Acting on the kind of impulse that has 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 each other’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 just curious about 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 again as its owner discovered that I wasn’t who he thought I was.
‘Sorry,’ came a muttered voice out of the darkness.
‘No problem,’ I answered.
The grounds were even bigger than I’d thought. There was an ornamental lake, a summer house and a splodge of darkness that was probably some kind of arbour 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 first-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. Well, 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, for a moment seeing only a vertical stack of fuse boxes and some folding chairs. I smelled the acid reek of urine. Then I realised with a jolt that a pair of human eyes was peering out from behind the chairs: the cupboard was deeper than I 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 was 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 little game, which at least gave the seemingly oversized staff something to do. ‘Maybe you should come out of there,’ I suggested, as non-threateningly as I could manage. ‘Do you want some help?’
The old guy 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 just break into pieces. He wore silk pyjamas that were a little too big for him; there was a broad, dark stain spreading outwards and downwards 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 his own head 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 – because the old man was still holding tight onto 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, Mister 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 grey suit trousers and a woman who was self-evidently a nurse – had gently and painstakingly prised 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 Mister Palance,’ I said, and saw the punchline looming a full second before it came.
‘Well,’ Covington said, nodding towards the door that the old man had disappeared through, ‘it looks as though you’ve already introduced yourself.’
‘Mister 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 afterwards, 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, which 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 me my salary.’