Passing Strange Page 13

  Stones were not the only things to have sermons in them. There was obviously material in shaving brushes. Reflections in a mirror, you might say.

  He had gone back to the possibilities of the meek inheriting the earth. There was the eminently tenable theory that the tribes which lived in the Kalahari Desert in Africa might well be the sole survivors of nuclear holocaust because they lived in the world’s only totally windless zone.

  That might one day hold water.

  And there was the father of modern medicine, Sir William Osler. The great physician had noted that the meek shall inherit the earth because the aggressive achiever often died prematurely. ‘Kindness, gentleness, tolerance, generosity and charity’ were ingredients for the prevention of coronary heart disease as well as the Christian way of life.

  But none of that would do for today.

  A very different homily was called for.

  His sermon for today would have to be about the murder and yet not about the murder.

  The Reverend Thomas Jervis, Rector of the parish, climbed the pulpit stairs, reached confidently for his notes and began to preach about the Mammon of unrighteousness.

  His eyes strayed over his congregation while he delivered himself of his set piece. Everyone was there whom he had expected to see – Sam Watkinson in the churchwarden’s pew, marked by its rod of office, Herbert and Millicent Kershaw, churchgoers since they became prosperous, Edward Hebbinge in the Priory pew but not in the front seat where the Brigadier and his wife used to sit, Miss Tompkins …

  Unrighteousness was a good old-fashioned word. Everyone knew what he was talking about when he used it. There could never be anything righteous about the slaying of a sentient being.

  While the law of the land – that law which was Cæsar’s – took the view that the slaying of one person by another, with malice aforethought, was an offence against the Queen’s Peace the Rector went back to the Ten Commandments.

  Thou shalt not kill.

  It had been written on tablets of stone.

  It was attention to Mammon, pronounced the Reverend Thomas Jervis unequivocally, that led human sinners to break them.

  There was, he had felt, no need to bring the Garden of Eden into his discourse. He felt reasonably sure that sex had played no part in the life or death of Joyce Cooper. She had had that uncherished look about her of a woman ‘who had never been asked’. He suspected that no willing Barkis had ever troubled that spinster’s lonely dreams.

  Mammon, though, must come in somewhere.

  He ran his eye round the church again. The murderer might be there.

  Fred Pearson and his wife were sitting at the back. So was Dora Smithson. And Mrs Wellstone, the woman who had won first prize for her unworthy tomatoes.

  On the other hand the murderer might not be there.

  Cedric Milsom never came to church, nor did his wife, – the equine world had a prior call on her time, and womanizing on his. The doctor wasn’t there, nor Ken Walls. The Rector strongly suspected that Ken Walls had to cook the Sunday lunch.

  And if rumour were right Miss Richenda Mellows was mewed up in the Police Station. Of Maurice Esdaile there was no sign in the parish at all.

  “Nevertheless, brethren …”

  He led into his finish: There was the doctrine of redemption, the grace – the unbought grace – unbought by mankind, that is – of penitence and forgiveness …

  In the circumstances, before the Blessing, he hurried over the presentation of the offering brought up to the altar by Sam Watkinson and his fellow churchwarden, even though it was the largest church collection since Easter. It didn’t seem proper to dwell on it.

  On the way out of the church afterwards Fred Pearson nudged his wife. “Did you see the flowers over there? Mrs Kershaw did them.”

  “Very nice, I’m sure,” whispered Mrs Pearson.

  “They brought them over to the church after the Show yesterday.”

  Mrs Pearson nodded and then said, “Look, Fred, there’s Mr Turling over there.”

  Fred tugged at her sleeve. “Come along, Ruby. We must be getting along.”

  “But, Fred, he’s waving.”

  Fred would clearly have preferred him to have been drowning, not waving.

  “He shouldn’t be in church,” said Fred Pearson, going a plethoric red.

  “Now, Fred …”

  “It’s no place for a man like that.”

  “Fred!”

  “How he can show his face at all in the village after last year’s Show, I really don’t know.”

  “Fred, you’re speaking in church, remember.”

  “A man like that shouldn’t be allowed in.”

  Mrs Pearson was clearly scandalized. “Fred, shush, do …”

  “Can’t keep him out, I suppose,” grumbled Fred, “even if he did use furniture polish on his apples.”

  “He was asked to leave the Horticultural Society,” said his wife. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Thrown out, you mean,” said her husband. The Society’s motto was ‘Friendship through the fruits of the earth.’

  “Fred, people will hear you.”

  “I’m only whispering,” said Fred Pearson clearly.

  Mrs Pearson set her jaw. “Fred Pearson, I’m ashamed of you.”

  It was unfortunate that Derek Turling came up behind the Pearsons just as they reached the church door. There was no escape for Fred. He was sandwiched by the crowd.

  “I’m really getting somewhere with my sweet peas,” said Turling offensively.

  Fred Pearson gritted his teeth. “You are, are you!”

  “I’ll have a true yellow by next year, Pearson, you see if I don’t.”

  The congregation was making its collective way to the outside world. It bore Fred inexorably along with it. He found himself taking his turn to shake hands with the Rector.

  “Ah, Fred,” said that well-meaning cleric kindly, “no more horticultural problems, I hope …”

  The only sermon that Sloan had heard that morning was delivered by Superintendent Leeyes. After he’d finished a round of golf.

  It was on the presentation of clear reports.

  “I’ve got the picture, Sloan,” said Leeyes testily. “Don’t rub it in.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “An orphan girl alone in a primitive camp in the jungle somewhere in South America near the source of a river …”

  “The Upper Tishra,” supplied Sloan unobtrusively. Stephen Terlingham had admitted to having had his own atlas out more than once since Richenda Mellows had appeared in Calleshire.

  “Without a passport?”

  “Exactly, sir.” Sloan coughed. “Mr Terlingham said that the possession of a passport was not evidence of identity in the sense that he needed it but that it would have helped to clarify the picture.”

  “Clarify the picture!” Leeyes was highly scornful of the lawyer’s euphemism. “I like that. Considering that what he’s looking for is sure and certain proof that she’s who she says she is …”

  “I think,” said Sloan profoundly, “that what our friends Terlingham, Terlingham and Owlet are looking for is a Court to do their deciding for them.”

  Leeyes changed his tune. “Ah, that’s different.”

  “And the girl won’t play,” added Sloan. This no longer came as any surprise to him.

  “Ha!”

  “If she made a claim the matter could be tested by the court.”

  “Well?”

  “She won’t sue. In fact she won’t institute any litigation at all. Says her father had warned her about lawyers.”

  Leeyes rubbed his hand. “Good for him.”

  “As things are at the moment,” reported Sloan, “Terlingham, Terlingham and Owlet have to decide – as executors – whether the estate should go to this girl – at least be placed in the hands of her Trustees until she’s twenty-five – or whether it should go to the party who’s next in line.”

  “Stephen Terlingham won’t like that,”
forecast Leeyes with certainty. “Not the deciding bit. Legal eagles never do.”

  “No.” Sloan had felt that the solicitor had not been sorry to talk to him about Richenda Mellows. “So, sir, there was the girl stuck in South America without her passport.”

  “It hadn’t done her a lot of good, had it,” observed Leeyes trenchantly.

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “Or her father, come to that.” The Superintendent grunted. “Not with that other tribe.”

  “Which tribe, sir?”

  “For your information, Sloan, a British Passport carries a clearly written request to all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance.”

  Sloan hesitated. According to Stephen Terlingham, the fate that had befallen Richard Mellows, anthropologist, had gone gruesomely beyond ‘let or hindrance’. He chose his next words with care: Superintendent Leeyes was in some respects a man of the nineteenth century and was not yet reconciled to the absence of the death penalty.

  Or to the passing of gunboats as instruments of diplomacy.

  Calling a battleship a Task Force was the modern parlance for the same thing. And it didn’t make it any different – or more effective either.

  “I don’t think, sir,” he said, “that the people who killed Richard Mellows were readers.”

  Leeyes grunted.

  The writ of Her Britannic Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs wasn’t what it had been either but Sloan did not say that now. He knew enough about red rags and bulls to keep them apart when he could.

  “What did she do?” enquired the Superintendent down the line, “after the natives had been so very – er – unfriendly?”

  “There was quite a bit of bureaucratic hassle while she tried to get back to this country. The Embassy treated her as a Distressed British Subject Abroad.” Sloan was quoting the solicitor on this though he’d already put a man at the Police Station onto checking it.

  Richenda Mellows was still saying nothing at all: he’d been back to check on that personally.

  “Then she came home,” said Sloan.

  “Home?” Leeyes pounced.

  “To Mother England anyway.” Sloan could have kicked himself. If ever a word had both undertones and overtones it was the word ‘home’.

  “Not to Almstone?”

  “To London.”

  “England,” pronounced Leeyes, “but not Home and not Beauty.” The Great Wen held no attractions for the Superintendent.

  “More like England, Home and Duty, sir. She had to earn her living.”

  “Not, surely, if she was coming into the Priory estate at Almstone,” said Leeyes smartly. “There’s a tidy bit of land out there surely, isn’t there?”

  “Best part of a thousand acres, I should say,” replied Sloan. The estate map hung opposite the telephone in Edward Hebbinge’s study and he had got to know it quite well the night before. “Abbot’s Hall and Dorter End Farms are about three hundred acres apiece and Home Farm’s all of four hundred, if not more.”

  Leeyes grunted. “Nice work if you can get it.”

  “The trouble, sir, is that she didn’t behave at first as if she was coming into money.” That was one of the many things that were puzzling Terlingham, Terlingham and Owlet. “She went into lodgings.”

  “Hardly to the manner born,” commented the Superintendent.

  “And got herself a job.”

  “With no education and no training? What as?”

  “In an office. As a filing clerk.”

  “At least,” he said acidly, “she didn’t go into politics and get given office.”

  Sloan withheld immediate comment.

  “Then what?” enquired Leeyes.

  “Then nothing,” said Sloan, looking out of the window. It was a lovely day.

  “Nonsense, Sloan,” barked Leeyes. “Something must have happened.”

  “Mrs Agatha Mellows died, of course.”

  “That was something.”

  “And Messrs Terlingham, Terlingham and Owlet got cracking.”

  “That’s something, too. What did they do?”

  “They started looking for Richard Mellows at his last known address.”

  “How?”

  “They wrote to him.”

  “In the jungle?”

  “At his London Club.”

  “His Club?” echoed Leeyes hollowly.

  “The Homo Sapiens,” said Sloan. The Superintendent could always put his finger on a weak spot. Perhaps that was how he’d got to be Superintendent. “All the mail for Richard Mellows went there for him because he was away so much. Terlingham, Terlingham and Owlet didn’t know at that stage that he was dead, you see. The news about him didn’t break until later.”

  “And she collected the letter, I suppose,” Leeyes groaned.

  “She says she did.” Sloan shrugged his shoulders in an empty room. “Someone did, anyway.”

  “An open sesame to fraud.”

  “That’s what Stephen Terlingham’s afraid of.”

  “I take it anyone could have known that the Homo Sapiens was his Club?”

  “Listed in Who’s Who,” agreed Sloan flatly.

  “So that almost anyone could have picked up that letter from the hall of the Homo Sapiens?”

  “Almost,” said Sloan. “I should say that Stephen Terlingham’s a worried man myself.”

  “The life of the father …”

  “An open book,” said Sloan neatly. He corrected that. “About ten open books, actually. All of them published.”

  “There are far too many travel books about,” said Leeyes.

  “As well as writing books,” said Sloan, “Richard Mellows sent his records home to the Anthropological and Ethnographic section of the Greatorex Library every three months. Diaries, letters, scientific findings – the lot.”

  Leeyes pounced. “Has the girl been there?”

  “Frequently. Terlingham checked on that straightaway. She said she’s looking at them with a view to publication.”

  Leeyes paused. “Richard Mellows knew all about the danger out there, then.”

  “And Stephen Terlingham knows all about the danger of handing over the Priory estate to someone who could have mugged up everything she needed to know.” Sloan had another thought and added, “Everything anyone knew, sir, come to that. It’s all there on paper in the Greatorex Library. And he says that the girl’s word perfect on the Brazilian years.”

  “What about the Trustees?” Superintendent Leeyes had cast himself in the role of Devil’s Advocate – and found that it suited him.

  “A dead loss from an identification point of view, sir. There are three – all appointed donkey’s years ago by the Brigadier. Just as a contingency measure, in the event of a minor succeeding. The Rector of the Parish for the time being, the Brigadier’s London Bank, and the solicitors themselves.”

  “The three estates of the realm,” murmured Leeyes ambiguously. He said, “A good memory could get an impostor by, couldn’t it?”

  “Terlingham,” said Sloan sagely, “has got himself into a difficult position. He’s executor and requires to be convinced beyond reasonable doubt that this girl is Richenda Hilary Pemberton Mellows.”

  “And he isn’t.” Superintendent Leeyes didn’t like people who had sole authority – unless, of course, they happened to be Superintendents of Police in the Calleshire Force, which was very different.

  “There’s a lot of money riding on his next move.”

  “Photographs,” said Leeyes suddenly.

  “There are plenty of snaps of a young girl holding this creature and that up to the camera but no really full face close-ups of the girl herself. Terlingham says he’s seen them but there’s nothing that anyone’s prepared to do some proper swearing to. Actually, he tackled her about that.”

  “Well?”

  “She said the jungle wasn’t a studio and anyway her father was more interested in animals than in people.”

/>   “That figures. Not every father would have taken the girl out there with him in the first place.”

  “He seems,” said Sloan warmly, “to have treated her more like a baby gorilla than a daughter.”

  Leeyes snapped his fingers. “Sloan, what about speech?”

  “Speech, sir?”

  “In My Fair Lady,” said the Superintendent impatiently, “Professor Higgins could pin a man down to Hoxton by the way he said something.”

  “I gather,” said Sloan, “that there was nothing in Richenda Mellows’s manner of speech that assisted the solicitors one way or the other.”

  “It helped them get Arthur Orton,” Leeyes informed him gratuitously.

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “The Tichborne Claimant.”

  Out of his own schoolboy memory Sloan had only been able to dredge up Perkin Warbeck. And he – poor lad – had had backers. Richenda Mellows hadn’t any of those. Or at least not noticeably.

  Which was interesting.

  “How he spoke and a lot of other things as well,” said Leeyes, adding nostalgically “They still had hard labour when they sentenced him.”

  “According to Stephen Terlingham,” reported Sloan punctiliously, “the BBC World Service would seem to have had a formative influence on Richenda Mellows in every way.” He ought to be giving some thought to the absence of any visible backers of the girl. That might be important. Someone, somewhere, somehow stood to gain out of the whole imbroglio. And the sooner he, Sloan, found out who it was the better.

  “And Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation,” said Superintendent Leeyes unexpectedly. Lord Reith would have been pleased.

  “Quite so, sir,” said Sloan. He didn’t know yet who had attempted to buy prosperity at the expense of Joyce Mary Cooper’s life but he would find out.

  Given time.

  “By the way, Sloan …”

  “Sir?” He looked out of the window again at the sunshine – the sunshine that the District Nurse should have been enjoying.

  Leeyes said, “I told them you’d see the Press at twelve-thirty. That all right?”