Dead Men's s Boots

I felt angry and restless, a sour taste in my mouth because even now – having been told where my enemy lived; having had a loaded weapon placed in my hands – I couldn’t act quite yet. Couldn’t move until I’d filled in at least some of the blank spaces in my mental map: the spaces that currently just read ‘Here be monsters’.

First and foremost, there was the question of what kind of odds I was facing. How many of the born-again killers would be at Mount Grace, and would I meet them in the flesh or in the spirit? It made a difference.

John’s symphony for drums might do what he’d obviously designed it to do, but if the souls of the dead were flying around loose when I walked in through the door they could probably get to me before I got to them. If they were wearing other men’s bodies, they’d put up a different kind of resistance but at least I wouldn’t have to worry about being possessed and turned into a meat robot the way I now suspected John had been.

Then there was the even spikier question of how far this network of the evil dead extended.

They owned Mount Grace – owned the Palance estate, effectively, through the trustees who employed Peter Covington and ruËovieviled in the name of poor, senile old Lionel. They had their own law firm, for Christ’s sake. There could be dozens or hundreds of them out in the field, wearing the bodies of rich and famous men and wielding their names. That would take a bigger nut than me to crack, if it could be cracked at all.

That was why I had to go through Ruthven, Todd and Clay before I went back out to Mount Grace. In some ways it was a lousy idea, but I couldn’t come up with a better one. I had to get hold of Maynard Todd’s files: I had to know how big this was and how deep it went, or all I’d achieve by charging into Mount Grace would be to poke the nest and make sure the wasps came out good and angry.

So I had to go to Todd’s office, and I couldn’t make my move there until after they closed for the night.

In the meantime, all I could do was wait – wondering what Juliet was up to, and whether Myriam Kale had added any more notches to her suspender belt.

I did have one more stop on my itinerary, though, and it was welcome in one respect only: because it had nothing at all to do with the mess I’d got myself into. It belonged to a different mess, older and if anything more intractable.