I looked up and recoiled instantly; a dark red fleshy lump sat in the centre of the altar, blood seeping from it to form an ugly stain on the white cloth.

"Oh, God," I breathed, for I knew what I was looking at. Gingerly I prised Ned's lower jaw open to reveal the stump of his tongue. The movement unleashed a fresh flow of blood down his chin and I jumped back instinctively, though I knew he could not possibly be alive.

"This happened very recently," I observed, turning to the rector. He nodded, passing his hands over his face.

"Ned came every day at around four to make the chapel ready for Evensong at five," he said, his voice still barely audible. "That is the Bible clerk's principal duty. Anyone would have known to find him here. The chapel is not kept locked. They must have hidden and waited for him. Poor boy." He shook his head. "But you see what they have done to him, Bruno?" He looked up at me expectantly.

"Foxe again?"

He gave a brief nod. "I believe it is meant to be Romanus. His martyrdom comes in Book One of Foxe, just after the story of Saint Alban that I recounted in chapel yesterday. Romanus's torturers mutilated him to stop him singing hymns, but when they cut wounds in his face, he thanked them for opening many more mouths with which to praise God."

"They always had a ready wit, these saints," I said grimly.

"So they cut out his tongue. Eventually they strangled him." Underhill made a strange noise like a hiccup, and clamped a hand over his mouth.

I loosened the cloth of Ned's shirt that had bunched up around his neck; sure enough, his pale flesh was marked with dark bruises where fingers had gripped his throat.

"They cut out his tongue to stop him talking," I mused, half to myself. Only a few hours earlier, Ned had told me what he had seen on Saturday evening. Had he died for that? I cast my mind back to our encounter after dinner on the way out of the great hall. Who could have overheard our conversation? Lawrence Weston? But the passageway had been thronged with students and Fellows sheltering from the rain; any one of them might have seen me handing Ned the shilling he never even got to spend. The idea that I might unwittingly have called down this vengeance on the poor boy seized me with horror for a moment, but my thoughts were interrupted by an impatient cough.

"Now that Doctor Bruno has been good enough to give us his expert verdict," Slythurst said, his voice chilly with disdain, "perhaps I should alert the constables, Rector? Whoever did this cannot have got far in so short a time-if they put out the hue and cry now-"

"He is most likely still here in the college," I said, turning to the rector. "If he is, he will barely have had time to wash the blood from his hands-you must gather the whole community in the great hall at once. Someone must have seen something."

The rector nodded and turned to Slythurst. "Walter-go down and call all the students and Fellows together as Doctor Bruno suggests," he instructed. "Make sure everyone is present and comes just as he is-knock on every door, drag men from their rooms if you have to."

Slythurst gave me one of his furious glares, but turned on his heel and left the chapel.

"What did you do after you found the body?" I asked.

"I… I cried out for help… I could not think clearly," he stammered. "Richard was in the library and came running across. Then I stayed with the body and he went to find Walter."

"You were in the library all the time?" I asked, turning to Godwyn, who was still standing by the door in a state of some agitation.

"Well, yes," he said, somewhat defensively, "I was working there all afternoon."

I stared at him in disbelief. "And you heard nothing? While a boy was murdered just across the landing?"

"The doors of the library and the chapel are both solid oak, Doctor Bruno," Godwyn said, his voice rising in protest. "I heard footsteps on the stairs earlier but I did not think that unusual. But I didn't hear a voice until Rector Underhill opened the chapel door and called out."

I looked back at the body.

"I suppose if someone lay in wait and surprised him, they could have strangled him before he had much of a chance to fight back or cry out." The thought offered a degree of comfort, but still I regarded Godwyn with suspicion. Did he know Ned had seen him meeting Jenkes outside the Divinity School?

"Then he would have been dead before all this…?" The rector gestured to the boy's mutilated face.

"Let us hope so," I muttered, rising to my feet.

"But Ned," Godwyn said, looking down at the battered corpse, his brow crumpled as if the scene somehow did not make sense to him. "Why Ned?" He shook his head as if that might rid him of his confusion. I suddenly recalled something that Ned had told me in our fateful conversation earlier.

"Did Ned also undertake duties in the library as well as the chapel?" I asked.

Godwyn turned and looked at me sharply.

"Sometimes he helped me out with small tasks," he said, his eyes guarded. "Matters of tidying and upkeep, generally-he did not handle the books. Why do you ask?"

"Master Godwyn," I said, "someone was in the library on Saturday evening, while most of the college was out at the disputation, the evening James Coverdale was murdered. Ned heard them, but he didn't know who it was."

Godwyn bit the knuckle of his thumb and regarded me anxiously.

"Well, as I have told you, the Fellows all have their own keys. I suppose it is possible that someone came back early, but I have no idea. Or else…" He shot a furtive glance at the rector and allowed his sentence to trail away. I recalled what he had told me about Sophia using her father's key to access the library. Ned said he had heard a man's voice raised in anger, but who was that man speaking to? Godwyn's composure was clearly affected; I could not help wondering if Ned, in the course of his library duties, might have stumbled across Godwyn's cache of illegal Catholic books.

"And you?" I asked, looking him directly in the eye. "You did not see anyone when you returned early?"

"I?" Godwyn looked away, his large drooping eyes assuming a hurt expression. "I was at the disputation, Doctor Bruno." He shifted uncomfortably and folded his arms across his chest.

"But you left early to meet someone, I understand."

The rector looked up, mild surprise displacing the expression of weary despair on his face for a moment. Godwyn coloured violently and did not try to maintain his lie.

"It's true-I slipped out at the beginning on a matter of personal business," he added, his voice growing strained. "Nothing to do with the college. But I did not return until just before six, when I found the library locked and empty, just as I had left it. That is the truth, before God, I swear it."

I looked at Godwyn's hands as he twisted them, folding and unfolding his fingers. Broad hands, stained at the fingertips with ink, though not, as far as I could see, with blood. The rector looked from me to Godwyn as if he didn't know what to believe anymore.

"Wait-what is that?" A heap of something dark had caught my eye by the foot of the altar. I bent to examine it; on closer inspection it appeared to be a pile of folded black cloth. Lifting it gingerly by one corner between my finger and thumb, I saw that it was a scholar's gown, frayed in the sleeves and sticky with fresh blood.

"This trick again," I said, holding the gown up to show the rector. "This must be Ned's gown. The killer puts his victims' gowns on over his own clothes so that he can walk away without any noticeable trace of blood on him."

The door creaked open and the three of us jumped, made skittish by our proximity to murder. Slythurst's rodent face appeared in the gap.

"The college is assembled in the hall, Rector, whenever you are ready, though I'm afraid not everyone is accounted for." He glanced at me. "I cannot find William Bernard. Gabriel Norris and Thomas Allen do not appear to be in their room either. And John Florio has not been seen since this afternoon."