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God, what had been done to her! She was still strong, but . . . broken. Broken way past mending.

‘But like I said, this was just a holiday. I came home and I threw myself back into the day-to-day, life-to-life stuff. The Krays, who were never part of our little clique, were arrested and carted off to Broadmoor, and we had the whole of the East End to ourselves. Then I read about Myriam being caught and conviëauglitcted, and I made up my mind right then to bring her in.’

‘Are we up to the sins yet?’ I asked.

Covington smiled humourlessly.

‘Almost. The rest of the committee were against it from the start. They could see all kinds of trouble arising from having an actual psychopath in our club – and they were right, obviously. I saw most of the potential problems myself, but I didn’t care. I was determined to try. I felt . . . responsible for her, somehow. And I hoped, against all the evidence, that in a new body she might somehow recover. Get over her madness and become what she was meant to be before all the rapes and the beatings.

‘It didn’t work. And yeah, now we’re up to the sins. I feel sorry and I feel ashamed when I think of the men she murdered. I never did acquire much of a taste for torture – and for personal reasons I hate it when violence and sex get mixed up together. It always makes me think of poor Ginny.

‘But the harm was done, now. The committee were terrified that Myriam would draw unwanted attention. They even paid to have that poor bastard Sumner – the hack writer – bumped off because he wrote a book about her.

It got harder and harder to convince them to give her another chance – and last year, when I suggested giving her a man’s body as a way of jolting her out of her old behaviour patterns, they told me it was the last time. That meeting got kind of heated. I told them they were pathetic little echoes of what they’d been when they were alive: so scared of losing their creature comforts that they weren’t really living at all any more. They accused me of being too big for my boots, trying to run Mount Grace as though it was my personal empire. They threatened to expel me, and I told them they couldn’t. Not any more. I didn’t need them now to keep my hold on this body – and I could take another one, any time I wanted to, without their help. That was probably an unwise thing to say: when they realised how strong I was, they broke with me completely. By that time . . . it came as something of a relief.