We heard our visitor descend the stair and the bang of the front door. In an instant, Holmes’ manner changed. He threw down Bradshaw.

“Quickly, Watson”, he exclaimed, “after him”.

Snatching our coats, we clattered down the stairs and out into Baker Street.

The portly frame of our recent ecclesiastical visitor was easily visible among the crowds on the pavement on the other side of the road. He set off at a slow and dignified pace towards Oxford St, pausing only to glance into the bay window of a popular milliner. Then, to my astonishment, without warning he took to his heels like a hare, darting into Blandford St like a man possessed.

Ignoring my warning shout, Holmes dashed in pursuit across the street, vanishing behind a dray laden with barrels. He returned a moment later, white with chagrin.

“A black mark against me, Watson! I should not have been so indiscreet in my eagerness to follow”.

He glanced around the crowded street.

“There is no object in our remaining here. Let us return to our rooms.”

Holmes flung himself into the basket chair and brooded for a moment. Then, in that mercurial fashion which I had come to know so well, he laughed and picked up his old briar pipe.

“I see from your face, my dear chap, that you are perplexed. And yet there were no less than 28 ways in which you could have reached the same conclusion as I”

My face betrayed my consternation.

“Watson, old chap, consider this: how likely is it that a senior clerk in holy orders at this most new of English cathedrals should have been in a pub, of all places, ‘upon a call’? And then his ‘Church Warden’ accompanied him – a post that from my investigations into early English charters I happen to know does not exist at a Cathedral Church. And, to crown it all, the man’s clerical garb was that of a Primitive Methodist!”

Holmes made a sudden angry movement.

“Am I now so ill-respected by the criminal classes that they think me liable to be deceived by such a poor show? I have not seen such a display since our unlamented friend James Winter called upon us”.

“If as you say, Holmes, the caller’s story was so very ill judged, perhaps it was not intended to deceive you? It may be some sort of peculiar joke, perhaps”.

Holmes laid down his pipe in the fender and sat back in his chair, folding his long thin arms.

“As I have remarked before, Watson, you are at times an excellent conductor of light. Pass me that Crockfords, there’s a good chap, and then I think I shall take a walk in Whitechapel”.

- o –

It was not until late that evening, as I sat with a brandy and water by the fire, that Holmes returned, dressed as a common vagrant. His face was flushed and his eyes bright and, cocking an eye at him, I pushed out his chair with one foot in expectation of an account of his affairs that day. I was not disappointed.

“You saw, of course, that Respess and Langdon are real members of the Chapter at St Albans’s? There are not many in the criminal world who know their Crockfords, and one who does is Reeling Jake, as he is known, once Canon of a respectable Oxfordshire Deanery and now part-owner - with a Russian émigré - of a dosshouse in Whitechapel. He owes me a favour or two since I solved that little matter of the ostrich feather hat – you recall the case, Watson?”

I nodded grimly. “Shocking, Holmes, shocking”.

“Yes, yes” Holmes interrupted, “My defrocked friend is well up on everything which is unholy in ecclesiastical circles, and he tells me that there is something afoot at St Albans, something “deep and evil”, in his own words, and he referred me to the Good Book, no less, to” – Holmes read from a scrap of paper – “Proverbs Chapter 1 verses 10 to 14. Make an arm, old man.”

I reached for the small well-worn leather-bound volume that Holmes had received from the hands of His Holiness himself, and read:

“My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not. If they say, Come with us, let us lay wait for blood, let us lurk privily for the innocent without cause: Let us swallow them up alive as the grave; and whole, as those that go down into the pit: We shall find all precious substance, we shall fill our houses with spoil: Cast in thy lot among us; let us all have one purse”.

Holmes shrugged his shoulders at my dismay.

“It may be no more than a drunkard’s turn of the dramatic, Watson, not the return of the Evil One himself. Still, a visit to church is never profitless, and I have a hankering to probe the matter at its root. We will visit St Alban’s tomorrow, if you are agreeable, and see what we may”.

Despite Holmes’ flippancy, the ancient words returned to me in the hours of the night as the wind and rain battered at the window of my bedroom. What fearful grinning evil might we confront on the morrow?

- o -

The clear morning sky did much to dispel my mood. The newspaper boys were gaily calling their chants as Holmes and I clattered in a four-wheeler to St Pancreas amid the swirling throngs of office workers and city gentlemen. Holmes too seemed buoyant, alternating between loudly humming the refrain from the principal work of the night before and telling me a host of little-known facts about the art of the concertina, in which he seemed oddly well-versed.

It was as we alighted at the great Gothic station that my ear caught a familiar phrase. Muttering an apology to Holmes, I turned and seized a seller of the Hertfordshire Gazette by the shoulder as he passed, bawling out his headlines.

“Holmes”, I said, pushing through the crowd toward him, “look at this”.

Holmes took the damp newsprint and scanned the lead story.

“This changes everything,” he said grimly. “The very man who someone took so much trouble to impersonate so badly is the very same day murdered upon the altar of his own Cathedral to the sound of the Cathedral bells. The game is afoot, Watson!”

Proceed to Part Three