“Don’t worry,” I said. “This won’t take long.”

Nightingale looked gaunt and colorless under the sodium lights; there were smudges under his eyes, and while he tried to hide it I saw the occasional shiver. He kept his expression bland.

“Would you like to go first, sir?” I said.

He nodded, but gave me a long cool look before finally he sighed. “When I took you on as my apprentice, I thought I could protect you from having to make certain ‘choices.’ I see now that I was wrong, and for that I apologize. That said, what the hell did you think you were trying to achieve?”

“I was trying to do my duty as a sworn constable under the Human Rights Act,” I said. “To wit, the right to life under article two, which mandates that any use of force must be absolutely necessary and that any poor bastard we kill had better have it coming good and proper.”

“Assuming that you expand the definition of human being to vampires and chimeras,” said Nightingale.

“Then let’s get a judgment from the courts or better still have Parliament clarify the law,” I said. “But it’s not our place to make that decision, sir—is it? We’re just coppers.”

“If they were ugly, Peter, would you care half so much?” asked Nightingale. “There are some hideous things out there that can talk and reason and I wonder if you would be quite so quick to rush to their defense.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But that just makes me shallow, it doesn’t make me wrong.”

“I estimate that among them Simone and her sisters have killed or mutilated almost two hundred and twenty people since 1941,” said Nightingale. “These people also had their human rights.”

“I’m saying that we just can’t pretend that the law doesn’t exist,” I said.

“Very well,” said Nightingale. “Let’s assume that we arrest them and, God knows how, try to convict them for …”

“Manslaughter by gross negligence, sir,” I said. “I think it would have been reasonable to expect them, after twenty years or so, to notice that they weren’t getting any older and that their boyfriends were regularly kicking the bucket.”

“They’re going to say they didn’t remember,” said Nightingale.

“I believe them, sir,” I said. “Which means they are suffering from a mental disorder as defined by the Mental Health Act of 1983 and since they are an obvious threat to members of the public we can detain them under section one thirty-five of the aforesaid act and remove them to a place of safety for care and evaluation.”

“And when they get hungry?” he asked. “Do you think starving them to death is more humane?”

“We don’t know they’d die,” I said. “Perhaps their metabolism will revert and if all else fails we can feed them. They were taking less than a victim a year—they can’t need that much.”