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’

He relaxed a little. ‘Okay. Just the wind, I guess. I picked this room because it’s right under his: if he stirs, we’ll hear him. You’ll notice I sent the nurses away, so I’m . . . on duty tonight. Myriam, right. Myriam was Yoko Ono. The femme fatale who gets the blame for breaking up the band.’

He took another long swig of whisky. He’d been drinking pretty regularly and pretty determinedly at every pause in the conversation and the bottle was mostly empty now. He was nerving himself up for something, but I wondered whether he might already have missed his stop.

‘By the 1960s,’ Covington said, ‘I was in my eighth body, if you can believe that. We wore them out pretty quickly: the psychic punishment is reflected in premature ageing. Our numbers were up to two hundred, which is where they’ve stayed ever since, and we’d already had the idea of moving out of organised crime into legitimate business – things that would make us just as rich, but at the same time lessen the chance of any police investigation finding us by accident.

‘For me, it was getting . . . claustrophobic. I wasn’t enjoying the company of my peers much at all. And I’d been practising meditation techniques: I found that if I was really disciplined I could maintain control of the body I was in more or less indefinitely, without reinscription.

‘I went to the States intending to take a good long holiday – to stay away from Mount Grace for as long as possible. But I needed an excuse and so I made up this bullshit story about making contact with the American mobs.

Then, to make it look like I was doing that, I spent some time with the Chicago families. That’s how I met Myriam.

‘I think I loved her because she was the opposite of everything I’d become. Okay, she was a killer: to that extent we were the same. But there was no calculation in anything she did. She was spontaneous, just following her instincts all the time whether they were bad or good. Whereas at Mount Grace calculation was our heart and soul.

We’d become parts of a machine, and the machine ground on. And she was vulnerable and damaged, where we were immortal and beyond all harm. I don’t know. I can’t psychoanalyse myself. I was drawn to her. I wanted to help her. Probably the love came later, and it was never consummated. The closest we came to having actual sex was me masturbating her once, while we were at a drive-in movie. She cried when she came: cried buckets. Like she couldn’t bear it.