“My father killed a man,” he says hoarsely and is appalled at the note of pride. “I was told I’d end up doing the same.”

The priest drains his glass. “Ah. Well. In that case, let me talk to your angel. See whether he wants to be introduced.”

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They find him in the bell tower, cleaning the mildewed brass of the great bell.

“We ring it on holidays,” the priest explains as they labour up the narrow stairwell, “but it’s started to sound off-key. Constipated. It’s all the dirt clogging up the bell.

“He does odd jobs for me,” he carries on as they step onto a miniscule landing. “Grendel’s the name. Tobias Grendel. Gren, here’s a lad to meet you. Violent, he says. But I think he’s got a good enough soul. Anyway, I will leave you to it. Have a chat. Shout if you need refreshments. Cheerio.”

The priest’s steps retreat back down the stairwell. It leaves Thomas alone with the stranger. He finds himself at a loss for words.

The man called Grendel has continued working, rubbing the side of the great bell with a dirty cloth, all the while watching Thomas shyly, from behind lowered lids. The crick in his neck lends something abject to him. It forever condemns him to cower before his peers.

“What is it?” Grendel says after the silence has stretched to several seconds, his voice quiet and gentle, inflected with a slight, pleasant lilt. “Some sort of trouble?”

Thomas shakes his head, steps closer to him.

“You were there at the hanging,” he says at last, unsure where to start. “At the end of November. A woman was killed. The whole square was painted black.”

The man nods, a vague fear showing in his eyes.

“Yet you did not smoke.”

Thomas reaches out with his fingers, grabs hold of the man’s collar, turns it back, aware of his imposition, of the brutal rudeness of the act. The shirt is discoloured, Soot-stained, more black than white. But the inside is grey rather than black. All the shirt’s Soot clings to the fabric’s outside: city sin, absorbed from walls and air.

“Where do you get your sweets from?”

“Sweets,” the man repeats, shaking a little.

“Don’t play stupid now.”

“The priest gives them to me.”

“The priest told me he has two a year, and sells them for wine.”

“I found them,” the man cringes.

“Enough to keep you smokeless while a woman dangles from a rope?”

Thomas shakes his head, feels an emotion fill him that he fails to recognise. Something very close to fear. Awe perhaps: a vise around the heart. It releases some Smoke in him, an iodine plume that he does his best to spit in the stranger’s face. It drifts past his cheeks, flakes as Soot onto his shoulders and neck, and draws no change from his bluff and honest features.

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