‘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 fleur-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 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 might lean in and throw a punch at me.