“Hell, another murder. If we don’t find who did this, Lord Jameson is going to have our heads.”

“Any ideas Robert?”

“We could try Forensics.”

“Popperian Empiricism? In a 13th Century setting? We’d be burned at the stake.”

“What have we got then William?”

“Well, there’s always Aristotelian Deductive Logic.”

“That sounds good, very Conan Doyle.”

“Yeah, you’d think that, but it’s pretty much useless. It frowns on testing theories or experimenting to find data. The only new information it’ll give is based on what we already think we know.”

“Think we know?”

“No testing remember.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“So. Bloody corpse. No murder weapon. The victim is a stranger. He’s been eaten a bit by rats.”

“Think we can blame it on rats William?”

“What do you think?”

“Damn, what else do we have?”

“Inquisition?”

“What’s that like?”

“We can find someone without an alibi. A loner who lacks any real political power and torture him into a confession.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Yeah, some things will never, ever change.”