Name To a Face

THIRTY-SEVEN

It was six o’clock on a raw, dark evening when Harding turned in to Deal Castle Road. A chill wind was barrelling in from the sea and it seemed a good bet that Jack Shepherd, quondam editor of the Kentish Mercury, would be at home. Sure enough, the lights were on in his ground-floor flat.

He took his time answering the doorbell, however. When he did, the stick he was leaning on heavily suggested why Harding had been kept waiting so long. He was a big, fleshy sack of a man, with a flushed face that emphasized the whiteness of his hair and a grouchy, thin-lipped expression. He was dressed in a voluminous cardigan, baggy trousers and a frayed shirt. Grey wary eyes met Harding’s through unfashionably large, thick-lensed glasses.

“Jack Shepherd?”

“You must be Harding.”

“How did you know?”

“Oh, voice, age, manner. Or journalist’s intuition. I didn’t think it’d be long before you showed up, despite crying off on Sunday.”

“Something cropped up.”

“Doesn’t it always?”

“Can I come in?”

“Why not?”

Shepherd hobbled back into the flat. Harding followed, closing the front door behind him. There was an aroma of fried food cut with whisky and an immediate impression of learning embedded in dowdiness. The cramped sitting room they entered was long overdue for a makeover, the furniture’s second-hand value well below zero. But there were crammed bookcases lining three walls and Shepherd’s current choice of leisure reading, standing next to the whisky tumbler on a low table by his fireside armchair, was a biography of Pushkin.

“Want a drink?” Shepherd nodded to a tray on a sideboard. “There’s whisky… or whisky.”

“Thanks.” As Harding helped himself to a finger of Johnnie Walker, Shepherd subsided into the armchair and flapped a hand towards the sofa.

“Take a seat.”

“Thanks.” Harding sat down. “Cheers.”

“Looks like a Scotch evening out there to me.”

“It is.”

“So, what’s this all about?” There was no hint Shepherd knew Barney Tozer was dead-or that Hayley Foxton was wanted for his murder. Harding was not entirely surprised. It was hardly the stuff of headlines in Deal. All in all, he reckoned there was no need to rush into announcing the news.

“It’s simple enough really. Kerry Foxton worked for you, didn’t she?”

“Cub reporter to my sourpuss editor. Yes. She soon moved on, though-on and up. But she stayed in touch. I liked her. And I like to think she liked me. She wasn’t terribly good at her job, to be honest. Council committee meetings and magistrates’ hearings bored her rigid and she didn’t hide it well. She was a rotten team player too. But that didn’t really matter. She had this… dazzling personality… that made even a sourpuss editor cut her a lot of slack. Besides, if you put her onto a story with some meat in it, well, she gave it everything. And she got results. She had Fleet Street written all over her. When she left, I never seriously expected to see or hear from her again. But, as I say, she stayed in touch. She liked to get my views on things. I was a little like her when I was her age and I think she sensed that. I was considered a high-flyer in my day. Before I… bottled out, you could say if you were of a punning disposition. But you don’t want to hear about my problems.”

“When we spoke on the phone, you said you’d be reluctant to talk about Kerry”

Shepherd smiled. “So I did. But that was partly to see how easily put off you’d be. And I thought about it afterwards, especially when I had my daughter and the grandchildren over. Family’s important. Probably more important than what I choose to call my principles. Kerry didn’t talk much about her sister. But she said enough for me to know she’d want me to do anything I can to help her. So, how’s she placed?”

“Oh, she’s OK.” Harding winced inwardly at the scale of his misrepresentation. “Most of the time.”

“And the rest of the time?”

“Well, there’s this idea she can’t get out of her mind that Kerry may have been… murdered.”

“Murdered?” Shepherd frowned sceptically. “I was going through a bad patch when they held the inquest and wasn’t well enough to attend, but I read the reports later. The lead diver may have been sloppy, but it came across as a straightforward accident to me. Tragic. But no one’s fault other than Kerry’s for entering the wreck. Which sounded to me like the kind of mistake she might make. She always was headstrong. That was part of her appeal.”

“I’m sure you’re right. And I think Hayley could bring herself to accept that. If only there weren’t so many unanswered questions about what Kerry was working on in the weeks and months before the accident.”

“Ah. I see. You reckon I know, do you?”

“Her friend Carol says she was often on the phone to you while she was staying with her on St. Mary’s.”

“Yes. She was.” Shepherd drank the last of his whisky and gazed for a moment at the empty glass. “You couldn’t top me up, could you?”

“Sure.” Harding obliged with the Johnnie Walker and Shepherd took another sip.

“After I retired from the Mercury, Kerry started using me to do background research for her freelance stories. It was a good arrangement for both of us. Kept me busy and off the booze and saved her having to do all the checking and double-checking she never really had the patience for anyway. She certainly had something on the boil that summer, though she never told me exactly what. She liked to tease me about where the research she palmed off on me was leading and I enjoyed trying to second-guess her. Sadly I never got the chance to find out where we were heading that time. I kept my files on the work I did for her. I looked through them after you called. Reminded myself what it was all about. And I can honestly say there was nothing in them to suggest Kerry had strayed into… dangerous territory.”

“What did you do for her?”

“You’re going to be disappointed if you’re expecting anything sensational.”

“I won’t be disappointed,” said Harding, sticking to his cover story. “The less sensational the better. For Hayley”

“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?”