“How does he do that, Mother?” asked Johann.

“By poisoning their lives, so that everything they touch sickens and dies,” she replied, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. His mother saw signs, symbols and portents in everything. When she recognised some secret harm in him, she called him to the shadowed passage where she waited with the slender leather whip that striped the backs of his knees, branding his guilt into place until the marks remained through the suntan of summer. He had come to recognise that her religious fervour was a form of illness, a disease of the brain that infected her every action. While his classmates met after school to play football, he was sent to the priest for further teaching. He spent his weekends in church, or at the seminary helping in the vegetable garden. He was never allowed to mix with the children from the village. To be left with others was to encourage the Devil, who gleefully made work for idle young hands. The Devil, like the dirt, the dust and the sun, was the enemy outside, and had to be kept beyond the door.

How he longed to let the Devil in, just to see what he would do. He wanted to talk to his grandfather, to understand why the old man’s daughter was so much stricter than any of the mothers in the village, but the yellow-faced old man in the wicker chair was growing feebleminded, and the time was fast approaching when he would have no remaining power of speech.

One Saturday morning in early October, just before the weather turned, Johann slipped the great iron latch and ran off down the hill towards the village. His mother allowed him no money, but he had already planned to do without; he would hitch a lift with one of the lorry drivers who drove vegetables down to the city. Once aboard, he knew he would be safe, for she would have no way of finding him. He hung around the dusty grocery store waiting for a delivery, and his patience was rewarded when a truck pulled into the depot.

One look told him that the driver would never allow him on board. He waited until the lorry had been loaded, and was still trying to climb into the back when his mother arrived at the store on her bicycle, and spotted him.

This time, his mother whipped him with the oiled birch she kept in the shed, in order to impress the fullness of her love upon him. After that he was kept at home, where he could be watched by God and his family. Her intention was to keep him pure and untouched by evil, but her prescription had the opposite effect. The boy became sly and dark. Subterfuge came naturally to him.

He remained in the little house for five more years, waiting for an opportunity to free himself, and when the chance finally came, he seized upon it with the full violence of his trapped spirit.

It was a storm-ravaged morning in late autumn, soon after his grandfather had been placed in the gravelled cemetery behind the dry-stone wall shared by the village’s only petanque pitch. He stood in the middle of his mother’s bedroom, knowing exactly what had to be done. Raising the ceramic pitcher she kept on her dresser, he hurled it with all his might onto the floorboards, and when he heard the approaching thump of her stick, went to wait for her in the corridor, where she kept the leather strap.

Beating an old lady should be easy if you have the stomach to do so, he thought, if she has done everything within her power to deserve it, but it’s not if God can see you. If He witnesses your fall from grace, you are damned for eternity. His mother stood before him, her small sharp teeth bared, the whip raised, about to strike him down-and then a miracle occurred.

Earlier that morning the first snowstorm of the season had ridden over the mountain peaks and across the haute route above the village, whitening the tarmac. In seconds the sky had grown dark, as if someone had thrown a sheet over the sun, and God was blinded from His view of mortals. The silent blizzard dropped over the house and all around them. Now, he thought, he could do whatever he needed to survive. Hidden inside the caul of falling snow, protected by the purity of nature, he snatched back the whip and beat his unrepentant mother to her knees.

He did not stop when the sky suddenly cleared and he could once more be seen by the Almighty, because he decided that God should see what he had done. If I am to be damned, it is how I will live, he decided. He looked up into the pin-sharp panel of azure that had appeared inside the banks of clouds, and openly defied his Maker. See what I have done, I defy you to save me. God saw all, and once He did there could only follow judgement, trial, repentance and suffering.

He walked to the front door, kicked it back, and stepped out into the front garden. In the sky above, the white corridor that had opened through the vaporous mountains shone all the way up to the heart of the sun.

“The urge has come on me to speak to you about carpet slippers, Mr. Bryant,” Alma Sorrowbridge told her former lodger. “You wander in from the garden with half of London on your boots, all over my spotless kitchen floor, and it does my head in.”

“I thought you wanted me to get into the great outdoors,” grumbled Arthur Bryant, lowering his library book with reluctance. He wore his tweed overcoat and pyjama bottoms to the table, in protest over Alma ’s restrictions on the bar heater, which had been faulty ever since he had tried to fix it with a fork.

“Yes, but 1 didn’t expect you to bring it back in with you. I thought you might come to Regent’s Park with me, instead of digging holes in the garden looking for-whatever old rubbish you expect to find out there.”

“Old rubbish? Relics, madam!” Bryant peered over his pages and scowled. “You have no idea of the history upon which you stand, do you? I don’t suppose you know that near this site, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey was slaughtered in most vexing circumstances.”

“I read the papers,” Alma bridled.

“I doubt you’d have been reading them in 1678, when his body was discovered among the primroses near Lower Chalcot Farm. He had been strangled until his neck broke, and a sword run through him, yet spatters of candle wax placed him miles away at Somerset House. His three murderers eventually confessed to having brought him to this lonely spot by horse and sedan chair. We live in Chalk Farm, a corruption of Chalcot Farm, within the cursed circle of Mother Shipton, the area’s most famous witch, who said that once the farmland was hemmed in on all sides by London houses, the streets of the metropolis would run with blood. She proved correct, for the area became famous for its fatal duels. And so I dig through London clay, the most recalcitrant material imaginable, in the hopes of finding evidence of those deaths. And once I find it, as I surely will, it will end another chapter of my biography.”

“Here, am I in this book you’re writing?” asked Alma, suddenly suspicious.

“You most certainly are. So I should watch your step, especially when it comes to forcing me on route marches and making me eat your bread-and-butter pudding.”

“You’re a stubborn old man,” Alma decided, folding her arms. “A proper walk would do you the world of good.”

“I am not being dragged around a park to feed ducks and admire crocuses while you hand out evangelical leaflets to disinterested passersby,” snapped Bryant. “Besides, I’m already planning a trip of my own this week which will require the commandeering of your decrepit Bedford van, and I intend to drive with the windows closed specifically to avoid breathing in the odours of the so-called countryside.”

“But your lungs is filled with London soot. When you cough it’s like a death rattle. You’ve got clogged phlegm in your tubes.”