Dead Men's s Boots

Shot me and shot a lady name of Ginny Tester under me. We both died instantly.’

‘And in your end was your beginning.’

Covington grimaced. ‘Not right away. It was a shock – waking after my own death and finding that I was trapped in Mount Grace. Tied to my own ashes. You never really are, of course. The trap is just your own habits. Your own ways of thinking. But it felt real. It felt as though I’d be spending eternity on that one little plot of ground, and eternity would be a long time passing.

‘But a year later Stephen Kesel died, and he felt the same way about burial as I did.

And four years after that it was Rudolf Gough’s turn. And that was critical mass. There was an old janitor who used to live on the site. We took him one night while he was asleep: the three of us, working together. Then we took turns to ride him. We were back in business.

‘The first thing I did was to visit Meyer-Lindeman and pay him back with interest. I liked Ginny Tester a lot: she deserved better than to die in that undignified way.

And Steve and Rudy had similar visits to make – good ones and bad ones.

‘But we realised pretty quickly that this went beyond dealing with unfinished business. We also figured out that it wasn’t possible for one of us to betray the others: Steve tried to take off on his own, but he came limping back three days later: the janitor was fighting back, and it took the three of us to whip him into line again.

‘So there we were. We were immortal, but only so long as we stuck together. An immortality collective.

Till death us do part, only it never could whether we wanted it to or not.

‘All the rules and refinements came over the next twenty years or so – the years of throwing things against the wall to see whether or not they stuck. Experimentation and refinement. We discovered that the ashes made everything ten times easier, and made the possession stick for longer too. We discovereëo. k. d that night was better than day, particularly for the initial breaking-in of a new body, and that dark of the moon was the best time of all.

We turned it into a very streamlined process. Tried and tested. It helped that nobody believed what we were doing was even possible: that meant nobody was on their guard.’

‘What about Myriam Kale?’ I asked. ‘Where does she come in?’

For a moment I thought Covington hadn’t heard me. He was looking up at the ceiling, his posture one of acute attention.

‘Did you hear Lionel crying?’ he demanded.

‘I didn’t hear a thing.