Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  And what had he done after that? Two things I knew about already, and they didn’t fit together all that well. He’d changed his will, insisting that he be burned at Mount Grace instead of being buried out at Waltham Cross. He’d done that even though he’d known by this time—or maybe from the start—that whatever the deal was at Mount Grace, it was by invitation only, with thugs, murderers, and former gangsters forming all or most of the clientele.

  At the same time he’d planned an invasion. The letter I’d found inside his watch case, where he’d hidden it with such paranoid care, didn’t bear any other interpretation: You’ll just get the one pass, and it’s got to be on INSCRIPTION night, so you can get them all together. Take backup; take lots of backup.

  So had he ever made that pass? Presumably not. He’d killed himself instead and given himself into the tender care of the born-again killers he’d been stalking. I couldn’t see the logic, even for a man whose mind was crumbling away like a sandcastle at high tide. I just couldn’t for the life of me see how that would work.

  One thing I could see, though: Whatever was going on, Maynard Todd was at the heart of it. He’d said he handled most of Lionel Palance’s business affairs, which meant he was de facto in charge of the crematorium if Palance didn’t ask too many questions. He’d told me it was his suggestion that John Gittings should choose Mount Grace after he’d decided on cremation. Then he’d moved heaven and earth to make it happen, calming Carla’s fears and bringing her on board with a tact and sensitivity that didn’t go hand in hand with the word “lawyer” in my personal lexicon. And Gary Coldwood had had his accident—you can take the ironic emphasis for granted—after I’d pointed him toward Todd’s office.

  Okay, so Ruthven, Todd and Clay were next on the itinerary. But right now I had to keep my mind on the job at hand.

  The Maltings wasn’t a house at all, I realized as I reached the front gates. It was a mansion, set way back from the street behind a thick barricade of mature yew trees. The gates were electronic, as I could see by the thick hydraulic arms mounted at waist height across each one. There was a bell and a speaker grille, but I ignored them for the moment. There was plenty of more interesting stuff to look at.

  It had crossed my mind as I walked that I might be wasting my time, that I’d find the house silent and dark, everyone safely tucked up in bed and sleeping the sleep of the more or less just. I needn’t have worried. Every light was ablaze, and figures crossed and recrossed the lawn beyond the yew hedge, calling out to one another as they went. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could hear the urgency in their tones.

  I rang the bell, waited, rang it again. Nobody answered. The crisis in the house, or rather on the house’s grounds, hadn’t left anybody free to deal with casual after-midnight callers. What the hell has happened to the social niceties these days?

  Acting on the kind of impulse that had brought me up before unsympathetic magistrates more than once, I stowed my bags behind some bushes and shinnied up the gate. I’d already sized it up as an easy climb, and it didn’t offer any unpleasant surprises at the top, where you sometimes find razor wire or bird lime. Within the space of about seven seconds, I was dropping down on the inside, on the margin of a flagstoned driveway that stretched off ahead of me to where it became a broad terrace in front of the distant, flamboyantly lit-up house.

  The people weaving around on the big lawn seemed to be engaged in some kind of nocturnal hunt-meet. Some of them were beating the bushes, or rather combing them as though they hoped to find some shy woodland creatures nestled among the roots. Others were quartering the lawn itself, occasionally shining flashlights in one another’s faces and then shouting apologies.

  I walked into their midst, partly hoping to find Peter Covington and explain what the hell I was doing there, partly curious as to what it was they were looking for. Nobody accosted me or seemed to notice me at all. Once the beam of a flashlight picked me out, but it swung away as its owner discovered that I wasn’t who he’d thought I was. “Sorry,” came a muttered voice out of the darkness.

  “No problem,” I answered.

  The grounds were bigger than I’d thought. There was an ornamental lake, a summerhouse, and a splodge of darkness that was probably some kind of arbor out in the middle of the lawn. Vague silhouettes circled around all three.

  Three broad, shallow stone steps led up to the front door of the house, which was wide open. I walked inside and stood in the entrance hall at the foot of a flight of stairs that bifurcated at second-floor level, breaking away to left and right like an architectural cluster bomb.

  “Anybody home?” I called. And then “Covington?” No answer.

  Killing time, I looked at my surroundings in a “who lives in a house like this?” frame of mind. Someone with a shit lot of money to spend, that was for sure. The hall was bigger than Ropey’s living room, and there was polished mahogany everywhere. Over my head hung a massive chandelier that was modern, asymmetrical, and ugly as sin. Money can buy you love at the market price, but good taste you’ve got to be born with. I counted my blessings and almost got to one.

  A noise sounded from somewhere near at hand, once and then again: a muffled scuffling, like rats behind the skirting boards. I followed it to a cupboard under the stairs with a three-quarter-height door. The sort of place where, in a suburban semi, you might hide the Hoover and the dustpan. In this stately pile, it was probably the servants’ quarters.

  More scuffling. I opened the door and peered inside, seeing only a vertical stack of fuse boxes and some folding chairs. I smelled the acid reek of urine. Then I realized with a jolt that a pair of human eyes was peering out from behind the chairs. The cupboard was deeper than I’d thought, and someone was sitting back there in the dark. An old man with a slightly dazed, more than slightly sleepy look to him.

  He didn’t seem too alarmed at being found. He just blinked and shielded his eyes as the light flooded into his bolt-hole. “Hide,” he said. His voice thin and high, with a faint vibrato that sounded a little plaintive.

  “Right,” I agreed.

  Then the lined face opened up in a disconcerting grin that looked as though it belonged somewhere else entirely. “Hide-and-seek.”

  A shiver went through me, but it came from a memory—John Gittings’s last days as relayed to me by Carla—rather than from this harmless old man’s crazy game, which at least gave the seemingly oversize staff something to do. “Maybe you should come out of there,” I suggested as nonthreateningly as I could manage. “Do you want some help?”

  He seemed to need a long time to think that through, but eventually, he said, “Ye-e-es,” drawing the sound out into a querulous bleat.

  I moved the chairs and helped him to his feet, taking care not to make him move any faster than he was comfortable with. He was so frail he looked as though he might break into pieces. He wore silk pajamas that were too big for him. There was a broad, dark stain spreading out and down from the crotch, which explained the gents’ urinal smell.

  I took a step backward, and then another, bending my head as I passed under the lintel. The old man shuffled out after me, not needing to bend because of his diminutive size and stooped shoulders.

  As I was closing the cupboard door, I heard footsteps from behind me and turned my head with difficulty—the old man was still holding tight to my arm—to see who was coming. One of the search parties had come in out of the cold. At its head was a familiar face topped by a familiar shock of snow-white hair.

  “Door was open, Mr. Covington,” I said. “So I let myself in. Hope you don’t mind.”

  He stared at me, then at the old man leaning against my arm, then back at me. “The door was open,” he agreed, “but as I recall, the gate was locked. It still is. Do I know you? Your face is vaguely familiar.”

  “Felix Castor. We met at Mount Grace,” I said. “On Wednesday, when John Gittings was cremated.” By this time, two of the searchers—a man in an immaculate white shirt and gray
suit trousers and a woman who was evidently a nurse—had gently and painstakingly prized the old man’s fingers loose from my forearm and were leading him away, the woman murmuring reassuringly into his ear about getting cleaned up and having a nice cup of tea. I watched him out of sight, then turned back to Covington.

  Covington nodded slowly, his expression still wary. “All right. Yes. I remember you. But what are you doing here now?”

  “I was hoping to talk to Mr. Palance,” I said. A presentiment hit me as soon as the words were out.

  “Well,” Covington said, nodding toward the door that the old man had disappeared through, “it looks as though you’ve already introduced yourself.”

  “Mr. Palance—Lionel—had a stroke about ten years ago,” Covington said, walking ahead of me along a corridor you could drive a truck down. It would have ruined the Persian carpet, though, and probably knocked one or two of the enormous Tiffany lamps off their wrought-iron brackets.

  “A bad one?” I asked.

  “No.” Covington shook his head. His expression—what I could see of it—was closed, impossible to read. “Not a bad one. Not really. He was able to walk afterward, and his speech was back to normal after three months. But it came on the back of a lot of other problems. Most of them, I have to say, psychological. A nervous breakdown at the age of fifty-two that he never fully recovered from, and occasional bouts of dementia since.

  “He’d had a very happy—almost blessed—life up until then, but it all came apart very quickly. That was when he first hired me to look after the day-to-day workings of the estate.”

  “Before the breakdown?” I asked. “Or after?”

  The blond man looked over his shoulder at me, his eyes narrowing very slightly. “Before,” he said. “A year or so before, I suppose. I was still relatively new when all that stuff happened. Why do you ask?”

  I didn’t even know myself. “Just wondering about the legal situation,” I said glibly, remembering John Gittings’s Alzheimer’s and the doubts it might have cast on his changed will. “If he took you on when he wasn’t in his right mind…”

  Covington shrugged. “There’s a trust,” he said. “They’re the real decision-makers as far as Lionel’s investments are concerned. I’m just an administrator. And a sort of personal assistant. I deal with the running of the house, sort and answer the mail, liaise with the medical staff here. That sort of thing. The trustees manage the investment portfolio and pay my salary.”

  “Who looks after the crematorium?” I asked.

  Covington held open an oak-paneled door, and I walked 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 fleurs-de-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 siphon.

  “Would you like a drink?” Covington asked, derailing the conversation. “Whiskey? Brandy?”

  “Whiskey. Thanks.”

  “Straight or on the rocks?”

  “Straight.”

  He went behind the bar and fixed the drinks, moving unhurriedly and with practiced ease, as though serving in a pub was where his real strengths lay, rather than managing an estate. The whiskey was Spring-bank 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 bartop 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, Mr. 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 were able to understand what changed his mind.”

  Covington strolled back around the bar, setting his drink down on the way, as though he were 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 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, Mr. Castor. Bullshit is bullshit. Tell me what you really want to know.”

  Flushed out of cover, I weighed the possible outcomes of doing that. It was hard to read this man. Despite the harsh language, he didn’t seem angry; only 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 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 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 Mr. 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, turning the big, ornate key that 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 the 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 realized, seeing him from this close up. There was a hard-edged definition to his muscles that suggested long hours on a bench press.

  “Yes. You know what I mean, Mr. 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 asked. “If he—they—had already taken John over, then they didn’t have to worry about the investigation anymore. 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 only 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 on 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.