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‘Stourton Hall?’ Cam rocked back in his seat at her mention of one of the finest examples of Jacobean architecture in the region. It wasn’t his particular speciality, his personal and research interest being ecclesiastical buildings, but he knew Barnie would chew his own arm off at the chance to have a nose around the Hall. Miss Travers – Hope – had travelled at least a couple of hours to see him that morning. Well, to see someone from the department, he mentally corrected himself because she hadn’t come to visit him specifically. The Hall was part of a massive country estate, one of the largest in the area still in private hands. He’d grown up on a very different kind of estate in a little two-up, two-down council house on the outskirts of York. Unless Hope was an employee, she might well be an aristocrat of some description. ‘You live at Stourton Hall?’
Hope laughed. ‘Not exactly. My family decamped from there when it was refurbished, a few years before I was born. We live in the estate farmhouse and the Hall is a hotel and spa. My uncle thought Stourton Hall sounded a bit stuffy and old-fashioned, so he rebranded when we opened to the public.’
‘Juniper Meadows,’ Cam said, connecting the dots. He had to agree that it sounded more inviting. Making a mental note to do a bit of research later, he turned the conversation back to his original question. ‘You mentioned refurbishments, is that how you found the badge?’
Hope set the badge and cloth down on his desk and sat back in her chair. ‘Yes. Well, not exactly. I didn’t find it at the Hall.’ She laughed. ‘Technically, I didn’t find it at all, my contractors did. I’m having a house built, you see.’
Not sure he did see, Cam made a non-committal sound and gestured for her to continue.
‘It’s a bit crowded at the farm and I wanted my own little place. There’s a spot I love on the estate with an old oak tree and the chapel ruins. It’s out of the way of everything else and I thought it would be the perfect site.’
‘Chapel?’ Cam sat up at that, his interested piqued.
Hope shrugged. ‘Well, that’s what I’ve been told it was, it’s now just a few jumbled stones that are mostly overgrown.’ She sighed. ‘The plot I chose for the house was well away from both the oak tree and the ruins, but not far enough away, apparently.’
Cam held his hand up, thoroughly confused now. ‘You found the badge at the chapel ruins?’
Hope shook her head. ‘No. I found it at the other ruins, or perhaps it’s the same ruins, how should I know? The digger hit something within the first couple of scoops, and the crew stopped work immediately.’
At the mention of other ruins, Cam felt a familiar sense of excitement building inside him. ‘I don’t suppose you took any photographs of the site?’
‘Oh, yes, sorry, that’s the first thing I should’ve shown you!’ Looking a touch embarrassed, Hope leaned forward in the chair and pulled her phone out from the back pocket of her jeans. ‘Sorry, this whole thing has completely thrown me for a loop. Declan said if we were lucky, it might just be a dumping ground for a few spare stones left over from when the chapel was built.’
‘It could be,’ Cam said in the most neutral tone he could manage. On the one hand, it would be a relief to Hope if it was just a handful of stray stones so she could get on with her house-building project. On the other hand… ‘I can’t promise I’ll be able to tell anything just from the pictures,’ he warned her.
‘No, of course not, but you’ll surely have a better idea than I do of what we might be dealing with.’ She passed him the handset with a rueful grin. ‘It just looks like a jumble of old rubbish to me, but perhaps that’s wishful thinking on my part.’
The second he laid eyes on the first image, he knew her wish wasn’t going to come true. He remained silent, though, taking his time to study each of the dozen images, making sure he wasn’t letting his own desire for it to be something of interest unduly influence his opinion. ‘And whereabouts did you find the badge?’
Hope reached forward and scrolled back through the images to one he hadn’t seen before. It showed the layout of the construction site before the ground had been disturbed. She tapped a finger on a large yellow skip sitting on the far side of the site. ‘I don’t know exactly. One of the guys spotted it sticking out of the top of the discarded soil.’ She gave him an apologetic glance. ‘He’d already climbed in and fished it out before I knew anything about it, so I don’t have a photo of it in situ.’
Cam gave her a reassuring smile. ‘It’s not your fault, and if it was sitting in the soil pile, then it would be impossible to tell where it had come from.’ He pressed the home button on the phone to close the photo app, an automatic action on his part. He was about to hand it back to her when he noticed the home screen image. It was Hope and a man he guessed to be around the same age. They were grinning into the camera, each clutching an enormous ice cream, their eyes shielded behind sunglasses. The dark-haired man had an arm slung casually around her shoulders. He passed the phone back to her, trying to ignore a pang of regret. Of course someone this pretty was going to have a boyfriend.
‘So, what’s the verdict?’ she asked, having tucked her phone away. When he remained silent, the corners of her mouth slipped down and he hated that he was the one who had chased away that pretty, sunny smile. ‘I’m not going to be able to go ahead, am I?’
Cam shook his head. ‘Someone will need to come out to site and have a proper look, but it’s definitely going to need some further investigation.’ He reached into his desk drawer and retrieved the battered organiser he kept all his contacts in. He pulled out a slightly dog-eared card and slid it across the desk to her. ‘This is the number of the county archaeologist. He’ll be able to advise you further and put you in touch with someone who can carry out a site survey. They’ll also need to do a desk survey and search through any archival records your family might have related to the estate. Do you know if you have anything like that?’
Hope looked nonplussed for a moment. ‘Well, I’m sure we do, but I’ll have to ask my uncle where they are.’ She stared at the card on his desk for a long moment, then back up at him. ‘Dr Ferguson… Cam, I, umm, I rather thought that you might be able to take a look for me.’ She glanced back over her shoulder towards his open office door. ‘Mrs Cotteridge suggested as much, but obviously I got the wrong end of the stick.’ She stood, ignoring the business card as she reached for the badge that was still resting on the cleaning cloth.
She looked so disappointed, and honestly, Cam couldn’t blame her. It would likely take the county archaeologist weeks to get around to looking at her case. Not for want of effort, but because, like so many other public sector resources, his department had been cut to the bone. As her fingers touched the badge, Cam found himself placing his hand atop hers, holding it in place. When her eyes met his, there was the slightest flare of her pupils, the black widening to swallow the inner edge of the vibrant blue of her irises.
‘I have some time this weekend,’ he found himself saying, ignoring the weight of all those unwritten end-of-term reports. ‘I can at least take a look and try to determine if there really is a need for further investigation.’
4
‘She definitely said to turn left at the previous junction,’ Barnie said as he turned in his seat to look back the way they’d just come.
The ‘she’ in question was the sat nav and this wasn’t the first time it’d sent them in the wrong direction. The overgrown hedgerows loomed closer to the car and Cam tapped the brake, easing their already slow speed down to below thirty. ‘Keep your eyes peeled for somewhere we can turn around,’ he muttered. Beyond the hedgerows, it was agricultural land as far as the eye could see. If they encountered a tractor around one of these blind bends, they were done for.
Beside him, Barnie was fiddling with his phone. ‘No signal, of course,’ his friend sighed as he held the phone up towards the window as though he could coax a bar or two to appear. ‘Who lives where there’s no 4G, anyway?’
‘No one, by the looks of it,’ Cam observed dryly as he surveyed the open fields around them before turning his attention back to the road. They rounded the corner and were almost plunged into darkness as hedgerows gave way to an avenue of tall trees. The branches on either side curled over the road, the canopy all but blocking out the sun. Cam shoved his sunglasses up on his head, blinking to adjust his eyes to the abrupt change in the light. The trees stretched on and on, one of those stray patches of ancient woodland that had somehow survived when everything else around had been cleared for farmland. Cam glanced down at the sat nav and groaned. The screen was blank apart from two words: NO SIGNAL. There wasn’t much he could do about that now. They’d have to hope the tree cover cleared and they could pick up a signal again. As he drove through the dappled light, Cam gave up looking for a turning spot and just focused on the road ahead. It had to lead somewhere, eventually.
After what seemed like forever, but was probably less than a couple of miles, the wooded area ended as abruptly as it started, and Barnie raised a hand to point in front of him. ‘A spire! Over there on the left. Civilisation!’ He made it sound as though they’d been navigating through the heart of the Amazon rather than meandering along a country road for a few miles.
‘Looks like I won’t have to eat you to survive,’ Cam said with a wry laugh.
‘Not if that pub does some decent grub,’ Barnie replied with a grin, pointing ahead of them again.
