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ride always tended to cool his overheated moods. He remembered riding here on the day he learned of the murders, when he had first met Baldwin, ten years ago, during the famine. That had been a terrible time. The only good thing had been the discovery of a new friend.
    Sir Baldwin de Furnshill, his best and longest friend – and yet he too was lost to Simon.
    It was shocking that Baldwin could so quickly have become almost foreign to him. In the last ten years, Simon had grown to depend utterly upon the tall, greying knight. Baldwin was dedicated to justice, to the rational explanations that always lay at the heart of any mystery; he shone as bright as a beacon in Simon’s eyes. He was loyal, intelligent, and so widely travelled that Simon could only marvel at his tales of journeying from here to the Holy Land, and his accounts of the kingdoms and duchies that lay between.
    But when Simon’s friend had been asked to drop his sword when Edith’s life was in peril, he had refused. And Simon could never forget or forgive that.
    The irony was that, as soon as Simon had returned his daughter to her new family, to the man whom she loved and his parents, there had been a new demand. Her father-in-law, Charles, had told her that if she wished to remain with their son Peter, she must agree never to speak with Simon again.
    Charles had been blunt and to the point. The association with Simon had put both their children at risk, and Charles was not prepared to run that risk again. He had told Edith that she must choose: her husband or her father. And she had chosen.
    There was no thunderclap of ill omen to herald the event, no sudden deluge, no eclipse – but to Simon, it felt as though his world was ending. His family was all to him. His daughter had been the delight of his life, the physical embodiment of his love for his wife Meg. To accept that she had fallen in love with a man and would leave his family was hard enough; to find that she was gone from him for ever was a hideous disaster.
    And to learn this just as he had discovered that he could not trust his old friend and companion, Sir Baldwin de Furnshill, the most compassionate man he had ever known, made the loss doubly painful.
    Simon stopped his horse and sat staring at the moors ahead. There was an implacable permanence to those rolling hills. Asteadiness that taunted him now. Once he had been a bailiff on the moors, and his life had been full and purposeful, serving the Abbot of Tavistock. That had been only a couple of years ago. And now all was lost: the abbot was dead, and with him Simon had lost his position, then his friend and his daughter.
    Turning his rounsey’s head, he set off back homewards again, retracing his path. He didn’t look at the moors again.
    It felt as though they were mocking his weakness.

Bishop’s Palace, Exeter
    The bishop was unamused. ‘Fetch me the dean,’ he snapped, as he left the cloisters and walked up the path to his palace, his robes ungainly in the cold morning breeze.
    ‘My lord bishop?’ Dean Alfred entered with an enquiring expression fitted to his face. A mild-mannered man in his late sixties, with a nature better suited to studying than vigorous effort, the bishop knew he was nevertheless still possessed of a keen intellect, which he generally concealed behind an affable manner.
    ‘Dean, have you heard about the rector?’
    The dean was experienced in the ways of the cathedral and knew that divulging too much when asked a question of this sort could result in embarrassment all round. ‘The … ah … rector?’ he repeated, assuming his usual air of bumbling diffidence.
    The bishop peered at his dean. His poor sight was a sore irritation at times like these when he wanted to see the dean’s expression more clearly.
    Eyes narrowed, he growled: ‘Don’t try to fob me off, Alfred. We know each other too well for that. Now tell me the truth:
have you heard about the rector
?’
    Seeing the look on his bishop’s face,