Yet in the end, soon after nine o'clock, she found herself in a bus on the way to Sloane Square; for, late in the afternoon, several thoughts had come to her to allay her fears. Depraved as the members of the Brotherhood might be individually, they were under the orders of their High Priest Abaddon, and from his benevolent looks she believed he would protect her; they clearly set great value on the proper observance of their ceremonies, so were unlikely to depart from a set ritual; and surely Ratnadatta would not have spent so much time indoctrinating her unless his object was to make her a permanent disciple of the Devil, whereas that would be defeated if she were so treated that night that she refused ever again to go to a meeting. Moreover, once a neophyte, the probability was that she would be permitted to talk to other members of the Brotherhood, and that would give her a chance to pursue her original intention of trying to find out if the Satanists had been responsible for Teddy's terrible end.

At the Tube Station Ratnadatta was waiting for her. As he had directed, she had no obvious make-up on and had had her hair scragged back tightly into a bun; so, although she had tied a silk scarf round her head, she felt quite a sight. But his comment was one of approval.

They got into a taxi and again she allowed him to tie a handkerchief over her eyes. The drive seemed much shorter than when he had taken her to the Temple the previous Saturday and during it he said little, except to reaffirm that the ceremony would be quite a brief one and add that, as it was to be the first item on the evening's programme, he hoped to be able to drop her at Hyde Park Corner well before eleven o'clock. Again she wondered, with a nasty sinking feeling inside her, if he was telling the truth; but it was too late to back out now.

The taxi set them down in a different place from that at which they had got out before, but after a few minutes' walk through streets that stank from the garbage that littered their gutters, they again turned into the cul-de-sac at the end of which lay the old mansion.