Lord Parr gave him a look of contempt. ‘No. I imagine you would not, for fear of being hanged. But Michael Leeman was a thief. And you are deep in the mire.’ He looked at me. ‘I will have this man held close at my house for the moment. Come with us, Master Barwic. I’ll put you in the charge of a guard, as a man suspected of conspiracy to rob the Queen. And you don’t say a word about keys. Leeman, and his confederate, are discovered, but Leeman has escaped and you’ll keep all this quiet till he is captured.’

Barwic sank to his knees again. His voice shook. ‘Will – will I hang, sir? Please, would you ask the Queen to show mercy? I have a wife, children – it was all the expenses of being Guild Chairman, the taxes for the war – ’

Lord Parr bent over him. ‘You’ll hang if I have any say,’ he said brutally. ‘Now, come.’

BARWIC WAS PUT in the charge of a guard and led away, sobbing, across Baynard’s Castle yard. Another man whose life now lay in ruins. Some men lifting bolts of silk from a cart turned to look at the weeping prisoner being taken away under guard.

‘Well,’ Lord Parr said quietly. ‘You have taken us far, Serjeant Shardlake. We have the whole story of the theft, the how and the who. But still not the why. And who has the damned manuscript now? And why are they keeping quiet about it?’

‘I do not know, my Lord. My young assistant is trying to trace the maker of that piece of torn sleeve he found near Greening’s print-shop, but for now there are no other leads. We need to catch Greening’s friends.’

He stirred the dust of the courtyard with his foot. ‘I will send Cecil a detailed description of Leeman; I’ll get it from Captain Mitchell. He can add it to those who are to be watched out for.’

‘They will likely try to leave under false names.’

‘Of course they will,’ he said impatiently. ‘But the customs house has the descriptions, and if any of them try to board a ship they will be arrested and held close till I can question them.’ He shook his head. ‘Though they may try to go via Bristol, or Ipswich.’

‘That leaves our enquiries in the Tower,’ I reflected. ‘It may be possible we could find that it was another radical who leaked the truth about Anne Askew. Possibly someone linked to the others.’

He nodded slowly. ‘I certainly smell some sort of radical conspiracy here. I wish I knew what it was about.’

‘Whatever it was, that original group has been attacked and blown apart.’ I looked at him. ‘By internal dissension, or perhaps it could even be that someone in the group was a spy, maybe for someone in the conservative camp.’