were being pulled all the way down the line. Did you summon Moloch, too?’ Covington nodded without speaking. ‘Yeah, I thought so. Big coincidence otherwise – that a demon with just those dietary needs happened to be raised from Hell just where he’d catch the scent of the Mount Grace permanent floating barbecue. But there weren’t any coincidences operating here: it was all part of the master plan.’
I took a long swig of the whisky. It burned pleasantly in my mouth.
‘So that was the main thing,’ I said. ‘The strings. You don’t get all those strings without someone to pull on them. How did I know it was you? Just lots of little things. Your real name – Aaron Silver’s real name, I mean – was Berg: and the name you gave to Ruth Kale was Bergson.’ Covington opened his mouth to speak and I anticipated his objection. ‘No, you’re right. I wouldn’t have picked up on that if I didn’t already know. It was the Paragon, Silver. You let yourself get seen by two people there.’
He looked surprised. ‘I know. But I had my collar drawn up and I was moving fast. I didn’t think either of them got a good look at me.’
‘They didn’t. But their different descriptions of you got me thinking. The desk clerk, Merrill – he said you were an old man. But Onugeta jostled against you in the hallway and he felt how solidly muscled you were: he knew you had to be a young, fit guy. So why would Merrill think you were old?’
‘I don’t know, Castor. What’s the punchline?’
I pointed at his head. ‘Your snow-white locks. You walked past his desk with your head down and your collar up, and all he saw of you was your hair. And I dunno, maybe there’s something about how you walk, too: another echo. Something that goes with being a century and a half old. Either way, the paradox got my mind working. And once it was working, I saw that the little question – who was that masked man? – was the same as the big question. Why were you there at all? Why did you take the hammer away with you? Locking the stable door after the horse had bolted, even though Doug Hunter – and Myriam Kale inside him – was going to be arrested anyway.’
Covington shook his head slowly. ‘You really thought this through, didn’t you? Why did I?’
‘Because flesh is clay. When a human soul possesses an animal body, it bends it as far as it can into a human shape. Sometimes the animal soul pushes back, and you can get some really interesting – not to say nasty – results as the see-saw tips. And the same thing happens to you and your friends, doesn’t it? The longer you stay inside a body that isn’t yours, the more it adjusts to having you there. The more it slides into the shape and form you remember having in your old body. That’s why you’re snow-white blond as Peter Covington, and why you were snow-white blond as Les Lathwell: because Aaron Silver’s soul remembered having snow-white hair. And that hammer, gripped in Doug Hunter’s hand as Myriam Kale came bubbling up out of his soul and into the driver’s seat—’
‘-Had Myriam Kale’s fingerprints on it. Right. The hammer is behind the bar, by the way: I assume you’ll be wanting to take it with you when you go. And it won’t make any difference to me or to Mimi after tonight. Can I refresh your drink, Castor?’
I looked at my empty glass. ‘Probably better not,’ I said. ‘I need a clear head if I’m going to play you out.’
‘You don’t need to worry. I won’t make it hard for you. But I’m in the mood to confess before I die. And I’ve got a favour to ask you, too. Have another drink with me.’
Fuck it. Why not? It was his house, and his booze. I held out the glass and Covington filled it from the bottle he’d been drinking from. Well, alcohol is meant to be a good disinfectant.
‘How long has it been since your last confession?’ I asked him.
He laughed. ‘A hundred and some years. And I’m Jewish, not Catholic. Born Jewish, anyway: religion never meant very much to me – which is why I had myself burned rather than buried. I didn’t believe in the bodily resurrection. All my life I just did what I had to do to get by, and that never seemed to leave much room for thinking about God. The last time I went to schul was on the day I was bar mitzvah. Three years after that I killed my first man. Probably the one thing had as much to do with growing up as the other did.’
Suddenly the prospect of hearing all this seemed a lot less attractive. ‘So you were a bad man,’ I said. ‘We can take that as read, if you like. Move on to the atonement and the absolution.’
‘I’ve been handling the atonement in my own sweet way, Castor. And for your information, I haven’t started telling you my sins yet. I don’t think any of the men I killed back when I was Aaron Silver had any reason to complain. They would have done the same to me, if I’d given them an opening. One of them did, in the end. Henry Meyer-Lindeman got the drop on me in a whorehouse in Streatham. Actually on the job. Shot me and shot a lady name of Ginny Tester under me. We both died instantly.’
‘And in your end was your beginning.’
Covington grimaced. ‘Not right away. It was a shock – waking after my own death and finding that I was trapped in Mount Grace. Tied to my own ashes. You never really are, of course. The trap is just your own habits. Your own ways of thinking. But it felt real. It felt as though I’d be spending eternity on that one little plot of ground, and eternity would be a long time passing.
‘But a year later Stephen Kesel died, and he felt the same way about burial as I did. And four years after that it was Rudolf Gough’s turn. And that was critical mass. There was an old janitor who used to live on the site. We took him one night while he was asleep: the three of us, working together. Then we took turns to ride him. We were back in business.
‘The first thing I did was to visit Meyer-Lindeman and pay him back with interest. I liked Ginny Tester a lot: she deserved better than to die in that undignified way. And Steve and Rudy had similar visits to make – good ones and bad ones.
‘But we realised pretty quickly that this went beyond dealing with unfinished business. We also figured out that it wasn’t possible for one of us to betray the others: Steve tried to take off on his own, but he came limping back three days later: the janitor was fighting back, and it took the three of us to whip him into line again.
‘So there we were. We were immortal, but only so long as we stuck together. An immortality collective. Till death us do part, only it never could whether we wanted it to or not.
‘All the rules and refinements came over the next twenty years or so – the years of throwing things against the wall to see whether or not they stuck. Experimentation and refinement. We discovered that the ashes made everything ten times easier, and made the possession stick for longer too. We discovered that night was better than day, particularly for the initial breaking-in of a new body, and that dark of the moon was the best time of all. We turned it into a very streamlined process. Tried and tested. It helped that nobody believed what we were doing was even possible: that meant nobody was on their guard.’
‘What about Myriam Kale?’ I asked. ‘Where does she come in?’
For a moment I thought Covington hadn’t heard me. He was looking up at the ceiling, his posture one of acute attention.
‘Did you hear Lionel crying?’ he demanded.
‘I didn’t hear a thing.’
He relaxed a little. ‘Okay. Just the wind, I guess. I picked this room because it’s right under his: if he stirs, we’ll hear him. You’ll notice I sent the nurses away, so I’m . . . on duty tonight. Myriam, right. Myriam was Yoko Ono. The femme fatale who gets the blame for breaking up the band.’
He took another long swig of whisky. He’d been drinking pretty regularly and pretty determinedly at every pause in the conversation and the bottle was mostly empty now. He was nerving himself up for something, but I wondered whether he might already have missed his stop.
‘By the 1960s,’ Covington said, ‘I was in my eighth body, if you can believe that. We wore them out pretty quickly: the psychic punishment is reflected in premature ageing. Our numbers were up to two hundred, which is where they’ve stayed ever since, and we’d already had the idea of moving out of organised crime into legitimate business – things that would make us just as rich, but at the same time lessen the chance of any police investigation finding us by accident.
‘For me, it was getting . . . claustrophobic. I wasn’t enjoying the company of my peers much at all. And I’d been practising meditation techniques: I found that if I was really disciplined I could maintain control of the body I was in more or less indefinitely, without reinscription.
‘I went to the States intending to take a good long holiday – to stay away from Mount Grace for as long as possible. But I needed an excuse and so I made up this bullshit story about making contact with the American mobs. Then, to make it look like I was doing that, I spent some time with the Chicago families. That’s how I met
