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
‘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.’
‘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
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
