‘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.