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‘Mister 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 afterwards, 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, which 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 me my salary.’

‘Who looks after the crematorium?’ I asked.

Covington held open an oak-panelled door, and I walked through 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 fleurde-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 syphon.

‘Would you like a drink?’ Covington asked, derailing the conversation. ‘Whisky? Brandy?’

‘Whisky. Thanks.’

‘Straight, or on the rocks?’

‘Straight.’

He went behind the bar and fixed the drinks, moving unhurriedly and wit»rrip hh practised ease, as though serving in a pub was where his real strengths lay rather than managing an estate. The whisky was Springbank 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 bar-top 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, Mister 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 was able to understand what changed his mind.’

Covington strolled back around the bar, setting his drink down on the way as though he was 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 a little 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, Mister Castor. Bullshit is bullshit. Tell me what you really want to know.’

For a moment, flushed out of cover, I weighed the possible outcomes of doing just that. It was hard to read this man.