Eye of the raven

NINETEEN

McClintock drove off, having promised to find out as quickly as he could about Hector Combe’s blood group, although still not clear about why. For his part, Steven hurried back to his car and drove directly to the Western General Hospital where he rushed up to the ward where he’d last spoken to Samantha Egan. It was going to be a long shot at this time of night — just before ten — but worth a try.

‘ I don’t suppose Sister Egan is still on duty?’ he asked the staff nurse who challenged him when he entered.

The girl shook her head. ‘No way,’ she said in an Australian accent. ‘The night staff took over more than an hour ago.’

Steven screwed up his face. ‘A pity,’ he said. ‘It’s important I speak with her. He showed the girl his ID.

‘ You might still be lucky,’ said the girl. ‘I’m pretty sure she’ll still be in the hospital. She and some of the other sisters were having a little get-together when they went off duty. One of the gang is leaving so they were planning to break out the Bulgarian red and get stuck into some peanuts.’

Steven smiled and asked, ‘Do you know where?’

‘ I think she said it was in the nursing manager’s office. Want me to phone her?’

Steven said not; he’d rather go up there himself. The nurse gave him directions.

The female laughter coming from inside the room stopped when he knocked on the door. After a short delay, a tall woman with a wineglass in her hand opened it. Steven apologised for the intrusion, showed his ID and explained why he was there. The woman turned and said over her shoulder, ‘Sam, it appears the police have finally caught up with you.’

Steven was invited into a small sitting room where he apologised again for interrupting and said to a bemused-looking Samantha Egan that he had to speak to her.

‘ Use my office, Sam,’ said the tall woman.

Samantha led Steven through to an adjoining office and closed the door behind them.

‘ I didn’t expect to see you again,’ she said as she sat down. ‘How can I help this time?’

‘ This is going to sound very strange,’ said Steven. ‘But during our last conversation you told me about some kind of mistake you made in Ronald Lee’s lab over a blood grouping?’

‘ Yes, that’s largely why I gave up lab work,’ said Samantha.

‘ As I recall, you had been asked to group the blood found in the scrapings taken from under Julie Summers’ fingernails?’

‘ That’s right.’

‘ Can you remember what you thought the blood group was?’

‘ I’m not liable to forget,’ said Samantha. ‘We are talking about two simple and straightforward tests here. I was devastated when John told me I’d got both the ABO grouping and the Rhesus factor wrong: I just couldn’t believe it. But when he repeated the tests in front of me it was obvious that he was right. I realised then that if I could screw up something as simple as a blood grouping, there was no hope at all for me in lab work. I thought the blood in the scrapings was O negative: to my embarrassment, it was A positive.’

‘ That is exactly what I wanted to know,’ said Steven.

‘ This is all very mysterious,’ said Samantha. ‘And rather upsetting if I may so. It was something I really didn’t want to be reminded of.’

‘ I’m sorry,’ said Steven. ‘But…’ His mobile phone went off and he excused himself, walking over to the window to take the call. It was McClintock.

‘ For what it’s worth, Combe was blood group, O negative.’

‘ It’s worth a very great deal,’ said Steven. He turned back to Samantha. ‘You didn’t make a mistake,’ he said. ‘John Merton did.’

‘ John did?’ exclaimed Samantha as if it were the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard. ‘John didn’t make mistakes. He was the one who held the lab together.’

‘ Maybe “mistake” was the wrong word,’ said Steven, reluctant to divulge too much. ‘But in this case you were right and he… wasn’t. The blood was O negative.’

Samantha sighed deeply and bowed her head in silence for a few moments then she looked up and smiled. She said, ‘It’s silly but I can’t tell you how much this means to me. I know I was only a junior in the lab at the time and my “mistake” was discovered almost immediately but the thought of having made it has been in the back of my mind ever since. To this day I tend not to trust myself. I always check everything twice on the ward.’

‘ Well, it’s a mistake that never was,’ said Steven. ‘You got the blood group and type absolutely right. I promise you.’

‘ But how could John have got it…?’

‘ Tell me about John Merton,’ interrupted Steven.

‘ I don’t think I can tell you any more than I did last time. I really didn’t know him that well.’

‘ Everyone I’ve spoken to has told me that it was really him who ran the lab and covered up as best he could for Dr Lee’s shortcomings but no one has ever been able to tell me why. Were they close friends?’

‘ I don’t think so,’ said Samantha. ‘In fact, I sort of got the impression that John maybe despised Dr Lee a little.’

‘ What made you think that?’

‘ Just the way he looked at him some times, sort of superior, if you know what I mean. But then, John had a bit of a chip on his shoulder.’

‘ About what?’

‘ Sounds awful but I think it was the old working class thing. He was always making jibes about the ‘establishment’ as he called it. The whole country was run by public school twits in his opinion. Maybe he thought his background was holding him back. I don’t know but he certainly seemed bitter about something.’

‘ Was he married?’

‘ No. The story was that he’d been engaged at one time but the girl had called it off; something else he felt bitter about by all accounts.’

‘ So he didn’t have a girlfriend, or even a boyfriend for that matter?’

‘ None that I ever saw,’ said Samantha. ‘But I think it was definitely girls that John was interested in. I saw the inside door of his locker once. It’s a wonder some of these girls didn’t catch their death of cold.’

Steven smiled. ‘Did you ever visit him at his home?’

‘ Never,’ said Samantha. ‘I don’t think anyone in the lab was ever invited to John’s place. From what he said from time to time I think it must have been full of computers anyway. That seemed to be his big passion in life. He was a bit of a jacket in that respect.’

‘ Anorak,’ Steven corrected with a smile.

‘ God, yes, I’m always getting that wrong.’

Steven thanked Samantha for her help and apologised again for interrupting the party.

‘ I’m so glad that you did,’ said Samantha. ‘You’ve made my day.’

‘ Mine too,’ thought Steven as he returned downstairs and started walking back along the corridor. It was now clear that John Merton was the man he was looking for. It was Merton, not Lee or any of the others who’d been Verdi’s contact in the lab. Instead of stopping Lee making mistakes and generally looking after him, as everyone thought, Merton had actually been introducing mistakes, some of which, he would subsequently ‘discover’ and blame on Lee, others he would deliberately let through so that Verdi could question the evidence and get his clients off. Lee of course, conveniently got the blame for everything. All he needed now was for Verdi to confirm it.

But it was Merton’s role in the Julie Summers case that Steven now concentrated on. Merton had deliberately conned a subordinate in the lab into believing she had made a mistake in typing the blood found under Julie’s fingernails. Being very junior, Samantha Egan had accepted it, especially when Merton had apparently repeated test in front of her but, unknown to her, he must have switched the samples. Group A positive blood wasn’t hard to find. Almost half the population had it. It could even have been his own.

If Ronald Lee had succeeded in carrying out the DNA fingerprinting on the scrapings, as had been his intention, he would have come up with Hector Combe’s DNA fingerprint. Merton must have persuaded him — as he had Samantha Egan — that he had made some mistake and shown him his version of the test, one that matched the profile of the semen belonging to David Little. As this would have appeared to make more sense in the circumstances, Lee must have believed him and been grateful.

So why had Merton gone to such lengths to fit David Little up for a crime that he did not do and what kind of pathological mind lay behind it? It had to be pathological. No normal person could have done such a thing. Samantha Egan had said that Merton had a chip on his shoulder but this was something else. It was several orders of magnitude different. Merton was a lunatic.

There was still no doubt however, that David Little’s semen had been found in Julie’s body. How had Merton managed to arrange that? There was no obvious answer. As far as he knew there was no direct link between Merton and Little and only a secondary one between Verdi and Little’s wife, Charlotte. Steven decided that there were two people he had to speak to. One was Paul Verdi, now that he knew who his associate was and the other was David Little. He had to ask Little just who hated him that much and why.

Knowing that he would probably not be able to see Verdi until the afternoon, Steven set out for Barlinnie first thing in the morning. He found Little a bit better in terms of his health than last time. He was lying on his bunk reading but he was not at all pleased to see him.

‘ I thought I told you to fuck off.’

‘ You had every right to,’ said Steven. ‘I gave you false hope when I didn’t mean to.’

‘ Fine; Te absolvo; now fuck off,’ said Little.

‘ I know that you didn’t rape and murder Julie Summers,’ said Steven.

Little stared at him, his dark sunken eyes betraying nothing. At length he broke the silence and said, ‘Do you know, no one has ever said that to me before. Not even my wife.’

‘ A man named, John Merton framed you. Ring any bells?’

‘ Merton?’ repeated Little. ‘I did know a John Merton once but that was many years ago.’

‘ Could you have given him cause to hate you?’ asked Steven.

‘ We were medical students together,’ said Little. ‘We were friends. We shared a flat.’

Little stopped talking and appeared to be lost in thought.

‘ But something happened between you?’

‘ Neither of us came from a wealthy background so we didn’t have much money to play a round with,’ said Little. ‘We lived on cornflakes and beans and toast for the last couple of weeks of every term then suddenly John wasn’t poor any more. He seemed to have money coming out of his ears. He told me that a rich relative had died but he was lying. I found out that he was supplying a foreign pharmaceutical company with human glands. He was stealing them from corpses in the med school,’ said Little. ‘I tackled him about it told him that it was a stupid and dangerous thing to do because the corpses hadn’t been screened for diseases that could be passed on through the glands he was selling.’

‘ What did the company want them for?’ asked Steven.

‘ They were extracting growth hormone for sale abroad. The practice was banned in this country because of the possibility of transmitting Creuzfeld Jakob Syndrome but the extract was still being used abroad.’

‘ So what did you do?’ asked Steven.

‘ He was my friend so I told him that if he packed it in I’d say no more about it. He promised that he would but a few weeks later I found out that he was still doing it — the sports car was a bit of a give-away. We had a fight: I reported him to the Dean and when the dust settled he was thrown out of medical school.’

‘ He didn’t leave you much choice,’ said Steven.

‘ He didn’t see it that way,’ said Little. ‘He didn’t seem to see that he was doing anything wrong. He had no conscience at all about it. He blamed me for his expulsion and threatened to kill me. He was engaged at the time to a girl named Melissa Felton, one of the other med students: she left him when she found out what he’d been doing. I think he held me responsible for that too but I never saw him again.’

‘ He must have gone elsewhere to do a science degree,’ said Steven. ‘He was working in the police lab at the time of Julie Summers’ murder. He manipulated the forensic evidence to fit you up.’

Little tried to take a deep breath to hide the fact that he was being overcome by emotion. Tears started to run down his face.

‘ But the fact remains that your semen was found in Julie’s body,’ said Steven. ‘Any idea how?’

Little looked at Steven as if the question was ridiculous then he said, ‘Oh Christ, we were donors.’

‘ Sperm donors?’ asked Steven.

‘ First year at med school, one of the research council labs was looking for donors among the students so we went along. We thought it was a hoot. A few minutes with a dirty magazine and a plastic cup and that was it. Easy money. Christ, he must have managed to get my sample from the sperm bank.’

‘ Not too difficult if you know your way around the university labs I suppose’ said Steven.

‘ A hoot,’ said Little distantly. ‘We thought it was a hoot…’ More tears started to flow down the hollows of his cheeks.

‘ Merton was also responsible for the pornography found on your computer,’ said Steven. ‘Your wife worked for an associate of his. That’s how he came to know where you were and what you were doing. It was Merton who supplied the utilities disk to help sort out some problem you’d been having. That’s where the porn came from.’

Little shook his head and spread his scrawny arms. ‘He said he’d kill me. I just didn’t realise that he was deadly serious about it. What’s happened to him? Have you arrested him?’

‘ No, I’ve only just worked out what happened.’

‘ The bastard,’ whispered Little. ‘He took away my life… slowly… one day at a time… each one worse than the one before. And the police? What are they saying to all this?’

‘ They don’t know yet,’ said Steven.

Little looked at him questioningly.

‘ I only worked out last night who’d set you up and now you’ve told me why and how. I’ll break the news to them when I get back to Edinburgh.’

‘ You wouldn’t like to video it for me?’ said Little. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll live long enough to sue the bastards.’

Steven silently agreed.

‘ Who did kill Julie?’ asked Little.

‘ Hector Combe, the psychopath I told you about, the one who confessed to the crime on his deathbed.’

‘ The real killer confessed but nobody listened,’ said Little.

‘ I did,’ said Steven.

Little turned his head — he’d been looking up at the ceiling. ‘Yes, you did and I’m not sure what to say to you. I’ve had no reason to thank anyone for anything in over eight years. I’m out of the way of such things.’

‘ No need,’ said Steven. ‘Try concentrating on positive things. Take your medication and start making plans.’

‘ Plans?’ exclaimed Little. ‘Positive things?’

‘ Even if it’s only psyching yourself up to hear apologies from everyone who owes you one.’ Steven got up to go. I’m going back to set everything in motion.’

Little stopped him with a hand gesture but then couldn’t get the words out. He had to settle for two brief nods that clearly said thank you. The tears emphasised the point.

Once back in Edinburgh, Steven went straight to police headquarters and told McClintock everything. ‘I’m telling you this because I want you to tell Santini. If it came from me it would look and sound like gloating — and it would be. I don’t much care for your boss but to be fair, there was little the police could have done in this instance.’

‘ Thanks for that,’ said McClintock. ‘But facts are facts and there has still been a bloody huge miscarriage of justice.’

‘ Fraid so.’

‘ Do you still want to talk to Verdi?’ asked McClintock.

‘ Please. Any progress?’

‘ Not yet. He’s still denying everything but we got permission to hold him for another forty-eight hours. He still doesn’t know about us having the snuff videos. We’re keeping them as our ace in the hole.’

‘ Mum’s the word,’ said Steven.

‘ Give me a moment,’ said McClintock. He left the room and came back a couple of minutes later, accompanied by a man in shirtsleeves. ‘Sergeant Wills will take you to him,’ he said. ‘I’m off to tell Santini.’

Despite the intensive questioning he’d been undergoing, Verdi still seemed sharp and alert, thought Steven as he entered the room.

‘ Shit, this is all I need,’ he exclaimed when he saw Steven. ‘What the hell do you want?’

‘ Just a few questions,’ said Steven.

‘ I’ll tell you what I told the rest. I don’t know anything about Tracy Manson’s death or any porn videos.’

‘ I’m not concerned with Tracy’s death; that’s a police matter. Same goes for the porn.’

‘ So what the hell do you want?’

‘ I want you to tell me about your association with John Merton.’

Verdi’s eyes narrowed at the name but he said, ‘Never heard of him.’

‘ Yes you have. He deliberately screwed up forensic evidence and then gave you the nod so you could expose the flaws in court and get your clients off — the ones who could afford it that is. Three of them to be precise, all big name criminals and all three acquitted.’

‘ Don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘ You do, Verdi, but I’m not even interested in them. It’s the Julie Summers case I want to know about.’

‘ Still don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Steven leaned closer and said, ‘You are entirely dependent on your people keeping quiet, aren’t you Verdi? They keep quiet and you’ll look after them and their families handsomely. Isn’t that the deal?’

Verdi said nothing.

‘ The trouble with that is that it falls to pieces when you go broke and that’s just what’s about to happen.’

‘ What are you talking about?’ snapped Verdi.

‘ The money, Verdi, the money that links you to an international criminal operation involving pornography, maybe even some of the money that the villains paid to you and Merton for getting them off. I know where it is and how to get my hands on it. The police don’t but I do.’

‘ Dream on,’ said Verdi as Steven sat back.

Steven took the card out of his pocket and read out the first number.

Verdi winced but kept his composure. ‘I take it these are your lottery numbers,’ he said. ‘Let me tell you, it’s a mugs’ game. You’d be better off buying Premium Bonds.’

Steven read out the second account number and then finally, the third.’

Verdi swallowed but didn’t say anything.

‘ Ring a bell?’ Steven asked. ‘Or should I say, sing a song?’

‘ What?’ croaked Verdi.

‘ Eleven letters, usually sings in Berkeley Square,’ said Steven. ‘How am I doing?’

The blood drained from Verdi’s face. ‘You’re serious?’ he said. ‘The police don’t know?’

‘ They don’t,’ said Steven. ‘I’m the only one.’

‘ How about a deal?’

‘ Tell me what I want to know and I’ll give you the card back.’

‘ Not a word to the police?’

‘ Not a word.’

‘ All right, I did have something going with John Merton.’

‘ How did you meet him?’

‘ We met at a club in the early nineties. Let’s say we had a mutual interest in young ladies.’

‘ And their exploitation,’ said Steven.

Verdi ignored the comment. ‘John was a computer buff. He convinced me that that was where the real money was to be made. All we needed was a few willing girls and some film equipment. I had a few friends who were in the sauna business so we pooled our resources and made a few videos. John distributed them via the net and they went like shit off a shovel. Then I found out what his day job was and we decided to help each other out there as well.’

‘ He faked evidence for you?’

‘ Fucked more like. He messed it up and I brought it to the attention of the court.’

‘ Tell me about the Julie Summers case. That was different.’

‘ Yeah, that was different. God help me, I don’t know too much about that. None of it was anything to do with me. It was John’s thing. He had some bee in his bonnet about the guy who was charged.’

‘ David Little?’

‘ That’s right. John maintained that he was as guilty as sin and was determined to see him go down for life. The DNA fingerprint evidence against Little was perfect but John said that some of the other stuff was a bit iffy. He asked me not to challenge it so I didn’t but that bloody case was just about the end of us.’

‘ How so?’

‘ Lee, John’s boss was a piss artist. He didn’t suspect anything about what had been going on until the Summers case. John could usually convince him that he must have screwed up but this time he kept on arguing with John about some gel pattern I think he called it. He refused to accept that he’d made a mistake. The drunken old bastard overheard John telling me on the phone about it in one of his sober moments and checked up on the phone number afterwards. He got in touch with Seymour and Nicholson to say that he thought that something ‘gravely unprofessional’ had been going on.

The old queens called me in and made noises about calling in the police. I had to point out that they had been sharing handsomely in the money I’d been bringing in to the firm and even if they didn’t go down with me, it would be the end of the line for dear old S amp; N. I put forward the alternative of my resignation from the firm with a bit of a pay-off and they went for it.’

‘ What about Lee?’

‘ I had a word with him.’

‘ What does that mean?’

‘ I told him that S amp;N were not going to take the matter any further so there would be no support for him from that direction. If he tried doing something on his own he would be exposed publicly as a drunk who couldn’t run a pie stall let alone a forensic lab. On the other hand, if he forgot about the whole thing he would be paid generously for his continuing silence. Guess which option he went for?’

‘ When did you last hear from him?’

‘ Funnily, a few weeks ago. He called me to say that some nosy bastard was asking questions about the evidence in the Summers case. I suppose that was you. He was up to high doh about it.’

‘ So you killed him in case he started talking about it?’

‘ Christ no, I didn’t give a damn about the Summers case. It was nothing to do with me. All I did was not ask a few questions.’

‘ Did you tell John Merton about Lee’s call?’

‘ As a matter of fact I did.’

‘ So you’re still in touch with him?’

‘ He runs the website.’

‘ And finds the customers?’

‘ No comment.’

‘ Where can I find him?’

‘ I haven’t seen him in ages.’

‘ Then how?’

‘ Through the website. Aren’t computers wonderful?’

‘ So he could be anywhere?’

‘ You got it. Can I have the card now?’

Steven handed over the card without another word and left the cell.