ON THE journey back he was alone in the carriage. He put his feet up and lay relaxed, his back to the whirling dark outside. He remembered how, from curiosity, he had been to look at the store out of which Christopher had been abducted. It was disastrous that the woman who took the boy away should be his Fireman Instructor’s sister. Hardly less fatal that the store had been lit by stained glass windows in front of arc lamps which cast the violent colours of that glass over the goods laid out on counters.

He remembered, in the autumn, it was dusk as they used to arrive at the fire station to report, in dark blue overalls, rubber boots, and what looked like a chauffeur’s cap with a white metal badge. The tower each station has in its yard, the five open platforms one above the other, each the height from ground level of the floor of a building, was partially visible by street lights, monstrous, overwhelming because there were no railings round its platforms.

When he was sixteen a friend of the family, a man who studied church windows, had taken them round just under those in the choir of Tewkesbury Abbey, on a ledge about forty feet from the ground. This step which ran along in the thickness of the walls was no more than a yard in width and had nothing to the side, no balustrade, no rail. Every so often they had to get by cords, cutting across from each window down to the floor that seemed so far beneath. These were the means by which panels in the glass could be opened to ventilate the choir. As they went round, each one in turn had to take hold of a cord with his right hand to step over left leg first, and then, in his own case, as he faced right to bring his right leg over, he had that terror of the urge to leap, his back to deep violet and yellow Bible stories on the glass, his eyes reluctant over the whole grey stretch of the Abbey until they were drawn, abruptly as to a chasm, inevitably, and so far beneath, down to that floor hemmed with pews, that height calling on the pulses and he did not know why to his ears, down to dropped stone flags over which sunlight had cast the colour in each window, the colour it seemed his blood had turned.