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to.”
    “Very well,” said Sellick. “You will have to tell me, Martin, if this interests you as an historian. As a man, it interests me deeply.” He paused to sip his coffee, then began.
    “As I say, there is not much in the history books about Edwin Strafford. The Dictionary of National Biography devotes less than a column to him. He was born in 1876, the son of an officer in the Indian Army. He went to Cambridge, then—briefly—to South Africa as a junior staff officer in the Boer War. He returned to England to fight his home constituency in Devon for the Liberals at the 1900 election and won, against the national trend.
    Then he climbed slowly but surely through the ranks of his party and became a junior minister when the Liberals came to power in 1905. When Asquith became Premier in 1908 he reshuffled his Cabinet and appointed Strafford Home Secretary at the age of thirty-two. It was a remarkable but short-lived rise. Two years later, Strafford resigned without explanation and disappeared virtually overnight—from the public eye at any rate. He left Parliament and became a totally private citizen—soon, a totally 24

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    forgotten one also. He served throughout the First World War in the army, then took the post of British Consul here on Madeira.
    Later he bought this house and the quinta. He retired from the Consulate in 1946 and died five years later. End of story.”
    Sellick paused for effect. This was clearly not the end of the story.
    “Beginning of mystery,” put in Alec.
    “That’s right,” resumed Sellick. “I found what little I could glean from the history books about Strafford not so much disappointing as wholly unsatisfactory. How could a man rise so swiftly—presumably on merit—then quite simply vanish without trace and, what’s more, without apparent reason? One is familiar with scandal and failure in politics, but Strafford is tainted with neither. The passing mentions of his actions during two years in office—difficult years of Suffragette and trade union unrest—are, at worst, neutral, sometimes laudatory. The only reason he is not given more extensive treatment is that he did not proceed with a political career like his contemporaries. It is as if Churchill or Lloyd George—of the same generation, both also promoted by Asquith—resigned abruptly in 1910, before either won fame as leaders of their country in war. Would that not seem surpassingly odd?”
    “With hindsight, it would in their cases,” I put in. “But who can say what Strafford might or might not have achieved if he hadn’t resigned?”
    “Precisely,” said Sellick. “No-one can say. It is a mystery. And the fundamental mystery is why a talented, ambitious man in the prime of life chose to achieve nothing when he could have achieved so much.”
    “Perhaps he simply lost interest in politics,” I proffered. “Or perhaps he found the public eye not to his taste. It’s been known.”
    “True, very true,” Sellick replied weightily. “And those were my thoughts too—an enfant terrible who burnt himself out for some prosaic reason. It seemed a pity.”
    Sellick rose from his chair and moved to replace the picture on the wall. He did so with reverential care, while I pondered the past tense in his last remark and waited for the next.
    “It seemed a pity and it was not so,” Sellick continued, re-
     

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    suming his seat. “As it turned out, I had been wasting my time burrowing in the reference books. I had ignored what that picture should have told me, that the answer—albeit an incomplete one—was here all the time.
    “There’s a fine old wooden desk in what was Strafford’s study—I’ll show it you later, preferably in daylight. When I was turning it out, I found in one of the drawers a large, handsomely bound volume, filled—but for a few pages—with writing in the same hand as that on the back of the photograph.”
    “What was