Free Passing Strange by Catherine Aird

year.”
    â€œKilled?” said Sloan, instantly alert. “How?”
    â€œThe complete facts haven’t been established,” responded Hebbinge carefully, “but it is believed that he was shot with a poisoned dart or arrow –”
    â€œJust a minute.” Sloan held up a hand. “That rings a bell.”
    â€œYou may have read about it, Inspector. There was a good deal reported in the newspapers at the time.”
    â€œRichard Mellows,” murmured Sloan slowly, light dawning. “You’re not by any chance talking about Mellows the anthropologist, are you?”
    â€œAh, you know of him, do you, Inspector?”
    Sloan nodded. There could be very few people in the country who didn’t know that Richard Mellows had been an anthropologist – an anthropologist who had been shot with a poisoned dart somewhere in South America. While only the famous newspaper whose name and funds were attached to the Mellows Expedition had published exclusive dispatches from Richard Mellows covering every inch of his journey into the interior, every single newspaper in Great Britain had printed the news of his being killed. There is no copyright in death.
    And none in speculation, either, if Sloan remembered the newspaper reports properly. On the surface Richard Mellows’s journeyings had had an old-fashioned – almost nineteenth-century – ring about them. He had been living en famille so to speak with a primitive but not unfriendly grub-eating tribe and collecting data for all the learned anthropological and sociological societies you could think of. He was assembling botanical specimens for all the botanical institutions that came to mind. He was on the look-out for inaccuracies in the maps of the region. He had been retained by at least three zoos.
    All this naturally led the gossip columnists to the inevitable conclusion that he was working for the British Secret Service – or worse.
    Worse in this case meant the CIA.
    â€œRichard Mellows,” said the land agent, “was the Brigadier’s nephew. There had been a quarrel, you know.” He winced. “A bad one, I’m afraid. That was why the connection wasn’t ever mentioned here in the village.”
    Detective-Inspector Sloan let his eye run over the Priory and the land in which it was set. “And all this would have been his if he’d lived?”
    â€œIndeed, yes.” The agent followed his gaze and said, “It’s a far cry from the middle of South America, isn’t it?”
    Sloan thought about Messrs Terlingham, Terlingham and Owlet, Solicitors and Notaries Public. Those orderly men of the law liked to have a piece of stiff paper, duly signed and sealed, certifying every rite of passage from birth through vaccination and marriage to death. Hostile tribes didn’t go in for such documentary refinement.
    â€œWas there,” he asked carefully, “any doubt about Mellows being dead?”
    â€œI am told,” said Edward Hebbinge soberly, “that his body was returned to the tribe with whom he had been living by the tribe which had killed him.” He paused and added distantly “I understand that that is a custom of the country.”
    Messrs Terlingham, Terlingham and Owlet predictably hadn’t liked that. Richard Mellows had, it appeared, been buried without benefit of either clergy or documentation. Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador had made due enquiries through such diplomatic channels as were open to him. Though these all stopped far short of the hinterland, they all confirmed that an Englishman had indeed been killed beyond the Upper Reaches of the river Tishra. It was not confirmation on a par with a certificate from Somerset House but in the end it had been good enough for Terlingham, Terlingham and Owlet.
    â€œHis death has been established, then,” concluded Sloan when he heard this. He thought of the broad Almstone acres awaiting care