Dead Men's Boots (44 page)

I took a step backward, and then another, bending my head as I passed under the lintel. The old man shuffled out after me,
not needing to bend because of his diminutive size and stooped shoulders.

As I was closing the cupboard door, I heard footsteps from behind me and turned my head with difficulty—the old man was still
holding tight to my arm—to see who was coming. One of the search parties had come in out of the cold. At its head was a familiar
face topped by a familiar shock of snow-white hair.

“Door was open, Mr. Covington,” I said. “So I let myself in. Hope you don’t mind.”

He stared at me, then at the old man leaning against my arm, then back at me. “The door was open,” he agreed, “but as I recall,
the gate was locked. It still is. Do I know you? Your face is vaguely familiar.”

“Felix Castor. We met at Mount Grace,” I said. “On Wednesday, when John Gittings was cremated.” By this time, two of the searchers—a
man in an immaculate white shirt and gray suit trousers and a woman who was evidently a nurse—had gently and painstakingly
prized the old man’s fingers loose from my forearm and were leading him away, the woman murmuring reassuringly into his ear
about getting cleaned up and having a nice cup of tea. I watched him out of sight, then turned back to Covington.

Covington nodded slowly, his expression still wary. “All right. Yes. I remember you. But what are you doing here now?”

“I was hoping to talk to Mr. Palance,” I said. A presentiment hit me as soon as the words were out.

“Well,” Covington said, nodding toward the door that the old man had disappeared through, “it looks as though you’ve already
introduced yourself.”

“Mr. Palance—Lionel—had a stroke about ten years ago,” Covington said, walking ahead of me along a corridor you could drive
a truck down. It would have ruined the Persian carpet, though, and probably knocked one or two of the enormous Tiffany lamps
off their wrought-iron brackets.

“A bad one?” I asked.

“No.” Covington shook his head. His expression—what I could see of it—was closed, impossible to read. “Not a bad one. Not
really. He was able to walk afterward, and his speech was back to normal after three months. But it came on the back of a
lot of other problems. Most of them, I have to say, psychological. A nervous breakdown at the age of fifty-two that he never
fully recovered from, and occasional bouts of dementia since.

“He’d had a very happy—almost blessed—life up until then, but it all came apart very quickly. That was when he first hired
me to look after the day-to-day workings of the estate.”

“Before the breakdown?” I asked. “Or after?”

The blond man looked over his shoulder at me, his eyes narrowing very slightly. “Before,” he said. “A year or so before, I
suppose. I was still relatively new when all that stuff happened. Why do you ask?”

I didn’t even know myself. “Just wondering about the legal situation,” I said glibly, remembering John Gittings’s Alzheimer’s
and the doubts it might have cast on his changed will. “If he took you on when he wasn’t in his right mind…”

Covington shrugged. “There’s a trust,” he said. “They’re the real decision-makers as far as Lionel’s investments are concerned.
I’m just an administrator. And a sort of personal assistant. I deal with the running of the house, sort and answer the mail,
liaise with the medical staff here. That sort of thing. The trustees manage the investment portfolio and pay my salary.”

“Who looks after the crematorium?” I asked.

Covington held open an oak-paneled door, and I walked 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 fleurs-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 siphon.

“Would you like a drink?” Covington asked, derailing the conversation. “Whiskey? Brandy?”

“Whiskey. Thanks.”

“Straight or on the rocks?”

“Straight.”

He went behind the bar and fixed the drinks, moving unhurriedly and with practiced ease, as though serving in a pub was where
his real strengths lay, rather than managing an estate. The whiskey was Spring-bank 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 bartop 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, Mr. 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 were able to understand what changed his mind.”

Covington strolled back around the bar, setting his drink down on the way, as though he were 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 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, Mr. Castor. Bullshit is bullshit. Tell me what you really want to know.”

Flushed out of cover, I weighed the possible outcomes of doing that. It was hard to read this man. Despite the harsh language,
he didn’t seem angry; only 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 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 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 Mr. 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, turning
the big, ornate key that 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 the 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
realized, seeing him from this close up. There was a hard-edged definition to his muscles that suggested long hours on a bench
press.

“Yes. You know what I mean, Mr. 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 asked. “If he—they—had already taken John over, then they didn’t have to worry about the investigation
anymore. 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 only 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 on 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 couldn’t keep sitting there anymore as my mind stripped its gears trying to accommodate these new
facts.

“How do you know all this?” I asked, 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.

“Until recently,” Covington admitted, his expression turning a little grim, “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 Mr. 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 center of something. But I naively assumed that the something
was 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 organization 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 said. “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 realized
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.”