Eye of the raven

TWO

‘ Julie Summers?’ exclaimed Detective Inspector Peter McClintock of Lothian and Borders Police, his red face showing disbelief. ‘Combe confessed to killing Julie Summers?’

‘ That’s what the report says,’ confirmed his sergeant, Mark Ryman.

McClintock maintained his look of incredulity as he firmly shook his head and said, ‘No way Jose, we put David Little away for that one eight years ago and the evidence against him was watertight.’ After a few moments thought he added, ‘Why on earth would a nutter like Combe want to put his hands up for the Julie Summers killing? It doesn’t make sense.’

Ryman shrugged and said, ‘Apparently he confessed to some Church of Scotland minister who was on-call at Carstairs last night.

‘ Some guys get all the good jobs,’ muttered McClintock’

‘ His name’s Joseph Lawson; he’s the minister over at Upgate. The report suggests it was a deathbed confession,’ said Rivers. ‘Combe moved on to the great State Hospital in the sky shortly afterwards.

‘ Not all bad news then,’ muttered McClintock. ‘Except for God, that is.’ But his mind was already drifting elsewhere. He was running through the details of the Julie Summers murder in his head and it wasn’t that difficult given it had been such a high profile case.

Although an arrest had been made and a conviction secured on irrefutable evidence, it had left a trail of damage in its wake, including several resignations from the force and the suicides of both the initial suspect, Bobby Mulvey, and his mother, Mary.

A missing schoolgirl was the kind of case that the press made a meal of and there had been massive public interest at the time. Before the body had been found, Bobby Mulvey, a seventeen stone, six-foot tall man with the mental age of an eight-year-old had been brought in for routine questioning. He had lived in the same street as Julie and had been seen talking to her on the day she had disappeared. Because of this he received a particularly rough ride from the tabloids.

Although they didn’t actually accuse him in print, they did succeed in fuelling a whispering campaign against Mulvey, which spread like wildfire throughout the small community and beyond. To his added misfortune, Mulvey looked like everyone’s idea of a suspect for that type of crime. He was swarthy, had long unkempt hair and seemed to have a permanent leer on his face. McClintock remembered the officer in charge of the investigation at the time, DI Bill Currie, saying that Bobby Mulvey was the only man he’d ever come across who actually looked like a photo-fit picture.

Mulvey didn’t have a police record but he had more than once caused unease among the locals by throwing spectacular temper tantrums in public — usually after some of the local kids had been bating him. This was something his mother insisted they did it on purpose in order to provoke such a response.

As rumour and innuendo about Mulvey’s involvement fermented into openly voiced suspicion, some of the locals had demonstrated their frustration at what they saw as police ineptitude by throwing bricks through the Mulveys’ windows and daubing the walls of their small cottage with abusive slogans. His mother’s insistence that Bobby had been particularly fond of Julie and would never have done anything to harm her only served to foster a general belief that he might have made sexual advances towards her and got angry when she had rejected him.

Julie’s body was found some three days later after a massive search involving hundreds of public volunteers who’d responded to an appeal put out by the papers. Her naked, broken body had been discovered lying like a discarded doll in woodland about half a mile outside the village. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled with her own underwear.

Under terrific pressure from the media to make an arrest, Currie decided in his own mind that Mulvey must be guilty and brought him in again. He attempted to break him by subjecting him to what amounted to unceasing verbal abuse for thirty-six hours interspersed with episodes of actual physical violence.

Mulvey, desperate for sleep and in need of respite from the angry men who constantly accused him, finally broke down and confessed to the rape and murder of Julie. He probably would have admitted to causing the downfall of the Roman Empire and having complicity in the murder of John F Kennedy had Currie and his team suggested this were so.

Mulvey’s mother had complained bitterly when she was finally allowed to visit her son and saw the bruising to his ribs and his kidneys. She tried lodging an official complaint but found the police surgeon, Dr George Hutton, less than helpful. Hutton hadn’t been interested in tabulating or recording her son’s injuries. He shared the public’s distaste for anyone who could carry out such a crime and felt confident that the tabloid-readers weren’t going to be too concerned with a little physical discomfort being meted out to little Julie’s killer should details leak out. Apart from anything else, Hutton played golf with Currie and wanted the glare of publicity to be off the force just as much as Currie so they could all get back to normal. The public wanted Bobby Mulvey’s head on a plate and that was exactly what the force had given them — or so it seemed.

Currie and his team could hardly believe it when DNA evidence from the forensic lab said that a mistake had been made and that Mulvey was innocent of the crime. In an embarrassing volte-face, they were forced to release Mulvey and start the hunt all over again. For Bobby Mulvey however, it was a case of out of the frying pan into the fire. He was set upon that same night by a mob who were unaware of the real reason for his release and who had put it down to some legal loophole being exploited by some clever-dick lawyer in an age when the system always seemed to be on the side of the offender.

This had been due to Currie and his superior, Supt. George Chisholm, being extremely reluctant to admit their mistake in public and even less keen to explain the circumstances under which Mulvey’s ‘confession’ had been obtained. They had issued a fudged press statement listing ‘technical factors’ as the reason for having let Mulvey go and carefully avoided using words like ‘innocent’ with reference to Mulvey or ‘mistaken’ with regard to themselves. They had removed the police guard on the Mulveys’ home and it was only hours before Bobby Mulvey was dragged from it and beaten senseless. Not content with that, one of the mob had carved the words ‘rapist’ on his back with a Stanley knife while his mother looked on helplessly.

Bobby Mulvey spent three weeks in hospital recovering from his injuries during which time his mother decided that enough was enough. She recognised that she was getting too old to look after her son and that no one else would do it when she was gone — especially after seeing what the establishment in the shape of the police had put him through. Mary Mulvey had mixed a cocktail of every pill and sleeping tablet she could find in the house and added it to the cocoa that she and her son had every night before bed. She and Bobby ended their lives together on the carpet of their living room floor, the outside walls of their cottage daubed with obscenities and its broken windows letting in the winter rain.

Currie, now under almost intolerable pressure to find Julie’s killer and make an arrest, could hardly believe his luck when the forensics lab came up with a DNA match for the crime. The suspect, David Little, a professional man living with his family in the same village as Julie, had given a DNA sample along with all the other males in the village at the outset of the murder investigation. He didn’t have a police record but he had previously been reported to the police for being in possession of pornographic material found on his computer at work. He had subsequently been released without charge.

Little’s DNA fingerprint proved to be an exact match for the semen found in the victim and it transpired that he knew Julie quite well. She had acted as a babysitter for him and his wife on several occasions in the recent past. Little had maintained his innocence throughout but the evidence against him was so overwhelming that he went down for life with a judge’s recommendation that he spend at least twenty-five years in prison.

In the aftermath of the case the tabloid press, wishing to distance themselves from all blame and looking for a new angle to sell papers, decided to concentrate on the Mulveys’ tragic suicide. They suddenly felt the need to ‘expose’ what they called ‘the heavy-handed methods’ used by the police in the investigation and cited this as the main reason for its tragic outcome for the Mulveys.

They openly accused the force of being responsible for the deaths of ‘two of society’s vulnerable people’, charging them with the age-old tactic of picking up the ‘local loony’ as a quick fix whenever public interest was high in a case. In doing so they managed to broaden their remit by resurrecting doubts that had been expressed about several other cases over the years. The public at the time had been happy to jump on the press bandwagon, mainly to assuage their own guilt in the affair.

Currie had been forced to take early retirement from the force on health grounds, as had his superior officer, George Chisholm. George Hutton, the police surgeon who had failed to protect Mulvey and process the complaint lodged by his mother about the injuries he’d received at the hands of Currie and his team was also put out to grass, as was the forensic pathologist involved in the case, Ronald Lee.

‘ So why the hell would Combe pull a stunt like that?’ muttered McClintock, still sounding puzzled.

‘ No doubts at all?’ ventured his sergeant.

‘ The DNA evidence was perfect,’ said McClintock. ‘It was a one hundred percent match for Little. The odds against it being wrong were countless millions to one.’

‘ So maybe Combe just wanted to make trouble for the force by bringing up that Mulvey business all over again?’

‘ I think I like that idea better,’ grunted McClintock. ‘That would be entirely in the bastard’s nature.’

‘ So we just forget it?’

‘ No, we do things by the book. We dig out the file on the Julie Summers case; make sure there was no margin for error — as indeed there wasn’t — and then we’ll forget it.’

An hour later, when he came back from a meeting with his superintendent who had been telephoned personally by the governor of The State Hospital about the confession, McClintock found the Julie Summers file on his desk. The first thing that struck him was a small sticker on the front cover saying that a copy of any material added to the file after the closing date of May 4th 1993 should be forwarded to the Sci-Med Inspectorate at the Home Office in London without delay.

‘ Wonder what their interest was…’ murmured McClintock. He knew that they were a small body concerned solely with hi-tech crime in science and medicine. He supposed that the so-called confession of Combe to the murder would have to be appended to the Summers file.. or would it? McClintock toyed with the notion of burying it somewhere else but then thought better of it. There was always a chance that the story might leak out to the press. Half the bloody nation seemed to be on the phone to the papers these days. No, he would play this strictly by the book and forward a copy of the confession to London. The chances were that Sci-Med would probably just file it themselves after seeing it for what it was — the ramblings of a now dead psychopath.

John Macmillan, head of the Sci-Med Inspectorate looked thoughtful as he closed the Julie Summers file in front of him and pushed the desk intercom button. ‘Send Dunbar in will you, Miss Roberts.’

In the outside office Steven Dunbar smiled at Jean Roberts as she indicated that he should go through. ‘Don’t let him bully you,’ she said conspiratorially.

‘ I’ll try not to,’ replied Steven in a stage whisper. In truth he got on very well with John Macmillan and had done ever since joining Sci-Med as one of their medical investigators.

The Sci-Med Inspectorate had been set up under the directorship of Macmillan as a small, specialised Home Office unit whose function it was to investigate possible wrongdoing in the world of science and medicine. These areas of modern life had become just too technical for the police to keep up with and, while they had specialised units to deal with fraud and crime in the art world, they were often very much at sea when it came to many areas of science and medical technology. Sci-Med’s small team of specialist scientists and doctors filled the gap and carried out preliminary investigations to establish facts before — if necessary — handing over their findings to the police with their recommendations.

Although Steven had qualified as a doctor, he had never practised medicine in the conventional sense. He had joined the army straight after his registration year and had served with the Parachute Regiment and on attachment to Special Forces on assignments that had taken him all over the world. In the process, he had become a specialist in field medicine, having been called upon to apply his medical skills under a variety of trying and testing conditions ranging from surgery under the stars in Iraq to setting broken bones in the South American jungle.

He had known well enough when he left the forces in his early thirties that there would be no call for his particular medical skills in civilian life and also that it would be too late for him to train in any other field. The career bandwagon would have passed him by. He had been preparing himself with a heavy heart for life as an in-house physician with some large commercial concern or looking for some clinical post with a pharmaceutical firm when, to his great relief, he had been approached by the Sci-Med Inspectorate and offered something much more attractive and quite different.

Sci-Med had been looking to recruit a new medical investigator and they were looking for a physically fit, medically qualified man with a record of achievement and resourcefulness. Steven fitted the bill. He had been tested under conditions of extreme pressure and had come through with flying colours. Sci-Med understood that there was a world of difference between the team-building games of corporate enterprise and real life situations where the stakes were always so much higher. A couple of days abseiling and clay pigeon shooting was a universe away from coping in situations where real bullets flew and the margins between life and death grew alarmingly narrow. Steven had gone on to become one of Sci-Med’s best investigators.

‘ Two days ago I received an update to a file from the Lothian and Borders Police in Edinburgh,’ said Macmillan. ‘They were updating it and found our sticker on it.’

‘ Something interesting?’ asked Steven.

‘ I’m not sure,’ replied Macmillan. ‘I don’t know if you remember the case but some eight years ago a man named David Little was convicted of the particularly brutal rape and murder of a thirteen year old schoolgirl in a village outside Edinburgh.’

‘ I remember,’ said Steven. ‘It was headline news at the time. The girl had been babysitting. Little was some kind of academic who lived locally. What was our interest in the case?’

‘ Little wasn’t just any old academic,’ said Macmillan. ‘Dr David Little was a leading medical scientist, a leader in his field who had just been recruited from Harvard to set up a new research unit at a hospital in Edinburgh.’

‘ He’s American then?’

‘ No, he’s English, but he had been working in the States for the usual career reasons of better facilities, more money, greater academic freedom etc. He had however, been tempted back to the UK with a big money offer to set up his own unit here in the UK with joint funding from the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council.’

‘ What exactly was his field?’

‘ Cell biology. He was an expert in stem cell technology. ‘His aim was to make organ transplants a thing of the past and he reckoned he could do it in ten years. The idea was to persuade patients’ own stem cells to repair damaged organs so there would be no need for the introduction of any foreign tissue and the problems of rejection that always brings.’

‘ The stuff Nobel prizes are made of,’ said Steven.

‘ Quite so but instead he raped and strangled a schoolgirl and ended up in prison for the rest of his natural life.’

‘ From what I remember of the case, prison was too good for him,’ said Steven.

‘ A view shared by many,’ said Macmillan thoughtfully.

‘ So what was the update about?’

‘ A convicted killer who’d been serving life in Scotland’s State Hospital at Carstairs for multiple murder, a psychopath named Hector Combe, confessed on his deathbed to a local clergyman that he carried out the crime.’

‘ But there was never any question about the evidence against Little,’ said Steven.

‘ Absolutely not,’ said Macmillan. ‘A perfect DNA match: his semen was recovered from the girl. You can’t ask for better than that.’

‘ So Combe couldn’t have done it.’

‘ No, he couldn’t,’ said Macmillan. ‘Which begs the question, why confess to a crime you didn’t commit?’

Steven shrugged. ‘Maybe he was confused. You said he was dying?’

‘ Of cancer. The report suggests that he was quite lucid when he made the confession. He died shortly afterwards but he was adamant that it was Julie Summers he’d killed. The local police think that he was just trying to cause trouble for them by digging up the past. They took a lot of flak over the case on account of the suicide of the original suspect and his mother. The blame for that was laid at their door by the press at the time. They’ve no desire to see it all over the papers again.’

‘ Understandable. So where do I come in?’ asked Steven.

‘ Take a look at the case file. If you agree with the police assessment we’ll forget it, if not pick away at it, see what you come up with.’

‘ He that pryeth into every cloud may be hit by a thunderbolt,’ quoted Steven with a smile.

‘ But that’s what we pay you for,’ replied Macmillan, handing over the file and adding, ‘Miss Roberts has prepared some extra material for you. Collect it on the way out.’

Steven left the Home Office and took a cab back to his fifth floor apartment in a converted warehouse near the river. It wasn’t quite on the river — Sci-Med pay didn’t quite run to that — but it was only one street back so he could actually see the Thames through a gap in the buildings along to the right. He made himself some coffee and sat down by the window to read through the background material he’d been given.

He started with the original police report on the crime and found it made harrowing reading. Julie Summers had been a bright attractive schoolgirl who had been baby-sitting for a local couple on the evening of January 5 ^ th 1993 while they attended the husband’s works dinner. The couple had been home by twelve but Julie had declined the husband’s offer to walk her home as she lived less than half a mile away. She never made it and was found dead some three days later.

Post mortem examination revealed that she had been raped both vaginally and anally and had been subsequently strangled with her own brassiere. Her panties had been stuffed into her mouth — presumably to prevent her screaming — and three fingers of her right hand had been broken — presumably during the initial struggle.

Steven looked at the photograph of the child supplied to the police by her parents when she first went missing — a pretty girl smiling and eating ice cream — and compared it with the ones taken by the forensics people after her body was found. It was impossible not to feel an overwhelming sense of sadness. Despite his own medical training he actually felt slightly nauseous, maybe because he had a daughter of his own and it was impossible not to wonder, what if?

Just how many of these animals were there? Steven wondered as he paused to look out of the window. How many were out there tonight, just watching and waiting their chance?

He moved on to the photograph the police had taken of David Little. There was certainly no clue from his appearance that he might be one of them but then that was the trouble; lunatics often tended not to look or act like lunatics. How many rapists and killers had subsequently been described by their neighbours as, ‘A quiet man who kept himself very much to himself’? The ugliness of evil was nearly always hidden, just waiting its chance or its trigger.

Little appeared every inch the academic, something under five feet seven according to the police height scale he stood against. He had a mop of frizzy hair, narrow sloping shoulders, a thin waspish looking face, perhaps suggesting petulance or even arrogance, thought Steven and wore small, metal-framed glasses to complete an image that could have been taken from the Hollywood drawer marked, ‘assorted boffins’.

Steven skimmed through the information that Rose Roberts had included in the file about Little’s work and had to admit to being impressed. Unlike so many proposed research projects these days, which were little more than cleverly worded attempts at extracting grant money from the research councils in order to keep their proposers in a job, it sounded as if Little’s work had a real chance of success. It made the man’s conviction and imprisonment all the more tragic.

Little had been thirty-five at the time of the trial; he would now be forty-three, maybe forty-four. He had been married with two children, both girls, who would now be thirteen and ten. They had lived in the same village as Julie Summers, after moving out there from rented accommodation in Edinburgh where they’d been living since their return from the states. This had been in the summer of 1992 when a large, comfortable, family house had come on to the market.

It was difficult not to think that Little had had everything going for him at the time of the murder. He had a job he loved, the recognition of his peers, four million pounds in research grants and as much autonomy to apply them as he could ever have hoped for. He had a wife, two kids and a nice home and he had thrown the lot away because… he needed the body of a schoolgirl.

It seemed incredible but Steven knew well enough that, where sex was the driving force, logic and common sense often went out of the window. It was something that had been documented time and again throughout history. You could be President of the USA and still think that a quick blowjob was worth risking your place in history.

Steven noted that a police psychiatric report had found Little to be uncooperative and aggressive but had found no evidence of personality disorder save for his continuing insistence of his innocence and a reluctance to even contemplate his own guilt.

Little’s wife, Charlotte, had divorced him within a year of his conviction and had subsequently severed all links with him. She had moved with the girls away from the district and was last known to be staying with her parents in Cromer in Norfolk. She had recently declined an invitation to take part in a Channel 4 documentary about the suffering experienced by the wives and families of convicted killers.

Steven referred again to the supplementary file on Little and saw that his academic record was outstanding. From humble beginnings as the only child of an insurance agent and a nursery nurse, he had gained a first class degree from Edinburgh University in medical sciences, and a subsequent D. Phil. from Oxford with a thesis entitled, ‘Mammalian Cell Differentiation, Cause and Control’. He had gone on to carry out post-doctoral research on transgenic mice at UCLA in California and then come back to do a second post-doc at the University of Leicester in England before returning to the States to join the so-called brain drain with a move to Harvard where he took up a tenure-track position in the spring of 1990.

After two years however, his wife had become homesick and he had succumbed to pressure to at least consider a move back to the UK. Rumours on the scientific grapevine had led to him being offered the job at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh and this had tipped the scales in favour of a return. Apart from generous funding for his work it had been made clear that he would be granted a personal chair at the university within a year of his return. The idea of being Professor Little in sole charge of his own unit had heralded a new life for the Little family. Unfortunately, thought Steven, it had also signalled an end to the short one of Julie Summers.

A list of Little’s scientific publications was appended to the file along with a note of his awards and achievements. There was a copy of his medical records, background reports made at the time of the trial and a psychiatric assessment made after his committal to prison. The bottom line was simple. Little was a highly intelligent, if abrasive man and no one quite knew why he’d done what he’d done. He was currently a Rule 43 prisoner in Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow. He did not have visitors.