Free The Prayer of the Night Shepherd by Phil Rickman

day?’
    Amber shrugged. ‘There are no Vaughans left now. Anyway, Conan Doyle is supposed to have been related to either the Baskervilles or the Vaughans – maybe both, I don’t remember – and it’s believed that he stayed here, in this house, to research the story. Or he heard it while he was staying here. Or something.’
    Jane was impressed. If this was true it was well worth all Ben’s efforts. ‘But why would Conan Doyle switch the story to Devon?’
    ‘We don’t know,’ Amber said. ‘As Kennedy says in his letter, a lot of Holmes enthusiasts reject the Welsh Border theory entirely, because there’s also a Devon legend that fits. Maybe Doyle liked the name Baskerville enough to want to use it but didn’t want to implicate the actual family, so he set the novel somewhere where there aren’t any obvious Baskervilles.’
    Jane thought of the stone hounds on the Stanner Hall gateposts. ‘Did the Baskervilles have anything to do with this house?’
    ‘Not that we know of. It was built by a family called Chancery. It must have been fairly new at the time the book came out in 1902. But it was built to look historic, so maybe it gave Conan Doyle an idea of what he wanted. I mean, it certainly looks more like the Baskerville Hall he describes in the book than Hergest Court does. Just a farmhouse now.’
    ‘Honey, it’s how novelists work,’ Natalie said. ‘You take a bit of this, bit of that, and muddle it all up so that there are no comebacks.’
    Jane recalled something else. ‘A woman brought it up at the murder weekend. She wanted Ben to talk about it, but he hinted he was saving it.’
    ‘Well, of course he was,’ Amber said. ‘He was saving it for the annual conference of The Baker Street League. The plan was that Ben would get The League to endorse the evidence that this place is quite possibly the real Baskerville Hall, and then we’d start publicizing it. And, at the same time, Antony—’
    There was a loud clink and a muted splash. Natalie had tossed a soup ladle into one of the sinks. She stood with her hands on her narrow hips, annoyed.
    ‘It’s all my fault. If I’d bothered to check out Kennedy on the Net before Ben had invited him, we’d all have realized that, as he was born in bloody Tavistock, he might not have been an ardent supporter of the theory that The Hound had sod-all to do with Devon.’
    ‘How much does all this matter?’ Jane asked.
    ‘You can’t do all his thinking for him, Nat,’ Amber said. ‘He gets an idea and he’s off. Doesn’t do his homework. He didn’t even know Kennedy had scotched the Herefordshire theory in at least two of his own books.’ She turned to Jane. ‘Dartmoor gets a lot of Hound-related tourism – Americans, Japanese. It’s like King Arthur in Cornwall: they don’t exactly want to share it.’
    Jane gazed around the vast kitchen. The high windows were full of pine tops and dark purple dusk. It wasn’t very warm in here.
    ‘What will you do now?’
    Amber shrugged. ‘Ben’s still desperately trying to get hold of Antony, to put him off for a couple of weeks while he rethinks everything. He won’t give up. He can’t. We’ve very little money left, and if we sell up now we sell at a loss.’
    ‘Who’s Antony?’
    ‘What?’ Amber closed her eyes, opened them and blinked a few times, shaking her head despairingly. ‘Sorry. Sorry, Jane, I thought you knew about that. Antony Largo. Old mate of Ben’s from Beeb days. Independent producer, documentaries. There’s a series that his outfit’s putting together for Channel Four, called Punching the Clock , about successful people hitting hard times and having to make a new start in mid-life. So Antony approaches Ben, and Ben tells him to stuff it – I mean, he refuses to think of himself as being in mid-life, for a start . It’s always the beginning for Ben.’
    Jane smiled. It was one of the aspects of Ben she most approved of.
    ‘But it started him thinking,’ Amber said,