I looked at him. His was an unremarkable face, but for those powerful, protuberant eyes which I had noticed seldom blinked, and that line of three moles running down one cheek. Yet he had been married, widowed and remarried, and become a confidant of the highest in the land, all by his mid-twenties. For all his ordinary looks and reserved manner, William Cecil was a man out of the common run. ‘We turn down here,’ he said abruptly.

We walked into a narrow alley, made darker by the shadow of the cathedral, onto which it backed. Chickens pecked in the dust. Cecil stopped in front of a door with flaking paint. Beside it, almost blocking the dusty alleyway, stood a cart, a tarpaulin slung over it. Cecil knocked gently at the door: two short raps then a long pause till the next, obviously a prearranged signal.

THE DOOR WAS OPENED by a woman in her forties, as short and spare as Elias had been large and burly. She wore a shapeless grey dress and had not even put on a coif, her dark hair hastily knotted behind her head. Her eyes were wide with horror and fear. On her cuffs I saw flecks of red. She stared at me, then Cecil. ‘Who’s this?’ she asked him fearfully.

‘Master Shardlake. A lawyer. And, like me, one who would not have people persecuted for their opinions. May we come in, Goodwife Rooke?’

Her shoulders slumped helplessly, and she nodded. She led us into a poorly furnished parlour where two thin little girls of about eight and nine sat at table. The younger had her mother’s small, birdlike features, the elder Elias’s heaviness of face and body. Both stared at us in fear. I noticed a bucket and scrubbing brush on the floor, a discarded apron, stained red, rolled into a ball beside it.

‘Girls,’ Goodwife Rooke said gently. ‘Go and wait upstairs in our bedroom. But do not go in your brother’s room. Do you swear?’

‘I swear,’ the elder girl said. She took her sister’s hand and they sidled past us. Their footsteps sounded on a wooden staircase. Goodwife Rooke sat down.

‘It is no thing for his sisters to see,’ she said. ‘Nor a mother either,’ she added, her voice breaking.

‘Do the girls know?’ Cecil asked gently.

‘Only that Elias has been hurt, not that he is dead. I had a mighty job keeping them in our room last night, while I was heaving his body up the staircase. The noise made the girls call out to ask what was happening.’ She rested her brow on a trembling hand for a moment, then looked at us desperately. ‘I don’t know what to do, sirs.’

Cecil said, ‘We shall try to help you. Now, can you tell this gentleman what happened?’

‘If it is not too much,’ I added reassuringly.