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.’

He didn’t seem to know what to do with himself now that he was up on his feet again. He tried pacing, but that didn’t seem to work somehow: he’d stop after every few steps as though he was trying to remember a specific sequence of movements and it kept escaping from him, forcing him to break off and start again.

‘There were problems with Lionel,’ he said, staring at the floor. ‘We needed to make a certain land transfer at an awkward time – when he was only two years old. We went ahead and did it, because there wasn’t any other choice. Then the woman who was Lionel’s mother started making difficulties – trying to spend our money – and Driscoll ordered a hit on her. But it was botched, and then she went public and it wasn’t easy after that to get close to her. Or rather, it wasn’t easy in any of the regular ways.

‘But Driscoll saw a way of squaring the circle. He possessed Lionel, and we got Lionel to kill her.’

In spite of everything I’d already seen and done that night, I felt an uncomfortable movement in my stomach at that moment. ‘His own mother?’

‘Yeah. When he was three months past his second birthday. Cute, huh? That train set upstairs – I don’t know if you saw it – that was what I sent him. Stupid gift for a two-year-old: he couldn’t even put the fucking track together. But it didn’t matter, anyway, because he wasn’t going to get to play with it.

‘Driscoll thought it was funny. He’d worn a lot of bodies by that time, but he’d never tried wearing a kid. So he stayed there for a few months. Made quite a joke out of it, turning up for the monthly inscription with a – with a sharp tailored suit, and looking at me out of my own son’s . . . Do you mind? I need some fresh air.’

Covington took aim with the bottle and hurled it against the picture window. The bottle shattered: the window fractured across, but stayed whole. Frustrated, he crossed to the bar, picked up a heavy glass ashtray and slung it like a discus. That did the job: it went pinwheeling through the window, which shattered spectacularly, and impacted on the stone flags outside in a fountain of sharëounscuds that winked and sparkled briefly in the glare of one of the security lights. As though it hadn’t happened, Covington turned to me again. His eyes were dry but his cheeks were flushed and a terrible strain twisted his mouth, making his handsome face a thing you wanted to look away from.

‘So anyway, that started a whole craze. Driscoll talked it up so much, everyone had to try. Between his second and tenth birthdays, I’d estimate that Lionel had forty or fifty different passengers. And I let it happen. I stood by, and I . . . did nothing. Didn’t think about it. Didn’t care. Told myself I didn’t care, anyway. Life is cheap, and the rest is – sentiment. Which is even cheaper.

‘At ten Lionel was left to himself for a while. They lost interest. But it was too late by then. The cognitive centres in the brain – I don’t know. I’ve heard it explained in four or five different ways. At the crucial points in his brain development, he’d been . . . asleep. A prisoner in his own body, bludgeoned into eight years of unconsciousness. He was never going to be normal now. It turned out that you couldn’t just put those years back.’

Covington took a deep, ragged breath. ‘So we had a hard choice,’ he said. ‘Lionel was still the legal possessor of a lot of land – a big chunk of our assets. He was a ward of court, in my legal custody, but there’d be problems if I just administered his property as though it was mine.