'You think the Pastoureaux are rogues?'

'I think we should talk to the young men and women of their community.'

Corbett nodded. 'When we have finished here, you and Maltote will take my compliments and condolences to Master Joseph. See if you can talk with the community.'

Ranulf closed his eyes. 'Master, I'm cold and I'm hungry!'

'Aye, and when you return there'll be a warm meal and a good bed and you and Maltote can play dice.' He held up an admonitory finger. 'But not with Sir Simon's servants.'

Ranulf blinked innocently at him.

'I mean that,' Corbett insisted. 'And you aren't to gull them into buying the medicines you try to sell whenever we come into the countryside, the strange concoctions and elixirs handed down to you from the ancient Egyptians.'

Ranulf swallowed hard and stared guiltily at Maltote. How did old Master Long Face know about his little leather bag and the remedies he was always ready to sell to the gullible?

'Now,' – Corbett urged his horse forward – 'let's look at the gallows.'

They rode along the cliff edge until they came again to the three-branched scaffold. It soared up against the darkening sky, only about seven yards from the cliff edge. Corbett gathered the reins and tried to keep his skittish horse still. He looked up at the great iron hook in each of the scaffold branches.

'I suppose,' he said, more to himself than to his companions, 'if some poor unfortunate's to be executed, he's brought out here, pushed up a ladder, the ladder's turned and he's left to hang. But that's not what happened to the baker's wife.'

He stared down at the ground, where the grass had long been worn away. His horse was so nervous that he wondered whether someone was buried there – it was, he knew, the custom to bury suicides and excommunicants beneath a scaffold. Why, he wondered, had the baker's wife come out here? Why had she allowed someone to place a rope round her neck? How was it that the murderer had left no sign? And who had ridden the baker's horse back to the village?