Looking out from the window of his apartment in St James’s Place, Hunter was filled with a hazy sense of depression, remembering how many times he had walked to school from his parents’ flat in Mount Street, across Constitution Hill, which he could see through the leafless plane trees, its rain-soaked paths hurried along today by office workers, tramps, civil servants, tourists and, for all he knew, Westminster School children on their way to the morning service ‘Up Abbey’, or to double Chemistry, or to an expulsion interview with the Headmaster – he had managed to clock up three of those during his chequered adolescence. He hadn’t thought of Westminster Abbey for a long time, although for five years he had gone there six times a week. He could still remember the chandeliers that hung by cords nearly invisible in the dimness of the morning service. They looked like glass bombs pointing down on the congregation, promising an explosion of light if they could only complete their descent to the stone floor a few feet below the tips of their scintillating bodies. Hunter would hide his most pressing homework inside his hymnal and pretend to sing while he tried to get on top of a Latin translation or a physics equation.