‘So Seb Driscoll – the guy you met as Todd – he had a brilliant idea. We have kids. Doesn’t have to be a church wedding, semi-in-the-suburbs kind of deaclass="underline" we just knock some woman up every now and then, so we’ve got biological children of our own. Because if you’ve got a kid – certifiably, genetically yours – everything becomes really easy. When the time comes to take a new body, you leave everything to the kid. You top yourself. You jump. Now you’re the kid, and you’ve got the fortune, and nobody is going to ask any questions. You just look like a mensch: like a stand-up guy who saw his duty right at the end of his life and did it. End of story.’
Covington stood up, slowly and carefully: from the look on his face and the slight jerkiness in his movements, the booze was starting to kick in.
‘So what went wrong?’ I asked.
‘Nothing.’ His voice dripped with bitterness. ‘Except . . . human nature, maybe. You could forgive me for thinking I didn’t have any by this time, couldn’t you? After all the things I’d done. All the mayhem, the killings, down through the years. Life is cheap, right? But not your own. And your kids are a little bit of your own life, growing in someone else.’
He didn’t seem to know what to do with himself now that he was up on his feet again. He tried pacing, but that didn’t seem to work somehow: he’d stop after every few steps as though he was trying to remember a specific sequence of movements and it kept escaping from him, forcing him to break off and start again.
‘There were problems with Lionel,’ he said, staring at the floor. ‘We needed to make a certain land transfer at an awkward time – when he was only two years old. We went ahead and did it, because there wasn’t any other choice. Then the woman who was Lionel’s mother started making difficulties – trying to spend our money – and Driscoll ordered a hit on her. But it was botched, and then she went public and it wasn’t easy after that to get close to her. Or rather, it wasn’t easy in any of the regular ways.
‘But Driscoll saw a way of squaring the circle. He possessed Lionel, and we got Lionel to kill her.’
In spite of everything I’d already seen and done that night, I felt an uncomfortable movement in my stomach at that moment. ‘His own mother?’
‘Yeah. When he was three months past his second birthday. Cute, huh? That train set upstairs – I don’t know if you saw it – that was what I sent him. Stupid gift for a two-year-old: he couldn’t even put the fucking track together. But it didn’t matter, anyway, because he wasn’t going to get to play with it.
‘Driscoll thought it was funny. He’d worn a lot of bodies by that time, but he’d never tried wearing a kid. So he stayed there for a few months. Made quite a joke out of it, turning up for the monthly inscription with a – with a sharp tailored suit, and looking at me out of my own son’s . . . Do you mind? I need some fresh air.’
Covington took aim with the bottle and hurled it against the picture window. The bottle shattered: the window fractured across, but stayed whole. Frustrated, he crossed to the bar, picked up a heavy glass ashtray and slung it like a discus. That did the job: it went pinwheeling through the window, which shattered spectacularly, and impacted on the stone flags outside in a fountain of shards that winked and sparkled briefly in the glare of one of the security lights. As though it hadn’t happened, Covington turned to me again. His eyes were dry but his cheeks were flushed and a terrible strain twisted his mouth, making his handsome face a thing you wanted to look away from.
‘So anyway, that started a whole craze. Driscoll talked it up so much, everyone had to try. Between his second and tenth birthdays, I’d estimate that Lionel had forty or fifty different passengers. And I let it happen. I stood by, and I . . . did nothing. Didn’t think about it. Didn’t care. Told myself I didn’t care, anyway. Life is cheap, and the rest is – sentiment. Which is even cheaper.
‘At ten Lionel was left to himself for a while. They lost interest. But it was too late by then. The cognitive centres in the brain – I don’t know. I’ve heard it explained in four or five different ways. At the crucial points in his brain development, he’d been . . . asleep. A prisoner in his own body, bludgeoned into eight years of unconsciousness. He was never going to be normal now. It turned out that you couldn’t just put those years back.’
Covington took a deep, ragged breath. ‘So we had a hard choice,’ he said. ‘Lionel was still the legal possessor of a lot of land – a big chunk of our assets. He was a ward of court, in my legal custody, but there’d be problems if I just administered his property as though it was mine. That would look like malfeasance: it was exactly what we wanted to avoid.
‘We took the low road instead. Carried on possessing Lionel, carried on using him as our puppet – working on a strictly enforced rota, because the novelty had worn off by this stage and nobody was very keen to go through puberty again. We kept the whole routine up until he came of age. After that, he was as viable a suit to wear as anybody else, and it didn’t matter so much. The job was done.
‘But so was the damage. Now that it was too late, I could see – could really see, for the first time – what a monstrous thing we were doing. How big an obscenity we were.
‘I couldn’t save Lionel. I’d even been part of what had been done to him. What I could do was decide that there wouldn’t be any more Lionels. That the operation would finally be shut down. And when they lost interest in him – when he got too old, and they let him go at last – I brought him here. I’ve tried to make him comfortable, at least: I was trying for happy, but most of the time comfortable is what we can manage. He doesn’t remember much, but he has nightmares, and he’s always confused. Always a little bit panicky, as though he’s forgotten something important and something awful is about to happen and it’ll be his fault.
‘So you see, it wasn’t Myriam. They all think it was, and maybe for them that was the real crisis. For me – the camel’s back was already well and truly fucked. Whatever they let me do for Myriam, or tried to stop me from doing, I was done. I was all done.’
Covington looked at me bleakly. ‘Another drink?’
‘No.’
‘No. Not for me, either, I guess. I can see the way you’re looking at me, Castor. I would have killed you for that once.’
‘It’s your party, Aaron. It’s been your party all along.’
He nodded. ‘Yeah, it has. What time is it?’
‘About five-thirty.’
‘The next shift of nurses comes in at six. I need to make sure they all clock in: if someone doesn’t make it, I have to call the service. After that, I’m yours. We’ll go to where Myriam is. We’ll sort this.’
‘Fine.’ I pulled myself wearily to my feet. Covington could have saved his effort: breaking the window hadn’t done anything to clear the air in here. I crossed to the bar, found the hammer wrapped in bubble plastic behind it and hefted it onto my shoulder. ‘I’ll wait for you in the car. Come on out whenever you’re ready.’
Retracing my steps through the maze, I came back out onto the driveway and climbed into the car. The form-fitted leather was way too comfortable and I dozed off into uneasy dreams. John Gittings was in them: so was Gary Coldwood. When a hand on my shoulder – the one that Todd had stabbed me in earlier that evening – woke me back into the world, cold sweat slicked my body from head to foot.
It was Covington, and he was already in the passenger seat.
‘Nice car,’ he said, without much enthusiasm. ‘Did it belong to the dead woman in the back seat?’
‘Demon,’ I corrected him. ‘Yeah, it’s hers. And the rumours of her death are usually exaggerated.’