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

decisions we have to make about Great-Uncle Alan’s affairs, of course I will, though I don’t claim to know anything about business and I probably shan’t be much help to you. I can’t even claim to know what he would want done, because I know almost nothing about him. But I don’t at all mind saying what I think I should want done in the circumstances. I don’t think, for instance, that I should want my death assumed and my property disposed of too soon, so we won’t go into that part of the affair just now, if you don’t mind. He’ll probably live to be a hundred, and make a will leaving whatever he’s got to his old college, and I shan’t mind at all. But I quite see that you need someone to come in on a practical issue like what to do about his tenants. I think you should extend the tenancy for another full year, if that’s what they would like. It would ensure the house being taken care of, and the staff maintained, since you say they’re good tenants. And even if Uncle Alan turns up within a month or two, he can hardly complain. It’s his own fault. And the inconvenience will be only slight, he can always take up residence at his college again until their time’s up.’

She made it sound very simple, as young people do; and she hadn’t yet considered the implications for herself, Mr Stanforth reflected cynically, or she would not so blithely dismiss the matter of the inheritance. It was not a fortune, but it was a respectable competence, thanks to royalties, which would continue for years yet, whether the doctor reappeared or remained in limbo. ‘I’m gratified,’ said Mr Stanforth, with only the mildest irony,‘ that your judgement agrees with mine. That is indeed what I had intended suggesting to you, and it disposes of the immediate problem.’

‘If you want me to keep in touch, and be available for consultation, of course I will.’

‘Thank you, that will ease my position considerably. And as you say, all we can do is wait, and continue to expect Doctor Morris to turn up in his own good time. May I ask what your own plans are? Do you intend to stay some time in England?’

‘I’m making my home here,’ she said. ‘I’m taking a teaching job in a new comprehensive school, but that won’t begin until the September term. That’s why I’m trying to fill up the gap with a few concerts, but of course I’m not good enough for the big dates, it will be mostly provincial engagements. I’ll let you have word of all my movements.’

‘That would be most kind and helpful.’

The interview seemed to have reached its natural conclusion. She picked up her handbag, and he rose from behind his desk to take a relieved and ceremonious farewell. But before they had reached the doorway she hesitated and halted.

‘You know what I would like? Could you let me have a list of all the books Uncle Alan’s written? If I’m going to be a stand-in for him, even temporarily, like this, I really need to know more about him, and that seems as good a way as any. They must surely convey something about him.’

Strange, he thought resignedly, she’s not at all interested in how much her kinsman’s worth, only, rather suddenly and rather late, in what he’s like. And at this stage, isn’t that rather an academic consideration? But he said politely: ‘Yes, of course. If you’ll allow me, I’ll have a few of his titles sent round to your hotel. This last one, the text he sent from Istanbul—the publishers took care of the proof-reading, of course—that one I believe I’ve got here. Take it with you, if you’d care to. Though it’s hardly the most riveting of his works. He found Aurae Phiala, it seems, rather an over-rated site in revisiting it.’

There was a large bookcase in the corner of his office, stocked mainly with leather-bound volumes; but the end of the lowest shelf was brightened by the clear colours of a number of paperbacks. He plucked one of them from its place and brought it to her. ‘The Roman Britain Library’, the jacket told her, and in larger print: ‘AURAE PHIALA’, and Alan Morris’s name, with a comet’s-tail of letters after it.

The cover was a fine, delicately-composed, atmospheric photograph of a shallow bowl of meadows beside the silver sweep of a river, the whole foreground patterned with a mesh of low walls in amber stone and rosy, fired brick and tile, with two broken pillars to carry the accented rhythms up into a sky feathered with light cloud. Charlotte gazed at it, fascinated. A landscape obviously planned, disciplined, tamed long, long since, and long since abandoned to the river, the seasons and the sky; and not a human soul in sight. A less cunning photographer might have felt the urge to place a single figure, perhaps close to the columns, to give life and scale. This one had understood that Aurae Phiala was dead, and immense, needing no meretricious human yardstick to give it proportion.

‘But it’s beautiful!’ she said, and voice and accent had become wholly French for one moment. ‘This is where he spent those last few days?’ she said. ‘Before he caught that flight into Turkey?’

‘Yes. He knew the site from many previous visits, though I think he had never organised a dig there himself. The curator is an old friend of his, a fellow-student, I believe. But less distinguished.’

‘So Uncle Alan would be with friends, when he stayed there? And he went straight from this place, to catch his plane?’

‘So I understand. It is an attractive picture,’ said Mr Stanforth, with patronising tolerance. ‘Wonderful what a first rate photographer can do with even unpromising material. But you’ll see what Doctor Morris has to say about the place.’

‘Where is it?’ she asked, still viewing the sunlit, fluted hollow with pleasure and wonder.

‘Somewhere on the Welsh border, I believe. The text and maps will show you exactly where. The name means something like “the bowl of the gentle wind”. Apparently an ideal climatic site. But you’ll discover all about the place if you read it.’

Clearly he hardly believed that she would stay the course. She wondered if he himself had survived it. She closed the little book between her palms, and put it away in her handbag. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I look forward to setting foot in my uncle’s field.’

She was not sure herself how much in earnest she was, at that stage; and if she had had any other agreeable reading matter to fill up her evening, she might never have started on Aurae Phiala at all. But she had no concert, and no engagement socially, since she knew hardly anyone in London, the small hotel in Earls Court was not productive of amusing company, and the television was surrounded by a handful of determined fans watching a very boring boxing match. Charlotte returned almost gladly to the recollection of her morning interview, and in retrospect it seemed to her far more strange and mysterious than while it was happening. She had never been brought face to face with her great-uncle, and never devoted any conscious thought to him. He became real and close only now that he had vanished.

Such a curious thing for an established and respected elderly gentleman to do, now that she came to consider it seriously. How old would he be now? Her grandmother, his elder sister, would have been seventy if she had been still living, and there were several years between them. Probably sixty-three or sixty-four, and according to the photographs she had seen in newspapers and geographical magazines, and his occasional appearances on television, he looked considerably younger than his age, and very fit indeed. Say a well-preserved sixty-four, highly sophisticated, speaking at least three languages, enough to get him out of trouble in most countries, and with a