Hanken shoved open his door and led the way towards the house. Behind them, excited howling came from what seemed to be the stables, which stood at the end of an overgrown gravel lane shooting north from a curve in the nearby drive. “Someone's with the harriers,” Hanken told Lynley over his shoulder. “Probably Julian—he breeds the dogs—but we may as well check inside first. This way.”
This way took them into a courtyard, one of two, Hanken informed him. According to the DI, the imperfect rectangle in which they stood was a relatively modern addition to the older four wings of the building, which comprised the west facade of the house. Relatively modern in the history of Broughton Manor, of course, meant that the courtyard was just under three hundred years old and as such it was called the new court. The old court was mostly fifteenth century with a fourteenth-century central portion that constituted the shared boundary between the courts.
Even a cursory inspection of the courtyard was enough to reveal the decay that Julian Britton was attempting to counteract. But there were indications of occupancy intermingling with those of decrepitude: A makeshift clothesline waving incongruous pink sheets had been rigged in one corner, extending in a diagonal between two wings of the house and tied onto two paneless windows by means of their rusting iron casements. Plastic rubbish bags waited to be carted off alongside antique tools that probably hadn't been used for a century A shiny aluminium walking stick lay near an old, discarded mantel clock. Past and present met in every corner of the courtyard, as something new tried to rise from the detritus of the old.
“Hullo there. Can I help you?” It was a woman's voice, calling to them from above. They looked towards the windows, and she laughed and said, “No. Up here.”
She was on the roof, with a rubbish sack slung over her shoulder, giving her the appearance of a decidedly unseasonal and even more outsized Christmas elf in the middle of a delivery. But she was a particularly dishevelled elf: Her bare arms and legs were streaked with grime.
“Gutters,” she said cheerfully in apparent reference to her current occupation. “If you'll wait a moment, I'll be right down.”
Clouds of filth and decomposing leaves rose round her as she worked, her head turned away to keep the worst of the mess from alighting on her face.
“There. That's that,” the young woman said when she reached the gutter's end. She yanked off a pair of gardening gloves and came across the roof to an extension ladder that rested against the building, behind the line of pink sheets. She climbed down agilely and came across the courtyard. She introduced herself as Samantha McCallin.
In an environment so conducive to historical reflections, Lynley saw the young woman as she would have likely been seen in the distant past: extremely plain but hardy, of peasant stock, a perfect specimen for childbearing and labour on the land. In modern terms, she was tall and well built, with the physique of a swimmer. She wore no-nonsense clothes that were suited to her activity. Old cut-off blue jeans and boots were topped by a T-shirt. A bottle of water hung from her belt.
She'd pinned her mouse-brown hair to the top of her head in a coil, and she loosed it as she observed them frankly. It fell in a single thick plait to her waist. “I'm Julian's cousin. And you, I expect, are the police. And this visit, I imagine, is about Nicola Maiden. Am I right?” Her expression told them that she generally was.
“We'd like a chat with Julian,” Hanken told her.
“I hope you're not thinking he was involved in her death.” She unhooked the water bottle and took a slug of it. “That's impossible. He adored Nicola. He played knight to her damsel and all that nonsense. No distress was too much of a challenge for Julie. When Nicola called, he was into his armour before you could say Ivanhoe. Metaphorically speaking, naturally.” She offered them a smile. It was her only mistake. Brittle, it revealed the anxiety beneath her friendly demeanour.
“Where is he?” Lynley asked.
“Gone to the dogs. Fitting, isn't it, for the environment we're in? Come along. I'll show you the way.”
Her guidance wasn't necessary. They could have followed the noise. But the young woman's determination to monitor their meeting with Julian was an intriguing circumstance that a wise investigator would want to toy with. And that she was determined to monitor that meeting was evidenced in the long, sure stride she employed, charging past them out of the courtyard.
They followed Samantha up the overgrown lane. The branches of unpruned limes overhung it, offering an idea of what the leafy, tunnelled path to the stables had once been like.
The stables themselves had been converted to kennels for the breeding of Julian Britton's harriers. There were dogs in abundance in a number of curiously shaped runs, and all of them broke into cacophonous barking as Hanken and Lynley approached with Samantha McCallin.