But she could be better employed elsewhere. Besides, he was going to a place designed for men and run by men; they might just feel it easier to be completely open with him if he didn’t have a sparky young woman at his side. Downton Hall, the place where he now presumed John Bickerstaffe had spent his last troubled nights on this earth, was beautifully set at the head of a gently sloping valley, in the foothills of the northern Pennines. Pendle Hill, with its abrupt Western profile and its associations with the Lancashire witches, was a few miles to the south of it, its greater bulk cutting off the mansion from the last of the sizeable Lancashire industrial towns, Burnley, Preston and his own base, Brunton. The Hall was a solid stone building, built towards the end of the nineteenth century, when King Cotton ruled the back-to-back streets of brick houses in the Lancashire towns and his courtiers built themselves places like this for weekends and holidays.
