I ran my hands through my hair. Stice, the servant of Richard Rich who I had reluctantly worked with, had been spying on me since the spring. But as I thought it through, it began to make sense. April was when the hunt for heretics linked to the Queen was getting going. Rich knew I had worked for her; if he was able to link me to religious radicals, he might be able to incriminate her by association. This could have been a small part of his and Gardiner’s campaign to destroy her. But of course he would have found nothing. Then, after the campaign against the Queen failed in July, and Rich found me hunting for Greening’s murderers – and, as he thought, Anne Askew’s book – he could easily have switched from spying on me to using me.

Yet it did not add up: I had not burned my books till the end of July, when Stice and I were already working together, and if it was actually Rich who brought that matter to the Privy Council, then why had he helped me today, when it was likely to bring him into bad odour with Gardiner? But the paths Rich followed were so sinuous, it could all still be part of some larger plan. I had thought him sincere this morning, but Rich could never, ever be trusted. I had to talk this through with Barak.

Martin was looking at me now, a twitch at the corner of his mouth. ‘Crabtree gave me the money I needed to start to pay down the debts. But only little by little, and all the while the interest was mounting. Agnes, she was at the end of her tether.’

‘I know.’

‘And Crabtree kept demanding information.’ Brocket looked at me in a sort of desperate appeal. ‘I was bound to him, he could expose what I had done, if he chose.’

‘That is the problem with being a spy. Where did you meet?’

‘In a house, a poor place, barely furnished. I think it was used for business.’

‘In Needlepin Lane?’

He shook his head. ‘No, sir, it was at Smithfield, hard by St Bartholomew’s Hospital.’

‘Exactly where?’

‘In a little lane off Griffin Street. Third house down, with a blue door and a Tudor rose above the porch.’

It did not surprise me that Rich kept more than one place for secret meetings. He owned half the houses round St Bartholomew’s.

‘I suppose Agnes and I must go now, sir,’ Martin said quietly.

‘I take it she knows nothing of this.’