‘If you want him, Ranulf, he’s yours. But I doubt if he will leave.’

The friar knelt down and tickled the cat between his ears. He looked up at the lined, seamed face of the rat-catcher, framed by his black, tarry leather hood.

‘He’s a mercenary. If you took him away, he’d be back tonight!’

Bonaventure agreed, stretched, and walked back to his favourite place at the base of the pillar.

Once Ranulf had gone, Athelstan sat on the altar steps, his mind going back to the corpses he had seen: Vechey’s lying cold amongst those dreadful heads on the tower gate of London Bridge; Brampton’s sheathed in dirty canvas in the death house of St Mary Le Bow; Springalls lying alone under its leather covering in the great four poster bed in his mansion. What eluded him still? He thought of Hob dying in his hovel, his wife frightened of the future. Surely he could get some money for her from somewhere? He lifted his hands to his face and smelt the chrism he had used on Hob’s head, hands, chest and feet. The feet!

Athelstan jumped up. Of course, that was it, Brampton’s feet! The manservant hadn’t committed suicide. He couldn’t have done. He had been murdered!

Athelstan looked around the church. He wished Cranston were here. The sun streamed through the horn-glazed windows and Bonaventure stretched out, relaxing after a good night’s hunting. Athelstan turned from the familiar, domestic sight and knelt before the altar, his eyes fixed on the red light.

‘Oh, God,’ he prayed, ‘help me now. Please!’

In his own private chamber at his house in Poultry Sir John also was thinking as he leant over his writing desk, quill in hand. He was engaged in the great love of his life: writing a treatise on the maintenance of law in the city of London. Cranston had a love of the law and, ever since his appointment as coroner, had been engaged in drawing up his own proposals for law reform. He would put them forward in a specially written book, bound in the finest calf, to some powerful patron who, in Cranston’s dreams, would see them as the solution to all of London’s problems.

Sir John loved the city, knew every stone, every church, every highway, every alleyway. Immersed in London’s history, he was constantly begging the monks of Westminster Abbey, or the clerks of the chancery in the Tower, to let him have access to manuscripts and documents. Some he would take home, copying them out most carefully before returning them in their leather cases to their proper places. In a sense Cranston never wished to finish his labour. He believed that his survey would be of use, but privately thought of it as his escape. No one else knew. No one except Maude, of course.