Which means—try not to laugh—Me Rescuing Her.

Which in turn means either gangbusting her out by force or smuggling her out by guile. Sliced any way, it means me finding out where the fuck they’re holding her.

Enter: money. This is where money comes in. Thanks to the recent boom in military subcontractors one can, with sufficient resources, buy one’s own little army. (As is now widely known, the Bush administration bought one—Blackwater—and sprinkled it just above the law all over Iraq.) My resources are sufficient—but still, I don’t know where they’re holding her .

There is one infallible way of finding out.

Meanwhile my life here is a dentist’s waiting room. A rhythm soon established itself: dayshift agents handing over to night, evenings in the library, jagged bits of sleep, raw-eyed mornings, the shift change, the daylight hours of pacing or lying on the couch. Harley never had a TV, so I can’t keep my love company in Soapland, but of course I’m surrounded by books. This afternoon I leafed through a 1607 Dutch-German edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses illustrated by Crispijn de Passe. Market value, according to a 2006 index, eight thousand pounds. I have no idea what Harley intended for the collection, whether he’d made a will, what’ll happen to the place now he’s gone. Not that the world has a clue he’s gone. Grainer & Co. have seen to the cover-up of his murder (God only knows what became of the severed head in the Vectra’s boot) though it can only be a matter of time before a utility company or Council Tax office starts chasing a payment. Harls had no living relatives. There’s a solicitor in Holborn, but since I’ve no intention of getting involved in a homicide investigation there’s little point in contacting him. Instead I wear my deceased friend’s clothes and drink his supply and pass the tight-wound time with his books. Of late I’ve found myself leaning, at idle moments, on his bone-handled cane.

I have little truck with my minders, who’ve been schooled to keep shtoom, and in any case I’m not disposed to chat. A few words exchanged with the arrival of cigarettes or firewood, but otherwise I remain mute and they talk among themselves, quietly, over their headsets. There’sa man stationed on every floor. The miserable roof detail rotates, since no one wants it. I’ve offered to take a turn myself (the Hunger with no fresh air is a soft close hell) but no dice. Sorry, chief, can’t be done. This is Russell, the one responsible for lopping off Laura Mangiardi’s head back in Cornwall, who has an appealing liveliness and who is by now so bored that he would talk to me if I didn’t keep making it obvious that I wished to be left alone. Instead he smokes and does Sudoku and thinks up wretched jokes with which he torments his fellows—What do you call a small robot vampire? Nosferatu-D2—and strips and cleans and reassembles his personal arsenal two or three times a day. The team’s firepower is a mix of conventional automatic hardware and antivamp kit: night-vision goggles, long- and short-range Stakers, UV sticks, a miniature version of the Hail Mary for whoever’s on the roof. Russell packs a small flamethrower, too, though I recall Harley telling me most Hunters regarded even the compact versions of these units—“boochie-burners” (“BBs” for short)—as obsolete. Thanks to Sigourney Weaver’s turn in Alien there had been a revival in the eighties, but the hard maths of weight-to-efficacy had soon reasserted itself, and now they were seen as an affectation. In any case young Russell wears one from time to time, and is wearily mocked for it by his compadres. With all this equipment dedicated to my protection I ought to feel safe. I don’t.

Outside, London goes about its business like a virile degenerate old man. By the fire’s light I sit in the window seat with a straight Macallan (two bottles remain from a case of twelve) and a Camel, watching the traffic—sudden halts and surges like blood through a complex valve—and the self-involved comings and goings of humans. As always most are full of energy, riddled with their own details, asimmer with schemes and regrets, fears, secrets, hungers, sins. Occasionally love. A very young dark-haired couple came out of a deli, not dreamily or holding hands or in any way obviously rapt but deep in conversation and glimmering with the shared wealth of each other. My in-love heart tautened to see it. In love. Oh, indeed I have the condition. Verily, reader, I am fully, absurdly sick. Life, grinning like a great white, is enjoying the joke: Years of incrementally getting ready for death and now all he wants is life. Come on, Jake, you’ve got to laugh.

I can’t. Not with my in-love heart on perpetual pleading duty, inwardly audible at every gap in my self-distraction: Please … Please … Please … There are specifics—please don’t let them hurt her; please let me see her again; please let me find out where they’re holding her—but this pleading is an emotional whole greater than the sum of its parts, addressed to the God who isn’t there, to the benignly indifferent universe, to the spirit of Story, who we know these days has a soft spot for the dark ending. Please … Please … Please …

My inner dead are asleep, sleeping very badly, dreaming of release. Love, it appears, has the power to force them under. They toss and turn. Their murmur builds, threatens a swarm into wakefulness, dies back. Love’s crude spell holds them down, just. Arabella’s ghost endures in seared wakefulness, knowing something’s over. I keep turning away from her. I keep turning my face away. For the first time in a hundred and sixty-seven years a hundred and sixty-seven years ago doesn’t seem like yesterday. For the first time in a hundred and sixty-seven years the present matters more than the past.

It’s seemed, these thirteen days, that I’ve left real time behind, drifted into a suspension or loop where seconds bulge and minutes warp, taking their normal shape only when I hear Talulla’s voice on the phone.•

It’s seemed. Until a couple of hours ago. Ellis has been.

I was pouring myself a drink when the library door opened and he entered, smelling of wet London. He had a painful-looking stye on his left eye and was wearing an excess of ChapStick. The effect was of a creepily humanised waxwork. “Wouldn’t mind keeping you company with one of those, Jake,” he said, before taking the armchair opposite the couch, which received him with a leather gasp. “It’s miserable out there.” I poured a second Scotch and handed it to him, suppressing a shudder when our fingertips met at the glass. “Jiminy,” he said, after slug and lip-smack. “That’s better.”