Dead Men's s Boots

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.’