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called a meeting up at the church. He apparently wants to question Sir Roger’s whelp and the other justice, what’s his name?’
    ‘Tressilyian.’
    Ysabeau walked down the passageway. Deverell closed his eyes.
    ‘So it’s begun,’ he whispered. ‘God’s justice will be done!’
    Deverell opened his eyes and stared at the crucifix nailed to the wall. At Sir Roger’s execution, he reflected, hadn’t the knight vowed, just before he was turned off the ladder, to return from the dead and seek justice?

Chapter 3
    The crypt under the church of St Edmund’s, Melford, was cavernous and sombre. Rush lights and oil lamps sent the shadows dancing, turning the atmosphere even more ominous. Sir Hugh Corbett stared at the funeral ledges built at eyelevel around the chamber. Some of the coffins were rotting and decayed, displaying fragments of bone. One entire casket had fallen away and its yellowing skeleton lay on its side, jaw sagging. Corbett thought it was grinning at him like some figure of death, ready to pounce. He waited while Parson Grimstone loosened the lid of the coffin which lay on trestles in the centre of the room. The priest took the lid off and removed the purple cloth beneath. Corbett stared down at the waxen face of the corpse within. Those who had dressed the young woman for burial had done their best. Corbett moved the head with one finger. He stared at the mottled bruises which ringed her throat like some grisly necklace.
    ‘It looks like a garrotte,’ he remarked. ‘Where was she found?’
    ‘Near Devil’s Oak. Her body was tucked away beneath a hedge. Two boys collecting firewood found it and raised the alarm.’
    Corbett stared at the priest. Parson Grimstone was undoubtedly nervous - his eyes puffy with lack of sleep, hands trembling. He looked as if he hadn’t shaved and his black gown was marked with food stains. The parson placed the lid back on the coffin and walked over to the stone chair built into the wall. He sat down next to his friend Adam Burghesh and put his face in his hands.
    ‘You are very upset.’
    Sir Hugh Corbett went to stand over him. The priest looked up and swallowed quickly. He was frightened, not just by the terrible murders which had occurred but by the presence of this royal emissary, with his black hair tied in a queue behind him, the long thoughtful face tense and watchful. Corbett would have been called swarthy except for the peculiar strikingness of his high cheekbones and those brooding dark eyes which never seemed to blink. They stared and searched as if eager to remember every detail. Parson Grimstone didn’t like the look of the King’s principal clerk of the Secret Seal. Sir Hugh was dressed in a dark grey military cloak fastened at the neck; a brown leather sleeveless jerkin beneath, leggings of the same colour, pushed into black, mud-spattered riding boots on which the spurs still clinked.
    Corbett took his gauntlets off and thrust them into his sword belt. Yes, I’m frightened of you, Grimstone thought. Even more so of his companion - what was his name? Ah yes, Ranulf-atte-Newgate: tall, red-haired, dressed like his master. A fighting man despite his status as a clerk in the Chancery of the Green Wax. Burghesh had whispered that he was Corbett’s bullyboy. Grimstone glanced quickly at Ranulf’s white, clean-shaven face, those lazy, heavy-lidded green eyes. He reminded Grimstone of a feral cat which stalked the graveyard. A brooding man, Ranulf stood with his back to the door, watching his master, who, in turn, seemed fascinated by this rib-vaulted crypt.
    ‘A strange place to gather.’ Burghesh broke the silence. ‘Couldn’t we have met elsewhere?’
    ‘It’s cold,’ Robert Bellen complained.
    The curate sat hunched in one of the chairs almost obscured by the great central pillar which supported the roof.
    ‘The place reeks of death.’ Walter Blidscote, the plump, red-faced, balding bailiff of Melford shook his head so vigorously his jowls