Little Knell Read online

  ‘The dogs that did bark in the night,’ said Sloan. ‘Mind you, Pearson and Worrow guessed that was what Derek had done, although they didn’t know who had bought the policy.’

  ‘Catch them shopping a client…’

  ‘All the same, the accountants should have told the proper authorities they suspected something,’ said Sloan righteously. ‘So we’d better let Colin Thornhill go now, hadn’t we, sir? Before he sues us for wrongful arrest…’

  * * *

  ‘This is Berebury District General Hospital. Is Detective Inspector Sloan available to take a call?’ said a woman’s voice.

  ‘Speaking,’ said Sloan, suppressing a yawn brought about by an unhealthy combination of tiredness and hunger.

  ‘That you, Sloan?’ said another voice. ‘Dabbe here. Just reporting on that post-mortem.’

  ‘Which one?’ enquired Detective Inspector Sloan. There had, after all, been rather a lot of them this week in which the police had had more than a passing interest.

  ‘Rodoheptah. We had to put him on the back burner when the Goddard body came in.’

  Sloan could have wished for a happier metaphor, but he held his peace.

  ‘We’ve just got him down as Rodoheptah. Is that right? We don’t have a Christian name.’

  ‘He wasn’t Christian.’ Offhand, Sloan couldn’t think of whom or what Rodoheptah would have worshipped: Ra, the sun god, most probably. Or had it been Osiris, ruler of the hereafter?

  ‘Sorry, I was forgetting. Anyway,’ the doctor airily dismissed theism and went back to his own subject, ‘the post-mortem examination was very interesting. These palaeopathologists certainly know their stuff.’

  Sloan said he was glad to hear it.

  ‘Of course, with a truly mummified body there is quite a lot of material preserved that is lost in the ordinary way.’

  Sloan wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to think about the ordinary way. Certainly not as applied to Jill Carter, innocent victim, and Wayne Goddard, not so innocent victim but still not deserving of an early death. Or Peter Caversham, as good as half dead.

  ‘All of which means,’ continued the pathologist, ‘that Professor Miles Upton and I have been able to identify the probable cause of his death.’

  ‘Really, doctor?’ Sloan pulled his notebook towards him and tried to take a proper interest in the year 2000 BC or thereabouts.

  ‘Sand.’

  ‘Sand?’

  ‘And the dry dusty climate. Sandstorms would have been a great trouble to him. Difficult to get away from it, there.’

  ‘I can see that, doctor, but…’

  ‘Leading in the case of this mummy to sand pneumoconiosis. Professor Upton found massive fibrosis of the lungs, which I was able to confirm endoscopically. And we’ve just had the histology report back.’

  It was a disease of the lung that was going to kill Howard Air, too, thought Detective Inspector Sloan as he made another note. Pollution of one sort or another was an older problem than he had imagined, then. Murder, on the other hand, wasn’t. The ancient Egyptians had always experienced murder – and worse, much worse.

  ‘Sand was ever their great difficulty out there,’ the pathologist was saying. ‘They couldn’t prevent it getting into their food as well as their lungs and the grit ground their teeth down.’

  ‘Which must have made eating difficult,’ said Sloan, conscious that he himself was in real need of food now.

  ‘Very.’

  ‘So the coroner can have his post-mortem report after all,’ mused Sloan. And, although he didn’t say so, the superintendent his Sunday morning’s round of golf.

  ‘On an adult male, aged about thirty, date of death unknown,’ said the pathologist.

  ‘Isn’t science wonderful?’ murmured Sloan, deciding that perhaps they would have their kitchen floor covering renewed. It was, after all, important to keep matters in proportion …

  By the same author

  The Religious Body

  A Most Contagious Game

  Henrietta Who?

  The Complete Steel

  A Late Phoenix

  His Burial Too

  Slight Mourning

  Parting Breath

  Some Die Eloquent

  Passing Strange

  Last Respects

  Harm’s Way

  A Dead Liberty

  The Body Politic

  A Going Concern

  Injury Time (Short Stories)

  After Effects

  Stiff News

  LITTLE KNELL. Copyright © 2000 by Catherine Aird. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

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  ISBN 0-312-26983-8

  First published in Great Britain by Macmillan, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Ltd

  First U.S. Edition: April 2001

  eISBN 9781466873513

  First eBook edition: May 2014