by Mike Carey
‘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 fleurde-lis, and you could have played a game of five-a-side football on the black leather settee. There was a bar, too: the full deal, with wall-mounted optics and a gleaming chrome soda syphon.
‘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. 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 m
ight 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.’
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 Just So Stories, yeah? You’re still on that one?’
‘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.’