My phone rang and I reached for it, again hoping it was Marina. It wasn’t.

‘I told you to ensure no one in Middleham saw you,’ said an angry squeaky northern voice—one I was getting quite used to.

‘No one did.’

‘Then how do I know you went to see Simon Paulson after I left you?’

‘So how do you?’ I asked with surprise.

I had donned the sunglasses and cap again while driving through the town to and from Simon’s yard, even though wearing sunglasses to drive on such a dull and miserable day was probably more suspicious than anything.

‘Because you were seen there.’

‘Who by?’

‘I don’t know, but someone saw you,’ he said. ‘It’s all over social media that Sid Halley was snooping round Middleham this afternoon.’

‘The police will trace you if you keep using your phone.’

‘No chance. I took the SIM card out.’

‘So how are you calling me?’

‘It still connects to the internet. I’m using Wi-Fi calling. And I’m logged on to the free guest Wi-Fi from the pub at the back of my garden.’

‘I bet they can still trace it.’

‘I don’t think so, because I’ve turned all the tracing apps off.’

I wasn’t so sure, but did I care? He’d have to show himself sometime. But I was far more concerned about the fact that my presence in Middleham this afternoon was now being advertised on social media. Had Simon Paulson told someone? I thought it most unlikely, but who knows what people do when they are stressed, and Simon had clearly been stressed.

As hard as I’d pushed him, he hadn’t admitted to me that a third party was directing where and when his horses ran. In fact, he had said almost nothing else other than to implore me not to tell anyone about my going to see him. Hence, I believed that it must have been someone different who had seen me. But how?

Simon’s stable yard was off the main road behind the seventeenth-century Black Swan Inn. Even its postal address was Back Street.

I tried to remember if anyone had been on the road as I turned in but, even then, I had still been wearing my crude disguise. I’d only removed it as I walked over to Simon’s front door.

What had I then been able to see? I scoured my mental image.

The castle. Mysterious and forbidding, it towered over Simon’s yard.

Back in the early 1480s, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, king of the castle and also of the rest of England, would have easily been able to look down into Simon’s stable yard from the high battlements—except, of course, the yard hadn’t been built then.