Todd was right about the veneer of civilisation. Something earthy, East End and broad was creeping into his accent as his emotions got the better of him. I decided to encourage it: if he was angry then he was off balance and not thinking straight, and you never knew what kind of options might open themselves up.
‘But it was Silver’s choice,’ I said, ‘because it was his game. Mister Rourke said if I could take Silver out then everything else would fall apart of its own accord.’
Todd laughed incredulously, shaking his head. ‘Take Silver out? Fuck, if I’d known that was on your agenda, I’d have waited and let you take a shot. We’d do it ourselves, except he’s too cagey to give us an opening. Him and his American whore have fucking ruined us. Made us visible again, after we worked for years to cover our tracks. Live for ever. Live like kings for ever. Build up an empire, stronger and safer than anything we had when we were alive. That was what was in the prospectus – and it was his own fucking prospectus! “We can own this city.” And we do! We do own it! We take our cut and we take our pleasure and nobody even knows – or if they find out they die, and their wives and kids die, and their gardens are sown with fucking salt. We’ve got it all. But you know what they say about love being blind. He wouldn’t listen to reason. From the moment he met her, he was a changed man. Take Silver out?’ He laughed again, but there was a bitter, choking sound in it. ‘You should have fucking said.’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed, switching tack. ‘Kale was your weak spot all along. Every time you gave her a new body, she’d kill again . . .’ Todd was nodding, so I went on. All I was doing was what mediums do: using the stooge’s feedback to refine the guesswork, zeroing in on the truth so it looks like you’ve known it all along. ‘The old psychosis showing itself again, every time. But you couldn’t just stop. Couldn’t just leave her in the ground. Silver wouldn’t let you. So I guess Mister Rourke was right about the pecking order.’
‘We’re a collective,’ Todd growled. ‘Democratic and egalitarian. Everything is fair, and everything is set out nice and clear in the rules. You spend a year up on top, riding one of the bodies with the influence and the power and the celebrity lifestyle – then you spend a year as one of the grunts, earning your keep, minding the shop. We don’t trust anyone else to maintain the crematorium, or to guard it. We keep it all in the family.
‘But that cunt-bubble is as strong as the rest of us put together. He started to write his own rules. And because he’s the oldest we’ve got to go carefully. Time isn’t just money, it’s power too. We don’t know what kind of safeguards he put in place for himself back when he was the only one. Just in case of emergencies. He’s not ever going to let himself be caught with his pants down. If we did kill him-’ Todd didn’t finish the sentence, but his shrug conveyed his meaning: that killing Aaron Silver, in flesh or spirit or both, would be the start of something, not the end of it.
‘So that was your brief,’ he said, coming back to the point. ‘Not the rest of us. Just Silver. That’s why you went out to Alabama? Tracing his steps?’
‘Looking for information about Kale. She seems to be his weak spot.’
Todd nodded. ‘Yeah, you’re right there. But the paraphernalia you collected from Chesney – most of that wasn’t anything to do with Silver. So what was the deal there?’
‘I didn’t know what Chesney had,’ I temporised. ‘I had to take a look.’
Todd looked surprised at that – and suspicious. ‘Then you weren’t working with Gittings?’
I had the feeling of thin ice starting to crack under me. ‘Not directly,’ I said. ‘Gittings and Langley were the first string. I was the second. Rourke didn’t activate me until they crashed and burned. And obviously the first thing I had to do was to find out how far they’d got.’
Todd was staring at me hard now. Whatever was going on behind that stare, it wasn’t looking good.
‘Then how come you spent so long sniffing around Gittings’s widow?’ he demanded.
I pretended to look uncomfortable and abashed. ‘Me and Carla are old friends,’ I said. ‘Kind of – more than friends, once upon a time. I thought – you know, there wouldn’t be any harm in reminding her of that.’
Todd relaxed slightly, giving me a contemptuous grin. ‘That’s actually funny, Castor. Groves was stuck inside the house, right there with you, and all you were thinking about was getting your leg over?’
‘I know,’ I said, adopting a tone of bitter, naked resentment. ‘I figured it out later. Groves was the one who possessed John, right?’
‘Possessed him, realised the guy’s brain was turning to cheese, shot himself. That was a hairy moment. If you’re in someone else’s body, and they go into the whole second-childhood thing, what happens to you? Groves didn’t want to stick around and find out. And he thought he was safe because of the will. Return to sender. But he forgot about the wards on Gittings’s door: too strong for him. He couldn’t get out of the house. He had to pull that tantrum to get you interested. I wasn’t sure what to make of you right then. I thought you’d either be useful or we’d end up having to kill you. But it turns out it wasn’t an either/or kind of proposition.’
‘I thought John knew too much about your operation to walk into a trap,’ I said, trying to push Todd’s expansive mood as far as I could. ‘How did you get him?’
Todd seemed to have momentarily forgotten his rule about the man with the knife. He shrugged. ‘Well, the actual recipe is a trade secret,’ he said. ‘But we got him the same way we get everyone. He came onto the premises and we got the drop on him. That’s what we had in mind for you, of course, on the day we burned Gittings. But your demon bitch walked in and we had to abort the mission. We weren’t sure we could take her down, and we didn’t want yet another loose end floating around. That’s the only reason you walked out of Mount Grace under your own steam. Best-laid plans. Listen, this has been illuminating, but I don’t want to draw it out any longer. You want to buy some more time, or are you all out of revelations?’
He stood up and moved around to one side of me, knife in hand at the level of his waist. I could more or less see the angle he’d decided to use: an upthrust, probably to my throat, from behind and off to the side to minimise the amount of blood he got on himself.
‘Rourke isn’t alone,’ I said quickly. ‘There are two other guys. De Niro and Rampling . . .’
‘Don’t fight it, Castor. Under the circumstances, things could be a fuck of a sight worse.’
I was already moving as his hand flashed up. I kicked with my legs, not against him – he hadn’t been stupid enough to bring himself into range – but against the desk. I pitched out and down, the blade slicing shallowly across my shoulder.
I was hoping the impact would smash the back of the chair. It didn’t. Desperately I swung myself to the left and then to the right, sawing with the handcuff chain against the unyielding bars of the chair-back. With a muffled exclamation, Todd leaned in over me, but the chair-back shattered into loose kindling and I rolled aside as he reached for me, kicking out again in a one-two bicycling movement and missing him by a mile but fending him off for long enough for me to swivel, get my knees on the ground and lurch/stumble back up onto my feet. My hands were still cuffed behind my back, but at least I was in with a chance now.
Or I would have been, if Todd hadn’t kept the gun in his pocket when he switched to the knife. He stepped back now, the gun once again in his hand. He looked annoyed.
‘What the fuck did that achieve?’ he demanded.