"Another sign of the unrest on the moor," Baring-Gould said with a sigh. "Longtime residents, people with roots deep into the peat, pulling up and moving away. Like Josiah Gorton, Sally Harper's father was one of my songmen. I collected two ballads and three tunes from the man, oh, it must be nearly thirty years ago. He gave me an alternative verse to 'Green Broom,' as I recall, as well as a sprightly tune, set with most unseemly words that I had to rewrite before it could be published. Sally was a blooming young thing then, and now she and her husband have had to sell off their farm up near Black Tor, a very old place with several generations of newtakes added to the original. Never had children, and although they have a bit of money from the farm sale, the house they have their eyes on near Milton Abbot isn't ready yet. I felt I ought to help out, and it'll only be for a few days. Hard to believe it was that many years ago. Where were we? Yes, Josiah Gorton."

He bent closely over the fine lines of the map, squinting for a moment until he had his bearings, and his long, gnarled finger came down in the upper left quadrant of the map, tracing an uneven line down to the lower right.

"This is the most likely route for Gorton to have been taken," he said, which, I realised to my surprise, was for my sake, not that of Holmes, who had already been over the route. He then drew his hand back and put it down a short distance from where he had started. "And here is the place Lady Howard's coach was seen, on the night Gorton disappeared." This was, judging by the few roads and fewer dwellings, one of the most deserted areas of the entire moor, a place thick with the Gothic script mapmakers use to indicate antiquities: hut circles, stone rows, stone avenues, tumuli, and ancient trackways, as well as an ominous scattering of those grass-tuft symbols that indicate marshland. There were no orange roads for miles, or even the hollow lines of minor roads, only densely gathered contour lines, numerous streams, and the markings for "rough pasture." A howling wilderness indeed.

What was a kistvaen? I wondered, seeing the word on the map, but Holmes spoke before I could ask.

"Who on earth was out in that wasteland to see a spectral coach?" he demanded.

"It is not a wasteland, Holmes," Baring-Gould corrected him sharply. "Merely sparsely populated. A farmworker saw it. He was benighted on his way home from a wedding."

"Why does that say 'Artillery Range'?" I interrupted without thinking.

I felt two sets of disapproving male eyes boring into me, and did not look up from the map.