'I wonder?' Corbett whispered to himself.

Monck might be a strange character but he was still a clerk. Perhaps he, like Corbett, would sit in his bed late at night poring over parchments, scribbling notes on his writing tray. Corbett knelt, felt beneath the bed and smiled in triumph as his fingers caught hold of three pieces of parchment.

He pulled them out carefully and sat on the edge of the bed to study them. The first appeared to be a list of precious objects. Corbett examined it closely; these items were not mere baubles but silver plate, cups, even a cope. It was difficult to decipher the writing because Monck had used many of the personal abbreviations so beloved of chancery clerks. Corbett put the list on the bed and studied the second piece of parchment. At first he could make no sense of the strange lines drawn on it. He smoothed the parchment out and then realized he was looking at a crude map of the Hunstanton area. It was very similar to the one he had drawn. He traced with his fingers the coastline of the Wash, as drawn by Monck, and found the crosses that marked Holy Cross convent, Hunstanton village, Mortlake Manor, the gallows and the Hermitage. It was more detailed than his own map and covered a wider area, including Swaffham, the area around the Wash and the river Nene. It was here that Monck had done the most scribbling, with dotted lines criss-crossing each other. On the third piece of parchment was a crude drawing of the coastline and a sketch of a cog under sail.

Corbett tried to memorize every detail of all three parchments before pushing them back under the bed. He got up and, making sure everything was in its place, walked across and looked out through the unshuttered window which, like his, overlooked a grey, sullen sea.

Whatever brought you here, Monck, he thought, it's not the Pastoureaux!