Dead Men's s Boots

Because by that time I had something else eating at me. Worse even than Myriam.’

‘Palance,’ I guessed.

‘Yeah,’ Covington whispered. ‘Lionel.’ He emptied the bottle in one final, three-glug swallow.

‘Who is he, Covington?’

‘He’s my son.’

In the dead silence that followed this flat assertion I did the maths and failed to make it come out even close. Covington read the calculation and the outcome in my face and made a sweeping gesture with his hand to head off any objection.

‘I didn’t father him as Aaron Silver,’ he said.

‘I was in one of the other bodies. I can’t even remember which one: they all merge together now. They all ended up looking exactly the same after I’d been wearing them for a year or so, anyway.

‘You see, Castor, once we’d got the mechanics of possession all worked out, the only problems we had left were the legal ones. We had a lot of property that we had to pass on from one generation to the next – from one body to the next – and we wanted to do it in ways that didn’t look odd to someone looking in from outside.

Some of us had trained as lawyers, which meant that – as far as contracts went – we could nail down any arrangement we liked. But it had to look right. Right enough to avoid anybody wanting to look any deeper.

‘So Seb Driscoll – the guy you met as Todd – he had a brilliant idea. We have kids. Doesn’t have to be a church wedding, semi-in-the-suburbs kind of deal: we just knock some woman up every now and then, so we’ve got biological children of our own.

Because if you’ve got a kid – certifiably, genetically yours – everything becomes really easy. When the time comes to take a new body, you leave everything to the kid. You top yourself. You jump. Now you’re the kid, and you’ve got the fortune, and nobody is going to ask any questions. You just look like a mensch: like a stand-up guy who saw his duty right at the end of his life and did it. End of story.’

Covington stood up, slowly and carefully: from the look on his face and the slight jerkiness in his movements, the booze was starting to kick in.

‘So what went wrong?’ I asked.

‘Nothing.’ His voice dripped with bitterness. ‘Except . . . human nature, maybe. You could forgive me for thinking I didn’t have any by this time, couldn’t you? After all the things I’d done. All the mayhem, the killings, down through the years. Life is cheap, right? But not your own. And your kids are a little bit of your own life, growing in someone else.