Eye of the raven

FIVE

‘ So what’s Sci-Med’s interest in this?’ asked McClintock as he returned from the bar carrying two pints of beer. They were sitting in an old fashioned pub in Inverleith Row where McClintock appeared to be well known judging by the nods and asides made at the bar.

‘ David Little was a top-flight medical scientist,’ said Steven.

‘ Ah,’ said McClintock, putting down the glasses carefully but still slopping some on the tabletop. ‘I get it. You’re looking for some reason to spring one of your own?’

‘ Nothing could be further from the truth,’ said Steven, bristling at the suggestion. ‘The evidence against him was overwhelming.’

‘ Damn right it was,’ growled McClintock.

‘ On the other hand, if a man like Hector Combe says on his deathbed that he did it and that the police fitted someone else up for it — someone who just happened to be a brilliant medical scientist — then we do take an interest.’

‘ Come on man, that was just Combe taking one last swing at his natural enemy, the police. He was opening up old wounds and rubbing salt into them. It was just his way of saying good-bye. That was Combe all over, evil bastard.’

‘ Combe knew about Julie Summers’ fingers being broken,’ said Steven, taking a sip of his beer and watching McClintock’s reaction over the rim of the glass.

‘ I’m not with you,’ said McClintock, opening a new packet of cigarettes and lighting one with an old style Zippo lighter: it made the air smell of petrol.

Steven waited until McClintock had taken a first lungful and exhaled it before saying, ‘It was never common knowledge that her fingers had been broken in the attack. It didn’t come out in court and the newspapers never got hold of it but Combe knew,’ said Steven. ‘He made a point of telling the Rev Lawson all about it in great detail.’

McClintock looked doubtful. ‘All sorts of details get circulated in the prison system,’ he said. ‘And nobody knows how they get there in the first place. I bet half the buggers in pokey know where Lord Lucan is. Combe knowing that is no big deal.’

‘ Probably not,’ agreed Steven, ‘but all the same I’d like to check the forensic reports on the case before I call a halt.’

‘ The forensic stuff was all in the file,’ said McClintock.

‘ Only the stuff that was used in court,’ said Steven. ‘Come to think of it, I’d like to see the full scene of crime report, sample lists, photographs, the lot.’

‘ Are you sure this is really necessary?’ asked McClintock.

‘ No, but it’s what I want to do,’ said Steven.

‘ But why?’ exclaimed McClintock. ‘If it gets out that someone is taking another look at the Julie Summers case, the press are going to want to know why. They’ll start crucifying us all over again.’

‘ It doesn’t have to get out,’ said Steven. ‘It can be done discreetly.’

‘ But Christ, man! Little was as guilty as sin,’ said McClintock, becoming animated. ‘The evidence was rock-solid, a perfect DNA match. What more do you need? A ribbon round his dick proclaiming, I fucked Julie Summers then throttled the life out of her?’

‘ I want to know about her broken fingers,’ said Steven, remaining calm. ‘I want to know if the lab found anything under her nails and I want to know why no mention of her fingers was made at the trial.’

McClintock took a long drag on his cigarette and looked at Steven without speaking as if weighing up his chances of winning the argument. Finally, he looked away, exhaled out the side of his mouth and said quietly, ‘The prosecution didn’t need anything else. They had more than enough as it was.’

‘ I know they did,’ said Steven. ‘But I’d still like to know what was available in the shape of back-up evidence.’

A cloud came over McClintock’s face and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘There might be a problem with that,’ he said. ‘Ronnie Lee didn’t exactly run a tight ship.’

‘ Lee was the forensic pathologist?’

McClintock nodded. ‘He was also a premier league piss artist.’

‘ Meaning?’

‘ Meaning his work suffered. Two or three cases went arse over tit when they got to court because of Ronnie’s fuck-ups. Important cases. Big name villains walked free. The Fiscal’s office wasn’t too amused but nothing was done about it except that they preferred not to rely too much on forensics after that.’

‘ Let me get this straight,’ said Steven. ‘You’re telling me that the Fiscal’s office would present a minimum of forensic evidence because they couldn’t trust the lab?’

‘ More or less.’

‘ Jesus,’ said Steven. ‘How long did that situation go on?’

‘ A couple of years. That’s the reason they took the opportunity to get rid of Lee along with the others in the big clear-out after what happened to the Mulveys.’

‘ Nice to know something good came out of their deaths,’ said Steven sourly.

‘ It’s never easy getting rid of someone in Lee’s position,’ said McClintock defensively. ‘People tend to look the other way, make allowances; colleagues cover up as best they can. You wouldn’t believe the number of pathologists I’ve known who’ve had a problem with the bottle.’

‘ Yes I would,’ said Steven without elaboration.

McClintock smiled and said, ‘Sorry, I guess you would. Mind you, Can’t be easy seeing the sights they see every day of their lives.’

‘ It’s more the smells,’ said Steven.

‘ I’ll take your word for it,’ said McClintock, screwing up his face.

‘ Another pint?’

‘ Why not.’

Steven fetched two more beers from the bar and asked, ‘How many of the original murder investigation team are still around?’

‘ None of the principals,’ said McClintock. ‘Chisholm, Currie, Hutton and Lee all fell on their swords. Jane went off to push trolleys.’

Steven gave him a quizzical look.

‘ Cabin crew, British Airways.’

Steven nodded with a smile. He’d been thinking of Tesco’s car park.

‘ I can’t think where the wooden-tops ended up, probably all over the place,’ said McClintock.

‘ What about Lee’s forensic team?’ asked Steven.

‘ Couldn’t really say. We don’t have much to do with the lab on a personal level. We just send in the samples and read the reports.’

‘ I think maybe I’d like to visit the lab,’ said Steven.

McClintock looked at his watch. ‘It’s a bit late now,’ he said. ‘They’ll be closed by the time we get there. Civil service hours.’

Steven nodded and said, ‘Then I’ll stay over.’

‘ Are you sure this is really necessary?’ asked McClintock again. There was no aggression in his voice this time. It was more of an appeal.

‘ I hate loose ends,’ said Steven.

McClintock nodded and paused before saying, ‘It’s as well to know that a lot of people up here are… a bit sensitive about the Julie Summers case.’

‘ That sounded like a warning,’ said Steven.

‘ I’m just telling you how it is,’ said McClintock, ‘and asking you to consider just for a moment that you might be playing Hector Combe’s game for him.’

‘ I’ll bear that in mind,’ said Steven. ‘In the meantime, how do I find the forensics lab?’

‘ Come to Fettes around nine in the morning, I’ll run you over.’

As they stepped outside and started walking back to the car, McClintock asked, ‘Do you know your way around Edinburgh?’

‘ Well enough,’ replied Steven.

‘ There are plenty of small hotels in Ferry Road if you’re looking for a place to stay.’

‘ I’ll be fine,’ replied Steven.

They drove back over to police headquarters and Steven picked up his own car, saying that he’d see McClintock in the morning. He declined his suggestion that they go out on the town together and have a few more beers, saying that he had some paperwork to catch up on and fancied an early night. Neither was strictly true; he just wanted to be on his own to think over the happenings of the day.

Almost on autopilot, he drove over to the south of the city with the intention of booking in at the Grange Hotel. He’d stayed there twice before when in Edinburgh, the first time with Lisa on an overnight stay after attending a concert during the Edinburgh Festival, the second after Lisa’s death when he’d been on an assignment in West Lothian. On that occasion he had chosen to stay there as part of a personal rehabilitation programme — a sort of test to see if he had got over Lisa’s death and could revisit places they had known together without the overwhelming sense of grief that usually accompanied such attempts. The Grange was the first of these places to assure him that he had. He could now think about Lisa with fondness and without the awful knife in the guts feeling of raw grief.

It was during the course of the West Lothian assignment that he had met a girl named Eve Ferguson who had convinced him that life had to go on and he had to move on with it. She had done her bit to exorcise the feelings of guilt he’d been prone to when faced with the possibility of an association with any woman other than Lisa.

Eve had been a beautiful, intelligent and down to earth girl who had been quite frank about her career ambitions and whom he might easily have fallen in love with had they had more time together. As it was, she had not seen herself settling down with Steven, acting as Jenny’s stepmother and wandering aimlessly around supermarkets — as she’d suspected such a future might hold. It wasn’t just children that women pushed round shopping centres in buggies, she had maintained; it was broken dreams and abandoned careers. Eve had been an MSc student at university at the time and wanted to give life her best shot. They had parted on friendly terms.

There had been one other woman in Steven’s life since that time and their time together had also been brief. Caroline had been a doctor, a public health consultant in Manchester at a time when a viral epidemic was sweeping the city. She had fallen victim to the virus while working as a volunteer nurse and had died in his arms.

For a while after Caroline’s death Steven had found it difficult to believe that he wasn’t jinxed when it came to women. The experience of having lost both Lisa and Caroline to disease had profoundly affected him. The old adage that life was what happened to you while you were planning for the future had never seemed more apt. He embraced a new philosophy that demanded he live more in the present and think less of what tomorrow might bring. Making ambitious plans for the future was best left to the young and to those as yet unharmed by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

He was not above using this as an excuse for not considering his personal circumstances in too much detail. On the odd occasion when he found himself alone in his flat, late at night, beset by thoughts of being nearly forty with little or nothing in the way of personal possessions, it was the perfect excuse for wiping such thoughts from his head. He would have another drink and go to bed. Tomorrow could take care of itself.

The only uncomfortable factor in all of this was that he had a daughter, Jenny, and therefore had a responsibility towards her. When Lisa died Sue and Peter had taken Jenny to live with them down in Glenvane. It had been his intention to have her back living with him as soon as possible if only for the selfish reason that he could see that in many ways Lisa lived on in Jenny and he needed to see that. She had Lisa’s eyes and, although she was still very young, certain mannerisms that were Lisa’s.

The practical problems however, of having Jenny live with him were quickly to defeat him. His job would simply not permit it. He had considered trying to find a more stable humdrum job that would have meant more regular hours so that he would be home every night but in reality, that was as far as it had ever gone. When push came to shove he had not been prepared to give up his job with Sci-Med. He knew that it was almost certainly selfish but he needed it: he needed the excitement, the unpredictability and even the danger of it on occasion.

As it was, Sue and Peter were more than happy to have Jenny stay as part of their family and Jenny was more than happy to be there. The downside that Steven recognised and accepted was that Jenny would probably end up regarding Sue and Peter as her real parents. He would be the man who appeared every couple of weeks, work permitting, bearing smiles and presents. He tried to be more than that, taking an interest in everything that Jenny did at home and at school but he knew that this was still a good bit short of taking on full parental responsibility. It was a compromise but then compromise was the glue on which society depended.

In the meantime, tonight was proving problematical. Steven arrived at the Grange Hotel in Whitehouse Terrace to find it no longer there. The building was there all right but it was no longer a hotel. It had been bought for private use. He looked at the darkened driveway, now stripped of its welcoming signs, and silently bade farewell to a little bit of his past. He looked up at the night sky as if imagining Lisa might be watching and murmured quietly, ‘Sorry love.’

Steven checked into The Braid Hills Hotel a couple of miles away to the west. It occupied a lofty position in the well-heeled south side of the city, which gave it an air of solid respectability and where he was lucky enough to get a room with a panoramic view to the north and west. After looking out over the lights of the city for a few moments he went downstairs and had a drink in the bar where golf club sweaters were much in evidence. He picked up that the four men standing next to him were lawyers, not his favourite profession believing as he did that in any sphere of human misery you would find a lawyer making a fat living. The ones beside him however, were discussing property prices — their own by the sound of it. ‘It’s absolutely outrageous!’ beamed one with a self-satisfied smile.

Steven exchanged small talk with the barman about the weather and agreed when asked that he was in the city on business without actually saying what that business might be. Steven wondered about that himself as he made his way back upstairs to his room.

McClintock and the local police were clearly unhappy about the prospect of his opening up old wounds where they saw no need and he had a certain sympathy for this view. As they saw it, what had happened was long in the past and the reputation of the force had suffered enough because of it — as had several of the individuals involved although Steven had less sympathy for them. By all accounts, they had fully deserved their early exit from the payroll.

On the other hand, Hector Combe had made such a good job of confessing to the murder that he had utterly convinced the Rev Lawson that he’d done it. The fact that his reason for doing this however, was still far from clear and this annoyed him. He hated loose ends. Now, to add to his unease, he had learned that a known drunk with a reputation for incompetence had been in charge of the forensic evidence against Little. If Little had been convicted by anything other than rock-solid DNA evidence he would have been seriously concerned. As it was, he just wanted to see the notes on Julie’s broken fingers and establish how Combe had come to know about them.

If they had been broken during a struggle with her assailant, as Lee had suggested, then it might well have been possible for the lab to identify her attacker from material recovered from under her fingernails. He wanted to see this information. Getting hold of it would be an acceptable alternative to trying to find out how Combe knew about the fingers in the first place. Fragments of skin and dried blood identifying David Little as Julie’s attacker would make Combe’s claims irrelevant.

It took Steven nearly forty-five minutes to cross town in the morning rush hour. He arrived at Fettes Police Headquarters at nearly a quarter past nine to find McClintock in conversation with another officer. Both men stopped talking as he came into view and McClintock adopted a wan smile. ‘Thought you’d changed your mind,’ he said, looking at his watch.

‘ Traffic,’ said Steven. ‘All ready to go?’

McClintock moved uneasily on his feet and cleared his throat unnecessarily before saying, ‘Actually, Chief Superintendent Santini would like a word with you before we go over to the lab.’

‘ Oh yes?’ said Steven, making it sound like an accusation.

‘ I had to tell him you were here and what was going on,’ said McClintock.

‘ No problem,’ said Steven. ‘Where do I find him?’

McClintock led the way to Santini’s office and affected a friendly grin as he waited for a response to his knock on the door.

‘ Come.’

‘ Dr Dunbar, sir,’ said McClintock ushering Steven inside and then leaving.

Santini, a rotund figure in his fifties with a tanned complexion and sleek silvery hair, sat back in his chair and made a steeple with his fingers. He didn’t smile or make any move to shake hands. ‘I understand you have an interest in the Julie Summers case, Doctor’ he said.

‘ I have an interest in Hector Combe’s confession to her murder,’ answered Steven. ‘But then I’m sure you know that already.’ He made a gesture towards the door behind him.

‘ Always nice to know what’s going on in one’s own backyard, Doctor, don’t you think?’

‘ Wherever possible,’ agreed Steven.

‘ I called Sci-Med. I’ve just spoken to John Macmillan. He tells me that there are no official plans to review the Summers case.’

‘ That’s my understanding too,’ agreed Steven.

This was not what Santini expected to hear. ‘So you are here in an

… unofficial capacity?’ he asked.

‘ You could say.’

‘ I do say,’ snapped Santini. ‘David Little was convicted on cast iron evidence, which no one has ever disputed. Hector Combe could not have carried out the crime. He just wanted to create trouble for the police and you — in your unofficial capacity — seem to be doing your level best to assist him in that objective.’

‘ Far from it,’ retorted Steven. ‘I agree with everything you say. I just want to take a look at the forensic evidence that wasn’t used in the trial so that I can be sure in my own mind about something.’

‘ What?’ Santini demanded. He then did a fair impression of a cat watching a bird without blinking, Steven thought.

‘Three of Julie Summers’ fingers were broken by her assailant during the struggle. I want to know what the lab found under her nails.’

‘ Maybe nothing,’ said Santini.

‘ If they were broken when she put up a struggle, as your own pathologist seemed to suggest at the time, there’s a good chance that something would have been recovered — skin, hair, blood, fibres?’

‘ The DNA evidence on its own was irrefutable,’ said Santini. ‘A one hundred percent match. There was no call for anything else.’

‘ I know,’ said Steven. ‘But I’d feel happier to see a piece of corroborating evidence. It would also prove beyond doubt that Hector Combe’s assertion that Julie Summers scratched his face was nonsense.’

‘ Of course it was nonsense,’ snapped Santini.

‘ Then corroborating evidence should make everyone happy,’ said Steven calmly.

‘ But it shouldn’t be necessary!’ exclaimed Santini. ‘What in God’s name don’t you accept about the evidence against David Little?’

‘ Nothing,’ replied Steven. ‘It seems irrefutable.’

‘ But you still want more?’

‘ I just want to take a look at the forensic samples taken at the time and then I’ll be on my way.’

Santini looked down at his desk top for so long that Steven wondered if he had a crystal ball installed in it. Eventually he said quietly, ‘That may not be possible.’

‘ I’m sorry?’ said Steven.

‘ There aren’t any samples,’ said Santini quietly. ‘Ronald Lee, the forensic pathologist at the time, screwed up. The samples were lost.’

‘ Lost?’ exclaimed Steven.

‘ Destroyed, incinerated, thrown out with the discards, something like that. I’m not sure of the exact details.’

‘ How long have you known this?’ asked Steven.

‘ Not long, I assure you. I called the head of the forensics lab when DI McClintock told me yesterday why you were here and he went into the lab last night to look out the samples. I just wanted to smooth the way so that you could see what you wanted to see and then be on your way without anyone getting wind of what you were up to. He called me just after eleven last night and broke the news.’

‘ But this suggests that the lab must have kept this a secret at the time,’ said Steven.

Santini nodded and said, ‘Presumably Superintendent Chisholm and Inspector Currie were told and they informed the Procurator Fiscal’s Office of the situation.’

‘ And then they all colluded in one great big cover-up,’ said Steven.

‘ It was a very difficult time for the force,’ began Santini. ‘The press were on our backs and the public were baying for an arrest. The investigating team had screwed up big time over the Mulvey boy and were being pilloried left, right and centre for perceived incompetence. I’m sure it was a case of the force simply not being able to afford another public scandal over a lab mix-up. It’s not as if anyone falsified evidence.’

‘ They just lost it,’ said Steven.

Santini swallowed and continued. ‘They did have a DNA match and it was perfect. The Fiscal obviously decided that a conviction could be obtained using that alone and he went ahead with the trial. He was proved right.’

Steven said quietly. ‘I take it that this is the real reason Ronald Lee got his marching orders with the others?’

Santini leaned forward and said, ‘Yes.’

Steven shook his head as he thought about it.

Santini said, ‘I’m asking you as a colleague to let sleeping dogs lie. Hector Combe could not have committed that crime. We got the right man. You know that.’

Steven nodded.

‘ Well?’

‘ Even if the samples were discarded, I presume they were logged at the scene of crime?’ said Steven.

‘ I suppose so.’

‘ I’d like to see the log.’

Santini took a deep breath as if trying to keep his equilibrium and exhaled slowly. ‘I’ll ask,’ he said. ‘Anything else?’

‘ I’d also like to see the medical officer’s report on David Little when he was arrested.’

‘ We should have that here. I’ll have to call the lab about the log. If they have it shall I ask it be sent over or will you want to go over yourself?’

‘ I’ll go over,’ said Steven.

‘ And then?’ asked Santini.

‘ If I don’t find anything untoward I’ll call it a day.’

‘ Good,’ said Santini. ‘The Julie Summers file can then go back to gathering dust and Hector Combe can continue to rot in hell.’