he Derbyshire weather matched DI Peter Hanken's mood: grim. While a silver sky dissolved into rain, he navigated the road between Buxton and Bakewell, wondering what it meant that a black leather jacket was missing from the evidence taken from Nine Sisters Henge. The missing rain gear had been easy to explain. The missing jacket was not. For a single killer did not need two articles of clothing to cover up the blood from a chopped-up victim.
He hadn't made the search for Terry Cole's missing leather jacket entirely unassisted. DC Mott had been with him, a flapjack in his hand. As evidence officer, Mott's presence was essential. But he did little enough to help with the search. Instead, he munched loudly and appreciatively with much smacking of lips and pronounced that he'd “never seen no black leather jacket, Guv,” throughout Hanken's inspection.
Mott's record keeping had been vindicated. There was no jacket. That message transmitted to London, Hanken set out for Bakewell and Broughton Manor. Jacket or no, there was still Julian Britton to clear off or keep on their list of suspects.
As Hanken cruised over the bridge that spanned the River Wye, he unexpectedly entered another century. Despite the rain that was continuing to fall unabated like a harbinger of grief to come, a fierce battle was going on round the manor house. On the hillside that descended to the river, five or six dozen Royalist soldiers, wearing the varied colours of the Monarch and the nobility, were flailing swords with an equal number of armoured and pot-helmeted Parliamentarians. On the meadow beneath them, more armoured soldiers were rolling cannon into position, while on a far slope a pistol-wielding division of helmeted infantry made for the south gate of the manor house with a battering ram trundling along among them.
The Cavaliers and the Roundheads were re-fighting a battle of the Civil War, Hanken concluded. Julian Britton was engaged in yet another means of raising money for the restoration of his home.
A seventeenth-century milkmaid standing beneath a Burberry umbrella waved Hanken to a makeshift car park a short distance from the house. There, various other players in the reenactment drama were milling about in the guise of Royals, peasants, farmers, noblemen, surgeons, and musketeers. Eating from a soup tin in the door of a caravan, ill-fated King Charles—a bloody bandage round his head—chatted up a wench who was carrying a basket of bread getting soaked by the rain. Not far away, a black-garbed Oliver Cromwell struggled out of his armour, attempting the feat without untying the lacing. Dogs and children dashed in and out of the crowd, while a snack stall did a thriving business in whatever they could serve that was hot and steaming.
Hanken parked and asked where the Brittons were hiding. He was directed to a viewing area within the third of the manor's ruined gardens. There, on the southwest side of the house, a stalwart crowd huddled on makeshift stands and deck chairs to watch the unfolding reenactment from beneath a motley mushrooming of umbrellas.
To one side of the viewers, a lone man sat on a tripod stool of the type used at the turn of the century by artists or hunters on safari. He wore an antique tweed suit and an old pith helmet, and he sheltered himself from the rain with a striped umbrella. He watched the action with a collapsible telescope. A walking stick lay by his feet. Jeremy Britton, Hanken thought, dressed as always in his forebears’ clothing.
Hanken approached him. “Mr. Britton? You won't remember me. DI Peter Hanken. Buxton CID.”
Britton half turned on the stool. He'd aged greatly, Hanken thought, since their sole encounter at the Buxton police station five years in the past. Britton had been drunk at the time. His car had been broken into on the High Street while he was “taking the waters”—undoubtedly a euphemism for his imbibing something considerably stronger than the town's mineral water—and he was demanding action, satisfaction, and immediate vengeance upon the ill-dressed and worse-bred hooligans who'd violated him so egregiously.
Looking at Jeremy Britton now, Hanken could see the results of a lifetime spent in drink. Liver damage showed in the colour and texture of Britton's skin and in the cooked-egg-yolk look of his eyes. Hanken noted the Thermos on the far side of the camp stool on which Britton was sitting. He doubted it contained either coffee or tea.
“I'm looking for Julian,” Hanken said. “Is he taking part in the battle, Mr. Britton?”
“Julie?” Britton squinted through the rain. “Don't know where he's gone off to. Not part of this though.” He waved at the drama below. The battering ram was mired in the mud and the Cavaliers were taking advantage of this blip on the screen of the Roundheads’ plans. Swords drawn, a crush of them were swarming down the slope from the house to fend off the Parliamentary forces. “Julie never did like a good dust-up like this,” Britton said, slipping slightly with dust. He'd added an h. “Can't think why he agrees to let the grounds be used this way. But it's great fun, what?”
“Everyone seems to be fully involved,” Hanken agreed. “Are you a history buff, sir?”