‘I’m sorry to be a disappointment. Was that the only reason you asked me to come?’ She was reasonably certain by then that it was merely a necessary preliminary to the real business he had with her.
‘Hardly, or I could have asked it over the telephone, and avoided imposing upon you. No, circumstances make it very desirable that we should have this talk, and continue in close touch afterwards, if you’re agreeable. I had better,’ said Mr Stanforth, philosophically accepting the fact of her total ignorance, ‘tell you exactly what the position is. I have acted for your great-uncle for more than twenty years now, and have often been left in charge of his affairs during his long absences abroad, on digs all over Europe and North Africa and the Middle East, everywhere that the Roman and Graeco-Roman power extended. You’re familiar with his subject, you know he is an authority, internationally known and universally respected. So naturally he travels a great deal, and is in demand as a consultant wherever Roman sites are being excavated. A year ago last October he planned a year’s tour in Turkey. It was approaching the end of the season, of course, but he intended to make a first flying visit to Aphrodisias, where some old friends of his were at work, and then to spend the winter on research in libraries and museums, and have the whole of the following summer for field work. He let his house in Chelsea furnished for the year, with the usual proviso that his own staff should remain to run it—he has a housekeeper who has been with him for years, and one daily maid. All quite in order, of course, he has done the same thing at least twice before. And of course no one expected to hear much from him during his sabbatical year, unless, as you say, something was wrong. But the trouble is that no one has heard anything from him even now that the year is over.’
‘Nearly six months over,’ Charlotte pointed out. ‘Quite an edgy matter for his tenants.’
‘Precisely! Finding accommodation in London is difficult in any circumstances, and this couple happen to be Australians who don’t intend to stay permanently, but are anxious to see their daughter through her physiotherapy training here, and take her back with them afterwards. It would suit them very well to have the tenancy of the house for at least another year. But without any instructions from Doctor Morris it’s difficult to know what to do.’
‘And what,’ she asked practically, ‘have you done about them so far?’
‘In the absence of any word from my client, I took the responsibility of renewing the tenancy for six months. They could hardly be expected to agree to less, and they’re excellent tenants.’
‘And now the six months is nearly up. And still no word! Yes, I see why I represented a last hope,’ she said. ‘Is this very unlike him?’
‘Very. He is a man who has deliberately avoided certain responsibilities in his life, and certain involvements, but those business obligations which do unavoidably devolve upon him he has always observed punctiliously. There are money matters, investments, tax affairs to be considered. It is, one might say, a conscious part of his policy of personal detachment to have all his affairs in scrupulous order, and so obviate pursuit and inconvenience of any kind. To be slipshod is to be hounded, which is the last thing he wants. No, I must say that things have now gone so far as to justify me in feeling considerable uneasiness about his continued absence.’
She gazed back at him in thoughtful silence for a moment, and shook her head doubtfully. ‘I don’t know… he’s a free agent, and he has confidence in you. At a pinch, he might very well feel safe enough in going ahead with what he’s doing, and leaving all the rest to you. Supposing he got excited about some new discoveries, for instance…’
‘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?’