Investigators had not been able to find out anything much about the second shooter either. They now theorized that the first shooter must have been taken out by the second shooter whom Peter may have put in place. There were some emails in Peter’s records that indicated he was planning to get someone that fit that kind of profile to boost security around him, the investigators told Jackson. And information from one of Peter’s associates, an official in the UK intelligence system, confirmed that Peter had asked this official about people who would have that kind of profile.

“But that second shooter is probably in the wind now,” the investigators said. “We couldn’t find any useful forensics from the various probable sites around the square mile surrounding that first sniper. So we have even less on this second shooter than we have on the shooter who fired into the estate.”

“With all our leads turning cold, we’re afraid that we have to shelve our investigations,” the lead investigator said regretfully, “until new evidence comes up.”

“Any number of his enemies could have arranged for something like that,” investigators said, “but there’s nothing to go on in his papers, files, or anything that would give us any leads. Just the usual fighting between firms, arguments, etc., that seem to be common in his business dealings, but all our efforts in looking at a few probables are not panning out.”

The investigator and his associates exited from Jackson’s suite of offices with a resigned air after that.

Now, after another glance around the crowd, Bette restarted, in a more determined tone, “Actually, what Peter specifically requested was for me to read out a passage from Tennyson, the last part of “Ulysses,” that he thought could sound like a call to never give up. Or to go on. Which he may have imagined was an appropriate last message to all of us since he could have thought that this memorial would have been held in the aftermath of his passing from an illness.”

She paused meaningfully and then added, “And not under the circumstances that transpired many weeks ago.”

“He and I had differing interpretations of this poem, actually, although we were both fond of it,” Bette continued, absentmindedly, rubbing her lip with a finger as she recalled the time when Peter had rescued her from a boat-racing accident off of the bay near Cannes. It was then that he’d advised her to do what she could to reduce her vulnerabilities to her enemies as she embarked on her quest to solve the riddle of the gold cache. As his yacht bore them back to the port of Cannes, they’d talked about various things, and had discovered a common love for Tennyson. With a smile she remembered that they’d laughed about how similar the Ulysses-figure in the eponymous poem was to Peter, who liked to take long journeys from time to time in the high seas in his yacht, to retire himself from the world at large.