A savage, cold wind had sprung up just after dark. It stirred and rippled the black water of the Thames, hit the moored ships and sent them moving and straining at their ropes. The decaying corpses of three river pirates twisted and twirled in the wind to the creak of the scaffold overhead. Ghostly dancers grimly turning to macabre music. The wind pierced the alleys and rutted tracks of the city, freezing the mud and ordure, driving deeper into the darkness those human predators of the shadows who might still be hunting for any unfortunate abroad on such a dark and miserable night.

The church of St. Mary Le Bow stood alone and desolate, its carved brick and woodwork open to the wind. The cemetery which surrounded it whispered and murmured with sound as leaves and branches were scornfully cast around by the wind as it bent and shook the flimsy wooden crosses of the dead. Inside the church, it was cold and dark, the wind slammed close a loose shutter and then continued to play its distant eerie music in the cracks and crevices of the crumbling masonry. The place was deserted and quiet except for the scurrying patter of the occasional rat and the slow dripping of rain water through a tear in the roof as it trickled down the mildewed wall forming a green dank puddle at its base. In the sanctuary, before the high altar, a man sat bolt upright in the Blessed Chair. His soft, plump hands clutched the carved wood as if he was reassuring himself that as long as he sat in that chair then he had found sanctuary and was protected by all the power, temporal and spiritual, of the Church. Yet he was afraid, his large protuberant eyes stared into the darkness, searching for Them, wondering if They would come. He had sinned grievously in being one of Them, he had sinned grievously in killing one of Them and They would not forget that. Nor would God.