Dead Men's s Boots

I’m going to Mount Grace, and since I’m going to be outnumbered a hundred to one, I’m taking the reconnaissance pretty fucking seriously.’

‘It won’t be enough,’ he said flatly. ‘Whatever you find out, and however you play it, you’re not going to be able to do it alone.’

‘Are you offering to help?’ I asked.

Covington laughed without the smallest trace of humour. ‘No. Absolutely not. I’m just saying, that’s all. No point putting the gun in your mouth if suicide’s not what you’re after. Get yourself some back-up – expert help.

‘I’ll take it under advisement,’ I muttered. ‘Is there anything you can do from this end? Get me a plan of the building, maybe. And a list of who’s been cremated there over the past fifty or sixty years, say.’

‘Maybe. But I’d have to ask Todd, and I doubt he’d cooperate. He doesn’t like me very much.’

‘Todd the lawyer?’

‘Todd the lawyer, Todd the son and Todd the holy ghost. Todd the president of the board of trustees.’

Chunk chunk chunk.

‘Don’t bother,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask him myself.’

I walked down to the North Circular, hoping to catch another cab, but the night bus came along first and I rode it around to New Southgate, all alone for most of the way but sharing it with a small crowd of friendly drunks on the last stretch. Their old man, anachronistically enough, said follow the van. I wanted to invite them to jump under a fucking van, but they were mostly big drunks so I closed my eyes and let the crumbling brickwork of the wall of sound break over me.

Half past two in the morning. I walked down towards Wood Green with my head aching. Most of that was from where Juliet had done the laying-on of hands, but some of it was because of the implications of what Nicky and Covington had told me. I’d have to go to Mount Grace, but if I just walked in off the street I’d be outgunned and easy meat. After all, I had no idea what I’d be facing there or even if they’d know I was coming. I had to map the terrain, and I didn’t know how.

I was bone weary and not my usual happy-go-lucky self as I got back to the block and trudged up the endless stairs – lifts were all »lifh=""still out, inevitably – to Ropey’s flat. Maybe the tiredness was why I didn’t notice that the door unlocked on a single turn of the key, when I’d double-locked it on my way out as I always did.

But as soon as I stepped over the threshold I knew, even in the pitch dark, that I wasn’t alone.