Not really silence: but then I wasn’t really listening, at least to any of that stuff. I was listening to Lioneclass="underline" to the rhythm of his soul and self, the music I’d play if I ever wanted to summon him or send him away.
It was very faint, but it was there. More to the point, it was right: the key and the tone and the chords and the pace and the nuance all felt like they belonged there. He was himself: not a ghost riding flesh it had no claim to; not a demon playing with a meat puppet. Just a frail old man living out his last days in a second childhood, surrounded by all the luxuries that money could buy.
And yet he was part of all this: part of whatever was happening at Mount Grace. How could he not be, when he was the owner of the place? Covington had said that Palance hadn’t had anything to do with the crematorium for more than a decade: but we were looking at events that had played out over more than a century, so a few years more or less were no more than a drop in the ocean.
I couldn’t question Palance, obviously, and it looked like I’d got all I was going to get from Covington. But I knew beyond any doubt that when I finally got the full story of Mount Grace and the born-again killers, it would turn out to be Palance’s story too. And – less than a conviction, but a very strong feeling – it was going to be a story lacking a happy-ever-after ending.
I backed quietly out of the room and rejoined Covington on the landing. There was nothing in his face or manner to indicate that he’d been moved or upset a few minutes earlier: he was cold and functional now, almost brusque.
‘What do you think you’ll do?’ he asked me, as we walked back down the stairs. ‘I mean, you came here for a reason, didn’t you? You’re looking into this, and it’s not just because you want John’s widow to have closure.’
‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘I came here for a reason. Too many people have died, Covington. And the body count its higher now than it was this time yesterday. I’m going to Mount Grace, and since I’m going to be outnumbered a hundred to one, I’m taking the reconnaissance pretty fucking seriously.’
‘It won’t be enough,’ he said flatly. ‘Whatever you find out, and however you play it, you’re not going to be able to do it alone.’
‘Are you offering to help?’ I asked.
Covington laughed without the smallest trace of humour. ‘No. Absolutely not. I’m just saying, that’s all. No point putting the gun in your mouth if suicide’s not what you’re after. Get yourself some back-up – expert help. Maybe some other people in your profession.’
‘I’ll take it under advisement,’ I muttered. ‘Is there anything you can do from this end? Get me a plan of the building, maybe. And a list of who’s been cremated there over the past fifty or sixty years, say.’
‘Maybe. But I’d have to ask Todd, and I doubt he’d cooperate. He doesn’t like me very much.’
‘Todd the lawyer?’
‘Todd the lawyer, Todd the son and Todd the holy ghost. Todd the president of the board of trustees.’
Chunk chunk chunk.
‘Don’t bother,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask him myself.’
I walked down to the North Circular, hoping to catch another cab, but the night bus came along first and I rode it around to New Southgate, all alone for most of the way but sharing it with a small crowd of friendly drunks on the last stretch. Their old man, anachronistically enough, said follow the van. I wanted to invite them to jump under a fucking van, but they were mostly big drunks so I closed my eyes and let the crumbling brickwork of the wall of sound break over me.
Half past two in the morning. I walked down towards Wood Green with my head aching. Most of that was from where Juliet had done the laying-on of hands, but some of it was because of the implications of what Nicky and Covington had told me. I’d have to go to Mount Grace, but if I just walked in off the street I’d be outgunned and easy meat. After all, I had no idea what I’d be facing there or even if they’d know I was coming. I had to map the terrain, and I didn’t know how.
I was bone weary and not my usual happy-go-lucky self as I got back to the block and trudged up the endless stairs – lifts were all still out, inevitably – to Ropey’s flat. Maybe the tiredness was why I didn’t notice that the door unlocked on a single turn of the key, when I’d double-locked it on my way out as I always did.
But as soon as I stepped over the threshold I knew, even in the pitch dark, that I wasn’t alone. My scalp prickled, and then the rest of me too: I was being watched in the dark by something that was neither wholly alive nor wholly dead.
I stepped hastily away from the door so I wouldn’t be silhouetted against the light from the corridor outside: but whoever was in here had dark-adapted eyes already, and they could pick me off at their leisure if that was what they wanted. Slowly, silently, I snaked my hand into my coat and slid out the tin whistle. The silent presence had a distinct feel to it, and it was starting to resolve into notes – fragmented, for now, but the links would come if I could stay alive long enough.
‘You might as well turn on the light,’ said a dry, brittle, utterly inhuman voice. ‘If I was going to rip your throat out, I’d have done it as soon as you walked in.’
I didn’t need to turn on the light: that voice was imprinted on my mind almost as powerfully as Juliet’s scent.
‘Moloch,’ I snarled.
A faint snicker ratcheted out of the darkness like a rusty thumbscrew being laboriously turned.
‘I thought it was time we pooled our resources,’ the demon said.
20
I turned the light on, shrugged off my coat and threw it over the back of the sofa, then stepped out of my shoes as I advanced into the room. I managed to do all of this stuff fairly matter-of-factly: after all, like the fiend-in-the-shape-of-a-man said, he’d already had an open goal and refused to take the shot. Whatever this turned out to be, it wasn’t a straightforward ambush.
‘So how was your trip?’ Moloch asked, in the same tone of metal grinding against bone.
I made a so-so gesture. ‘Too many Satanists,’ I said.
He nodded sympathetically, but his smile showed way too many teeth to be reassuring. ‘Our little fifth column. Yes. If it’s any consolation, they all get eaten in the end.’
He was sitting in the swivel chair, a 1970s relic that was Ropey’s most prized possession after his music collection. Moloch was looking welclass="underline" there was a ruddier tinge to his skin, and he’d even gained a little weight. His dress sense had improved, too: in place of the rags he’d been wearing when I first saw him outside the offices of Ruthven, Todd and Clay, he was dressed now in black trousers, calf-length black boots and a black grandad shirt with red jewelled studs at the neck and cuffs. He would have looked like some eighteenth-century priest playing a game of ‘my benefice is bigger than yours’ if it weren’t for the full-length leather coat. As it was, he looked like someone who’d taken The Matrix a little too seriously. The fingers of his two hands were cat’s-cradled around something small that gleamed white between them. He turned it slightly every now and then: the only move he made. Then, when he saw that my gaze had turned to it, he opened his fingers and let me see what it was: a tiny skull, about the size of a human baby’s but longer in the jaw, picked clean of flesh. I was willing to bet that it was a cat’s skull.
‘First things first,’ Moloch said briskly. ‘We don’t want to be interrupted, so let’s draw the curtains around our tent. Keep out the riff-raff.’
He spread his fingers with a flourish, letting the skull tumble off his palm. It made it most of the way to the floor: then it just stopped, in the air, six inches or so above the shag pile.