CYRUS MEHR WAS BURIED IN RICHMOND, where he had lived with his wife and his sons in a house that looked out onto the green. Their number, Webster was almost sorry to discover, was in the telephone directory. The articles published after his death had reported only that Mehr had been killed in Isfahan while on a buying trip. They hadn’t mentioned how. His body had been found in his hotel room and local police were acting on the assumption that robbery had been the motive: the original reports, distributed by the Iranian state news agency, had mentioned that a number of receipts had been found in his possession, and that the most likely culprit was a “collaborator” in Mehr’s “smuggling conspiracy.” They had not identified the objects assumed to be missing, but speculated that they were “national treasures” stolen from museums and archeological digs. There had been a struggle, but neither Mehr’s wallet nor his passport had been taken. This account had been picked up by the international agencies and then by most British newspapers, who had added little more than some basic biographical information about the man himself.
