The coroner duly obliged. ‘Or it was slipped to him shortly before he left the party he’d been attending,’ Clement said with satisfaction. ‘I doubt he took it deliberately since he knew he would soon be driving. And people intending suicide, as you well know, tend to do so tucked up in bed or in a chair, with a large dose of some alcohol or other of their choice at hand,’ he theorised out loud. ‘Taking a sleeping dose and then driving is a pretty haphazard way of going about it too. There would be no way you could be sure of dying, even if you did bury your car in a brick wall. Not to mention the possibility that you might crash into another car and take some poor innocent soul with you.’

Clement leaned back in his chair, aware that he was feeling pleasantly excited. Oh, not because a man had died, but because it was beginning to look more and more likely that someone had thought they’d got away with murder.

And they hadn’t.

But he shouldn’t rush things. ‘How likely is it he could have taken it by accident?’ Clement asked, then realising he wasn’t being clear enough, he added, ‘I mean, could you tell in what form the barbiturate had been administered? Because if he had to be injected with it …’

‘No, not by needle,’ Dr Carey said at once. ‘I think it was probably taken orally – and more likely than not in a regular sleeping draught form. We’re running more tests now to be sure, but I think it’s almost certain that a powder was dissolved in water or some other liquid. So it’s possible he didn’t know what he was drinking. I think when we’ve got it narrowed down, it’ll turn out to be a fairly bog-standard sleeping powder. You know – the kind that millions of sleepless souls and insomniacs toss back every night with their Horlicks.’

‘Over-the-counter stuff even?’ Clement asked, with a sigh. If that was the case, they would not catch their killer by being able to track down an incriminating purchase of some obscure poison. Or from a GP’s prescription.

‘Probably,’ Dr Carey said cheerfully.

Clement called him something distinctly slanderous. His friend responded by informing him even more cheerfully that Clement, as coroner, now needed to inform the constabulary of the fact that they had – at the very least – an ‘interesting’ death on their hands.