Dead Men's Boots (43 page)

Or maybe I was being too subtle. Maybe John had finished his investigation by going native: switching horses in the middle
of the River Styx. I could sort of see how that would work. If there was a gateway to immortality just off the Mile End Road,
and if I knew exactly where it was, I might be tempted to stand in line and take my chances.

Because what Lathwell and his friends had, or seemed to have, was a lot better than the alternatives on offer. Ghosts could
drink only the wine breath; zombies like Nicky had to stave off encroaching decay with fanatical care, or they’d quite literally
fall to pieces; and loupgarous had all the disadvantages of trying to remain human while living in the skin of an animal,
a battle that in the long run they all lost.

To come back as yourself—in living human flesh—was a sweet deal. And to come back again and again (because Les Lathwell’s
fingerprints were the same as Aaron Silver’s), well, that was the cherry on top of the sempiternal trifle.

Either way, Mount Grace was the link. That was where the killers were buried. That was where John had gone after he’d engaged
Todd to change his will. And I was willing to bet a rupee against a rollover lottery win that was where Myriam Kale had been
taken after Ruth gave up her sister’s mortal remains to Mr. Bergson, the charming killer with the bleached blond hair.

“Thanks, Nicky,” I said. “I owe you.”

“Yeah,” he confirmed. “You do. More than you can pay. That briefcase is full of the Git’s bits and pieces. There’s no way
I’m gonna try and sell them now. I’m going underground, and they’re too fucking easy to track. So you keep them to remember
me by.”

“Going underground?” I tried to read his expression. “Do you mean that literally, or—”

“Ask me no questions, Castor, I’ll tell you no fucking lies.”

I looked out the window. I had the sense of clocks ticking and events accelerating past me, out of control. I’d vaguely assumed
that we’d be taking the North Circular, and I could jump out at Wood Green on the way through to Nicky’s gaff in Walthamstow,
but the cabbie had taken the M25, and we were coming down on the A10 now, through Enfield and Ponders End. A memory stirred
in my mind.

I looked at my watch. It was very late, but what the hell. If nobody was home, I could always come back another time. It felt
like more than coincidence that I was passing this close right after Nicky had dropped that bombshell on me. Then again, that’s
how all the best coincidences feel. First things first, though; too much unfinished business was pressing on me. If I could
shunt some of it off, I’d travel lighter.

“Can you get a message through to someone for me?” I asked Nicky. “On your way to wherever it is you’re going?”

“Maybe,” he allowed warily. “Who’s the someone?”

“The governor of Pentonville.”

He gave a sardonic laugh. “Fine. What do you want me to say? That you love him after all?”

“That a demon from hell is probably going to walk through his front door sometime in the next twenty-four hours, looking to
let a murderer back out onto the street. A guy in the remand block. Douglas Hunter.”

Nicky stared at me. “A demon from hell?”

“Yeah. Wearing human flesh. Answering to the description of a wet dream.”

“Juliet?”

“Obviously.”

“You’re rolling over on Juliet?”

“I wish. Look, I don’t think there’s anyone in that place with the balls or the tradecraft to exorcise her. I just want them
to keep her out. Otherwise— Well, a shitty situation gets one degree shittier.”

Nicky considered. “I can drop him an e-mail through a blind proxy. That good enough?”

“That’s perfect, Nicky. Thanks.”

“You’re very welcome. Where I’m going, even she won’t find me, so what the fuck do I care?”

“Hey,” I called to the cabbie, “can you fork a left at NagsHead Road?”

“I was going to anyway,” he grunted.

“Great. You can drop me on the other side of the reservoir. That’s Chingford Hatch, right?”

“Chingford Green. Chingford Hatch is a bit farther down.”

“It’ll be fine,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Who do you know all the way out here?” Nicky demanded, genuinely curious. He is curious about everything, because he knows,
deep down, that the huge global conspiracy of which we’re all a part takes in every tiny detail. I think he even believes
that one of the tiny details may turn out to be the clue that unlocks everything else.

“A guy who runs a crematorium,” I said.

    
Nineteen

T
HE CAB ROLLED AWAY INTO THE NIGHT, LEAVING ME standing on a rain-slick pavement in the middle of a strangely lopsided street.
In front of me was an unremarkable row of white-fronted semis. At my back was the Lea Valley reservoir, a broad slash of night-black
nothingness barely contained behind a chain-link fence.

King’s Head Hill lay to the north of me, most of the rest of Chingford to the south. Taking advantage of a streetlight, I
fished out my wallet and rummaged through it until I found what I was looking for: the calling card that Peter Covington had
given to Carla on the day her husband got cremated, and that Carla had passed on to me because she had nowhere to put it in
her funereal glad rags. The address was off New Road, in Chingford Hatch, and it had a name instead of a number: the Maltings.
Under a mile away, anyway, even if it was at the farther end of New Road, up by the golf course. I made a start.

As I walked, I mulled over what I knew and didn’t know. The crematorium was the center of some reincarnation racket whose
implications I couldn’t get my head around yet. John Gittings had been investigating it when he died, and he’d known what
was going down long before he knew where. He’d spent days and weeks going through every damn cemetery in London, crossing
them off laboriously on his list before finally coming to the big revelation that it wasn’t a cemetery he was looking for
at all.
Smashana
. The lightbulb moment.

And what had he done after that? Two things I knew about already, and they didn’t fit together all that well. He’d changed
his will, insisting that he be burned at Mount Grace instead of being buried out at Waltham Cross. He’d done that even though
he’d known by this time—or maybe from the start—that whatever the deal was at Mount Grace, it was by invitation only, with
thugs, murderers, and former gangsters forming all or most of the clientele.

At the same time he’d planned an invasion. The letter I’d found inside his watch case, where he’d hidden it with such paranoid
care, didn’t bear any other interpretation:
You’ll just get the one pass, and it’s got to be on INSCRIPTION night, so you can get them all together. Take backup; take
lots of backup.

So had he ever made that pass? Presumably not. He’d killed himself instead and given himself into the tender care of the born-again
killers he’d been stalking. I couldn’t see the logic, even for a man whose mind was crumbling away like a sandcastle at high
tide. I just couldn’t for the life of me see how that would work.

One thing I could see, though: Whatever was going on, Maynard Todd was at the heart of it. He’d said he handled most of Lionel
Palance’s business affairs, which meant he was de facto in charge of the crematorium if Palance didn’t ask too many questions.
He’d told me it was his suggestion that John Gittings should choose Mount Grace after he’d decided on cremation. Then he’d
moved heaven and earth to make it happen, calming Carla’s fears and bringing her on board with a tact and sensitivity that
didn’t go hand in hand with the word “lawyer” in my personal lexicon. And Gary Coldwood had had his accident—you can take
the ironic emphasis for granted—after I’d pointed him toward Todd’s office.

Okay, so Ruthven, Todd and Clay were next on the itinerary. But right now I had to keep my mind on the job at hand.

The Maltings wasn’t a house at all, I realized as I reached the front gates. It was a mansion, set way back from the street
behind a thick barricade of mature yew trees. The gates were electronic, as I could see by the thick hydraulic arms mounted
at waist height across each one. There was a bell and a speaker grille, but I ignored them for the moment. There was plenty
of more interesting stuff to look at.

It had crossed my mind as I walked that I might be wasting my time, that I’d find the house silent and dark, everyone safely
tucked up in bed and sleeping the sleep of the more or less just. I needn’t have worried. Every light was ablaze, and figures
crossed and recrossed the lawn beyond the yew hedge, calling out to one another as they went. I couldn’t hear what they were
saying, but I could hear the urgency in their tones.

I rang the bell, waited, rang it again. Nobody answered. The crisis in the house, or rather on the house’s grounds, hadn’t
left anybody free to deal with casual after-midnight callers. What the hell has happened to the social niceties these days?

Acting on the kind of impulse that had brought me up before unsympathetic magistrates more than once, I stowed my bags behind
some bushes and shinnied up the gate. I’d already sized it up as an easy climb, and it didn’t offer any unpleasant surprises
at the top, where you sometimes find razor wire or bird lime. Within the space of about seven seconds, I was dropping down
on the inside, on the margin of a flagstoned driveway that stretched off ahead of me to where it became a broad terrace in
front of the distant, flamboyantly lit-up house.

The people weaving around on the big lawn seemed to be engaged in some kind of nocturnal hunt-meet. Some of them were beating
the bushes, or rather combing them as though they hoped to find some shy woodland creatures nestled among the roots. Others
were quartering the lawn itself, occasionally shining flashlights in one another’s faces and then shouting apologies.

I walked into their midst, partly hoping to find Peter Covington and explain what the hell I was doing there, partly curious
as to what it was they were looking for. Nobody accosted me or seemed to notice me at all. Once the beam of a flashlight picked
me out, but it swung away as its owner discovered that I wasn’t who he’d thought I was. “Sorry,” came a muttered voice out
of the darkness.

“No problem,” I answered.

The grounds were bigger than I’d thought. There was an ornamental lake, a summerhouse, and a splodge of darkness that was
probably some kind of arbor out in the middle of the lawn. Vague silhouettes circled around all three.

Three broad, shallow stone steps led up to the front door of the house, which was wide open. I walked inside and stood in
the entrance hall at the foot of a flight of stairs that bifurcated at second-floor level, breaking away to left and right
like an architectural cluster bomb.

“Anybody home?” I called. And then “Covington?” No answer.

Killing time, I looked at my surroundings in a “who lives in a house like this?” frame of mind. Someone with a shit lot of
money to spend, that was for sure. The hall was bigger than Ropey’s living room, and there was polished mahogany everywhere.
Over my head hung a massive chandelier that was modern, asymmetrical, and ugly as sin. Money can buy you love at the market
price, but good taste you’ve got to be born with. I counted my blessings and almost got to one.

A noise sounded from somewhere near at hand, once and then again: a muffled scuffling, like rats behind the skirting boards.
I followed it to a cupboard under the stairs with a three-quarter-height door. The sort of place where, in a suburban semi,
you might hide the Hoover and the dustpan. In this stately pile, it was probably the servants’ quarters.

More scuffling. I opened the door and peered inside, seeing only a vertical stack of fuse boxes and some folding chairs. I
smelled the acid reek of urine. Then I realized with a jolt that a pair of human eyes was peering out from behind the chairs.
The cupboard was deeper than I’d thought, and someone was sitting back there in the dark. An old man with a slightly dazed,
more than slightly sleepy look to him.

He didn’t seem too alarmed at being found. He just blinked and shielded his eyes as the light flooded into his bolt-hole.
“Hide,” he said. His voice thin and high, with a faint vibrato that sounded a little plaintive.

“Right,” I agreed.

Then the lined face opened up in a disconcerting grin that looked as though it belonged somewhere else entirely. “Hide-and-seek.”

A shiver went through me, but it came from a memory—John Gittings’s last days as relayed to me by Carla—rather than from this
harmless old man’s crazy game, which at least gave the seemingly oversize staff something to do. “Maybe you should come out
of there,” I suggested as nonthreateningly as I could manage. “Do you want some help?”

He seemed to need a long time to think that through, but eventually, he said, “Ye-e-es,” drawing the sound out into a querulous
bleat.

I moved the chairs and helped him to his feet, taking care not to make him move any faster than he was comfortable with. He
was so frail he looked as though he might break into pieces. He wore silk pajamas that were too big for him. There was a broad,
dark stain spreading out and down from the crotch, which explained the gents’ urinal smell.