegedly stumbled on the story of the authentic origin of werewolves and written it down in his diary. “Allegedly” being the key word. Neither Quinn nor his book made it out of the desert. A hundred years ago tracking this document down had been an idiotic obsession of mine. Now we might as well have been talking about Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy.