One

Jane stood and watched the entrance to a hotel at the Regent Street end of the road. Orange chalk mark on the steps leading to automatic doors long dead. Ornamental bay trees crumbled to ash in their grand marble pots. A man in a black suit and top hat lay dead just inside the entrance. He had fallen awkwardly, his left knee bent unnaturally, causing his shin to splay. Jane always felt a twinge of sympathetic cramp whenever he saw a body crumpled like this; felt the compulsion to straighten things out, give the body some dignity, some illusory comfort.

He panthered into the lobby and paused again, felt his skin prickling as he strained to hear noises that might give him a reason to leave. He hated this. Every night, the necessity of a roof over his head. It was like shutting yourself in a coffin, but statistically it was safer than a night spent treading pavements, ducking, hiding, trying to stay one step ahead. The reception area was empty. He took marble steps carpeted with red up to the top floor. A long corridor with subtle lighting that had not worked for ten years studded in the ceiling. Jane had forgotten what electric lighting was like. Sunlight too, for that matter. It would probably scour his eyes out.

He listened at the doors of all the rooms. Silence from within. He chose a room at the end and delicately closed the doors behind him, gritting his teeth at the soft, barely audible click of the lock. He listened for a while. Wind growling in the old city lungs. Snow spittle lashing glass and steel.

There was a body on the bed. A skeleton in ragged pyjamas with a white floss of hair. Most of the bones were still connected by leathery integument; he picked up the pyjamas like a bundle of faggots and tossed it into the wardrobe. He heard the scrabble and scratch of claws in the walls and sat on the bed, smelling the musty, rotten stench of ancient serous fluids rising from the mattress. It was rare to escape the filth. Occasionally he'd crack open the seal of a room that seemed never to have been occupied. A virgin territory, spotless, ghost-free, that breathed the faintest odour of new carpet and paint upon him as he entered. Mostly, though, he spent his nights in bedsit crypts and hotel-room mortuaries, clearing the beds of cringing bones or stiff, withdrawn bodies like so much unwrapped beef jerky.

He checked the exits. On the corridor there had been a fire escape next to his door. It would take him down to the ground floor and up to the roof. There were any number of options up there. The double-glazed windows didn't open that far; they were on a security catch, but they were weak, shot through with cracks. A judicious blow would clear their frames.

Jane went to the wall separating this room from the next and pressed his ear against it. The journey of air through the hotel's pipes and gutters and gulleys, little else. He returned to the bed and stripped the mattress. He lifted one corner but the body had emptied itself into the filling. It was rotten, the springs coming through the fabric as he inspected it. Good only for burning.

The sofa was a better option. It was a two-seater, which meant his legs would hang over the side, but it was better than the floor. He positioned his pack by the cushion where he would lay his head and placed his rifle alongside it, safety off, within easy reach. He lighted the stub of a half-inch candle and dripped wax on the dining table so that it would sit fast. The light didn't matter; Skinners couldn't see. He kicked off his boots, unzipped his sleeping bag and got into it, fully clothed.

From the pack he pulled a packet of chocolate buttons he'd found at the back of a fridge in a Holland Park kitchen. Best Before: over five years ago. They were white with age but they were delicious. So sweet he worried that his stomach might reject them. He unzipped a compartment in the top flap of the rucksack. A blister pack. Omeprazole. Protein-pump inhibitors. He pressed a bright yellow capsule into his palm and swallowed it. Twenty milligrams a day keeps the incubus at bay. What a chipper line Liggett had dreamed up; one that Jane could not shift from his thoughts every time he swallowed his medicine.

He lay back on the cushion and sighed. He felt age settle in his bones. What was he now? Forty? Give or take. His muscles would seize up by morning and he'd struggle to get his boots on. He thought back to a time of lying in hot baths while listening to the midweek football commentary on the radio. A glass of beer and the newspaper. Stanley lalling from his cot and the chatter of Cherry's sewing machine as she worked the treadle. Maybe imagining his face under her foot. Some Thai food on its way from the local restaurant. Christ. Thai food. Close to sleep, he felt his mouth fill with saliva at the thought of prawn crackers and sweet chilli dipping sauce, curried chicken, jasmine rice.