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I met his gaze. "If I wanted Robin of Locksley free, my lord, I would not have spent three years chasing her through that forest."

Fitzwalter smiled. "An excellent point."

His eyes stayed exactly as cold as they had been before he made it. He ordered the patrols doubled along the western edge of Sherwood. I agreed to it immediately and with enthusiasm, because the western edge is five miles of open beech wood where nobody had ever hidden anything and Robin's camp sats northeast of it. I would’ve offered to triple them.

Then I went down to the cells and had Aldous the cooper released. I did it in writing, under my seal, with the reason given as insufficiency of evidence against the holder of goods lawfully issued. The gaoler read the order twice and asked whether I wanted it entered in the daybook.

"Enter it," I said. "Enter it in a good clear hand."

The royal archives were beneath the east tower, overseen by a small, humorless man named Peverel. In the eleven years I'd known him, I couldn't recall a single occasion when he'd been happy to see me.

"Those records are sealed, Sheriff."

"I'm aware."

"By order of Lord Edmund Fitzwalter, under the authority of the estate confiscation. I can't simply hand them over."

"I'm not asking you to." I stepped closer to his desk. "I'll open them myself. You can record that the Sheriff of Nottingham examined the Locksley estate records under the King's authority, despite your objections. That way, if anyone asks, you've done your duty."

I picked up the oil lamp from his desk.

"And we both know that protects you, Peverel."

He considered that for a moment before reluctantly fetching the keys. The Locksley records filled four boxes. I spent the better part of the day going through them, reading everything from property inventories to correspondence seized after William of Locksley's arrest.

By the time the lamp needed more oil, I'd uncovered three things.

The first was evidence supporting what Robin's father had discovered.

Among the papers taken from his study was a ledger documenting taxes collected from four northern shires. William had copied the figures directly from the Crown's records. Eleven thousand marks had been collected, but the military garrisons responsible for protecting those regions had received considerably less.

He'd listed the amount collected, the amount delivered, and the difference between them.

At the bottom of the page, he'd calculated exactly how much money was missing.

Seven thousand one hundred and forty marks.

Every figure on the page matched the half letter in the lining of my coat. Fitzwalter had seized the evidence of his own theft six years ago, locked it in a Crown archive, and never read it, because it reads like a bookkeeping exercise and he had been searching for a letter.

The second thing was an inventory, and the second thing frightened me more.

It was a list of items removed from the chapel at Locksley in the week after the execution, two pages of plate and vestments and candlesticks. At the foot of it, in a different hand, somebody had noted that the chapel floor had been taken up and relaid, and that the strongbox set beneath the altar stone had been found empty.

Somebody had known six years ago that there was a strongbox under that altar. Somebody had known what was supposed to be in it. And they’d opened it and found nothing, which meant William of Locksley had emptied it before they came for him, and that was why Edmund Fitzwalter was still tearing up that chapel floor six years later, because a man who finds nothing in a hiding place he knew about will spend the rest of his life certain he is looking in the wrong room.

The third thing was a name.

The confiscation had been overseen for the Crown by a royal secretary, and he’d signed the bottom of the inventory, the seizure schedule, and the sealing order in the same cramped careful hand. Osbert Crane.

I’d never heard of him.

I went back up to my office with the name and spent the rest of the afternoon finding out why.

Osbert Crane had served nineteen years as a secretary of the exchequer, which is to say he was one of the men through whose hands the northern levy warrants would have passed on their way to being countersigned. He oversaw the Locksley confiscation in October of the sixth year, and his hand is on every page of it.

Eleven weeks later, according to the rolls, he retired.

Men of that rank didn’t retire at forty-one. They died in office, or they were promoted. Or they were disgraced in writing so the disgrace could be pointed at later. Osbert Crane simply stopped, with no pension recorded, no successor appointed for seven months, and no further mention of him in any book in that castle.