Beth stood in front of the desk and explained to the librarian why she was there. She got a raised eyebrow and an instruction to give the librarian a few minutes until she found the necessary books.

The morning had gone well so far. O’Dowd was back to her irascible best and even Thompson had seemed focussed.

A check of the registry for births, deaths and marriages had identified the Dylan mentioned on the male victim’s arm. Dylan Langley had died six weeks before his third birthday. He was survived by his mother Melanie, and father Nick, who had been reported missing yesterday morning when he hadn’t come home on Monday night. O’Dowd had gone to deliver the death knock with an FLO. Before the DI left, she’d requisitioned a spare pair of hands to go through the missing persons’ reports to look at possible identities for the two women. Anything that could narrow the search would give them a much-needed advantage.

The librarian returned with a stack of books, some she’d retrieved from the Jackson Library. She told Beth those books were rare and could not be removed from the premises, but the others could be withdrawn.

Beth found a table and started to scan through the first of the books. It was the tome she’d found online: Benson’s Guide to North West Country Houses. As interesting as she found it, Beth was keenly aware time wasn’t on her side, so she flicked her eyes across the descriptions looking for words like ‘derelict’ or ‘abandoned’.

She wrote the names of the houses which met those criteria on a notepad, but after completing the book, had only a few stately homes on her list. Beth wasn’t sure if this was a good or a bad thing. It would narrow down their search criteria, which was good, but it also meant that perhaps there were other places that hadn’t made it into the book.

Plus, the book itself was old news, it was published more than twenty years ago, which meant there were two decades for houses to have fallen derelict to lost fortunes or the ravages of fire since then.

There were many other possibilities Beth was sure she was missing, but at the same time, the book was comprehensive and while some of the stately homes, manor houses and castles were familiar to her, the majority were ones she’d never heard of.

She bit down on a yawn and picked up the book she’d requested on Highstead Castle. It wasn’t for lending, so she made copious notes about the castle’s history and turned her attention back to the first book she’d consulted.

Beth didn’t want to waste too much precious time on her research, so she used Google Maps to identify the locations of the names she’d discovered, and mapped out three possibilities which, like Highstead Castle and Arthuret Hall, were in the north-eastern part of Cumbria. Next she picked up a couple of books that listed Scottish country houses and searched for ones in the eastern areas of Dumfries and Galloway. She knew it was a long shot and may well prove to be time wasted, but she was trying to cover every eventuality she could think of.

What surprised her most was the number of grand houses in the county. She loved Cumbria and had thought she had a good handle on the area and its people, but the snippets of history she’d absorbed during her search had left her wanting to know more.

The houses dated back to Georgian, Jacobean, Tudor and Victorian times, although most of them had been rebuilt at some point in their history. Their owners included philanthropists, slave traders and a dozen other professions as the march of time deposed feudal landowners in favour of more peaceful owners.

Many of the houses, especially in the northern parts of the region, had been sacked by the reiving Scots. Beth knew from long-ago history lessons that, for a number of years in the seventeenth century, Carlisle Castle had been in Scottish hands.

As instructed by O’Dowd, she passed the locations and names of all the possible sites she’d found to Control so they could send officers to search them for bodies. Beth also passed on the details of the ones she’d found in Northumberland and Dumfries and Galloway, but she didn’t expect they’d receive the same priority as the ones in Cumbria.

She gathered up her notes and filed them all into the laptop bag she used as a briefcase. A snap decision made her trot down the stairs from the library and go to the cookie stall. With several cookies in a bag, she felt prepared to face the remainder of the day, comfortable in the knowledge there would be an energising sugar boost at hand.

While she drove back down the M6 towards Penrith and Carleton Hall, Beth ran a new series of questions through her head. Most of them had her finding more questions than answers, but at least they would open up some other lines of enquiry.