‘But a year later Stephen Kesel died, and he felt the same way about burial as I did. And four years after that it was Rudolf Gough’s turn. And that was critical mass. There was an old janitor who used to live on the site. We took him one night while he was asleep: the three of us, working together. Then we took turns to ride him. We were back in business.
‘The first thing I did was to visit Meyer-Lindeman and pay him back with interest. I liked Ginny Tester a lot: she deserved better than to die in that undignified way. And Steve and Rudy had similar visits to make – good ones and bad ones.
‘But we realised pretty quickly that this went beyond dealing with unfinished business. We also figured out that it wasn’t possible for one of us to betray the others: Steve tried to take off on his own, but he came limping back three days later: the janitor was fighting back, and it took the three of us to whip him into line again.
‘So there we were. We were immortal, but only so long as we stuck together. An immortality collective. Till death us do part, only it never could whether we wanted it to or not.
‘All the rules and refinements came over the next twenty years or so – the years of throwing things against the wall to see whether or not they stuck. Experimentation and refinement. We discovered that the ashes made everything ten times easier, and made the possession stick for longer too. We discovered that night was better than day, particularly for the initial breaking-in of a new body, and that dark of the moon was the best time of all. We turned it into a very streamlined process. Tried and tested. It helped that nobody believed what we were doing was even possible: that meant nobody was on their guard.’
‘What about Myriam Kale?’ I asked. ‘Where does she come in?’
For a moment I thought Covington hadn’t heard me. He was looking up at the ceiling, his posture one of acute attention.
‘Did you hear Lionel crying?’ he demanded.
‘I didn’t hear a thing.’
He relaxed a little. ‘Okay. Just the wind, I guess. I picked this room because it’s right under his: if he stirs, we’ll hear him. You’ll notice I sent the nurses away, so I’m . . . on duty tonight. Myriam, right. Myriam was Yoko Ono. The femme fatale who gets the blame for breaking up the band.’
He took another long swig of whisky. He’d been drinking pretty regularly and pretty determinedly at every pause in the conversation and the bottle was mostly empty now. He was nerving himself up for something, but I wondered whether he might already have missed his stop.
‘By the 1960s,’ Covington said, ‘I was in my eighth body, if you can believe that. We wore them out pretty quickly: the psychic punishment is reflected in premature ageing. Our numbers were up to two hundred, which is where they’ve stayed ever since, and we’d already had the idea of moving out of organised crime into legitimate business – things that would make us just as rich, but at the same time lessen the chance of any police investigation finding us by accident.
‘For me, it was getting . . . claustrophobic. I wasn’t enjoying the company of my peers much at all. And I’d been practising meditation techniques: I found that if I was really disciplined I could maintain control of the body I was in more or less indefinitely, without reinscription.
‘I went to the States intending to take a good long holiday – to stay away from Mount Grace for as long as possible. But I needed an excuse and so I made up this bullshit story about making contact with the American mobs. Then, to make it look like I was doing that, I spent some time with the Chicago families. That’s how I met Myriam.
‘I think I loved her because she was the opposite of everything I’d become. Okay, she was a killer: to that extent we were the same. But there was no calculation in anything she did. She was spontaneous, just following her instincts all the time whether they were bad or good. Whereas at Mount Grace calculation was our heart and soul. We’d become parts of a machine, and the machine ground on. And she was vulnerable and damaged, where we were immortal and beyond all harm. I don’t know. I can’t psychoanalyse myself. I was drawn to her. I wanted to help her. Probably the love came later, and it was never consummated. The closest we came to having actual sex was me masturbating her once, while we were at a drive-in movie. She cried when she came: cried buckets. Like she couldn’t bear it. God, what had been done to her! She was still strong, but . . . broken. Broken way past mending.
‘But like I said, this was just a holiday. I came home and I threw myself back into the day-to-day, life-to-life stuff. The Krays, who were never part of our little clique, were arrested and carted off to Broadmoor, and we had the whole of the East End to ourselves. Then I read about Myriam being caught and convicted, and I made up my mind right then to bring her in.’
‘Are we up to the sins yet?’ I asked.
Covington smiled humourlessly. ‘Almost. The rest of the committee were against it from the start. They could see all kinds of trouble arising from having an actual psychopath in our club – and they were right, obviously. I saw most of the potential problems myself, but I didn’t care. I was determined to try. I felt . . . responsible for her, somehow. And I hoped, against all the evidence, that in a new body she might somehow recover. Get over her madness and become what she was meant to be before all the rapes and the beatings.
‘It didn’t work. And yeah, now we’re up to the sins. I feel sorry and I feel ashamed when I think of the men she murdered. I never did acquire much of a taste for torture – and for personal reasons I hate it when violence and sex get mixed up together. It always makes me think of poor Ginny.
‘But the harm was done, now. The committee were terrified that Myriam would draw unwanted attention. They even paid to have that poor bastard Sumner – the hack writer – bumped off because he wrote a book about her. It got harder and harder to convince them to give her another chance – and last year, when I suggested giving her a man’s body as a way of jolting her out of her old behaviour patterns, they told me it was the last time. That meeting got kind of heated. I told them they were pathetic little echoes of what they’d been when they were alive: so scared of losing their creature comforts that they weren’t really living at all any more. They accused me of being too big for my boots, trying to run Mount Grace as though it was my personal empire. They threatened to expel me, and I told them they couldn’t. Not any more. I didn’t need them now to keep my hold on this body – and I could take another one, any time I wanted to, without their help. That was probably an unwise thing to say: when they realised how strong I was, they broke with me completely. By that time . . . it came as something of a relief. Because by that time I had something else eating at me. Worse even than Myriam.’
‘Palance,’ I guessed.
‘Yeah,’ Covington whispered. ‘Lionel.’ He emptied the bottle in one final, three-glug swallow.
‘Who is he, Covington?’
‘He’s my son.’
In the dead silence that followed this flat assertion I did the maths and failed to make it come out even close. Covington read the calculation and the outcome in my face and made a sweeping gesture with his hand to head off any objection.
‘I didn’t father him as Aaron Silver,’ he said. ‘I was in one of the other bodies. I can’t even remember which one: they all merge together now. They all ended up looking exactly the same after I’d been wearing them for a year or so, anyway.
‘You see, Castor, once we’d got the mechanics of possession all worked out, the only problems we had left were the legal ones. We had a lot of property that we had to pass on from one generation to the next – from one body to the next – and we wanted to do it in ways that didn’t look odd to someone looking in from outside. Some of us had trained as lawyers, which meant that – as far as contracts went – we could nail down any arrangement we liked. But it had to look right. Right enough to avoid anybody wanting to look any deeper.