Read Online After Effects by Catherine Aird - Free Book Online Page B

studying the dashboard.
    Christopher Granger advanced curiously, his dog at his heel.
    The farmer’s son might until today have been something of a stranger to human death but his acquaintanceship with it was being rapidly extended.
    That this man was dead, Granger was never in any doubt at all after he had seen him. It wasn’t so much the appearance of the body that convinced him as the fact that there was a length of flexible tubing leading from the exhaust pipe to the almost closed window behind the driver’s seat.
    Without thinking Christopher Granger opened the driver’s door and slipped his hand inside the car to turn off the engine. As he did so the man’s body canted over the door sill towards him. He fielded the dead weight quite as automatically and expertly as if it had been that of a sheep. As he did so his eye was caught by a boldly labelled document folder lying on the passenger seat beside the dead man.
    Re-energized and shaking slightly in a way that his country-bred mother would have called ‘shreugly,’ Christopher Granger made his way back to Willow End farmhouse very quickly indeed.
    The words ‘Cardigan Protocol’ written on the label of the document folder meant nothing to him at all.
    Then.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    That instrument of torture, the night bell.
    â€˜You’ve done what?’ barked Superintendent Leeyes down the telephone line from Berebury Police Station to St Ninian’s Hospital at Kinnisport.
    â€˜Found Dr Meggie,’ repeated Sloan.
    â€˜And about time, too,’ grumbled Leeyes. ‘You’ve been looking for him all morning and that should be long enough.’
    â€˜Dead,’ said Sloan.
    â€˜I’ve had that man Gordon Galloway on to me again about his mother,’ complained the superintendent. He stopped suddenly. ‘What was that you said, Sloan?’
    â€˜Dr Meggie’s been found dead, sir.’
    â€˜He has, has he—’
    â€˜In his car.’
    â€˜Find the car, find the man,’ said Leeyes sententiously.
    â€˜With a tube leading from the exhaust pipe.’
    â€˜Any note?’
    â€˜One hasn’t been found,’ said Sloan precisely. ‘Only a file with the results of some drug trials he’s been working on.’
    â€˜Remorse?’ suggested Leeyes with interest.
    â€˜Too soon to say, sir.’
    â€˜Not, mind you, that I think any of ’em feel it. Knocked out of them all at medical school, if you ask me.’
    â€˜Very probably, sir.’ He cleared his throat. ‘We’re leaving for Larking now.’ He had chosen his words with accuracy. If Crosby drove there as fast as he usually did then there was no guarantee that they would get there in one piece; or even that they would arrive at Willow End Farm at all.
    â€˜Don’t let Crosby play whacky races on the way there,’ said Leeyes. ‘Police cars come expensive.’
    â€˜I’ll try,’ promised Sloan, adding, ‘Of course, sir, Dr Meggie’s death may be quite unconnected with Mrs Galloway’s’
    â€˜Find out.’
    â€˜Dr Byville,’ volunteered Sloan, ‘seemed unconcerned enough about her when we spoke to him at Berebury.’
    â€˜Nothing at all to go by,’ said Leeyes darkly. ‘Remember, Sloan, that doctors get so used to people dying on their hands that they carry it off quite differently from normal people.’
    â€˜He did tell us that Mrs Galloway was going to die anyway,’ pointed out Sloan.
    â€˜Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ retorted the superintendent unanswerably. ‘What you mustn’t forget, Sloan, is that anonymous call we had here at the station saying the old lady had been treated with something funny. There’s nothing routine about that—’
    â€˜I won’t forget, sir,’ Sloan promised—and the very next minute did just that.
    He forgot absolutely everything as Detective Constable