'We have not discussed a fee,' I said, ignoring the insult. 'I believe your niece to be innocent,' I added. 'Sir Edwin, does it not occur to you that if she is innocent, you will kill an innocent person while a guilty one goes free!'

'Know better than the coroner, do you?' Needler said boldly.

At his insolent manner, more than Sir Edwin's insult, something snapped inside me. 'Do you let your steward speak for you, sir?' I asked Sir Edwin.

'David speaks true. He knows as well as I that you will drag matters out as long as you get paid for it.'

'Have you any idea what death by the press means?' I asked him. A couple of aldermen walking up the steps stared round at my raised voice, but I took no heed. 'It means lying for days under heavy stones, in an agony of thirst and hunger, struggling to breathe as you wait for your back to break!'

Sabine began to cry. Sir Edwin looked round at her, then turned back to me. 'How dare you speak of such things in front of my poor daughter!' he shouted. 'She aches for her lost brother as I ache for my son! Black-robed, stinking, bent lawyer! You can tell you have no children!'

His face was contorted, spittle gathering at the corners of his mouth. People going up and down the steps had stopped to watch; someone laughed at his tirade of insults. To stop the spectacle making Elizabeth's name a talking point again, I stepped past Sir Edwin. Needler sidestepped too, blocking my path, but I stared at him fiercely and he gave way. Followed by a host of stares, I walked down the steps and away to the stables.

When I reached Chancery's stall I found I was trembling. I stroked his head and he nuzzled my hand, hoping for food. Sir Edwin's fury had been unnerving; there seemed something almost unbalanced in his hatred of Elizabeth. But he had lost his only son and he was right – I had no children, I could only imagine how he must feel. I slung my bag of books over my shoulder, mounted and rode out. Sir Edwin and his party had disappeared.

I rode north towards the City wall, where the former Franciscan priory of St Michael's lay. It was situated in a street where good houses were mixed in with poor tenements. The street was empty, quiet and shady, St Michael's halfway along. It was a small place, the church no bigger than a large parish church. The wide doors stood open and, curious, I dismounted and looked in.

I blinked with surprise at the interior. Both sides of the nave had been blocked off with tall, flimsy-looking wooden partitions. There was a series of doors at ground-floor level and rickety steps led up to more doors, making a dozen apartments in all. The centre of the nave had become a narrow passage, the old flagstones strewn with dirt. The passage was dark, for the partitions blocked off the side windows and the only light came from the window at the top of the quire.

Beside the door a couple of iron rings had been hammered into an ancient font. From the piles of dung on the floor I could see this was where horses were tethered. I slung Chancery's reins round a ring and walked down the central passage. So this was Bealknap's conversion. It was so rickety it looked as though the construction could come down at any moment.

One of the doors on the upper floor opened. I glimpsed a poorly furnished room, where cheap furniture was lit by rich multicoloured light from the stained-glass window that now formed the apartment's outside wall. A thin old woman stepped out and stood at the head of the staircase; it wobbled slightly under her weight. She gave my robe a hostile look.

'Have you come from the landlord, lawyer?' she asked in a sharp northern accent.

I doffed my cap. 'No, madam, I represent the City council. I have come to look at the cesspit; there have been complaints.'

The old woman folded her arms. 'That pit's a disgrace. Thirty of us share it, those who live here and the others round the cloister. The vapours off it would stun a bull. I'm sorry for them living next door to the church, but what can we do? We have to go somewhere!'

'No one blames you, madam. I am sorry for your trouble. I hope we may get an order for a proper cesspit to be built, but the landlord is resisting.'

She spat fiercely. 'That pig Bealknap.' She nodded at her apartment. 'We've refused to pay him rent till he takes these great windows out and boards them up. We bake with the sun coming through them, the wretched papist things.'

She leaned on the rail, warming to her theme. 'I'm here with my son and his family, five of us in this one room, and we're charged a shilling a week! Half the floorboards fell out of one of the tenements last week – nearly killed the poor creatures living there.'

'Your conditions are clearly bad,' I agreed. I wondered whether her family was one of the thousands being forced off their land in the north to make way for sheep.

'You're a lawyer,' she said. 'Can he throw us out if we don't pay our rent?'

'He could, but I guess if you withhold your rent Bealknap will negotiate.' I smiled wryly. 'He hates losing money above all.' Speaking thus about another lawyer was professional disloyalty, but where Bealknap was concerned I did not care. The old woman nodded.

'How do I get to the cesspit?' I asked.

She pointed up the passage. 'There's a little door by where the altar was. The pit's in the cloisters. Hold your nose, though.' She paused. 'Try and help us, sir. This is a hellish place to live!'

'I'll do what I can.' I bowed and walked to the door she had indicated, which hung drunkenly from loose hinges. I felt sorry for the old woman; there was little I could do in the short term with the case going up to Chancery. But if Vervey bribed the Six Clerks' Office, that might help.

The former cloister yard had been converted too, the roofed walkway filled with more wooden partitions between the pillars to make a quadrangle of tiny ramshackle dwellings. Rags hung at the windows in place of curtains; these were hovels for the poorest of the poor. I blinked in the sunlight reflected from the white quadrangle stones where once the friars had paced.

The smallest of the little dwellings had an open door, from which a horrible stink issued. Holding my nose, I looked inside. A hole had been dug in the earth, with a plank set on bricks thrown across. It was a 'whistle and thud' cesspit, and should have been twenty feet deep so the flies could not reach the top, but from the cloud of them buzzing round the planks I guessed it was no more than ten feet deep. I held my nose as I looked down the dark, evil-smelling pit. It had not even been lined with wood, let alone the mandatory stone: no wonder it leaked. I remembered what Barak had said about his father falling down one of these pits and shuddered.

I stepped outside with relief. I must visit the house next door, the one the council owned, then get back to Chancery Lane. The morning was wearing on, the hot sun near its zenith. I paused and rubbed my sleeve across my brow, easing the uncomfortable weight of my satchel.

Then I saw them. They stood one on each side of the door to the church, so still that I had not immediately noticed them. A tall thin man with a pale face as pitted with pox marks as though the devil had scraped his claws across it, and on the other side an enormous, hulking fellow who kept small frowning eyes fixed on me as he hefted a chopping axe, the shaft cut short to make a fearsome weapon, in his big hand. Toky, and his mate Wright. I swallowed, feeling my legs begin to tremble. Other than the door to the church there was no way out of the cloister yard. I glanced along the rows of doors but all were shut, the inhabitants no doubt out at work or begging in the streets. I felt for my dagger.

Toky smiled, a broad smile that showed a perfect set of white teeth, as he lifted his own dagger. 'Didn't see us following you, did you?' he asked cheerfully in a sharp voice with a country burr. 'You've been getting careless without Master Barak at your side.' He nodded at the cesspit. 'Fancy going down there! They wouldn't find you till they cleaned it out, wouldn't notice the smell with what's down there already.' He grinned at Wright. The big man nodded briefly, never taking his gaze off me. His eyes were focused and still, like a dog stalking its prey; Toky's glittered with the bright cruel intensity of a cat's. He smiled with pleasure.