Inside the holdall was a second bag made of tough transparent plastic, tightly sealed with tape. Inside that was Harley’s head.

20

THERE WAS A note stuck over his mouth with a message written on it in black marker: IT WASN’T PAINLESS. IT WASN’T QUICK.

“Oh my God,” Madeline said. She stood with her bare white shoulders slightly hunched and her hands pressed against her midriff. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

The face had been beaten. At leisure, I imagined. Creases in the plastic held bubbles of blood, as with vacuum-sealed beef in the supermarket. They’d made sure his eyes were open.

Just stay , he’d said.

It would be heartening to say I broke down in tears. I didn’t. The moment merely updated the inventory of all the things I should feel but didn’t. I very carefully opened the seal, reached in and peeled the note from his mouth. Like it or not the image of myself sticking it across Grainer’s lips after I tracked him down and killed him came to me, which of course was the idea. Grainer’s idea after all. Ellis would have kept Harley alive. Ellis’s money was on guilt, conscience, responsibility—mine. Grainer’s was on eye-for-an-eye vengeance—mine. New and Old Testaments respectively.

“Jake?” Madeline said. “Is that real? That’s not real, is it?”

I closed Harley’s eyes. You have to. Open, the eyes of the dead are a travesty, a parody, make a fool of the deceased. Open, the eyes of the dead perform that most indecent subtraction, show the person without his life. I knew now all the times I’d pictured Harley’s recuperative solitude after my death I’d never really believed in it. The worst horrors confirm a suspicion you’ve hidden even from yourself.

IT WASN’T PAINLESS. IT WASN’T QUICK.

I’m used to the body as a thing separable violently into its constituent parts. To me a torn-off arm’s no more searingly forlorn than a chicken drumstick is to you. Still, it was Harley, what was left of him, a blunt testament to the defilements he’d suffered. A farcical testament, if you let yourself see it that way. Naturally torturers giggle while they work: The body’s dumb obedience to physics (pull hard enough and this comes off, squeeze tight enough and that pops out) against which the nuances of the victim’s personality count for nothing has in it one of the roots of comedy—the spirit’s subservience to the flesh. You can cut a head off and shove it in a bag, stick it on a pole, play volleyball or footie with it. Hilarious, among other things. This too is what I’m tired of, the friability of boundaries, the nearness of opposite extremes, the depressing bleed-ability of grief into laughter, good into evil, tragedy into farce.

Meanwhile Madeline was filling with unruly energies. I knew if she stayed shock would wear off and the demand for coherence take its place. With careful handling I put the head back in the holdall, zipped up gently, found myself out of deep inane habit hoping the darkness would come as a relief to him.

“You should go,” I said to Madeline.

“Who is that?”

“Never mind.”

“We have to call the police.”

“It’s best if you just go. The police aren’t part of this.”

“But—”

“No one will harm you, I promise. Just go and let me deal.” My window was that her system had temporarily crashed. I grabbed everything of hers I could find and stuffed it willy-nilly into the Louis Vuitton. She remained stalled by the door.

“That guy said you were a—”

“It’s a code word. It’s a word agents use.”

He’s a werewolf, honey . Naturally that had gone in. Naturally she’d made the connection.

“But you’ve said … All that stuff. It’s not true. There’s no such things.” This last utterance without much conviction, almost a question.

“Of course there are no such things,” I said. “That’s just a routine of mine, a gimmick. It’s nothing. Come on. Here, take the cash.” Six thousand. She took it, but numbly. Her face was clammy, her white hands lovely with veins. I had to keep pushing her forward against her need to stop, rewind, go over, make sense. In the end I half-propelled her through the door. I knew there was every chance she’d go straight to the police.

From which followed my own hasty pack-up and check-out. I put the holdall with my bag in the boot of the Vectra and drove. South. No specifics, just the sudden claustrophobic need to get out of the town’s clutter to the clean spaces of the coast.

It was dark, raining. I kept imagining discussing all this with Harley—then realising Harley was dead. It was a mental loop, augmented by the windscreen wipers’ two-syllable mantra, wichok, wichok, wichok . I must have been feeling something like grief (or self-pity) because I took the car’s responsive steering and smell of new vinyl as anthropomorphic sympathy. I didn’t cry. Real things don’t make me cry. Only false or sentimental things can do that. In this respect I’m like most civilised humans. Instead I drove, fluently, with reverence for the small actions, still going through the same loop of imagining talking events over with Harley then realising he was dead. When the loop faltered a giant contained emptiness took its place.

The road ran down the coast. To the west, Caernarfon Bay and the Irish Sea, occasional boat lights, a tanker or two. East and south the land rose into another stack of vowel-starved hills: Bwlch Mawr; Gyrn Ddu; Yr Eifl. Of course I was being followed, had been since leaving the hotel. A black transit van, which was unusual for the Hunt, who normally use something quicker.

You were pleased to see me. It was depressing as hell. I don’ t want that . Of course he didn’t. Forty years he’d been building up to avenging his father’s death. Not much of an avenging if the murderer was going to be grateful to him for it. Therefore provoke the murderer into something other than gratitude.

The question was: Had it worked? Was Harley’s death (or as I must infer, torture and death) incentive enough to bring the wolf out fighting?

Human standards would convict me of obscene weakness if the answer was no. Harley, a man who’d devoted his life to my protection, who’d loved me, whose love I’d exploited when it suited and stonewalled when it didn’t, had been mutilated and killed for my sake. I knew his killer or killers, I had the resources and experience to avenge the crime, and if I didn’t do it no one else would.