“I don’t know.” It’s my turn to be frustrated. “Whoever caused the Scrum to be set up. Not necessarily the person in the organization who knows about V syndrome and arranged for you to be part of it as their unwitting catspaw. Presumably they’re both, ah, people like you, only older. Ancients. But they’re going to have to shut you down, permanently, and soon.”

“Why?”

I’ve lost track of our little Q and A game. It doesn’t matter anymore: I push a morsel of salmon onto my fork and raise it. “Because every time you drink, you set up a sympathetic link between the V-parasites and a new victim, on whose brain the parasites then feed until the victim dies. Looks a lot like Krantzberg syndrome, or Mad Cow Disease,” I add in response to her horrified expression. “And the more vampires who hit on one donor, the faster it progresses.” I focus on the once-living thing on the end of my fork. “Just by feeding, you infect people. And I’ve got a suspicion that if you don’t feed the V-parasites, if you try to fast, they’ll eat you instead.”

Mhari pushes back her chair, stands, and marches towards the lobby of the restaurant. Her expression is set, her face pale, but she’s left her handbag. Halfway to the front desk she breaks into a trot and heads towards the discreet archway leading to the toilets. I can feel the waves of nausea coming off her from halfway across the restaurant. Yes, she’s hungry. I wonder if she’s been trying to starve the parasite? This could turn ugly, very ugly.

I spend the next five minutes eating slowly, trying to work out what to say and do next, all the while desperately trying not to admit that she’s my most important ex-significant other—before the woman I’m married to—and I’ve just told her that she’s contracted a fatal condition where the cure may be worse than the disease.

I feel like shit.

• • •

AFTERWARDS, THE ASSASSIN FINDS IT REMARKABLY EASY TO tidy up the scene. She returns the handcuffs to her evening clutch; the condom goes into a baggie before it joins them.

A typical human body sheds perhaps five million skin particles per day. The woman who is not called Marianne has been in Evan’s company for only an hour, in gloves and tights and with lip gloss and sealer over freshly exfoliated facial skin. It will take painstaking forensic work to recover any DNA traces from his body, and just to make it all the harder, she retrieves a small baggie of gray powder from her clutch and squirts the contents across the sofa. It’s dust hoovered from the crevices of a booth in a night club, dust containing hundreds of thousands of fragments of skin from sweaty excited dancers.