Dead Men's s Boots

Finding the last remnants of the strength she’d lent to me, I carried her to the door, down the hallway and out into the chill night air.

This wasn’t over yet. There was still one more man I had to visit tonight: visit, and maybe kill. Again.

The wind was as strong as ever: and now at last the rain began to fall, with perfect timing, like the tears of two hundred funerals saved up and shed at once.

25

The big advantage of Juliet’s Maserati was its acceleration: it had warp engines as well as impulse power. When I got onto the North Circular – which at three in the morning was mercifully deserted – and put my foot down on the pedal, six or seven cartloads of bullying G-force pressed me back into the hand-stitched leather and the street lights blue-shifted. I got to Chingford Hatch in what felt like a minute and a half.

The gates of The Maltings were wide open, and so was the front door. Just like the last time I’d been here, all the lights were on: but this time there was a general absence of people running around like headless chickens. I parked up and glanced at Juliet lying across the back seat, absolutely still.

It was too dark to tell whether the healing process had already begun. If she were conscious, I could ask her how she was feeling: and then if she broke my little finger, as she’d threatened to do back in Alabama, it would be a sign that she was starting to rally. In any case, I couldn’t take her with me where I was going.

I got out of the car and walked across the stone flags to the door. I still didn’t see a soul, and dead silence met me in the hallway. I wandered from room to room, expecting an ambush at first and looking behind every door, but you can’t keep those hair-trigger reflexes honed for ever. After a while it became more of a tense stroll.

I found Covington in Lionel Palance’s bedroom. He was sitting in a steel-framed chair next to Palance’s bed, reading the old man a bedtime story – and it wasn’t Noddy. I guess he must have put his foot down about that. I walked into the room, making as little noise as I could, and stood behind him while he read. He did the voices pretty convincingly.

‘“What have you been doing, Taffy?” said Tegumai. He had mended his spear and was carefully waving it to and fro.

‘“It’s a little berangement of my own, Daddy dear,” said Taffy. “If you won’t ask me questions, you’ll know all about it in a little time, and you’ll be surprised. You don’t know how surprised you’ll be, Daddy! Promise you’ll be surprised.”

‘“Very well,” said Tegumai, and went on fishing . . .’

Covington glanced across at his audience of one. Palance was already asleep, his chest rising and falling without sound.

Covington closed the book and put it on the bedside table, in the midst of all the medicines. His movements were a little jerky and so one or two of them fell off onto the floor: he picked them up and put them back in their places. He leaned forward, kissed Palance on the forehead without waking him, and then straightened again, squaring his shoulders as though for some ordeal.

‘Castor,’ he said, turning for the first time to acknowledge me. He looked impossibly tired. ‘How did it go?’

‘Pretty well, Aaron, all things considered.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that if you went to Mount Grace right now, you’d find it looking like a morgue.’

‘Well – good. That’s good. At least, I presume it’s good. And you and your . . . team all came out of it okay?’

I made a palm-wobbling, so-so gesture. ‘We had one fatality. Fortunately.’

He stood and looked calmly into my eyes. ‘And now you’ve come for me.’

‘Pretty much.’

‘Fancy a whisky?’

‘Pretty much.’

Covington led the way down the stairs to the same room we’d used the night before. It felt like another lifetime. He picked up the Springbank, but I put my hand on his arm and shook my head.

‘Something rougher,’ I said. ‘Please. Rotgut, if you’ve got any.’

He found some blended Scotch with a name I didn’t recognise and held it up for my approval. I nodded.

‘“Bartender, give me two fingers of red-eye,”’ he quoted. He mimed the punchline, poking his fingers towards but not into my eyes. I didn’t laugh. I wasn’t in the mood, somehow.

He set out two glasses and poured a generous measure into one. Then he looked at the bottle, thought better of it and took that, leaving the other glass empty on the bar.

‘Shall we sit down?’ he asked, gesturing.

‘Whatever.’ I followed him across to the leather three-piece. He sprawled on the sofa and I took one of the chairs. He chinked the bottle to my glass and then took a deep swallow of the whisky: he didn’t even shudder although God knew it wasn’t smooth.

‘You called me Aaron,’ he observed, running his tongue across his lips.

‘You’d prefer I called you Peter?’

Covington thought about that. ‘No, not really,’ he admitted. ‘Actually – in a strange way – there’s a rightness to it. I made up Silver for myself, but Aaron was the name I was born with. What goes around, comes around. How did you know?’

I let my eyebrows rise and fall. ‘You weren’t particularly trying to hide.’

He acknowledged the point with a shrug. ‘Still. John Gittings never saw through me. Or did he? Was my name in his notes?’

‘No.’ I swirled the whisky in the glass, watching the filaments roll in the liquor like the ghosts of worms. I thought back, trying to get the sequence straight in my own mind because the conviction had crept over me by slow degrees: there wasn’t any one moment when the light bulb had lit up above my head. ‘John didn’t work it out. But the letter you sent him was a part of it, I suppose. You told him to take back-up, and you told me the same thing when I came to see you. I guess that struck a chord. What was with the spelling, by the way? Just your instinct for camouflage kicking in?’

Covington made a slightly rueful face. ‘I can’t spell,’ he said. ‘There’s probably a name for this now – or there will be soon. Aaron Silver learned English late in life, and he never got his head around the orthography. Now I find that every new body I live in has the same limitations as the original. It’s possible to change, but it’s hard. And it doesn’t last. Old habits keep reasserting themselves. The past is . . . more present than the now. It’s easier for me to write like that than it is to look up the correct spellings. Was that all? Just that one coincidence? Me saying the same thing to you that I wrote to Gittings?’

‘No.’

‘Then –?’

‘You really want me to run through all the loose change you were dropping?’

‘If you don’t mind, yes. I still find it hard to believe that I’ve developed a death wish, after working so hard for so long to stay alive. Indulge me.’

I delved into my scattered thoughts again. ‘I was actually looking for you,’ I said. ‘Or at least – not for you, specifically, but for someone behind the scenes who was making things happen. You had to be there. Someone hired John, and gave him a small fortune to spend on those death-row trinkets. Someone told him about the set-up at Mount Grace, but for some reason let him grope around in the dark for weeks on end checking out cemeteries rather than just giving him the address. Someone playing games, in other words. Feeding him crumbs to keep him moving, but not wanting to show his hand. Maybe because if John went directly to Mount Grace, all your dead friends would know who sent him.’

Covington smiled coldly – maybe at the word friends. ‘Go on.’

‘Jan Hunter had a mysterious benefactor, too – someone who called her up claiming to be Paul Sumner, but Paul Sumner was already dead. You again, I’m guessing, trying to keep the momentum going in spite of John’s death – and maybe also looking for a way to stop Doug Hunter going down for a murder he didn’t commit. Strings