Swallowing fear and nausea, Bernard kept swiveling, to one, another, another. He raised his hands, ready to defend himself and strike.

In the brief time he had left to reflect, he realized that he was not sorry it had come to this. They were going to kill him, he knew. But it didn’t matter. He didn’t mind. In point of fact, he wasn’t even certain he wanted to live anymore anyway. Knowing what he knew. About his past. About himself. And this way, he reckoned, at least he might get to take one of them with him. To close with one of them, maybe even two. Rip a throat out, tear open a ribcage. It would feel good. It would send a message. A little E-mail to the old man …

“Come on,” he muttered, swinging from one to the other as they kept moving in. “Come on.” Swallowing his tears.

The circle was closing. The approaching shapes had come out of the aisles and the transepts. They had joined together and were all around him in the crossing where he stood. Any moment now, he expected them to rush in at him all at once.

But now they stopped.

Bernard spun, his knees bent, his knife-hands lifted, loose.

He cried out once more, loudly, despairingly. “Come on, will you!”

But only a single figure detached itself from the others, broke from the circle and came forward, towards him, down the center aisle.

Bernard faced that lone attacker, his breath scraping from his throat in feral growls. He waited, ferocious.

And yet, as he waited, some sound confused him. Some repeated sound. It reached him through the nimbus of his pain. He was flustered by it. Shook his head.

The figure came closer. Bernard blinked. He knew that sound. A steady, resolute, rhythmic clicking: the sound of a walking stick on stone.

He stared through the shadows. He made out, at last, the small, squat, waddling silhouette approaching. He made out the contours of the Borsalino. The line of the cane from hand to floor.

The figure stopped before him. Slowly, Bernard sank down onto his knees. He raised his arms. He waved them in front of him to cover his face.

“Don’t look at me!” he cried out.

Harper lay a withered hand on his shoulder.

“It’s all right, lad,” she told him quietly. “You made it.”

19

The body of Jervis Ramsbottom—the late Dr. Mormo—still hung from the cross. His arms had been released from the horizontal bar, but stout cord, wrapped around his throat, held him to the vertical. He hung there with his face purple, his eye sockets raw, his cheeks streaked with blood and jelly. His tongue protruded black under the light of PC Slade’s torch.

“Poor bugger,” the PC said.

“Poor bugger, by Jove,” Harper murmured behind him.