“OK. Well, it’s all pretty obscure historical stuff, actually. There were two strands to it and I think-only think, mind-I know how Kerry hoped to tie them together. The first strand concerns a semi-legendary figure from the fourteenth century called the Grey Man of Ennor.”

“Who was he?”

“To answer that question I need to take you back to the time of the Black Death. Know much about it?”

“About as much as most people, I suppose. A plague carried by rats that decimated the population of Europe around the year… 1350?”

“You’ve got it. Actually, it was much worse than literal decimation. At least one in three died, possibly more. It spread across Europe, starting in Constantinople in late 1347 and reaching England in the summer of 1348. It was at its height in the West Country between then and the spring of 1349. Which is where the Grey Man comes in. During that period-1348/49-an elderly grey-haired monk from St. Nicholas’s Priory on Tresco is supposed to have left his cell and wandered through Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset, miraculously curing plague-sufferers as he went while remaining immune to the disease himself. Ennor was the common name for the Scillies then. Hence the Grey Man of Ennor.”

“Did he really exist?”

“Who can say? It was a widespread enough rumour to warrant mention in the chronicles of the period. But the Church did its best to scotch the rumour. St. Nicholas’s Priory was under the control of Tavistock Abbey and the abbot’s known to have sent letters to the Bishop of Exeter in April 1349 for distribution to his parish priests stating unequivocally that no monk had absented himself from Tresco. Maybe it was just wishful thinking. There was no shortage of people hoping and praying for deliverance from the plague. Basically, there’s no hard evidence for or against the Grey Man.”

“What about the other strand?”

“How much do you know about King Edward the Second?”

“Did Shakespeare write a play about him?”

“No. But Marlowe did. Thanks to which a lot of people know how he’s supposed to have died. A gruesome exit involving a red-hot poker.”

“Ah. That was him, was it?”

“Yes. Succeeded his macho-man father, Edward the First, in 1307. Probably gay, though he married and dutifully fathered four children. Certainly no great shakes as a military commander. Widely blamed for defeat by the Scots at Bannockburn in 1314. Court riven with jealousy and rivalry. Civil war constantly threatening. Eventually forced to abdicate in favour of his fourteen-year-old son, Edward the Third, leaving the government of the country in the hands of his wife, Queen Isabella, and her lover, Roger Mortimer. Locked up in Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire, where, after a couple of abortive rescue attempts, he was murdered, at some point in September 1327. Nasty end to a nasty story. Or was it? Kerry wanted to know just how certain historians were that Edward died in 1327. The answer turns out to be not very. He’s got a smart tomb in Gloucester Cathedral, but it took Isabella and Mortimer all of three months to get round to putting him in it. There’s a whole host of circumstantial evidence to suggest he wasn’t recaptured, as he’s usually thought to have been, after he was sprung from Berkeley Castle by a raiding party organized by his former confessor, Thomas Dunheved, in late July of 1327. After searching in vain for him in the Welsh Borders, Mortimer may well have decided it was best to say he’d been murdered, so that he could be dismissed as an impostor if he ever reappeared. But he never did. Perhaps because he didn’t want to. Perhaps because he recognized that he didn’t have it in him to be a king. So, what became of him? Well, maybe the answer is that the Church gave him sanctuary. Dunheved was a Dominican. Maybe he eased Edward’s passage into a remote monastery somewhere on the Continent.”

“You’re saying he became a monk?”

“Possibly. Monk. Friar. Hermit. Something like that.”

“Something like… the Grey Man of Ennor.”

“It’s a tempting thought, isn’t it? He was born in 1284. That would make him sixty-four in 1348. The age certainly fits. When he saw the plague rampaging across Europe, might he have decided to return to his homeland in its hour of need? He could have entered the country surreptitiously, via the Scillies. Hence the idea that he was from the Scillies. As for the notion that he was able to cure victims of the plague, well, the Royal Touch was a persistent medieval belief. Anointment with holy oil during the coronation ceremony was supposed to confer on the monarch the power to cure leprosy and scrofula in particular by touching the sufferer. This was conditional on the monarch leading a sinless life, which could hardly be said of Edward the Second. But perhaps twenty years in a monastery-or wandering the byways of Europe-could be regarded as sufficient to atone for his sins. Not that I’m suggesting he actually cured anyone, you understand. But the arrival of the Black Death must have felt like the end of the world, so it’s small wonder people fantasized about a nomadic healer coming to their rescue. If Edward the Second was still alive, he’d be a leading candidate for the role because of the myth of the Royal Touch.”

“So, quite a few historians have identified him with the Grey Man of Ennor, have they?”

“As a matter of fact…” Shepherd smiled. “None at all.”

“But you think Kerry was trying to?”

“It’s the obvious conclusion. It’s certainly what I concluded at the time.”

“But why? What’s there to interest an ambitious free-lance journalist in a story like that?”

“Exactly. It’s hardly big news today, is it? There has to be more to it. And the more has to be what took Kerry to the Scillies, ostensibly to write about the total eclipse, in the summer of 1999. The research I did for her was just background. There must have been something else-something bigger-she was on the track of.”

“What could that have been?”

“I’ve absolutely no idea. But a mystery from the mid-fourteenth century doesn’t give anyone a plausible motive for murder in the late twentieth. I’m clear about that.” Shepherd squinted at Harding suspiciously. “Which should be good news for you. But strangely, judging by your expression, it isn’t. You look what you said you wouldn’t be: disappointed. Now, why’s that, I wonder?”

In the end, Harding told Shepherd the truth. There was nothing to be gained by keeping him in the dark about Hayley’s murder of Barney Tozer once he had revealed what Kerry was investigating at the time of her fatal dive off the Scillies: not Tozer’s suspect finances, but an historical conundrum which by any rational standards could have no connection with her death.

Shepherd deduced Harding’s motive for holding out on him swiftly enough and was only briefly angered by it. It was a double tragedy now, he observed, the more so since he did not believe Kerry’s accident had been engineered by anyone. There was nothing for Hayley to avenge. And nothing Harding could do to help her.

Nor was there much Shepherd could do to help Harding. Except suggest he top up both their glasses and offer him a bed for the night; as well as proffer some sage advice.

“Go back to France, son. Landscape a few more gardens. Get on with your life. Let the dead bury the dead.”

“But Hayley isn’t dead.”

“She’ll be as good as, once the law’s finished with her. Not that it ever will finish with her. Prison and/or mental hospital sounds like her foreseeable future to me.”

“I keep wondering… if there was something I could’ve done to prevent this outcome.”

“I wonder that about my entire existence to date. The answer’s yes, of course. But it doesn’t help to know it. What’s done is done. There are no second chances.”