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
‘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.
