She frowned at him. He shrugged damply back.

“It’s in the safe,” she said. “I don’t have the keys.”

“Coffee will be fine,” said Petrovitch, laying his glasses on the desk and grasping the bottom of the death metal T-shirt.

Sister Madeleine saw the logo and the name, closed her eyes and shook her head. “All this in the house of God,” she muttered as she left. She made sure she closed the door behind her.

Petrovitch struggled out of the rest of his clothes, pausing only to examine the scars on his chest. One was long and curving, livid against his shock-white skin, and the others short, raised lines like knife wounds, which is what they were: the work of a single cut of the scalpel. The latest of these bristled with black thread.

Everything he wore had wicked in twice its weight in water. Where he’d dropped his jacket, the red carpet had turned dark. Not good. But there was another door at the rear of the room, and judging from the draft swirling in, it led outside. He bundled up his laundry and threw it there instead.

In one of the heavy cupboards that smelled of incense and age, he found a rail of vestments. The black ones were the priest’s; the gold ones he assumed were for special occasions. Then there were the bewildering array of white garments, some short, some long, some plain, some edged with lace. He had no idea what he was supposed to use.

In the end, he gave up, and took two of the shorter white robes and toweled himself off with them, then chose one of the longer ones to wear. When he finished fighting his way to the neck end, he found he looked like a marquee.

He managed to turn it to his advantage, though, by holding the hem of the robe over the fire and concentrating the meager output of warm, ozone-tainted air inside.

“I’m sort of ready,” he called.

She came back in, stooping through the doorway. When she saw him, she laughed.

“Yeah. Go on. Something to tell all your nun friends back at the convent.”

“Trust me, there’s not much humor in this vocation. Lots of funerals, if you like that sort of thing.” She cleared a space for the kettle and unplugged the fire.

“Hey!”

“If I put both on at the same time, the fuses will blow.”

“I can wire it so they don’t.”

“And will the church burn down afterward?”

“Not in this weather. Maybe later.”

“We’ll do it my way,” she said firmly. She turned the kettle on, and retrieved two mugs from the desk drawer.

Petrovitch realized he was still holding the hem of his robe out. He let it go.

She sat down in the chair and hunched forward, fingers together; almost at prayer. “Where were you going to go?”