The Detective Omnibus: 'City of Gold and Shadows', 'Flight of a Witch' and 'Funeral of Figaro'

‘During the winter months work would be at a standstill. In many places it couldn’t open up again before June, late May at the earliest.’

‘You ought, perhaps, to start official enquiries,’ she suggested hesitantly.

‘I already have, more than a month ago. I rather wish I’d taken the step earlier. The trail came to a dead end. One that might be perfectly normal, though it leaves us in complete uncertainty.’

‘How much do we know? I mean really know? Do we even know that he ever reached Turkey? Exactly what did they find?’

‘Oh, yes, he got to Istanbul, all right. He caught his flight from Heathrow on the 6th of October, the flight-list has been checked through. He claimed his reservation at the Hotel Gul Bejaze, and stayed there for three weeks. We even know just what he was doing, intensively, during that time. He took a piece of work with him to finish. He was commissioned to write one of a series of monographs on the settlements of Roman Britain, and he took the almost completed text with him when he left England. I knew of that from him before he left, for he was going to spend his last few days before the flight actually on the site, refreshing his memory on certain details. Well, he posted the finished text to his publishers from Istanbul about three weeks after he arrived there. The book has been out several months, of course, now. A few days after he mailed it, he telephoned his friend and colleague at Aphrodisias, in Anatolia, and called off his visit. He said he was afraid the delay over the book had lost him the opportunity of reaching the city in time to take part in any meaningful work, and promised to join the next summer’s dig in June.’

‘But he didn’t.’

‘He didn’t. The day after that telephone call he paid his hotel bill and left by taxi for the main station. Attempts to trace one taxi in Istanbul, after a year and more, naturally fell flat. No one has heard from him since, no one knows where he is.’

It began to sound more serious than she had realised. ‘Who undertook these enquiries?’

‘The police, through their Turkish colleagues. Missing Persons has all the information available. But I’m afraid the trail was cold before I called them in, and we didn’t take it the length of broadcasting or advertising. One doesn’t want to set a public hue and cry in train after a perfectly rational and responsible person who knows very well what he’s about.’

‘He may still be that,’ she said. ‘There may be reasons for his silence, perfectly good reasons if we only knew them. And he may turn up at any moment with a simple explanation, and wonder what we’ve been worrying about.’

‘So I think, too. Though let’s admit that personal security has recently become distressingly tenuous all over the world, and the most innocent and uninvolved of people can still find himself made a pawn in all manner of dangerous games. And Turkey has its share of the modern virus. But urban guerillas don’t kidnap distinguished foreigners only to keep their exploit secret, hijackers can hardly help becoming news on the instant, and here there has been profound silence. I tell myself that silence is more likely to be a personal choice than an imposed one.’

‘There is such a thing as amnesia, I suppose,’ Charlotte said dubiously. ‘Illness or accident could have isolated him somewhere. I mean, if he did go off into the wilds of Anatolia, or somewhere remote like that—something might happen to him in some village, where he isn’t known.’

‘Villagers would be all the more anxious to get the responsibility for him off their hands. And there are quite a number of people in Turkey who do know him, people in his own field.’

They looked at each other for the first time with a long, speculative look, weighing up the possibilities honestly and in much the same terms. ‘You think, then,’ she said, ‘that this disappearance is more likely to be voluntary on his part. But in that case, all we have to do is wait, and when he chooses, he’ll reappear. And I take it the police still have his case more or less open, and will be looking out for news of him, in case there’s something more in it. There isn’t much more we can do, short of going off to Istanbul in person to try and find his tracks. And if, for some reason, he has really chosen to drop out for a while, he wouldn’t be grateful for too much fuss, would he?’

‘You state the position admirably. That’s exactly how we are situated—you and I both.’

‘I?’ she said, drawing back slightly into her crystalline, black-and-white reserve, and becoming in a breath notably more French. ‘I realise that I come into the picture as a relative, and I do feel natural interest and concern for my great-uncle. But I can’t feel that I have any more positive standing than that in the matter.’

‘You have a very positive standing, my dear young lady,’ said Mr Stanforth patiently, and perhaps a little patronisingly, too, for this was where money entered into the reckoning, and very young concert artists and music teachers with a living to make must surely react to the alluring image. ‘Let us suppose, just for one moment, that we are being over-optimistic, and that Doctor Morris will not reappear, as, of course, we hope and believe he will. If this situation goes on unchanged, then it may become necessary eventually, for legal reasons, to take steps to presume his death. That need not jeopardise his position if he should subsequently emerge from his limbo. But it would, meanwhile, regularise his affairs and ensure proper continuity, proper attention to investments, and so on. In short, Miss Rossignol, I’ve reached the point where I must have your approval and consent for whatever steps I take in protection of his financial affairs. Since your mother’s death you are his only remaining relative, apart from some distant cousins in Canada, several times removed. And Doctor Morris—a remarkable quirk in his otherwise orderly character, I may say—has always stubbornly refused to make a will. There are people,’ said the Norse troll, burning into sudden antagonistic fervour across his cavern-desk, ‘who hypnotise themselves into believing that they are going to live for ever.’ His client’s optimism and appetites, with equal suddenness, burned clear in opposition, and Charlotte had a vision of two principles in headlong collision, and chose to ally herself with her own kinsman, by intuition and once for all. ‘If we do not see him again—for we must take that possibility into account—you are his next of kin and his sole heiress. That is why I need to consult with you over anything I do, from now on, in his name.’

Charlotte had never in her life felt obliged to examine her relationships with anyone. Her mother, once rid of the armour-plated respectability of Maitre Henri and his phalanx of parents, brothers and sisters, all devoted to the law, had married a happy-go-lucky literary exile from Leeds, as nearly as possible his opposite, and the half-English, half-French child had been absorbed into their slapdash household with the greatest enthusiasm and affection, and never given time to doubt or worry, surrounded as she was by joyous evidence of her own importance and value. There had never been too much money, but never less than enough. She had no vision of money as an independent power, or a formidable opponent. It was there to be used, insofar as you had it; and when you were short, you worked a little harder, and made good the deficiency. And foreseeing that necessity, you made sure that you knew something which could earn you money at need. It was as simple as that. She did not even know what it meant to adapt oneself to another person’s requirements for the sake of self-interest. All she had, to enable her to visualise Mr Stanforth’s view of her position, was a vivid imagination and a very acute intelligence. They helped her to understand him, and even, regretfully, to sympathise with him.

‘If you’re asking me,’ she said carefully,‘ to come into consultation and share responsibility for whatever