One

You will discover music, books and art, things that will sometimes move you to tears with their beauty. There will be friends of your own, and people you will love. There will be great happiness, and some sadness too, but even that is a good thing, an important thing to experience. I can't wait until you are old enough so that I can play football with you, and laugh and joke with you, and show you all the amazing things there are to see. I'll take you diving on the Great Barrier Reef. You won't believe it.

Jane had his fingers under the edge of the hatch, lifting it, thinking of moon wrasse and morwong and blue puller, when he realised that its cack-handed replacement was nothing of the sort. It was a deadly come-on, the bait filaments jangling on a devil fish's head.

He heard something lurching within and he felt himself hoping it was just his own limbs readjusting to cope with the weight of the hatch, but the sound was all wrong, too deep, too fast, too out of rhythm with what he was doing. He was stepping back, feeling his back give with the strain, about to drop the hatch and run, when a ragged, striped cuff shot out of the shadow, peeling back to reveal a claw, giraffe-tongue purple, each curved tip as sharp as a ceremonial blade thinned almost to invisibility on a whetstone.

Jane felt it grip him and jerk him towards the place of his death.

17. STALL WARNING

Fear made Jane laugh and vomit. He ran hard for maybe two miles, until he was so shattered he could barely stand and had to drop to his knees in order to breathe. He was shaking violently; he could still feel the claws on him squeezing as though to assess his tenderness. He wasn't sure where he was; he hadn't really paid any attention to direction. Away was good enough. Now that adrenaline was draining from his muscles he began to become aware of his surroundings. It wasn't exactly the fire after the frying pan, but it was close. He was on the fringes of Hampstead Heath, the southern tip, where part of Gospel Oak train station, including the railway bridge, had collapsed into what had once been known as Mansfield Road.

They liked to congregate in this great park. Maybe something in its wintered desolation called to them. The desiccated trees against the sky like black fractures in unclean ice, agonised, all the sap bubbled out of them and rehardened like angry amber boils. The scorched, stubbled acreage of earth. The ponds filled with bodies: huge bowls of chilled consommé for them to guzzle. They crisscrossed the heath – Jane had watched them from the safety of a Highgate rooftop with his binoculars – like mendicants folded into their rags, deep in thought. Sometimes they dragged partially denuded victims along behind them by the hair, or a limb, to be stowed in the earth on Parliament Hill, or around the Vale of Health, for consumption later.

Jane struggled to think. The cold was freezing his head, turning him sluggish. It was a constant ache in his temples and nape; it had burrowed under his shoulder blades where it burned in his muscles like a slow blue fire. He remembered there was a bolt-hole in Belsize Park. Ten or fifteen minutes from here. It would mean cutting up by the Royal Free Hospital – hospitals were other places where they liked to bed down – but he had to get inside. The Skinner had gripped him so hard he was worried that the skin might be broken.