Another guard came in then and spoke to the first. We were taken roughly by the arm, and led out, through a second and then a third magnificent chamber, before we reached a corridor I recognized; the Privy Council Chamber. We came up to the door. The guard standing before it said, ‘Not the boy. He says to put him somewhere till he knows whether he needs to question him.’

‘Come on, you.’ The first guard pulled Nicholas’s arm, leading him away. ‘Courage, Master Shardlake,’ Nicholas called back to me. Then the remaining guard knocked at the door, and a sharp voice I recognized called, ‘Enter.’

I was pulled inside. The guard left, shutting the door behind me. There was only one man in the long chamber, sitting on a chair at the centre of the table, a sconce of candles beside him. He looked at me with hard eyes set in a slab face above a forked beard. Master Secretary Paget.

‘Master Shardlake.’ He sighed wearily. ‘How much work and effort you have made for me.’ He shook his head. ‘When there is so much else to do.’

I looked at him. ‘So you were behind it all,’ I said quietly. My voice sounded thick and muffled, my face swelling now where I had been struck.

His expression did not change. ‘All what?’

Recklessly, far beyond deference now, I answered, ‘The murder of those Anabaptists. The theft of the – the manuscript. Spying on me for the last year, I know not why. Nor care.’ I gulped a breath, my voice breaking as a picture came into my head once more of Barak dumped on that rubbish heap.

Paget stared back at me. He had the gift of sitting still, focused, like a cat watching its prey. ‘Murder?’ His tone was admonitory, accusing. ‘Those men were heretics, and traitors too, who would gladly have killed me, or the King, or you for that matter, to advance their perverted notions. They had easier deaths than they deserved, they should have been burned. They were stupid, though. When my spies among the radicals warned me of a nest of Anabaptists in London, my man Curdy infiltrated it with ease. Now there was a loyal servant, and he was murdered.’ Paget drew his heavy eyebrows together in a frown.

‘He was killed in a fight.’

‘Yes. By one of Richard Rich’s men.’ He waved a hand contemptuously. ‘Rich was after what Anne Askew wrote before she was burned, I know that. I believe John Bale has it now.’ For the first time Paget laughed, a flash of surprisingly white teeth amid the coarse brown of his beard. ‘That may come back to haunt Sir Richard yet.’

‘You suborned Rich’s servant,’ I said.