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incipient panic as he sat in the back of the police prowl car. This was not, by any means, an environment that offered him harmony.
    He tried to focus on the city that slid by outside.
    Clear-sky evening had turned to clouded night while he had sat in the bar with Corbin and the streets were now sleek with rain. The cop didn’t use the siren or the lights except at intersections, where an abbreviated whoop-whoop served both to clear the way and startle Macbeth. They cut through the Common on Charles, the silhouettes of the trees looking to Macbeth oddly two-dimensional, like stage scenery, before turning towards the towering sparkle of the Prudential Center. As they headed along Huntington, Macbeth could see more blue and white police cruisers blocking access to Christian Science Plaza.
    *
    “You the shrink?” the cop with the sergeant’s chevrons and the big Irish face asked Corbin as he got out of the patrol car.
    “I’m Dr Corbin, the duty psychiatrist, if that’s what you mean. This is a colleague, Dr Macbeth …” said Corbin as Macbeth slid out of the police car after him. The cop didn’t acknowledge Macbeth’s presence.
    “Yeah, well, we got a religious nut, looks like. Butt-naked onthe Christian Science Church roof. He’s the angel Gabriel, apparently.”
    “Anybody talking to him at the moment?” asked Corbin.
    “Father Mullachy. From St Francis just over there …” The cop had the same thick Boston accent that the cabbie had had.
Ovah they-ah
 … “I’ve got one of our guys with him. You never know when a crazy is going to try to take someone with them. Like that thing in San Francisco.”
    “You’ve got a Catholic priest talking to him?” Macbeth grinned. “I would have thought that the Christian Scientists would have a demarcation issue.”
    The sergeant looked Macbeth up and down wordlessly, before leading the way across the plaza. Ahead was a huge domed building that looked to Macbeth like a conglomeration of every style of religious architecture: part church, part cathedral, part basilica, part mosque. He had always thought of The Mother Church of the Church of Christ, Scientist, here in the heart of Boston, as something that should have been built in a theme-park for the godly. Or Las Vegas.
    He had visited as a child – Macbeth, Casey and their father tourists in their own town – and remembered being awed by the scale of the interiors. Religious architecture had always fascinated him; particularly the way the dimensions were intended to overwhelm, to intimidate – to remind how big was God and how small man. His favorite part of the visit had been the ‘Mapparium’ in the Mary Baker Eddy Library: a vast, three-stories-high, inside-out, glass-globe encapsulation of the world as it had been in 1935.
    The BPD sergeant led Corbin and Macbeth past the Reflection Pool, a long rectangle of water, dark and sparkling in the Boston night.
    “There he is …” The sergeant pointed up to a flat-roofed area around the dome with a parapet-walled edge. It was on the original part of the structure and halfway up. A naked figure stood poised on one of the wall’s merlons.
    Staring.
    His focus seemed fixed on something far out over the city. Something in the sky. Macbeth looked in the direction of his gaze, but could see nothing. Even at this distance, Macbeth saw that there was no urgency, no distress in the way the naked man stood, arms at his side. The sight of him stirred an uneasy memory of a patient at McLean. Macbeth’s last patient before he went into pure research.
    “Maybe he’s not serious,” Corbin said to the police sergeant. “It’s not high enough to ensure death if he jumps.”
    “Maybe so …” said the cop assessing the drop. “But it’s still gonna smart.”
Smaaht
. He led the two psychiatrists to a side door, through a storeroom and up an internal service stairwell. When they came out onto the roof section by the dome, everything looked different, the