Dead Men's s Boots — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

I lurched to my feet: I just couldn’t keep sitting there any more as my mind stripped its gears trying to accommodate these new facts.

‘How do you know about all this?’ I demanded, 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 now, ‘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 Mister 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 centre of something. But I naively assumed that the something was probably 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 organisation 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 grunted. ‘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 realised 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.’

‘So what did you do?’ I asked.

Covington looked at me as though I’d just done an impersonation of a duck singing the national anthem.

‘I didn’t do anything,’ he said, with an incredulous emphasis. ‘I still haven’t done anything. I called Gittings to warn him off, but he was already dead by then. If I needed an illustration of the shit I was potentially in, there it was. These people can kill you and make it look – not even like an accident, like something you did to yourself. I kept my mouth shut and dug in.’

He sighed. ‘And I made sure never to go into the crematorium i»e cd ttself from that moment onwards. I’ve been onto the grounds, as you saw. I’ve unlocked the doors, and locked them up again. But I haven’t stepped inside the place itself, and I don’t intend to. If that sounds irrational, you’ll have to excuse me.’

I said nothing for a moment. I was thinking of Doug Hunter, and what he’d said about his sprained ankle when we met. That was how they’d got him. He sprained his ankle, and because there wasn’t a first-aid kit, he went into ‘the church next door’. And when he came out, he was carrying a beast on his back that turned out to be Myriam Kale. I’d noticed the building site on Ropery Street: how could I not have made the connection?

No. Covington’s precautions sounded anything but irrational. If anything, he was still taking unwarranted risks just walking up to the door of the goddamn place.

Abruptly, Covington looked at his watch. ‘Listen, I have to go and check on Lionel,’ he said. ‘Kim will have him cleaned up by now and she’ll probably be putting him to bed. We have a routine, and he’ll sleep better if he sees me. You can wait if you want.’

‘Can I come along with you?’ I asked on an impulse.

There was a definite, frosty pause.

‘He hasn’t had anything to do with Mount Grace in more than a decade,’ the blond man said. ‘There’s nothing he can tell you.’

‘There may be things I can tell without talking to him,’ I countered.

Covington looked unconvinced. ‘He’s very frail. And he needs his sleep. I don’t want him upset any more tonight.’

‘I won’t ask him any questions,’ I promised. ‘Or even discuss any of this stuff while we’re with him.’

A brusque shrug. ‘All right. If you insist. Five minutes. Then we’ll leave so that Kim can settle him down. When I tap you on the shoulder, we go, whether you’re ready or not.’

‘Sure,’ I agreed.