It was 5.30 p.m. on a weekday evening in early November. The weather was dry with a low cloud ceiling of sombre and oppressive cumulus. The rush hour traffic was heavy on the main road that lay between two major English cities. Although it was not yet completely dark, the road was a ribbon of headlights.
A double-decker bus pulled in at a bus stop on the main road. Two twenty-something barmaids, Jessica Bryce and Georgina Lovell (not their real names), got off the bus and headed towards the nearby Half Moon Inn, that stood back from the road behind a fenced-off forecourt of low-maintenance shrubs.
The inn and its original ranges of stables and outbuildings had undergone a series of transformations during its two-hundred-year history. For the first half of its life it had been a wayside h
