‘You will appreciate this,’ Rowland said. ‘Bealknap left a vast sum of money to build what amounts to a mausoleum in the Inn chapel. With a marble image of himself, decorated and gilded and heaven knows what. He paid the Inn a good deal of money to agree to have it done.’

‘So he told me. I saw him the day he died.’

Rowland raised his white eyebrows. ‘Did you, by Mary?’

‘He asked me to visit him.’

‘A deathbed repentance?’ Rowland’s eyes narrowed with malicious curiosity.

‘No.’ I sighed. ‘Not really.’

‘You remember all the rumours that he had a great chest of gold in his chambers? Well, it was my duty to go and look for it. That chest did indeed exist, and contained several hundred sovereigns. But it wasn’t at his chambers. Bealknap had had the sense to deposit it with one of the goldsmiths, for security. According to this goldsmith, Bealknap used to go there and sit with it of an evening.’

‘He was a strange man.’

‘There was certainly enough in the chest to pay for this mausoleum. However, many of the benchers have objected. Bealknap was not, after all, a great credit to the Inn, and this thing is hardly in the chapel style. They are refusing point-blank to sanction it. As I suspected they would, at the time I made the bargain with Bealknap. He can lie under a marble slab in the chapel like a reasonable man.’ Rowland gave that cynical smile of his, world-weary but also cruel; proud of his outwitting of a dying man.

I said, ‘But if it is in his Will – ’

Rowland spread his arms, black silk robe rustling. ‘If the benchers will not agree, the legacy becomes impossible of execution.’

‘Who is his executor?’

‘Sir Richard Rich.’ I looked at him sharply. ‘It is an old Will. I know for a fact he hasn’t worked cases for Rich for over a year. Rich stopped using him when he began to get ill.’ I wondered, was that why Bealknap had come cosying up to me at the end of last year, in the hope that I could get him some work? I remember him saying he was not getting as much work from one of his clients. It must have been Rich. Rowland inclined his head. ‘I keep an eye on which of the great ones of the realm give work to Lincoln’s Inn barristers. As the Queen used to do with you. I have been in touch with Rich’s secretary, and he said Sir Richard couldn’t care less about the mausoleum.’ He shrugged. ‘And the Will specifically excludes members of his family from having a say. So, this thing will not be built, and all Bealknap’s gold will be bona vacantia. So in the absence of anyone else, his fortune will go to – ?’ He paused on a questioning note, as though I were a law student.

‘The Crown,’ I said.