She looked back at the building. In spite of his words, she was seeing it through the lens of her camera, weighing each area of composition. How it was situated on its triangle of land, how it was placed in the village, how it was designed. She did it as a second-nature response, like breathing.

“No,” she said at last, although she sounded reluctant. “No. It’s not the point. I suppose.”

She drove through a gate at the inn’s west end and stopped in the car park behind it. Like all the other structures in the village, the building was a combination of the county’s tan limestone and millstone grit. Even from behind, aside from white woodwork and green window boxes that were filled with a motley array of winter pansies, the inn bore no truly distinguishing features and no adornments. Its most significant distinction seemed to be an ominous portion of concaved slate roof that St. James earnestly hoped wasn’t over their room.

“Well,” Deborah said again with some resignation.

St. James leaned towards her, turned her to face him, and kissed her. “Did I mention I’ve been wanting to see Lancashire for years?”

She smiled at that. “In your dreams,” she replied and got out of the car.

He opened the door, feeling the cold, damp air lap against him like water, smelling woodsmoke and the peaty odours of wet earth and decomposing leaves. He lifted out his braced bad leg and thumped it to the cobbles. There was no snow on the ground, but frost rimed the lawn of what would otherwise be a seasonal beer garden. It was abandoned now, but he could imagine it fi lled with summertime tourists who came to walk on the moors, to climb the hills, and to fish in the river that he could hear but not see, coursing noisily some thirty yards away. A path led towards it — he could see this as well since its frosty fl agstones reflected the lights at the rear of the inn — and although the inn’s property clearly did not include the river, a boundary wall had an access gate built into it. The gate was open and as he watched, a young girl hurried through it, stuffing a white plastic bag into the over-size anorak she was wearing. This was neon orange, and, despite the girl’s considerable height, it hung down to her knees and drew attention to her legs which were encased in enormous, muddy green Wellingtons.