The Wrath of Angels

33





I made one small detour before I headed north to Maine: I drove into Boston and found the headquarters of Pryor Investments in Beacon Hill. It occupied a relatively modest-looking, but still absurdly expensive, brownstone not far from the Charles/MGH T-station. There was no sign of activity, and I saw nobody pass in or out of the building while I was parked nearby. So far, Epstein had been unable to find out anything of note about the company, apart from one small detail: the name of Pryor Investments was on documents relating to the formation of a 501(c) body called the American League for Equality and Freedom, and one Davis Tate, now deceased, had been the principal benefactor of the funds channeled through the organization. It was a small thread, but a thread nonetheless. Still, now wasn’t the time to pull it and see what would unravel. I drove away from Beacon Hill, and it was only as I passed the Pryor building that I saw the camera systems discreetly mounted in the shadows on the wall, their watchful glass eyes taking in the details of the street and sidewalks surrounding it.

The meeting with Eldritch had not been particularly satisfying, but then meetings with lawyers rarely were. I had no great desire to renew acquaintance with the man who sometimes called himself Kushiel, but was mostly referred to as the Collector. Neither did I want him running loose, indulging his taste for divine justice, or his own interpretation of it, by killing anyone who appeared on his copy of the list, particularly if I was among them. I did not trust the Collector enough to imagine that, if he found my behavior wanting, he would not consider consigning me to his personal retinue of the damned. We had been uneasy allies in the past, but I had no illusions about him: I believed that he, like Epstein, had concerns about my nature, and the Collector tended to err on the side of caution in such matters. He surgically excised polluted tissue.

But there was no reason to believe that the Collector knew about the plane in the Great North Woods, and it was important to secure it before any hint of its existence reached him. Better that Epstein should have the list that Harlan Vetters had seen than have it fall into the hands of the Collector, for Epstein was essentially a good man. Yet even about Epstein I had doubts: I didn’t know enough about those who worked alongside him, beyond the fact that the younger ones liked waving guns around, to be certain of their capacity for self-restraint. Epstein appeared to be a moderating influence, but he kept much about himself hidden.

It seemed obvious to say it, but knowing the identity of your enemies was the first step toward defeating them. With their names in his possession, Epstein could begin the task of monitoring their activities, and undermining them when necessary. He would also learn if there were traitors among those whom he had previously trusted, although the list would inevitably be incomplete, dating as it did only to some period prior to the crash of the plane. Who knew how many others had been added to it since then? Nevertheless, obtaining it would be a start. But was there not the possibility that, in some cases, Epstein and his people might choose to act as the Collector had done, and remove from play those on the list who were deemed most threatening?

Those were my thoughts as I drove up to Scarborough, an alternative music station playing in the background on Sirius radio: some Camper Van Beethoven, a double-play of the Minutemen which lasted about three hundred seconds in total, including the DJ’s intro, and even a little Dream Syndicate, but I felt compelled to run for cover when some bright spark requested Diamanda Galas, and, in a rush of blood to the head, the DJ obliged.

When I was in my early twenties, and getting to know the kind of girls who would ask you back to their place for coffee and mean it, although with the promise of more than coffee at a later date if you didn’t turn out to be a freak, I learned that a surefire way to understand a woman, as with a man, was to flick through her record collection. If she didn’t have one then you could largely give up on her right there, because a woman who didn’t listen to any music at all didn’t have a soul, or anything worthy of the name; if she was loaded up on English alternative music like The Smiths or The Cure, she was probably trying a little too hard to be miserable, but it wasn’t likely to be terminal; if she was a fan of hair metal like Kiss, and Poison, and Mötley Crüe, you were faced with the dilemma of staying with her for a while because she might put out, or ditching her before you were forced to listen to any of her music; but if she had Diamanda Galas on her racks, maybe alongside Nico, Lydia Lunch, and Ute Lemper for the quieter moments, then it was time to make your excuses and leave before she dumped powdered sedatives in your coffee and you woke up chained in a basement with the girl in question standing over you, holding a kitchen knife in one hand, a creepy doll in the other, and screaming the name of some guy you’d never met but apparently resembled in psychic form.

So I ditched the alternative station, switched to the CD player, and listened instead to the only album ever released by Winter Hours, which was more tuneful and less frightening, and put me in a better mood as I drove home.

As I parked outside my house, I saw that I had missed a call from Epstein. I returned it from my office phone. The death of Davis Tate was on Epstein’s mind.

‘Do you believe it was the work of this man, the Collector?’ he asked.

‘When I heard that he was shot, I thought it might have been your people. The Collector usually prefers to work with a blade.’

‘What convinced you otherwise?’

‘It seems that there were cuts on Tate’s body. He’d lost part of an earlobe. Whoever killed him also took his watch but left his wallet untouched. The Collector likes to acquire souvenirs from his victims. In that sense, he’s pretty much your common or garden serial killer. It’s the added self-righteousness that makes him special.’

‘You spoke to the old lawyer?’

‘I did. I got the feeling that Barbara Kelly sent him the same version of the list that you received.’

‘With your name on it?’

‘So it seems. His secretary was very certain that I was going to get whatever was coming to me.’

‘Are you concerned?’

‘A little. I like my throat the way it is, and I don’t need a smile cut in it. But I think the Collector has the same doubts that you had about me. He won’t act until he’s certain.’

‘And in the meantime, he will continue working through the names on that list. He will bring their protectors down upon himself.’

‘I imagine that’s what he’s hoping.’

Epstein’s voice grew muffled for a minute. He had covered the receiver with his hand as he spoke to someone else nearby. When he came back on the line, he sounded excited.

‘I have a theory about that plane,’ he said. ‘The date of the newspaper in the cockpit is close to the date when a Canadian businessman named Arthur Wildon disappeared.’

The name seemed familiar to me, but I couldn’t place him. It was left to Epstein to place it for me.

‘The Wildon twins, Natasha and Elizabeth, eight years old, were kidnapped in 1999,’ he told me. ‘A ransom was demanded, and secretly paid: a simple drop-off on a remote road, the driver instructed not to stop or the girls would be killed. The location of the twins was subsequently communicated by way of a note left by the shore of the Quebec river, its position marked with a rock painted black and white. The note claimed that the girls were being kept at a cabin outside Saint-Sophie, but when the rescue team got to the cabin it was empty, or appeared to be. Five minutes after they arrived, Arthur Wildon received a telephone call. The caller, who was male, gave him a single instruction: “Dig.”

‘And so they dug. The cabin had a dirt floor. The girls had been bound and gagged, then buried alive together in a hole three feet deep. The medical examiner estimated that they had been dead for days, probably killed within hours of their abduction.’

I held the phone away from my ear for a moment, as though its proximity were somehow causing me pain. I recalled closing a trapdoor on a young girl in an underground cell so that her cries would not alert the man who had put her there, and I heard again the terror in her voice as she had begged me not to leave her in the dark. She had been fortunate, though, because she had been found. Most of them were never found, or not alive.

But the man involved in that case had been a serial abuser and killer of young women, with no intention of ever releasing them. Kidnappers were different. Through Louis, I had once met a man named Steven Tolles, who was a hostage negotiator employed by a leading private security firm. Tolles was a ‘sign of life’ expert, called in to consult on cases of which not even the FBI or the police ever had any awareness. His primary concern was to ensure the safe return of the victim, and he was very good at his job. It was for others to catch the perpetrators, although Tolles, in his debriefing of victims, often drew from them crucial clues as to the identities of those involved: stray smells and sounds could be as useful as momentary glimpses of houses, woods and fields, sometimes even more so. From Tolles I learned that the instances of murder in kidnapping cases were comparatively rare. Kidnapping was a crime of greed: those who committed it wanted to pick up the ransom and vanish. Murder upped the ante, and ensured that the victim’s relatives would involve law enforcement in the aftermath. There was a very good reason why most instances of kidnapping never made the news: it was because terms were negotiated and ransoms paid without anyone beyond the family and the private negotiators employed by them ever learning anything about what had occurred, and that frequently included the police and the feds.

But if what Epstein was telling me was true, then the people responsible for abducting Arthur Wildon’s daughters – and there must have been more than one kidnapper, for two young girls would be difficult for one person to handle – had deliberately set out to extort money when there was no hope of the victims ever being returned alive. Indeed, it appeared that there had never been any intention to release them unharmed, given that they were killed so soon after their abduction. It was possible that something might have gone wrong, of course: one or both of the girls might have seen the faces of those involved, or caught sight of something guaranteed to give away the identity of a captor, in which case their kidnappers could have felt that they had no option but to kill them in order to protect themselves.

But to bury them alive? That was an appalling death to visit on two children, regardless of the ruthlessness of the kidnappers. There was sadism involved here, which suggested that the money was almost an afterthought, or a secondary motivation, and I wondered if Arthur Wildon or someone close to him was being punished for some unspecified offense through the dark suffocation of two little girls.

‘Mr Parker?’ said Epstein. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes, I’m here. Sorry, I was distracted by my own thoughts.’

‘Is there anything that you feel compelled to share?’

‘I was considering what the principal motive for the kidnapping might have been.’

‘Money. Isn’t that what kidnapping is always about?’

‘But why kill the girls?’

‘To leave no witnesses?’

‘Or to torment Wildon and his family.’

Epstein exhaled deeply, then said: ‘I knew him.’

‘Wildon?’

‘Yes. Not well, but we shared certain interests.’

‘Any that you feel compelled to share?’

‘Wildon believed in fallen angels, just as I do, and just as you do too.’

I wasn’t sure that was entirely true, despite anything to the contrary I may have said to Marielle Vetters. Most people who talked about angels seemed to picture a fusion between Tinkerbell and a crossing guard, and I remained reluctant to put that name to the entities, terrestrial or otherwise, that I had encountered. After all, none of them had sprouted wings.

Not yet.

‘But he also believed that they were infecting others,’ continued Epstein, ‘acquiring influence through threats, promises, blackmail.’

‘For what purpose?’

‘Ah, there Wildon and I differed. He talked of the End Times, of the last days, a peculiar mix of millenarianism and apocalyptic Christianity, neither of which I found personally or professionally appealing.’

‘And what do you believe, rabbi?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t it time that you shared that with me?’

‘Truly?’ He laughed: a hollow rattle. ‘I believe that somewhere, on earth or below it, an entity waits. It’s been there for a long, long time, either by its own will, or, more likely, by the will of another; trapped, perhaps even slumbering, but waiting nonetheless. The worst of these others, these creatures formed in its image, are seeking it. They have always been seeking it, always looking, and while they search they prepare for its coming. That is what I believe, Mr Parker, and I admit that it may well be proof of my madness. Does that satisfy you?’

I didn’t answer. Instead I asked, ‘Are they close to finding it?’

‘Closer than ever before. So many of them emerging in recent years, so much hunting and killing; they are like ants set in motion by the queen’s pheromones. And you are involved, Mr Parker. You know this to be true. You feel it.’

I stared out of my window at the shapes of trees and the silver channels of the marshes, the pale specter of myself floating against them.

‘Did Wildon own a plane?’

‘No, but a man named Douglas Ampell did. Ampell went missing around the same time that Wildon disappeared. Ampell and Wildon were acquainted, and Wildon used Ampell’s aviation services on an occasional basis.’

‘Did Ampell file a flight record in July 2001?’

‘None.’

‘So if that was Ampell’s plane, and Wildon was on it, then where was he heading?’

‘I think he was trying to reach me. There had been some contact between us in the months before his disappearance. He had followed up on hundreds of rumors, and was convinced that there was a record in existence of those who had been corrupted. He believed that he was close to finding it, and it seems that he might have done so. I think he was bringing that list with him when the plane went down.’

‘And not just the list. Who was the passenger? Who was cuffed to a chair in that plane?’

‘Wildon was obsessed with finding those responsible for killing his daughters,’ said Epstein. ‘It destroyed his marriage, and his business, but he became convinced that he was drawing closer to them. Perhaps on that plane was the man who killed Wildon’s daughters: a man, or something worse than a man. You must find that plane, Mr Parker. Find the plane.’





34





Darina Flores learned of the deaths of Becky Phipps and Davis Tate shortly before she and the boy moved against Marielle Vetters. Darina had been concerned when she had not immediately heard back directly from Phipps; they had been searching for a definite clue to the location of the plane for so long, yet hours went by with no contact. Darina, always cautious in such matters, was reluctant to disseminate what she had learned any wider than was necessary, but preparations needed to be made.

While she debated what further action to take, she received confirmation from Joe Dahl that he was ready to move when she was. Dahl had been hers for a long time: she and her agents ensured that the inveterate gambler was permitted to fall deeper and deeper into debt until everything he owned was effectively theirs.

And then they let him keep it all: his car, his house, what little of his business remained, all of it. They simply held onto the paper on his debt, and waited. It didn’t take long. Dahl was an addict, and he had not yet been cured of his addiction. On the evening that he tried to use his car as security on a cash loan so he could hit Scarborough Downs, Darina paid him a visit, and Joe Dahl was cured of his gambling vice forever. Darina had kept him in her pocket ever since, ready to be used once they had solid information about the plane. Unlike the others, she had not gone on random searches of the woods, chasing wisps of information that dissipated like morning mist in the sunlight. She considered such ventures unwise: they risked drawing attention to the object of the search, and she believed that it was better to wait until a solid lead emerged. True, the plane and its secrets represented a ticking device that could go off at the moment of discovery, but while it remained lost its danger was potential, not actual, and even the list itself was meaningless unless it found its way into the right hands. The mystery of the passenger and his fate troubled her more. He shared her nature, and he was lost.

Grady Vetters, gagged with a scarf and bound with plastic ties, woke just as daylight was fading. He was bleary, but his head began to clear when he took in the boy staring at him from the couch, and the woman cleaning her gun at the kitchen table, and he smelled Teddy Gattle, even through the closed bedroom door. Darina could see Vetters weighing his options. She preferred to keep him alive for as long as possible, but if he proved difficult she would be forced to do without him.

Darina slipped the magazine into the little Colt and approached Grady. He tried to squeeze himself further into the corner of the room, and said something unintelligible through the gag. Darina didn’t care to hear what it was, so she left the scarf in place.

‘We’re going to pay a visit to Marielle,’ she said. ‘If you do as we tell you, you’ll live. If you don’t, you and your sister will die. Do you understand?’

Grady didn’t respond immediately. He was no fool: she could tell that he didn’t believe her. It didn’t matter. This was all a game, and he would play his part until an alternative offered itself. The easiest way to ensure that he stayed alive and remained compliant was to make him want to stay alive by not doing anything foolish, and so he would do as he was told until they reached Marielle’s house. If he died before they got there, he could be of no help to his sister. Alive, he could always hope.

But there was no hope, not really. Darina’s entire existence was predicated on that belief.

Grady breathed in deeply against the scarf, and his nose wrinkled as he again took in the smell of Teddy Gattle.

‘If it’s any consolation, it wasn’t an act of betrayal on his part,’ said Darina. ‘He thought that he was helping you. If you wouldn’t use your knowledge of the plane to make some money, then he would do it on your behalf. I think he loved you.’ She smiled. ‘He must have, since he died for you.’

Grady glared at her. The muscles in his arms tensed as he tried to force the plastic ties apart. His knees were drawn up to his chest, and she could see him preparing to gather his strength to spring at her. Perhaps she had misjudged him. She pointed the gun at his face, said, ‘Don’t,’ and his body relaxed. Darina kept him under the gun as the boy advanced, the syringe once again in his hand.

‘Not so much this time,’ she warned. ‘Just enough to keep him compliant.’

She waited until Grady’s eyes grew heavy again before making two more calls. The first was to Marielle Vetters’ house to ensure that she was home. When a woman answered the phone, Darina hung up.

The second call she made more reluctantly, not simply because she preferred Becky Phipps to be her primary point of contact, but because the Backers did not like to be drawn into such matters. It was important to them that they should not be linked to acts of blood. It was why they used companies, offshore bank accounts, proxies.

But Phipps always called back within an hour – always, day or night – and so Darina dialed the number of the one that she thought of as the Principal Backer. Darina was not frightened of him; she was frightened of very little to do with men and women, although she found their capacity for self-destruction disturbing, but she was always careful around this Backer. He was so like herself and her kind that sometimes she wondered if he was really human at all, but she could detect no trace of otherness about him. Nevertheless, there was a difference to him, and she had never been able to penetrate his veneer and discover what lay beneath it.

He answered the phone on the second ring. The number was in the possession of only a handful of individuals, and used only when the seriousness of the situation warranted it.

‘Hello, Darina,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long time, but I know why you’re calling.’

Thus it was that Darina learned of how Becky and Davis had met their ends. Becky had sent out a warning before she fled, but Darina’s call had gone to her home number on the assumption that she would still be recuperating: a minor lapse on Becky’s part, and understandable if she was running for her life.

The Collector had never moved against them in this way before. Oh, they knew that he suspected their existence, but the Backers had hidden themselves well, and Darina and the others were comfortable in the shadows. Darina understood then that Barbara Kelly had lied to her before she died. She had admitted to reaching out to the lawyer Eldritch and the old Jew, but she had assured Darina that she had offered only the promise of material, and not the material itself. Even when Darina took out her left eye as punishment for what she had done to her own sight, and threatened to leave her blind by cutting out the right as well, still Kelly denied that she had taken more than the first faltering footsteps toward repentance.

But the Collector could not have targeted Davis Tate without the list. On the other hand, Kelly would not have handed over the entire list to their enemies. It was her only bargaining tool. She would have tempted them with part of it, certainly no more than a page or two: a page to the Jew Epstein, perhaps, and a page to the Collector and his handler.

Just as the Collector had never declared outright war upon them, prevented from doing so by his own caution and their cleverness, they too had kept their distance from him. His was a minor crusade for the most part, a picking off of the vicious and the damned, although his victims had been growing in importance in recent years. The possibility of a strike against him had been mooted, but, as with her ambivalence toward the Principal Backer, the Collector presented a problem. What was he, exactly? What motivated him? He seemed to have knowledge of matters known only to Darina and her fallen brethren, and to share their comfort with the darkness, but he was an unknown quantity. So far, the advantages of removing him from the board had been outweighed by the risk of precipitating a violent reaction, whether from the Collector himself, if he survived such an attack, or from his allies.

And Darina had heard rumors about a detective, one who had crossed paths with those like her, although he remained of little concern to her. Selfishness and viciousness were the curse of her breed, so much so that many of them had forgotten their true purpose on this earth, so lost were they to wrath, and sorrow at all that they had sacrificed in their fall from grace. Even Brightwell had been driven by his own urges, his desire to unite the two halves of the being he worshiped, and he was among the best, and oldest, of them. When he had briefly blinked out of existence, his spirit separating from its host, she had experienced the pain of it so strongly that she had called out to him, willing him to come to her. She had felt his presence near to her, straining to remain close, and she had found a man that night, and in this stranger’s act of insemination, Brightwell had been reborn inside her.

But a crucial element was missing. Aspects of his true nature had manifested themselves early, almost as soon as he could walk, but he seemed to have no memory of how his old form had been taken from him, and with that came his silence. He was traumatized, she supposed, but she could as yet find no way to break down the wall that kept him from truly becoming himself once more.

She watched the boy now as the Backer spoke. The Backer sounded worried, as well he might. His final words left it to Darina to take action against those who were moving against them. The death of Becky Phipps had tipped the balance against the Collector, and his fate now lay in Darina’s hands.

But the plane was the priority: the plane, the list, and the passenger and his fate. She could not allow herself to be distracted, not now. She flipped through the names in her head, for Darina required no list. She had disputed the need for its existence right from the start, but human evil seemed to have a desire to record, to order. It was, she guessed, a function of mortality: even the worst among them, consciously or not, wanted their deeds to be remembered. Something of that need to record had infected her kind.

So Darina went to work, and the order was given to wipe their enemies from the face of the earth.

And while Darina conspired in his destruction, the Collector paid a visit to a church in Connecticut. The final service of the day had concluded, and the last of the congregation had trailed out into the evening. The Collector looked kindly upon them: they simply worshiped a different aspect of the same God.

When the last of them had gone, he watched as the priest said goodbye to the sacristan at the back of the church, and the two men separated. The sacristan drove away while the priest walked through the church grounds and used a key to unlock a gate in the wall: behind it was a garden, and his home.

The priest saw the Collector approach while the gate was still open.

‘Hello?’ he said. ‘Can I help you?’

He had a faint Irish accent, altered by his years in the United States. A security light on the wall beside him illuminated his face. He was a middle-aged man with a full head of hair, but no sign of gray. Instead, the light caught unnatural tints.

‘Father,’ said the Collector. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but I wish to make a confession.’

The priest looked at his watch. ‘I was about to go to dinner. I take confession every morning after ten o’clock mass. If you were to come back then, I’d be happy to listen.’

‘It’s a matter of some urgency, Father,’ said the Collector. ‘I fear for a soul.’

The curious formulation of the statement passed the priest by.

‘Oh well, I suppose that you’d better come in,’ he said.

He held the gate open and the Collector entered the garden. It was carefully arranged as a series of concentric circles, shrubs and hedges alternating with cobbled paths, and winter flowering plants adding color to it all. Between a pair of elegant box trees stood a long stone bench. The priest sat at one end of it, and indicated that the Collector should sit at the other. The priest took a stole from his pocket, kissed the cross, and placed the vestment around his neck. He quickly whispered some prayers, his eyes closed, and then asked the Collector how long it had been since his last confession.

‘A very long time,’ replied the Collector.

‘Years?’

‘Decades.’

The priest did not look happy to hear that. Perhaps he thought that the Collector might feel compelled to unburden himself of a lifetime of sins, and he would be forced to sit on the cold bench and listen until breakfast. The priest made the decision to cut to the chase. The Collector suspected that this was not the orthodox approach, but he did not object.

‘Go on, my son,’ said the priest. ‘You said that you had a matter of some seriousness to discuss.’

‘Yes,’ said the Collector. ‘A killing.’

That made the priest’s eyes open wider. He started to look worried. He didn’t know the Collector from Adam, and now here they were in the garden of the priest’s own home, about to discuss the death of another human being.

‘You’re talking about – what? An accidental death, or something worse?’

‘Worse, Father. Much worse.’

‘A . . . murder?’

‘It might be viewed that way. I couldn’t really say. It’s a matter of perspective.’

The priest had moved from being worried to actively concerned for his own safety. He saw an out.

‘Maybe you should come back tomorrow after all, once you’ve had a chance to properly consider what it is that you wish to confess,’ he said.

The Collector looked puzzled.

‘Done?’ he said. ‘I haven’t “done” anything yet. I’m going to do it. I was wondering if I could have absolution in advance, as it were. I’m very busy. I have a lot to fit into my days.’

The priest stood. ‘Either you’re making fun of me, or you’re a troubled man,’ he said. ‘Whatever is the case, I can’t help you. I want you to go now, and think hard about yourself.’

‘Sit down, priest,’ said the Collector.

‘If you don’t go, I’ll call the police.’

The priest didn’t even see the blade being drawn. One moment the Collector’s hands were empty, and the next there was a flash of light in his hands, and the Collector had risen, the knife pressed hard against the soft flesh of the priest’s throat. The priest heard the garden gate swing on its hinges. His eyes moved to the right, hoping to see someone enter, someone who might help him, but instead there were only deeper shadows moving. They took the form of men in hats and dark clothing, their long coats drifting behind them like smoke, but that wasn’t possible, was it? Then the shapes became clearer, and he could make out the pale features beneath the old fedoras, the eyes and mouths nothing more than dark holes, the skin around them wrinkled like old, rotting fruit.

‘Who are you?’ said the priest, as the shapes drew closer.

‘You betrayed her,’ said the Collector.

The priest was torn between listening to the Collector, and trying to believe what his eyes were seeing.

‘Who? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Barbara Kelly. They put you here to keep watch over her. You befriended her, and as she began to have doubts she shared with you what she planned to do.’

Becky Phipps had told him as much. The Collector liked to think that he had encouraged her to make a full and frank confession.

‘No, you don’t understand—’

‘Oh, but I do,’ said the Collector. ‘I understand perfectly. And you did it for money: you didn’t even have an interesting motive. You just wanted a nicer car, better vacations, more cash in your wallet. What a dull way in which to damn yourself.’

The priest was barely listening. He was terrified by the figures that surrounded him, drifting along the paths of his garden, circling him but drawing no closer.

‘What are those . . . things?’

‘They were once men like you. Now they are hollow. Their souls are lost, as yours will soon be, but you will not join their ranks. The faithless priest has no flock.’

The priest raised his hands imploringly.

‘Please, let me explain. I’ve been a good man, a good shepherd. I can still make recompense for what I’ve done.’

The priest’s hands moved fast, but not fast enough. His nails reached for the the Collector’s eyes, raking at them, but the Collector pushed the priest away, and in the same movement flicked the blade at his throat. A small wound opened, and blood began to pour like wine from a tipped goblet. The priest fell to his knees before his judge, who reached down and removed the stole from the priest’s shoulders, then folded it into one of his own pockets. He lit a cigarette, and removed a metal canister from inside his coat.

‘You have been found wanting, priest,’ said the Collector. ‘Your soul is forfeit.’

He sprayed the lighter fluid over the head and upper body of the kneeling man, and took one long drag on his cigarette.

‘Time to burn,’ he said.

He flicked the cigarette at the priest, and turned his back as the man ignited.