“On the Channel, out past Ipswich. There’s a port there.”

“Sounds like a dreary place to die.”

“Not if you were Royal Navy. I wonder if he was still doing his bit for the Crown then. What else does it say?”

“Um, born August 1881, so he was sixty-three. Youngest son of late Lieutenant-Colonel G. F. Talbot. Cheltenham, Caius College—”

“A Cambridge lad!” cheered Iris.

“RNVR in the last war, British Naval Attaché in Athens 1917 to 1920—Ah, here’s a new item. Director of the London and North Eastern Railway Company. Didn’t Sally say he had a locomotive tie pin?”

“He did. Anything else?”

“Married Hélène, widow of Captain C. Labouchere, French army, in 1920. He married a French war widow. Trés gallant! One daughter, not named here. And that’s it.”

“Fairly skeletal. Let’s see who showed up at the memorial.”

Gwen flipped through to the twenty-seventh of April.

“Here it is,” she said. “Held at St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Nice choice. Reverend Loveday himself officiated.”

“I’ve always liked St. M’s,” said Iris. “Nell Gwyn’s buried there. Patron saint of mistresses.”

“That last part isn’t true,” said Gwen.

“It should be,” said Iris, resting her chin on Gwen’s shoulder to get a better look at the article.

“My, look at all the knights and ladies who attended,” said Gwen.

“And look at all the Greeks,” pointed out Iris. “‘The King of the Hellenes was represented … the Greek Chargé d’Affaires … Sir John Stavriki, Mr. Jean Romanos, Mr. P. Argenis, Mr. C. Torgos, Mr. D. Caclamenos, and other well-known members of the Greek Colony in London.’”

“But he hadn’t been stationed in Greece since 1920,” said Gwen. “And he was only a naval attaché when he was. Why was he still so popular with the Greeks twenty-five years later?”

“Why, indeed? It does sound like he’s our man.”

“Bad luck about his current lack of existence,” said Gwen.

“Are you saying we’ve reached a dead end?”

“I was going to, but now I can’t. What do we do now?”

“Keep looking,” said Iris. “There may be more.”

It was Iris who found it, nearly an hour later, poring through back issues of the Daily Express and sneezing profusely.

“Here it is,” she said, her eyes streaming. “Blast the Times and their reticence. I should have looked in the Daily Express from the start.”

“What did you find?”

“According to them, Talbot was in Paris when the Greek ministers and generals were arrested. He gets the word from Lord Curzon to go to Lausanne, then received instructions to head to Athens. Gets there too late to stop the first batch of executions, but in time to save Prince Andrea. He even arranged for the Minister of War himself to accompany them to the port in case there was anyone thinking of taking a potshot at the prince.”

“We have our Talbot,” said Gwen. “That doesn’t sound very covert, landing himself in the papers like that.”

“His cover wasn’t blown until after he completed the mission,” said Iris. “This story came out in late December, after he had already received the knighthood. Maybe that was his reward—being allowed to leave the Service, covered in glory.”