I let my eyebrows rise and fall. ‘You weren’t particularly trying to hide.’
He acknowledged the point with a shrug. ‘Still. John Gittings never saw through me. Or did he? Was my name in his notes?’
‘No.’ I swirled the whisky in the glass, watching the filaments roll in the liquor like the ghosts of worms. I thought back, trying to get the sequence straight in my own mind because the conviction had crept over me by slow degrees: there wasn’t any one moment when the light bulb had lit up above my head. ‘John didn’t work it out. But the letter you sent him was a part of it, I suppose. You told him to take back-up, and you told me the same thing when I came to see you. I guess that struck a chord. What was with the spelling, by the way? Just your instinct for camouflage kicking in?’
Covington made a slightly rueful face. ‘I can’t spell,’ he said. ‘There’s probably a name for this now – or there will be soon. Aaron Silver learned English late in life, and he never got his head around the orthography. Now I find that every new body I live in has the same limitations as the original. It’s possible to change, but it’s hard. And it doesn’t last. Old habits keep reasserting themselves. The past is . . . more present than the now. It’s easier for me to write like that than it is to look up the correct spellings. Was that all? Just that one coincidence? Me saying the same thing to you that I wrote to Gittings?’
‘No.’
‘Then –?’
‘You really want me to run through all the loose change you were dropping?’
‘If you don’t mind, yes. I still find it hard to believe that I’ve developed a death wish, after working so hard for so long to stay alive. Indulge me.’
I delved into my scattered thoughts again. ‘I was actually looking for you,’ I said. ‘Or at least – not for you, specifically, but for someone behind the scenes who was making things happen. You had to be there. Someone hired John, and gave him a small fortune to spend on those death-row trinkets. Someone told him about the set-up at Mount Grace, but for some reason let him grope around in the dark for weeks on end checking out cemeteries rather than just giving him the address. Someone playing games, in other words. Feeding him crumbs to keep him moving, but not wanting to show his hand. Maybe because if John went directly to Mount Grace, all your dead friends would know who sent him.’
Covington smiled coldly – maybe at the word friends. ‘Go on.’
‘Jan Hunter had a mysterious benefactor, too – someone who called her up claiming to be Paul Sumner, but Paul Sumner was already dead. You again, I’m guessing, trying to keep the momentum going in spite of John’s death – and maybe also looking for a way to stop Doug Hunter going down for a murder he didn’t commit. Strings were being pulled all the way down the line. Did you summon Moloch, too?’ Covington nodded without speaking. ‘Yeah, I thought so. Big coincidence otherwise – that a demon with just those dietary needs happened to be raised from Hell just where he’d catch the scent of the Mount Grace permanent floating barbecue. But there weren’t any coincidences operating here: it was all part of the master plan.’
I took a long swig of the whisky. It burned pleasantly in my mouth.
‘So that was the main thing,’ I said. ‘The strings. You don’t get all those strings without someone to pull on them. How did I know it was you? Just lots of little things. Your real name – Aaron Silver’s real name, I mean – was Berg: and the name you gave to Ruth Kale was Bergson.’ Covington opened his mouth to speak and I anticipated his objection. ‘No, you’re right. I wouldn’t have picked up on that if I didn’t already know. It was the Paragon, Silver. You let yourself get seen by two people there.’
He looked surprised. ‘I know. But I had my collar drawn up and I was moving fast. I didn’t think either of them got a good look at me.’
‘They didn’t. But their different descriptions of you got me thinking. The desk clerk, Merrill – he said you were an old man. But Onugeta jostled against you in the hallway and he felt how solidly muscled you were: he knew you had to be a young, fit guy. So why would Merrill think you were old?’
‘I don’t know, Castor. What’s the punchline?’
I pointed at his head. ‘Your snow-white locks. You walked past his desk with your head down and your collar up, and all he saw of you was your hair. And I dunno, maybe there’s something about how you walk, too: another echo. Something that goes with being a century and a half old. Either way, the paradox got my mind working. And once it was working, I saw that the little question – who was that masked man? – was the same as the big question. Why were you there at all? Why did you take the hammer away with you? Locking the stable door after the horse had bolted, even though Doug Hunter – and Myriam Kale inside him – was going to be arrested anyway.’
Covington shook his head slowly. ‘You really thought this through, didn’t you? Why did I?’
‘Because flesh is clay. When a human soul possesses an animal body, it bends it as far as it can into a human shape. Sometimes the animal soul pushes back, and you can get some really interesting – not to say nasty – results as the see-saw tips. And the same thing happens to you and your friends, doesn’t it? The longer you stay inside a body that isn’t yours, the more it adjusts to having you there. The more it slides into the shape and form you remember having in your old body. That’s why you’re snow-white blond as Peter Covington, and why you were snow-white blond as Les Lathwelclass="underline" because Aaron Silver’s soul remembered having snow-white hair. And that hammer, gripped in Doug Hunter’s hand as Myriam Kale came bubbling up out of his soul and into the driver’s seat—’
‘-Had Myriam Kale’s fingerprints on it. Right. The hammer is behind the bar, by the way: I assume you’ll be wanting to take it with you when you go. And it won’t make any difference to me or to Mimi after tonight. Can I refresh your drink, Castor?’
I looked at my empty glass. ‘Probably better not,’ I said. ‘I need a clear head if I’m going to play you out.’
‘You don’t need to worry. I won’t make it hard for you. But I’m in the mood to confess before I die. And I’ve got a favour to ask you, too. Have another drink with me.’
Fuck it. Why not? It was his house, and his booze. I held out the glass and Covington filled it from the bottle he’d been drinking from. Well, alcohol is meant to be a good disinfectant.
‘How long has it been since your last confession?’ I asked him.
He laughed. ‘A hundred and some years. And I’m Jewish, not Catholic. Born Jewish, anyway: religion never meant very much to me – which is why I had myself burned rather than buried. I didn’t believe in the bodily resurrection. All my life I just did what I had to do to get by, and that never seemed to leave much room for thinking about God. The last time I went to schul was on the day I was bar mitzvah. Three years after that I killed my first man. Probably the one thing had as much to do with growing up as the other did.’
Suddenly the prospect of hearing all this seemed a lot less attractive. ‘So you were a bad man,’ I said. ‘We can take that as read, if you like. Move on to the atonement and the absolution.’
‘I’ve been handling the atonement in my own sweet way, Castor. And for your information, I haven’t started telling you my sins yet. I don’t think any of the men I killed back when I was Aaron Silver had any reason to complain. They would have done the same to me, if I’d given them an opening. One of them did, in the end. Henry Meyer-Lindeman got the drop on me in a whorehouse in Streatham. Actually on the job. Shot me and shot a lady name of Ginny Tester under me. We both died instantly.’
‘And in your end was your beginning.’
Covington grimaced. ‘Not right away. It was a shock – waking after my own death and finding that I was trapped in Mount Grace. Tied to my own ashes. You never really are, of course. The trap is just your own habits. Your own ways of thinking. But it felt real. It felt as though I’d be spending eternity on that one little plot of ground, and eternity would be a long time passing.