Dead Men's s Boots — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

“If you won’t ask me questions, you’ll know all about it in a little time, and you’ll be surprised. You don’t know how surprised you’ll be, Daddy! Promise you’ll be surprised.”

‘“Very well,” said Tegumai, and went on fishing . . .’

Covington glanced across at his audience of one. Palance was already asleep, his chest rising and falling without sound.

Covington closed the book and put it on the bedside table, in the midst of all the medicines. His movements were a little jerky and so one or two of them fell off onto the floor: he picked them up and put them back in their places. He leaned forward, kissed Palance on the forehead without waking him, and then straightened again, squaring his shoulders as though for some ordeal.

‘Castor,’ he said, turning for the first time to acknowledge me. He looked impossibly tired. ‘How did it go?’

‘Pretty well, Aaron, all things considered’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that if you went to Mount Grace right now, you’d find it looking like a morgue.’

‘Well – good. That’s good. At least, I presume it’s good. And you and your . . . team all came out of it okay?’

I made a palm-wobbling, so-so gesture. ‘We had one fatality. Fortunately.’

He stood and looked calmly into my eyes. ‘And now you’ve come for me.’

‘Pretty much.’

‘Fancy a whisky?’

‘Pretty much.’

Covington led the way down the stairs to the same room we’d used the night before. It felt like another lifetime. He picked up the Springbank, but I put my hand on his arm and shook my head.

‘Something rougher,’ I said. ‘Please. Rotgut, if you’ve got any.’

He found some blended Scotch with a name I didn’t recognise and held it up for my approval. I nodded.

‘“Bartender, give me two fingers of red-eye,”’ he quoted. He mimed the punchline, poking his fingers towards but not into my eyes. I didn’t laugh. I wasn’t in the mood, somehow.

He set out two glasses and poured a generous measure into one. Then he looked at the bottle, thought better of it and took that, leaving the other glass empty on the bar.

‘Shall we sit down?’ he asked, gesturing.

‘Whatever.’ I followed him across to the leather three-piece. He sprawled on the sofa and I took one of the chairs. He chinked the bottle to my glass and then took a deep swallow of the whisky: he didn’t even shudder although God knew it wasn’t smooth.

‘You called me Aaron,’ he observed, running his tongue across his lips.

‘You’d prefer I called you Peter?’

Covington thought about that. ‘No, not really,’ he admitted. ‘Actually – in a strange way – there’s a rightness to it. I made up Silver for myself, but Aaron was the name I was born with. What goes around, comes around. How did you know?’

I let my eyebrows rise and fall. ‘You weren’t particularly trying to hide.’

He acknowledged the point with a shrug. ‘Still. John Gittings never saw through me. Or did he? Was my name in his notes?’

‘No.’ I swirled the whisky in the glass, watching the filaments roll in the liquor like the ghosts of worms. I thought back, trying to get the sequence straight in my own mind because the conviction had crept over me by slow degrees: there wasn’t any one moment when the light bulb had lit up above my head. ‘John didn’t work it out. But the letter you sent him was a part of it, I suppose. You told him to take back-up, and you told me the same thing when I came to see you. I guess that struck a chord. What was with the spelling, by the way? Just your instinct for camouflage kicking in?’

Covington made a slightly rueful face. ‘I can’t spell,’ he said. ‘There’s probably a name for this now – or there will be soon. Aaron Silver learned English late in life, and he never got his head around the orthography. Now I find that every new body I live in has the same limitations as the original. It’s possible to change, but it’s hard. And it doesn’t last. Old habits keep reasserting themselves. The past is . . . more present than the now. It’s easier for me to write like that than it is to look up the correct spellings. Was that all? Just that one coincidence? Me saying the same thing to you that I wrote to Gittings?’

‘No.’

‘Then –?’

‘You really want me to run through all the loose change you were dropping?’

‘If you don’t mind, yes. I still find it hard to believe that I’ve developed a death wish, after working so hard for so long to stay alive. Indulge me.’

I delved into my scattered thoughts again. ‘I was actually looking for you,’ I said. ‘Or at least – not for you, specifically, but for someone behind the scenes who was making things happen. You had to be there. Someone hired John, and gave him a small fortune to spend on those death-row trinkets.