Dead Men's s Boots

19

The cab rolled away into the night, leaving me standing on a rain-slick pavement in the middle of a strangely lopsided street. In front of me was an unremarkable row of white-fronted semis: at my back was the Lea Valley reservoir, a broad slash of night-black nothingness barely contained behind a chain-link fence.

King’s Head Hill lay to the north of me, most of the rest of Chingford to the south. Taking advantage of a street light, I fished out my wallet and rummaged through it until I found what I was looking for: the calling card that Peter Covington had given to Carla on the day her husband got cremated, and that Carla had passed on to me because she had nowhere to put it in her funereal glad-rags. The address was off New Road, in Chingford Hatch, and it had a name instead of a number: ‘The Maltings’. Less than a mile away, anyway, even if it was at the further end of New Road, up by the golf course. I made a start.

As I walked I mulled over what I knew and didn’t know. The crematorium was the centre of some reincarnation racket whose implications I couldn’t get my head around just yet. John Gittings had been investigating it when he died, and he’d known what was going down long before he knew where. He’d spent days and weeks going through every damn cemetery in London, crossing them off laboriously on his list before finally coming to the big revelation that it wasn’t a cemetery he was looking for at all. Smashna. The light-bulb moment.

And what did John do after that? Two things I knew about already, and they didn’t fit together all that well. He changed his will, insisting that he be burned at Mount Grace instead of being buried out at Waltham Cross. He did that even though he knew by this time – or maybe he knew from the start – that whatever the deal was at Mount Grace it was by invitation only, with thugs, murderers and former gangsters forming all or most of the clientele.

And at the same time he planned an invasion. The letter I’d found inside his watch case, where he’d hidden it with such paranoid care, didn’t bear any other interpretation: Youll just get the one pass, and its got to be on INSCRIPTION night, so you can get them all together. Take back-up: take lots of back-up.

So did he ever make that pass? Presumably not. He killed himself instead, and gave himself into the tender care of the born-again killers he’d been stalking. I couldn’t see the logic. Even for a man whose mind was crumbling away like a sandcastle at high tide, I just couldn’t for the life of me see how that would work.

One thing I could see, though: whatever was going on, Maynard Todd was at the heart of it. He’d said he handled most of Lionel Palance’s business affairs, which meant he was de facto in charge of the crematorium if Palance didn’t ask too many questions. He’d told me it was his suggestion that John Gittings should choose Mount Grace after he’d decided on cremation. Then he’d moved Heaven and Earth to make it happen, calming Carla’s fears and bringing her on board with a tact and sensitivity that didn’t go hand-in-hand with the word ‘lawyer’ in my personal lexicon. And Gary Coldwood had had his accident – you can take the ironic emphasis for granted – after I’d pointed him towards Todd’s office.

Okay, so Ruthven, Todd and Clay were next on the itinerary. But right now I had to keep my mind on the job in hand.

The Maltings wasn’t a house at all, I realised as I reached the front gates. It was a mansion, set way back from the street behind a thick barricade of mature yew trees. The gates were electronic, as I could see by the thick hydraulic arms mounted at waist height across each one. There was a bell push and a speaker grille, but I ignored them for the moment. There was plenty of more interesting stuff to look at.

It had crossed my mind as I walked that I might be wasting my time: that I’d find the house silent and dark, everyone safely tucked up in bed and sleeping the sleep of the more or less just. I needn’t have worried. Every light was ablaze, and figures crossed and recrossed the lawn beyond the yew hedge, calling out to each other as they went. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could hear the urgency in their tones.

I rang the bell, waited, rang it again: nobody answered. The crisis in the house, or rather in the house’s grounds, hadn’t left anybody free to deal with casual after-midnight callers. What the hell has happened to the social niceties these days?

Acting on the kind of impulse that has brought me up before unsympathetic magistrates more than once, I stowed my bags behind some bushes and shinnied up the gate. I’d already sized it up as an easy climb, and it didn’t offer any unpleasant surprises at the top where you sometimes find razor wire or bird lime: within the space of about seven seconds I was dropping down on the inside, on the margin of a flagstoned driveway that stretched off ahead of me to where it became a broad terrace in front of the distant, flamboyantly lit-up house.

The people weaving around on the big lawn seemed to be engaged in some kind of nocturnal hunt-meet. Some of them were beating the bushes, or rather combing them as though they hoped to find some shy woodland creatures nestled among the roots: others were quartering the lawn itself, occasionally shining flashlights in each other’s faces and then shouting apologies.

I walked into their midst, partly hoping to find Peter Covington and explain what the hell I was doing there, partly just curious about what it was they were looking for. Nobody accosted me, or seemed to notice me at all. Once the beam of a flashlight picked me out, but it swung away again as its owner discovered that I wasn’t who he thought I was.

‘Sorry,’ came a muttered voice out of the darkness.

‘No problem,’ I answered.

The grounds were even bigger than I’d thought. There was an ornamental lake, a summer house and a splodge of darkness that was probably some kind of arbour out in the middle of the lawn. Vague silhouettes circled around all three.

Three broad, shallow stone steps led up to the front door of the house, which was wide open. I walked inside and stood in the entrance hall at the foot of a flight of stairs that bifurcated at first-floor level, breaking away to left and right like an architectural cluster bomb.

‘Anybody home?’ I called. And then ‘Covington?’ No answer.

Killing time, I looked at my surroundings in a ‘Who lives in a house like this?’ frame of mind. Someone with a shit-lot of money to spend, that was for sure. The hall was bigger than Ropey’s living room, and there was polished mahogany everywhere. Over my head hung a massive chandelier that was modern, asymmetrical and ugly as sin. Well, money can buy you love at the market price, but good taste you’ve got to be born with. I counted my blessings and almost got to one.

A noise sounded from somewhere near at hand, once and then again: a muffled scuffling, like rats behind the skirting boards. I followed it to a cupboard under the stairs with a three-quarter-height door: the sort of place where in a suburban semi you might hide the Hoover and the dustpan. In this stately pile, it was probably the servants’ quarters.

More scuffling. I opened the door and peered inside, for a moment seeing only a vertical stack of fuse boxes and some folding chairs. I smelled the acid reek of urine. Then I realised with a jolt that a pair of human eyes was peering out from behind the chairs: the cupboard was deeper than I thought and someone was sitting back there in the dark. An old man with a slightly dazed, more than slightly sleepy look to him.

He didn’t seem too alarmed at being found. He just blinked and shielded his eyes as the light flooded into his bolt-hole.

‘Hide,’ he said. His voice was thin and high, with a faint vibrato that sounded a little plaintive.

‘Right,’ I agreed.

Then the lined face opened up in a disconcerting grin that looked as though it belonged somewhere else entirely. ‘Hide and seek.’

A shiver went through me, but it came from a memory – John Gittings’s last days as relayed to me by Carla – rather than from this harmless old man’s crazy little game, which at least gave the seemingly oversized staff something to do. ‘Maybe you should come out of there,’ I suggested, as non-threateningly as I could manage. ‘Do you want some help?’

The old guy seemed to need a long time to think that through, but eventually he said ‘Ye-e-es,’ drawing the sound out into a querulous bleat.

I moved the chairs and helped him to his feet, taking care not to make him move any faster than he was comfortable with. He was so frail he looked as though he might just break into pieces. He wore silk pyjamas that were a little too big for him; there was a broad, dark stain spreading outwards and downwards from the crotch, which explained the gents’-urinal smell.

I took a step backward, and then another, bending my head as I passed under the lintel. The old man shuffled out after me, not needing to bend his own head because of his diminutive size and stooped shoulders.

As I was closing the cupboard door I heard footsteps from behind me and turned my head with difficulty – because the old man was still holding tight onto my arm – to see who was coming. One of the search parties had come in out of the cold: at its head was a familiar face topped by a familiar shock of snow-white hair.

‘Door was open, Mister Covington,’ I said. ‘So I let myself in. Hope you don’t mind.’

He stared at me, then at the old man leaning against my arm, then back at me. ‘The door was open,’ he agreed, ‘but as I recall the gate was locked. It still is. Do I know you? Your face is vaguely familiar.’

‘Felix Castor. We met at Mount Grace,’ I said. ‘On Wednesday, when John Gittings was cremated.’ By this time, two of the searchers – a man in an immaculate white shirt and grey suit trousers and a woman who was self-evidently a nurse – had gently and painstakingly prised the old man’s fingers loose from my forearm and were leading him away, the woman murmuring reassuringly into his ear about getting cleaned up and having a nice cup of tea. I watched him out of sight, then turned back to Covington.

Covington nodded slowly, his expression still wary. ‘All right. Yes. I remember you. But what are you doing here now?’

‘I was hoping to talk to Mister Palance,’ I said, and saw the punchline looming a full second before it came.

‘Well,’ Covington said, nodding towards the door that the old man had disappeared through, ‘it looks as though you’ve already introduced yourself.’

‘Mister Palance – Lionel – had a stroke about ten years ago,’ Covington said, walking ahead of me along a corridor you could drive a truck down: it would have ruined the Persian carpet, though, and probably knocked one or two of the enormous Tiffany lamps off their wrought-iron brackets.

‘A bad one?’ I asked.

‘No.’ Covington shook his head. His expression – what I could see of it – was closed, impossible to read. ‘Not a bad one. Not really. He was able to walk afterwards, and his speech was back to normal after three months. But it came on the back of a lot of other problems. Most of them, I have to say, psychological. A nervous breakdown at the age of fifty-two, which he never fully recovered from, and occasional bouts of dementia since.

‘He’d had a very happy – almost blessed – life up until then, but it all came apart very quickly. That was when he first hired me to look after the day-to-day workings of the estate.’

‘Before the breakdown?’ I asked. ‘Or after?’

The blond man looked over his shoulder at me, his eyes narrowing very slightly. ‘Before,’ he said. ‘A year or so before, I suppose. I was still relatively new when all that stuff happened. Why do you ask?’

I didn’t even know myself. ‘Just wondering about the legal situation,’ I said glibly, remembering John Gittings’s Alzheimer’s and the doubts it might have cast on his changed will. ‘If he took you on when he wasn’t in his right mind . . .’

Covington shrugged. ‘There’s a trust,’ he said. ‘They’re the real decision-makers as far as Lionel’s investments are concerned. I’m just an administrator. And a sort of personal assistant. I deal with the running of the house, sort and answer the mail, liaise with the medical staff here. That sort of thing. The trustees manage the investment portfolio and pay me my salary.’

‘Who looks after the crematorium?’ I asked.

Covington held open an oak-panelled door, and I walked through into what was evidently one of the family rooms. I smelled the smell of understated luxury: leather and fresh-cut flowers and old, old wood. A sixty-inch TV stood against one wall of the room and tried in vain to dominate it. The carpet underneath my shoes swallowed the sound of my footsteps. The curtains had a pattern of fleur-de-lis, and you could have played a game of five-a-side football on the black leather settee. There was a bar, too: the full deal, with wall-mounted optics and a gleaming chrome soda syphon.

‘Would you like a drink?’ Covington asked, derailing the conversation. ‘Whisky? Brandy?’

‘Whisky. Thanks.’

‘Straight, or on the rocks?’

‘Straight.’

He went behind the bar and fixed the drinks, moving unhurriedly and with practised ease, as though serving in a pub was where his real strengths lay rather than managing an estate. The whisky was Springbank Local Barley, 1966, which didn’t surprise me in the least but did make my heart quicken just a little. Covington poured two generous measures and passed one across the bar-top to me on a folded serviette. I took it up and swirled it in the glass, the rich aroma rising so that I breathed it in like an olfactory French kiss.

‘The crematorium,’ I said again.

‘Yes.’ Covington took a sip of his own drink, held it on his tongue for a second or two and then swallowed. ‘Why do you want to know, Mister Castor?’

Truth as far as it goes: the Galactic Girl Guides’ ever-serviceable motto.

‘Because of John,’ I said. ‘He changed his will only a month or so before he died, and his widow, Carla, doesn’t know why. I think it would help her to accept John’s death if she was able to understand what changed his mind.’

Covington strolled back around the bar, setting his drink down on the way as though he was already tired of it. ‘And how does that translate into you coming here?’ he demanded. He walked past me and sat down on the settee, waving me to a seat opposite him that was only big enough for a quick round of three-and-in. I took the seat, because it gave me a few moments to think of an answer.

‘I was just wondering if there was anything special – anything unique – about the site itself,’ I said. ‘Anything that might have attracted his attention in the first place. It’s a long way from where he lived: if all he wanted was to be burned instead of buried, the Marylebone crematorium was a lot closer.’

Covington nodded, but he was looking at me a little quizzically. ‘That’s bullshit,’ he said at last.

His disarming directness caught me off balance. ‘In what sense of the word?’ I asked, gamely but lamely.

‘There’s only one sense of the word, Mister Castor. Bullshit is bullshit. Tell me what you really want to know.’

For a moment, flushed out of cover, I weighed the possible outcomes of doing just that. It was hard to read this man. Despite the harsh language, he didn’t seem angry: just matter-of-fact, and maybe slightly impatient at being snowed. Which could mean that he already knew more about this situation than I’d been assuming. Maybe more than I did myself: in spite of all my globe-trotting investigations, that wouldn’t have been hard.

I hesitated long enough for him to notice, but he didn’t seem to be in any kind of a hurry: he waited in silence for me to make up my mind.

‘Okay,’ I said at last, trying to find a way of putting it that got the essential point across without sounding ridiculously melodramatic. ‘There’s something going on down there. Something really strange, and really dangerous. Something illegal, maybe, but the laws don’t really cover this situation because it’s stuff most people consider impossible. But everyone who gets close to it ends up dead.’

That was enough to be going on with. I’d tossed him a quid: let’s see if he could offer me a quo.

Covington nodded, seeming to relax slightly. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then you know. I wouldn’t have been able to explain it, but if you know then that makes it a lot easier. Yes, you’re right. There is something going on at Mount Grace. And I think your dead friend Mister Gittings was investigating it when he died. In fact, I think that’s why he died.’ He looked at me searchingly.

‘John committed suicide,’ I pointed out, playing straight-man and wondering if that objection sounded as fatuous to Covington as it did to me.

The blond man shrugged. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘He did.’

‘In a locked room. With a shotgun.’

Covington conceded those points too with a cold nod.

‘Not an easy thing for someone to arrange,’ I hazarded.

‘That depends, I suppose.’ Covington stood and crossed the room to close the door, which I’d left open. He locked it too, turning the big, ornate key which had been left in the lock. Shutting me in, or shutting someone else out? ‘For an outside job, yes, it would be difficult. For someone working from the inside—’

The glass was on its way to my mouth: I almost poured that precious liquid into my shirt collar as I suppressed a start of unwelcome surprise.

‘From the inside?’ I repeated.

Covington stood over me, staring down. His hands were in his pockets and I was getting the distinct impression that we might be on the same side, but I still had to fight the urge to jump up and take a defensive crouch. He was a formidable man, I realised, seeing him from this close up: there was a sense of mass and solidity about him that suggested long hours on a bench press.

‘Yes. You know what I mean, Mister Castor. You’ve probably got your own reasons for pretending you don’t, but you do. Another man’s mind – another man’s soul, working from inside your friend’s body – could do all the things that John Gittings was said to have done. Locked the door. Put the shotgun barrel in his mouth. Pulled the trigger. He’d know, wouldn’t he, that his resurrection would follow in due course? So long as he could be sure that John’s body was going back to Mount Grace.’

I hadn’t consciously reached that conclusion until he said it, but every word was like a reel clanking to a halt on an enormous slot machine: chunk chunk chunk chunk, followed by the tinny jingling of the jackpot.

‘Why would he do it, though?’ I demanded. ‘If he – they – had already taken John over, then they didn’t have to worry about the investigation any more. If they did it to silence him, then the job was done. Why did they need to kill him?’

‘You tell me,’ Covington suggested, still staring down at me.

‘Because they don’t go for broken-down old men,’ I muttered. Chunk chunk chunk. ‘Because whoever got that gig – whoever possessed John – was just doing what had to be done to shut him up. Guided suicide. There was no need to stick around for the long-term.’

Covington nodded. ‘That’s the way I read it,’ he said. ‘I’m sure when they’re choosing their new wardrobe they go for the young and healthy. John struck me as anything but.’

Some of the reels were still spinning, still dropping into their final positions: a bell here, a lemon there. John’s fragmented notes and the crazy paranoid dance he’d led me proved that Carla had been right about him: his mind was starting to collapse in on itself. But some of the things she’d seen and described to me she hadn’t understood at all. How could she? When John went around the house writing messages to himself and hiding them, then went around again and burned them or ripped them up, that had looked like the purest insanity. But not if it was a game for two players: not if John was fighting back against the passenger riding inside his mind and soul, and almost winning. But it wasn’t a fair fight, of course: at least, not after the other guy got the drop on him with a fucking shotgun.

I lurched to my feet: I just couldn’t keep sitting there any more as my mind stripped its gears trying to accommodate these new facts.

‘How do you know about all this?’ I demanded, involuntarily shifting my weight and finding a good brace point, as though even now I was afraid that Covington might lean in and throw a punch at me.

‘Until recently,’ Covington admitted, his expression turning a little grim now, ‘I knew almost nothing. At least – I suspected that Mount Grace was a front for some kind of illegal activity. There were too many things that didn’t add up. It was odd that the trust had kept an interest in Mount Grace at all, in a portfolio that was dominated by Pacific Rim venture stocks and West African gold. There wasn’t any profit in it.’

‘Todd told me that Mister Palance kept it on because it’s a heritage site,’ I said.

Covington snorted. ‘Did he? Lionel never gave a damn about that stuff. And it’s where they meet – the board, I mean; the trust’s administrators – once a month, which meant it was certainly the centre of something. But I naively assumed that the something was probably tied in with drugs or unlicensed gambling – a nest egg the trustees were building up with an eye to their retirement. And that didn’t trouble my conscience very much at all. I’ve always believed that if you play your hand with a reasonable degree of skill, what you take proper care not to know can’t hurt you.’

‘But then?’

‘But then John Gittings came and told me some of what he’d found out about the place. That was in January. And I thought about a few things that I’d heard said at meetings of the board, or seen referred to in old files. It all fell into place. I became aware that there was an organisation underneath the one I knew: much older, completely invisible, with its own agenda.’

He frowned and turned away. ‘I say it fell into place,’ he grunted. ‘But it didn’t happen all at once. It took weeks, in fact. At the time I told Gittings he was insane and more or less threw him out of the place. Then I went away and thought, and realised that everything I’d been ignoring – it all came down to this. A reincarnation racket, operating out of Mount Grace. Run not by the trustees, but by the people whose ashes are kept there. It sounds insane when you put it like that, but that’s what it is, all the same.’

‘So what did you do?’ I asked.

Covington looked at me as though I’d just done an impersonation of a duck singing the national anthem.

‘I didn’t do anything,’ he said, with an incredulous emphasis. ‘I still haven’t done anything. I called Gittings to warn him off, but he was already dead by then. If I needed an illustration of the shit I was potentially in, there it was. These people can kill you and make it look – not even like an accident, like something you did to yourself. I kept my mouth shut and dug in.’

He sighed. ‘And I made sure never to go into the crematorium itself from that moment onwards. I’ve been onto the grounds, as you saw. I’ve unlocked the doors, and locked them up again. But I haven’t stepped inside the place itself, and I don’t intend to. If that sounds irrational, you’ll have to excuse me.’

I said nothing for a moment. I was thinking of Doug Hunter, and what he’d said about his sprained ankle when we met. That was how they’d got him. He sprained his ankle, and because there wasn’t a first-aid kit, he went into ‘the church next door’. And when he came out, he was carrying a beast on his back that turned out to be Myriam Kale. I’d noticed the building site on Ropery Street: how could I not have made the connection?

No. Covington’s precautions sounded anything but irrational. If anything, he was still taking unwarranted risks just walking up to the door of the goddamn place.

Abruptly, Covington looked at his watch. ‘Listen, I have to go and check on Lionel,’ he said. ‘Kim will have him cleaned up by now and she’ll probably be putting him to bed. We have a routine, and he’ll sleep better if he sees me. You can wait if you want.’

‘Can I come along with you?’ I asked on an impulse.

There was a definite, frosty pause.

‘He hasn’t had anything to do with Mount Grace in more than a decade,’ the blond man said. ‘There’s nothing he can tell you.’

‘There may be things I can tell without talking to him,’ I countered.

Covington looked unconvinced. ‘He’s very frail. And he needs his sleep. I don’t want him upset any more tonight.’

‘I won’t ask him any questions,’ I promised. ‘Or even discuss any of this stuff while we’re with him.’

A brusque shrug. ‘All right. If you insist. Five minutes. Then we’ll leave so that Kim can settle him down. When I tap you on the shoulder, we go, whether you’re ready or not.’

‘Sure,’ I agreed.

We walked along more miles of eight-lane corridor, up a staircase that wasn’t the one I’d seen in the front hall, and into a bedroom that looked more like a hospital ward. Mostly that was the bed, which was one of those electrically controlled multi-position efforts for people with mobility problems. But I also noticed the pharmacopoeia of pill packets and medicine bottles on a night table next to the bed, the oxygen cylinder discreetly positioned along one wall and the flotilla of wheelchairs parked just inside the door: motorised and manual, folding and solid, solid steel and lightweight aluminium, something for every occasion. In other respects it resembled a child’s nursery: there were toys on the floor, including an ancient-looking Hornby train set with a perfect circle of track, and a bookcase full of very big books with very brightly coloured spines.

Kim – the nurse I’d seen earlier – was adjusting the bed as we walked in. Lionel Palance was lying back on the high-banked pillows, breathing through a nebuliser which a second nurse, a male one, held to his face. His gaze passed over me without seeming to register me at all, but as it rested on Covington he smiled. His lips moved and made a muffled noise that might have been a greeting.

‘Hello, Lionel,’ Covington said gently, sitting on the bed. ‘Taking your medicine. That’s what I like to see.’

The nurse took the nebuliser away and laid it down on the night table.

‘Peter,’ the old man said, in his high, fragile voice. And then, ‘Taking – my my medicine.’

Covington nodded, pantomiming approval. ‘Yeah, I saw. And Kim’s going to read to you until you go to sleep. The Just So Stories, yeah? You’re still on that one?’

‘Noddy,’ Kim murmured. ‘We’re back to Noddy.’

Covington winced. ‘Noddy’s too young for him,’ he said, with an edge in his voice, as though they were parents disagreeing for the thousandth time about a child they had ambitions for.

Kim wasn’t cowed. ‘But he likes it,’ she said. ‘It comforts him.’

Covington raised his hands in surrender, I think more because I was there than because he accepted the argument.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘you’re going to have your story and you’re going to go to sleep, aren’t you? You’re going to be good now.’

‘All right, Peter,’ the old man agreed.

‘Goodnight, Lionel. God bless. See you in the morning, please God.’

He recited this quickly, as though it was a formula.

‘Goodnight, Peter,’ the old man fluted. ‘God bless. See you in the morning. Please God.’

Covington stood up and made to move away, but the old man was still looking at him, still trying to speak although he’d temporarily run out of breath.

‘We played hi- hide and seek.’

The big blond hunk turned around and looked down at his nominal employer who was dwarfed by the ultra-technological bed as he was by the ultra-luxurious house. Something in Covington’s face changed and for a moment he looked as though he’d taken a punch to the jaw. He blinked twice, the second blink longer than the first. His eyes when they opened again were wet.

‘Yeah,’ he said, with an effort. ‘We did, Lionel. We played.’

Covington walked out of the room quickly, without looking at me. I lingered, listening to the silence. Not really silence: Lionel Palance’s breathing was hoarse and hesitant and clearly audible, and the two nurses were bustling off to one side of me, Kim stacking the medications back in the right places on the table while the male nurse bundled up the old man’s soiled pyjamas and put them in a plastic laundry bin. Something beeped in a vaguely emergency-room tone, but I couldn’t see what or where it was.

Not really silence: but then I wasn’t really listening, at least to any of that stuff. I was listening to Lionel: to the rhythm of his soul and self, the music I’d play if I ever wanted to summon him or send him away.

It was very faint, but it was there. More to the point, it was right: the key and the tone and the chords and the pace and the nuance all felt like they belonged there. He was himself: not a ghost riding flesh it had no claim to; not a demon playing with a meat puppet. Just a frail old man living out his last days in a second childhood, surrounded by all the luxuries that money could buy.

And yet he was part of all this: part of whatever was happening at Mount Grace. How could he not be, when he was the owner of the place? Covington had said that Palance hadn’t had anything to do with the crematorium for more than a decade: but we were looking at events that had played out over more than a century, so a few years more or less were no more than a drop in the ocean.

I couldn’t question Palance, obviously, and it looked like I’d got all I was going to get from Covington. But I knew beyond any doubt that when I finally got the full story of Mount Grace and the born-again killers, it would turn out to be Palance’s story too. And – less than a conviction, but a very strong feeling – it was going to be a story lacking a happy-ever-after ending.

I backed quietly out of the room and rejoined Covington on the landing. There was nothing in his face or manner to indicate that he’d been moved or upset a few minutes earlier: he was cold and functional now, almost brusque.

‘What do you think you’ll do?’ he asked me, as we walked back down the stairs. ‘I mean, you came here for a reason, didn’t you? You’re looking into this, and it’s not just because you want John’s widow to have closure.’

‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘I came here for a reason. Too many people have died, Covington. And the body count its higher now than it was this time yesterday. I’m going to Mount Grace, and since I’m going to be outnumbered a hundred to one, I’m taking the reconnaissance pretty fucking seriously.’

‘It won’t be enough,’ he said flatly. ‘Whatever you find out, and however you play it, you’re not going to be able to do it alone.’

‘Are you offering to help?’ I asked.

Covington laughed without the smallest trace of humour. ‘No. Absolutely not. I’m just saying, that’s all. No point putting the gun in your mouth if suicide’s not what you’re after. Get yourself some back-up – expert help. Maybe some other people in your profession.’

‘I’ll take it under advisement,’ I muttered. ‘Is there anything you can do from this end? Get me a plan of the building, maybe. And a list of who’s been cremated there over the past fifty or sixty years, say.’

‘Maybe. But I’d have to ask Todd, and I doubt he’d cooperate. He doesn’t like me very much.’

‘Todd the lawyer?’

‘Todd the lawyer, Todd the son and Todd the holy ghost. Todd the president of the board of trustees.’

Chunk chunk chunk.

‘Don’t bother,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask him myself.’

I walked down to the North Circular, hoping to catch another cab, but the night bus came along first and I rode it around to New Southgate, all alone for most of the way but sharing it with a small crowd of friendly drunks on the last stretch. Their old man, anachronistically enough, said follow the van. I wanted to invite them to jump under a fucking van, but they were mostly big drunks so I closed my eyes and let the crumbling brickwork of the wall of sound break over me.

Half past two in the morning. I walked down towards Wood Green with my head aching. Most of that was from where Juliet had done the laying-on of hands, but some of it was because of the implications of what Nicky and Covington had told me. I’d have to go to Mount Grace, but if I just walked in off the street I’d be outgunned and easy meat. After all, I had no idea what I’d be facing there or even if they’d know I was coming. I had to map the terrain, and I didn’t know how.

I was bone weary and not my usual happy-go-lucky self as I got back to the block and trudged up the endless stairs – lifts were all still out, inevitably – to Ropey’s flat. Maybe the tiredness was why I didn’t notice that the door unlocked on a single turn of the key, when I’d double-locked it on my way out as I always did.

But as soon as I stepped over the threshold I knew, even in the pitch dark, that I wasn’t alone. My scalp prickled, and then the rest of me too: I was being watched in the dark by something that was neither wholly alive nor wholly dead.

I stepped hastily away from the door so I wouldn’t be silhouetted against the light from the corridor outside: but whoever was in here had dark-adapted eyes already, and they could pick me off at their leisure if that was what they wanted. Slowly, silently, I snaked my hand into my coat and slid out the tin whistle. The silent presence had a distinct feel to it, and it was starting to resolve into notes – fragmented, for now, but the links would come if I could stay alive long enough.

‘You might as well turn on the light,’ said a dry, brittle, utterly inhuman voice. ‘If I was going to rip your throat out, I’d have done it as soon as you walked in.’

I didn’t need to turn on the light: that voice was imprinted on my mind almost as powerfully as Juliet’s scent.

‘Moloch,’ I snarled.

A faint snicker ratcheted out of the darkness like a rusty thumbscrew being laboriously turned.

‘I thought it was time we pooled our resources,’ the demon said.