Free A Late Phoenix by Catherine Aird Page B

surrounding earth. Burns here checked.”
    Sloan nodded. There was, apparently, to be no easy way out.
    Dabbe waved an arm. “We’ll take the little one first, shall we, Inspector?”
    Sloan started. “The little one, Doctor?”
    â€œOver here.” The pathologist pointed to a separate little pile of bones on another bench. They were gray and discolored. “There is no doubt, Inspector, about the pregnancy though much of the cartilaginous content has gone, and by Hasse’s rule …”
    â€œHasse’s rule?”
    â€œThat’s right. The age of a fetus may be estimated approximately by Hasse’s rule.”
    â€œCan it?” said Sloan cautiously.
    â€œUp to the fifth month the length in centimeters, the lower limbs being included, equals the square of the age in months, and after the fifth month the length in centimeters equals the age multiplied by five.”
    â€œI see, sir,” said Sloan impassively. It was all right for the doctor. He could blind the coroner with science as much as he liked. He didn’t have a superintendent breathing down his neck who always wanted to know the reason why. He could see Detective Constable Crosby still struggling to write it all down. He only hoped he got it right. He knew for a fact that Crosby was only up to the sort of mental arithmetic where you took away the number you first thought of.
    â€œI,” went on Dr. Dabbe cheerfully, “aided by Hasse’s rule, calculate that the fetus was between five and six months advanced at the time of death.”
    â€œQuite so.” Sloan coughed. “That might very well be a help in identification in the end.”
    â€œAnd it very well might not,” retorted the pathologist promptly.
    â€œOh?”
    Dr. Dabbe turned and pointed to the adult skeleton on the other dissection table. “There was something missing from the proximal phalanx of her fourth left metacarpal.”
    â€œHer what?”
    â€œHer ring finger,” translated Dr. Dabbe.
    â€œNo ring?” said Sloan swiftly.
    â€œNo. If you ask me, Sloan,” said Dr. Dabbe solemnly, “I’d say the baby was on time but the wedding was late. There was no ring in the ground anyway—at least, not when the left arm was unearthed—but as to before …”
    â€œI shouldn’t have said the body was accessible enough to have been robbed earlier,” said Sloan slowly. “If it had been, then I think it would have been found before now.”
    â€œA good point,” conceded the pathologist. “Quite apart from anything else, of course, Inspector, I must remind you that there would also have been considerable mephitis.”
    â€œMephitis, Doctor?” That was a new one on Sloan. He kept his tone deliberately neutral—in spite of the fact that he always supposed doctors used words such as this on purpose to cut lay people—like patients and policemen—down to size.
    The pathologist’s eyebrows rippled. He intoned in a parsonic manner, “A pestilential emanation from the earth, Sloan.” The phrase certainly did have a biblical ring about it. “More shortly, stench.”
    Sloan breathed more easily.
    That was a word Constable Crosby could both spell and understand. He heard his sigh of relief.
    â€œNow to the mother …” said Dr. Dabbe.
    It was Sloan’s turn to sigh.
    There was the doctor using an ordinary human expression in the medical sense. It was all very confusing and not really very fair. Anything looking less like a mother than the skeleton would have been difficult to imagine …
    â€œIn my opinion,” dictated the pathologist, moving across to the postmortem table, “the bones are those of a woman aged between twenty-two and twenty-five at the time of death. She was of medium height—five foot five. As you see, Sloan, we have the complete skeleton here so that figure is reached by direct measurement