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Did you summon Moloch, too?’ Covington nodded without speaking. &#ëut mur8216;Yeah, I thought so. Big coincidence otherwise – that a demon with just those dietary needs happened to be raised from Hell just where he’d catch the scent of the Mount Grace permanent floating barbecue. But there weren’t any coincidences operating here: it was all part of the master plan.’

I took a long swig of the whisky. It burned pleasantly in my mouth.

‘So that was the main thing,’ I said. ‘The strings. You don’t get all those strings without someone to pull on them.

How did I know it was you? Just lots of little things. Your real name – Aaron Silver’s real name, I mean – was Berg: and the name you gave to Ruth Kale was Bergson.’ Covington opened his mouth to speak and I anticipated his objection. ‘No, you’re right. I wouldn’t have picked up on that if I didn’t already know. It was the Paragon, Silver. You let yourself get seen by two people there.’

He looked surprised. ‘I know. But I had my collar drawn up and I was moving fast.

I didn’t think either of them got a good look at me.’

‘They didn’t. But their different descriptions of you got me thinking. The desk clerk, Merrill – he said you were an old man. But Onugeta jostled against you in the hallway and he felt how solidly muscled you were: he knew you had to be a young, fit guy. So why would Merrill think you were old?’

‘I don’t know, Castor. What’s the punchline?’

I pointed at his head. ‘Your snow-white locks. You walked past his desk with your head down and your collar up, and all he saw of you was your hair.

And I dunno, maybe there’s something about how you walk, too: another echo. Something that goes with being a century and a half old. Either way, the paradox got my mind working. And once it was working, I saw that the little question – who was that masked man? – was the same as the big question. Why were you there at all? Why did you take the hammer away with you? Locking the stable door after the horse had bolted, even though Doug Hunter – and Myriam Kale inside him – was going to be arrested anyway. ’

Covington shook his head slowly. ‘You really thought this through, didn’t you? Why did I?’

‘Because flesh is clay. When a human soul possesses an animal body, it bends it as far as it can into a human shape. Sometimes the animal soul pushes back, and you can get some really interesting – not to say nasty – results as the see-saw tips.