Dead Men's s Boots

‘I wish. Look, I don’t think there’s anyone in that place with the balls or the tradecraft to exorcise her. I just want them to keep her out. Otherwise – well, a shitty situation gets one degree shittier.’

Nicky considered. ‘I can drop him an email through a blind proxy. That good enough?’

‘That’s perfect, Nicky. Thanks.’

‘You’re very welcome. Where I’m going, even she won’t find me, so what the fuck do I care?’

‘Hey,’ I called to the cabbie, ‘can you fork a left at Nags Head Road?’

‘I was going to anyway,’ he grunted.

‘Great. You can drop me on the other side of the reservoir. That’s Chingford Hatch, right?’

‘Chingford Green. Chingford Hatch is a bit further down.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

‘Who do you know all the way out here?’ Nicky demanded, genuinely curious. He’s curious about everything, because he knows, deep down, that the huge global conspiracy of which we’re all a part takes in every tiny detail. I think he even believes that one of the tiny details may turn out to be the clue that unlocks everything else.

‘A guy who runs a crematorium,’ I said.

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