“Why are you trying to kill me?” I asked him, in French. “And why are you so superhumanly shit at it?”

Still no dice. He just kept swallowing. His breath was bad. Aware of our conspicuousness I half-carried, half-dragged him off the drive and in among the trees. I’d left my smokes in Jacqueline’s boudoir so filched one of his Marlboros and lit it. Incredibly, he with trembling hands found his coke accoutrements and took a couple of hefty toots. It first dazed then steadied him.

“Better?” I said.

He nodded. “Don’t kill me,” he said, in English. Then added, with something like tenderness: “You fucking cunt.”

I hadn’t heard anything to make me laugh for a while. This did. Plus there was the standard French insult of ignoring your French and answering in English. “Hot tip,” I said. “If you’re trying to get someone to not kill you, avoid calling him a fucking cunt.”

He smiled, reached for the coke again. I snatched it from him and put it in my pocket. “Enough of that,” I said. “Quid pro quo, understand? You don’t get this back until you tell me what I want to know.”

Something ended in him, visibly. Though still lying more or less on his side, now semipropped against the flared bole of a tree, he sagged. The bright cosmeticised eyes said no sleep for a long time. “Quid pro quo, Clarice,” he said, in a Hopkins-Lecter impersonation of surprising accuracy.

“You’ve got it. Now. Why do you want me dead?”

“Because she wants you alive.”

“Jacqueline?”

“Did you fuck her yet?”

God only knows why, but I lied. “No,” I said.

“Her cunt’s got a mind. It knows you. Everything about you. Like Lucifer. God is omniscient but he can’t separate out the useful knowledge. You know? He can’t distinguish . For that you need the Devil or her cunt.”

“Why does she want me alive?”

“For the vampires.”

“What?”

“You don’t know anything. I can’t believe you’ve lived this long. I’m not talking to you. You’re beneath me.”

I got up off my knees and crept back out to the drive where I’d left the javelin. “I can use this in a number of ways,” I said when I returned. “They won’t kill you, these ways, but they will hurt. You’re fond, I imagine, of your right eye? I mean, you’ve gone to the trouble of putting makeup on it.” I lined the tip up with the object in question.

Tears, to my surprise, welled and hurried down his cheeks. Ignoring the silver point of the weapon (it was as if he genuinely didn’t recognise it was there) he reached up and tenderly covered his eyes. “Oh God,” he said, quietly. “You don’t know what it’s like with her.”

“For the love of Mary,” I said. “I get it, she’s got a nifty twat. Tell me what I need to know and you can go up there and try’n get back into it. What is this about vampires?”

He dropped his hands, snuffled up his tears, laughed as if at an irony visible only to him. With the now-smudged mascara he looked like Alice Cooper. “I thought I was large,” he said. “Until I met her. Little sins you’re so proud of. Nothing. Crumbs on her table. Now there’s no going back.”

“I can’t believe you’re going to make me do real damage to you,” I said, raising the javelin. “But if that’s the only—”

“Helios Project,” he said. “You know about the Helios Project?”

“Well, I know what it is ,” I said. Hardly a secret: The Helios Project is the ongoing attempt by vampires to get themselves immune to the destructive power of daylight. One way or another they’ve been working on it since the Ten Commandments.

“Well, I know what it is ,” he parroted, in satirical falsetto. “Do you know, loup-garou , that they now have three recorded cases of sunlight tolerance?”

“No.”

“No. Of course you don’t. So far it hasn’t lasted more than seventy-two hours, but you can imagine their excitement. Know what all three cases have in common?”

“What?”

“Werewolf attacks. The vampires who showed massively increased resistance to daylight had all been bitten by werewolves.”

I sighed. I probably hadn’t sighed in thirty years, but right then it was just the thing. See, Jake? Life said. See how things just start taking shape if you stick around long enough? Dots were becoming visible; I knew with weary certainty the next few moments would join them into some sort of bastard picture. Still, one goes through the motions.

“Doesn’t make sense,” I said. “There have been plenty of bites down the years. We’re like cats and dogs.”

“Yes, Clouseau, but what happened a couple of hundred years ago? Werewolves stopped multiplying. Victims stopped surviving the bite. A virus, WOCOP says. Who knows? But whatever it is when it’s passed to a vampire it confers, to however small a degree, resistance to sunlight.” He reached for the Marlboro. I let him light one up. In the time since leaving the house late afternoon had become dusk. The forest around us was suddenly wealthy with darkness. The white gravel of the winding drive would be the last light to go. “The vampires are kicking themselves because it took them so long to spot it,” Cloquet continued. “Now that they have spotted it”—the big lips widened to free the equine grin—“ O Fortuna! —there’s only one werewolf left.” He laughed, huskily, softly blasted me with the louche breath, forgot not to put weight on his bottom, yelped, curled back onto his side. I rather wished I’d stabbed him somewhere less awkward.

“Look,” I said, “I don’t dig vampires but they’re not stupid. It can’t possibly have taken them this long to work this out.”

He was searching his pockets—for the hip flask it turned out. I helped him unscrew the top. After a glug and a wince he said: “But of course it can. For one thing the cases are so far apart. One in 1786, one in 1860, one in 1952. In the 1952 incident the vampire never told anyone he’d been bitten. He was embarrassed. A minion found it in his journal last year and reported it. Plus you’re overstating the case for werewolf-vampire contact. The reality is that when you meet each other you just turn and go in opposite directions, no? Actual conflict rarely occurs.” He shook his head. “It’s too funny. They’re livid. ”