A False Mirror - Charles Todd [73]
“I don’t remember much of that weekend.” He’d been twelve and wretchedly sick. A long time ago…eighteen years?
“You played croquet with him. And won.”
It was his turn to laugh. “That was Matthew Hamilton?”
“Of course it was.”
“Good God. I thought him quite ancient. I expect he’s only forty-eight, now.”
“And still an attractive man, I must say. I saw photographs of him when he was at Versailles, they were in the newspapers for all of a week. He looked quite distinguished in that company of ancient men. Even as a girl I envied the women who played tennis with him. But I had my revenge, you know. He took me in to dinner, either because he felt sorry for me, abandoned and alone, or more likely, Melinda put him up to it. I was elated. My dinner companions were generally callow boys with spots, who either refused to speak to me or bored me to tears with their cricket exploits. I quite forgave you the measles.” There was a pause. “Ian. Why are you asking about him? Please don’t tell me he’s dead.”
“No. A person of interest in the inquiry that brought me here,” he said, evading the question. “His wife is many years younger and can’t tell me very much about his past.”
“Has he killed someone?” Her voice was tight. “I refuse to believe he could do such a thing.”
“The fact is, he’s gone missing.”
There was a silence on the other end of the line. Then Frances said, “All right, you’d rather not tell me more. So I won’t pry. What do you want to know? Why he should have disappeared?”
“More to the point, has there been gossip about him, most especially about his career?”
“He wasn’t very popular after expressing an opinion about the Peace Conference at Versailles. He’d been on the ambassador’s staff in Turkey before the war, and as I remember, in Germany even earlier than that. The general view was that he should have been consulted but his position wasn’t in accord with the intent of the French at the talks. Rather like that man Lawrence and his Arab connections, Matthew Hamilton had friends in Turkey and in Germany who were pushing for a different outcome. I daresay he was in the right, but no one cared to hear it. And so he chose to retire and return to England.”
“Not under a cloud?”
“Not precisely a cloud. But some very important people were not pleased with him, and he knew very well what that would mean to his career. Or perhaps he was disillusioned. Or they threatened him with Paraguay. There are ways of getting even without actually sending him home in disgrace. I don’t think he’d have cared for a South American posting, after Europe. And his interests lay there, of course.”
“What interests?”
“He liked to poke about in the old ruins. A way to pass the time, at a guess, and if one lives somewhere long enough, it’s natural to start to wonder what’s outside one’s window, so to speak. Remember Barton Wallace, who got caught up in those strange poles in Canada, and wrote about what the Indians were carving on them?”
Barton Wallace had been a friend of his father’s, sent to Vancouver to handle the Wallace family’s Pacific trade for their firm. While there, he’d written a treatise on Indian totems, and it proved immensely popular.
“Yes, Wallace sent Mother a copy of it one Boxing Day.”
“Well, I expect a man like Matthew Hamilton spent many of his holidays traveling to places he’d heard local people talking about, and word got out that he was there. It was rumored in the markets that he’d buy objects he liked without asking either provenance or source. Of course he couldn’t dig himself, but thievery is rampant, and important, much less unknown, sites can’t be guarded all the time. Such people sell real finds or competent fakes for whatever price they can ask. He sent Melinda Crawford the loveliest little marble figure of the god Pan, dancing. She was pleased, sure it was real, and put it in that curio cabinet of hers. When he left Turkey, there