The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

Now, Doyle was told about the Hound by his friend Fletcher Robinson — who, despite being a Devonian, was said to have come across the story in a Welsh guidebook. So we assume that Doyle was making inquiries about it in the area. And the Chancerys, when they learned that the great man was staying in the vicinity, well, you can imagine they just had to have him as their house guest.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Amber came into the light. ‘I think this is conjecture. Ben’s been all over the place, trying to find evidence—’

‘Mrs Foley…’ Beth Pollen came forward, her cape folded over her arm, looking reassuringly nice and motherly, but you never really knew with these people. ‘The main reason your husband didn’t find out about this was simply because nobody wanted him to. The only remaining family in this area related to the Chancerys are the Dacres, who certainly don’t like to talk about it.’

‘I don’t know them.’

‘It wouldn’t help you if you did. There’s only one left — Sebastian Dacre, and he’s a difficult man. Ironically, the one place where your husband might have laid hands on useful documentation was in the very extensive records of The Baker Street League in London. Which is where I first happened upon them. Does this begin to make a certain kind of sense?’

Amber said, ‘And you have copies of this… documentation?’

‘Mysteriously — or perhaps not so mysteriously — when I applied to the committee to draw out the relevant papers to allow me to make some photocopies, they seemed to have… disappeared. I explained all this to your husband earlier.’

‘You’re saying this is something to do with Dr Kennedy?’

‘Dr Kennedy now disputes that the material ever existed, and Dr Kennedy is now in virtual control of The League. Furthermore, he and most of the present committee very much deplore the White Company and all it stands for. They’d rather forget Doyle’s obsession with spiritualism. And I’m not sure they’d go out of their way to preserve an account handwritten by a participant in the Stanner seances for a London magazine, Cox’s Quarterly — which, it appears, paid for it in full but never, in fact, published it. Was, in fact, persuaded — we think — not to publish.’

‘And you’re saying this article proved conclusively that Conan Doyle based his novel on the legend of Thomas Vaughan and the Hound of Hergest?’ Amber’s hands were pushing down the bulges in her apron again. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

‘What I read certainly suggested that, after his evening here, Doyle was fully acquainted with the Vaughan story. We’ve since established that the man who wrote it, who was quite elderly at the time, died within a year of submitting it, still waiting for his piece to appear. And the magazine itself went to the wall a short time later. We don’t know how or when the article fell into the hands of The Baker Street League, but I don’t suppose that’s important now.’

Interesting. Jane imagined Ben and Antony in London, doorstepping Neil Kennedy, for the programme: So, tell us Dr Kennedy, why did you suppress documentary evidence that Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel was based not in Devon but on the Welsh Border?

She waited for Amber to ask the other crucial question — what happened here? But Amber didn’t. Amber really didn’t want to know.

Sod that.

‘Excuse me.’ Jane stood up. ‘You said the writer of this article was a participant. Like, participant in what? What did they actually do here, in this room?’

There was a silence.

She never got an answer. In the midst of the hush, she heard chair legs scraping the flags in Clancy’s corner of the kitchen, as Beth Pollen looked at Hardy and Matthew adjusted his glasses and said, ‘Should I attempt to —?’

By then Clancy was on her feet.

‘Mum!’

Matthew was frozen into silence. Natalie had arrived at the bottom of the kitchen steps, dark brown hair tumbled over one eye, the sleeves of her black woollen dress pushed up over the elbows. Both men looking at her, because that was what men did.

‘Amber…’ The calmness in Nat’s voice was like this really thin membrane over panic. ‘Do we have a first-aid kit?’

The halogen lights were showing up, around her wrists, these wild, wet swatches of what could only be — Jesus Christ — fresh blood.

Amber’s whole body jerked. ‘Where’s Ben?’

Jane sprang up and ran for the steps.

At the bottom of the car park, there was a small wrought-iron gate to an old footpath that Ben had cleared. The path went down through the grounds, curving through tangled woodland, almost to the edge of the bypass, facing Stanner Rocks. This was where Ben went jogging most mornings; you could go along the side of the main road and then join up with the main drive back to the hotel.

Now the gate was open. Footprints in the snow.

Jane went through hesitantly, carrying the rubber-covered torch that Amber had given her; there was no great need for it: the moon was out and the ground was bright with virgin snow.

‘Careful,’ Amber said, the white canvas first-aid bag over her shoulder. ‘For God’s sake. We don’t know —’

‘It’s all right.’ Ben’s voice from some yards away — Ben’s voice like Jane had never heard it before, kind of thin and stringy. ‘It’s all right, Amber. All right, now.’

Just the other side of the gate was a small clearing. Jane stayed on the edge of it and shone the torch towards Ben’s voice. The beam unrolled a white carpet slicked by the marks of skidding footwear. No sign of the shooters, no voices other than the Foleys’.

‘Stay there, Jane.’ Amber put down the first-aid bag and said to Ben, ‘What have you done?’

It was like she’d asked him to stir the soup and he’d let it boil over. It was always easy to underestimate Amber: she worried about intangibles, but only because she was a practical person, controlled. She’d sent Natalie to the ladies’ loo to get cleaned up and then stand by to call an ambulance.

‘I’m sorry.’ Ben let out a long, hollow breath that was more than a half-sob. ‘I’m really sorry about this.’

At the same time she saw Ben, Jane heard these liquid snuffling noises, knowing as he turned into the torchlight that he was not making them. Behind him was a fence post with no fence, only shorn-off twists of barbed wire nailed to it. And a hump on the ground.

Ben turned fully towards them, rising, and Jane gasped. His Edwardian jacket hung open, exposing his once-white shirt, emblazoned now with a blotch like a red rose.

‘Lost it,’ Ben said. ‘I lost it.’ And then he giggled. He was trembling hard. He stumbled. ‘Oh Jesus.’

‘Hold the torch a bit steadier, can you, Jane?’ Amber looked at Ben. It was like he’d been fighting a duel and staggered back, rapiered through the heart.

‘No, really, I’m all right. Don’t bother about me. I’m really all right. We should see to—’

He gestured vaguely at the hump on the ground. Jane had been afraid to look at the hump. Hoping it was a dead tree. Or something. Something that didn’t snuffle.

‘I’m sorry about this,’ Ben said again.

The man was lying with his shoulders propped against the fence post. He was wearing camouflage trousers, an army jacket. He was holding his head back against the post. You couldn’t see much of his face through all the blood, but his mouth was hanging open, and there was blood in there, too, and all around his lips and nose, bubbling through a film of dirt and snot. Jane recoiled, swallowing bile. It was like he’d been bobbing for apples in a barrel of blood.

‘Called me a nancy boy, you see.’ Ben moved away back, so that Amber could undo the first-aid bag. ‘Nat tried to stop the bleeding. Not very successfully, I’m afraid.’

‘He needs to go to a hospital.’ Amber’s voice was crisp as the snow. ‘You’ve broken his nose, for a