Eye of the raven

SEVEN

‘ I understand the local police are getting touchy about your presence,’ said John Macmillan when Steven called Sci-Med to say that he would be staying on in Scotland for a bit.

‘ I’m not unsympathetic,’ said Steven, ‘but there are one or two things about the secondary evidence that I want to be perfectly clear about. You wouldn’t think that should be too difficult but they’re certainly making it look that way. Not only were all the forensic samples discarded in some lab screw-up at the time but even the lab reports on them have gone AWOL. I’m reduced to hoping that the police pathologist of the day still has them somewhere, hidden away in his personal files or even in a box under the bed. It’s crazy.’

‘ Does no one remember what was in them?’ asked Macmillan.

‘ Oh yes, I’m told that they confirmed David Little positively as Julie Summers’ killer.’

There was a short pause before Macmillan said, ‘So what’s the problem or am I missing something here?’

‘ I’ve seen the inventory of samples taken at the scene of the crime,’ said Steven. ‘The only real candidate for providing a second positive ID of the killer apart from the semen itself was the material taken from under three of Julie Summers’ fingernails. Data obtained from the other samples collected at the crime could have provided circumstantial evidence to put him at the scene of the murder but for a positive ID it would have to have been the nail samples.’

‘ Because they could have got DNA from them?’

‘ Precisely.’

‘ So?’

‘ According to the police doctor’s report on David Little when he was arrested, he only had a single scratch mark on him and it was on his forearm not his face.’

‘ A single scratch from three fingernails,’ murmured Macmillan thoughtfully. ‘Not entirely impossible I suppose…’

‘ No, but pushing it. I need to be sure about this.’

‘ I admire your attention to detail,’ said Macmillan, sounding as if he didn’t. ‘Chances are all this will probably turn out to be some filing mistake. Try not to upset too many people.’

‘ I’ll do my best,’ said Steven but the line had gone dead.

Steven got an early start next morning and stopped after a hundred miles or so in Aviemore to find something to eat — he had made do with just coffee and orange juice for breakfast so he was feeling hungry. It had rained all the way up and the roads had been busy with commercial traffic sending up clouds of spray so the break was going to be welcome on both accounts. He found a seat in the bay window of a hotel restaurant advertising all-day food and ordered scrambled eggs and bacon and a pot of coffee.

‘ We don’t do pots,’ the waitress informed him.

‘ Well, whatever you do,’ said Steven.

‘ Cup or a mug,’ said the waitress.

‘ A mug.’

Steven looked out of the window while he waited and watched little groups of people in waterproof gear wander aimlessly up and down the main street of the village that promoted itself as Scotland’s premier ski resort. The colour of their jackets added brightness to the otherwise grey and depressing scene.

The food when it came was lukewarm and soggy but when the waitress returned to ask in her automated way if ‘everything was alright’ for him, he simply nodded and said, ‘Fine.’ The truth was that he hadn’t expected any better — although he did wonder what excuse the UK tourist boards would offer this year for falling numbers. He didn’t think that lousy food and bad service would even make it to the starting line.

Grantown-on-Spey struck Steven as one of these places where it was always Sunday. There were very few people about and it seemed almost as if a respectful silence was being observed. It had the kind of ambience that obliged people to speak in whispers. Yet when he looked more closely, shops and businesses did after all seem to be open. He asked at the post office for directions to Ptarmigan Cottage and was given clear instructions from a friendly woman who thought at first that he might be the Lees’ son. She seemed disappointed when he said that he was just a friend.

Steven spent much of the two miles on the forest-track road leading to Ptarmigan Cottage hoping that nothing was coming the other way. There were so many twists and blind turns in it as it led up through dense pinewoods that the seeds for disaster seemed to be sown at every corner. He completed the journey without incident however, and found himself admiring the cottage and its environs when he finally got out the car. It was painted white and perched on the edge of a steep cliff with magnificent views down the River Spey in both directions. He could understand the attraction the place must have had for Lee when he’d moved there; the idea of living among so much natural beauty after spending such a large part of his professional life with ugliness and decay must have proved irresistible.

He supposed that the cottage itself had probably started out as a home for estate workers but, like so many, it had been modernised and prettified — although not to an unacceptable degree — and sold off to incomers. Through the large picture window of the lounge, Steven saw a woman get out of her chair and come to the door.

‘ Can I help you?’ she asked in a well-educated voice but in a tone that questioned his being there.

‘ Mrs Lee? My name is Dunbar. I hate to intrude like this but I wonder if I might have a word with your husband?’ Steven showed her his ID.

‘ The Sci-Med Inspectorate,’ she read aloud. The formal smile faded from her face and suspicion took its place. ‘May I ask what this is about?’

‘ I’m looking into some aspects of an old case your husband was involved in, Mrs Lee. There are a few things I must ask him.’

‘ Ronnie retired more than eight years ago. That part of his life is over. There’s nothing he can tell you. All that stuff was in the past.’

‘ Stuff?’ asked Steven.

Mrs Lee waved her hands in the air and said, ‘Pathology, dead bodies, police evidence, being called out at all hours, all that… unpleasantness.’

‘ Mrs Lee, I really would like to speak to your husband,’ said Steven plainly. ‘It is important.’

‘ My husband is not a well man, Dr Dunbar and I will not have him being upset. If there’s one thing guaranteed to upset him, it’s any allusion to his former career. He’s still very bitter about the way he was treated by these… bureaucratic pygmies.’

Steven saw the steely resolve in her eyes but he said, ‘I need to ask him some things about the forensic evidence in the Julie Summers murder nine years ago.’

Mary Lee closed her eyes and remained silent for a long moment. When she opened them Steven saw the anger there. ‘The Julie Summers murder is the last thing on earth he needs to be reminded of,’ she hissed. ‘These bastards destroyed my husband’s distinguished career over that ridiculous Mulvey woman and her idiot son. They completely ignored the fact that Ronnie positively identified the murderer and secured a conviction for them.’

Well, well, thought Steven. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen middle-class charm disappear like snow off a dyke to be replaced by fascist rant but he still found it fascinating. He didn’t see any point in reminding the woman that it had been drink that had destroyed her husband’s ‘distinguished career’ and that it apparently had been on the skids for some time before the Summers case so he simply said, ‘My questions have nothing to do with the Mulveys, Mrs Lee.’

‘ Then what?’ Mary Lee demanded.

‘ I’m trying to find some missing lab reports connected with the case. I thought your husband might still have them in among his personal papers. If by any chance you yourself could lay your hands on them for me there would be no need for me to disturb your husband at all.’

‘ Ronnie didn’t keep anything of his old life,’ said Mary Lee. ‘He put it all behind him when we left Edinburgh… Actually, I remember now, we had a bonfire. Any old papers probably went on top of that.’ The sweet smile returned.

‘ I see,’ said Steven. ‘In that case I really will have to speak to him.’

Mary Lee’s smile vanished again. ‘And I’ve already told you; he’s ill.’

‘ Mrs Lee, I do have the authority to insist,’ said Steven. ‘I’m sure neither of us wants the involvement of the local police in this but that’s exactly what will happen if you continue to obstruct me.’

‘ You people make me sick,’ said Mary Lee, turning on her heel and going back inside the house. As she’d left the door open, Steven assumed that should follow and did.

‘ Wait here,’ said Mary Lee without turning when they’d reached the living room. Steven stood there while she disappeared for a few moments. When she returned she said, ‘Through here. You’ve got five minutes. Any longer and I’m going to call the press about harassment of a desperately sick man.’

Steven found Lee in bed. A slight figure with white hair and round shoulders, he was wearing pyjamas, buttoned up to the neck and was propped up on pillows, watching a small television, which sat on a table at the foot of the bed. It was currently showing a cooking programme involving teams of competing celebrities playing to the camera. Their animated laughter and show business smiles contrasted sharply with Lee’s pinched, angry expression. The yellowness of his complexion spoke volumes to Steven about liver damage but a vague smell of whisky in the air said that it was still a factor in Lee’s life.

‘ What the hell do you want?’ snapped Lee; although the effort involved in being aggressive made him cough. ‘You’ve upset my wife.’

‘ I need to ask you some things about the Julie Summers case.

‘ Julie Summers, Julie Summers,’ intoned Lee. ‘Always Julie bloody Summers. We nailed the bastard who did it. What more do you want? More crap about the blessed Mulveys? That was just so much shit from a gutter press who’d nothing better to do with their time than to destroy a few good careers. Rodents!’

‘ I’m not concerned with the Mulveys,’ said Steven. ‘It’s the forensic evidence in the Summers case I need to talk to you about. I already know that the samples taken at the scene of the crime were lost.’

‘ These things happen,’ said Lee. ‘It was an accident, just one of these things. Someone in the lab put them in the wrong rack. We’re all human.’

Steven was taken aback at Lee’s shifting of blame away from himself and apparent dismissal of such a serious mistake but resisted the urge to point this out. Instead he said, ‘I understand that the samples were analysed before they were lost?’

‘ Exactly, so it was no big deal.’

‘ But to all intents and purposes the evidence was rendered useless because the Procurator Fiscal couldn’t use it in case of a Defence challenge?’ countered Steven.

‘ His decision not mine,’ snapped Lee.

Steven was amazed at the arrogance still residing within this alcohol-ravaged shell of a man. He clearly believed that he had done nothing wrong and that he was just a victim of circumstance. ‘Did the evidence back up the case against David Little?’ he asked.

‘ Of course it did!’ exclaimed Lee, but he broke off eye contact.

‘ I’m particularly concerned with the scrapings taken from under the girl’s fingernails,’ said Steven.

‘ What about them?’

‘ Did they point to David Little?

‘ Yes, of course they did.’

‘ You remember that clearly?’

‘ Yes, dammit.’ Lee still kept his head down.

‘ You got DNA from them?’

‘ Yes, how many times do I have to…’

‘ Who did the DNA fingerprinting?

‘ I did.’

‘ You personally carried out the DNA sequencing on the material obtained from under Julie Summers’ fingernails?’ asked Steven slowly so that there could be no misunderstanding.

‘ Yes,’ said Lee, finally looking up at Steven.

‘ What about the hard evidence of that? Sequence data? Gel Photographs?’

‘ It’ll all be in the lab in Edinburgh somewhere.’

‘ It isn’t.’

‘ Then I suppose they must have thrown it out. You’ll have to talk to them about that.’

‘ I already did,’ said Steven, choosing to stare directly at Lee. ‘No one there ever saw it. They don’t think you left it behind when you retired. I hoped you might still have it somewhere but your wife tells me you had a bit of a bonfire before you left Edinburgh?’

Lee looked at Steven, his sunken dark eyes sizing him up for a few moments as he considered what had been said. His reaction made Steven think that this might perhaps be the first time that Lee had heard of any bonfire. ‘That’s true,’ said Lee softly. ‘My old files may well have been confined to the flames… ashes to ashes and all that. A bonfire of past vanities, the funeral pyre of a career, sacrificed on the altar of some idiot and his loony mother.’

‘ Let’s see if I’ve got this right,’ said Steven. ‘You were responsible for losing the forensic samples and then you followed up by destroying all the lab reports on them?’

Lee’s self-satisfied muse was well and truly fractured. ‘Just what the hell are you getting at?’ he stormed, setting off a round of coughing. It was interspersed with more angry comments when he could catch his breath. ‘What the fuck does it matter if a few old lab reports have gone missing. They were never used… because they were never bloody needed! The evidence against Little was overwhelming!’

Lee now entered a prolonged bout of coughing during which his wife came into the room with a glass of water for him. As he sipped it Mary Lee turned to Steven and said, ‘Get out! Leave us alone! Can’t you see the damage you’re doing?’

‘ I’m sorry,’ said Steven. ‘But I may have to come back.’

Steven stood for a moment outside the cottage, looking at the view and wondering where to go from here. He was aware of the muted sound of Lee’s coughing coming from the bedroom at the back of the house.

‘ Shit,’ he murmured. Lee had told him that he personally had analysed the material taken from under Julie’s nails but Carol Bain had suggested that he was incapable of doing that. One of them was lying and he didn’t think it was Carol Bain.

The rain gave way to watery spring sunshine as he drove back to Edinburgh. He stopped in Perthshire at a woodland park near Dunkeld to stretch his legs. This was a place he remembered visiting with Lisa in the early days of their courtship. It had been summer and the leafy canopy of the tall trees had shaded the winding paths as they walked by the river on a gloriously warm day. Today sunlight filtered through budding branches and sparkled off the fast flowing water of the River Bran as it carried away the rains of the morning.

Steven sat on a felled tree trunk near the water’s edge and flicked pebbles into the flow as he wrestled with the growing feeling of frustration inside him. It should have been such a simple thing for the forensic team to demonstrate that the material under Julie Summer’s fingernails had come from David Little but no, the samples had been destroyed and the lab reports were missing — possibly destroyed too. All he had to show for his efforts was the word of a discredited drunk who claimed to have carried out tests himself when one of his staff had already suggested that he wasn’t capable of it. What the hell was going on? Why lie about such a thing?

What if the samples had been discarded before any analysis had been carried out, he wondered. That would have made Lee’s error much more serious and may even have embarrassed him into claiming that they had been examined and that the evidence had backed up the DNA findings from the semen. There might even have been collusion among some of the lab staff at the time in a damage limitation exercise.

So had the scrapings been analysed or hadn’t they? If he didn’t find out the answer to that he knew that the worries he had over the case wouldn’t go away. This was the one thing that was stopping him dropping the whole thing and returning to London.

Steven feared that it might be necessary to go back and confront Lee with such an accusation but first, he supposed, it might be useful to have a word with the members of Lee’s team that he hadn’t yet spoken to, John Merton and Samantha Styles. If they could confirm or even admit to harbouring suspicions that no analysis had taken place then he would go back north again and tackle Ronnie Lee about it.

Steven remembered that Carol Bain had mentioned that she thought John Merton had moved to a job in the medical school when he left Lee’s lab. It was after six before he got back to Edinburgh so he left it until next morning to call.

‘ We did have a John Merton on the staff, the university’s personnel department confirmed. ‘He left nearly eight years ago.’

Steven asked for any forwarding address but none was known. He turned his attention to Samantha Styles. Carol Bain had said that she was working as a nursing sister in the Western General but she might well have married and changed her surname in the intervening eight years.

Lothian Regional Health Board did not have a Sister Styles on their register, he was told. ‘How about nursing sisters with Samantha as a first name?’ he asked.

‘ The staff aren’t filed under first names.’

‘ The list is computerised, isn’t it?’

‘ Ye…s’

‘ Then run a search for “Samantha”.’

‘ I’ll have to ask…’

Steven drummed his fingers lightly on the table as he waited.

‘ We do have a Sister Samantha Egan,’ said the voice, ‘working at the Western General Hospital.’

‘ Good show. How do I find her?’

‘ You’ll have to call the director of nursing services at the hospital.’

Steven wrote down the number and called it as soon as he’d rung off.

‘ Sister Egan is in charge of ward 31,’ he was told. He asked to be transferred to the ward and was rewarded by a series of clicks and buzzes until finally the phone went dead. He called the Western General directly and asked for ward 31.

‘ Ward 31, Staff Nurse Kelly speaking.’

‘ I’d like to speak to Sister Egan please.’

‘ May I ask who’s calling?’

‘ Dr Dunbar.’

Steven smiled as he picked up the distant words, ‘Never heard of him,’ before Samantha Egan finally came on the phone and he explained who he was and what he wanted to speak to her about.

‘ Ye gods and little fishes,’ she exclaimed and laughed before saying, ‘I only worked in the lab for a few months. Are you sure it’s me you want to speak to?’

Steven said that it was and in person rather than over the phone.

‘ Well, on the grounds that it can’t possibly take very long, why don’t you pop up to the ward this morning. Say, eleven thirty?’

Steven thanked her and said he’d be there.

As luck would have it, Steven couldn’t find a parking place at the hospital. He ended up leaving the car quite a way down Carrington Road, which ran east from the hospital, down past Fettes Police Headquarters. As he got out, Peter McClintock happened to be passing. He double parked against Steven’s car for a moment and got out to ask how he had got on with Ronnie Lee.

‘ I’ve had better days,’ said Steven. ‘Talking to the pot plant in my room would have been equally productive.’

McClintock looked pleased. ‘I won’t say I told you so,’ he grinned. ‘I’m surprised the bugger’s still alive. So where do you go from here?’

‘ I’m going to talk to one of the other people who was in the forensic lab at the time,’ said Steven.

‘ You’re persistent, I’ll give you that,’ smiled McClintock. ‘But you’re chasing rainbows.’

McClintock drove off and Steven walked back up to the hospital and followed the signs to ward 31. He had to pause at the entrance to allow a porter to manoeuvre his laden trolley out through the swing doors. He took the opportunity to ask the man where he would find ‘sister’.

‘ Second on the left,’ mumbled the man with a vague wave of his hand. ‘Cow’s in a foul mood. It’s no ma bloody fault if there’s no’ enough sheets in this bloody hospital.’

Steven smiled and gave him a sympathetic nod as he watched him move off, fighting his trolley over a directional disagreement and mumbling to himself about the injustice of the world. He personally found no evidence of Samantha Egan’s foul mood when he knocked and entered her office.

‘ Dr Dunbar, come in, I’m intrigued,’ she said, getting up and coming towards him.’

Steven found Samantha Egan’s smile attractive and genuine. For some reason he had been harbouring a mental image of a slim dark woman wearing glasses, with a serious countenance and a permanently severe expression. Instead he found a tall, attractive brunette who seemed anything but severe.

‘ Oh my God,’ she said with mock alarm. ‘You haven’t come to tell me that I made even more mistakes in the lab than I thought?’

‘ Nothing like that,’ smiled Steven. ‘But am I right in thinking that you did work in the forensic lab when Dr Ronald Lee was the consultant there some years ago?’

‘ Briefly, but not much more than a few months. It was my first real job. Let’s see, I got my degree in ’91 and then I did voluntary service overseas for a year in Africa so I would have joined the lab towards the end of ’92 and then I left in the spring of ’93 to train as a nurse.

‘ Any regrets?’ asked Steven.

‘ None at all,’ replied Samantha without hesitation. ‘I did a science degree and I thought I’d be suited to lab work but my time in Africa changed all that — you know the sort of thing, sheltered middle-class girl experiences reality for the first time. There’s nothing like a bit of dirt and squalor for completing your education. Anyway, I decided that I needed involvement with people rather than test tubes and Bunsen burners. I needed the smiles, the tears. Labs are cold, sterile places.’

‘ But you did apply for a job in forensic science,’ said Steven.

‘ Yes, I did,’ agreed Samantha. ‘I thought maybe it was just me feeling a bit unsettled after my African trip and that I might feel differently after a few months so, as you say, I did apply for the job in Dr Lee’s lab.’

‘ Not a happy time?’ asked Steven.

‘ A strange time,’ replied Samantha with an infectious smile, as if she’d been looking for a suitable euphemism.

‘ Strange?’ Steven persisted.

‘ Dr Lee…’ Samantha hesitated before completing the sentence. ‘Well, let’s just say he had problems.’

‘ It’s all right,’ Steven assured her. ‘I’m well aware of Dr Lee’s “problems”.’

‘ Oh good,’ said Samantha. ‘Then it was one weird place, if you really want to know. The staff seemed to spend half their time covering up for the fact that their boss was pissed out of his skull!’

Steven smiled and agreed that it must have been odd. ‘You must remember Carol Bain?’

‘ Oh yes,’ said Samantha. ‘I actually bumped in to her last year when she came to visit one of the patients. A nice woman.’

Steven looked at her for a moment as if challenging her assessment.

‘ Oh, all right,’ laughed Carol. ‘She was a right cow who related more easily to dead bodies than she ever did to live ones. She seemed to resent me from the word go, so let’s say I never found her particularly helpful.’

‘ How about John Merton?’

‘ Clever chap, good at his job, taught me a lot but not enough to make me want to stay in lab work. From what I could see, he did most of the covering up for Dr Lee.’

‘ I understand you worked on the Julie Summers case?’

‘ I was on the team,’ agreed Samantha, ‘but I didn’t do much.’

‘ Would you remember who did what?’

Samantha thought for a moment before saying, ‘As I recall, it wasn’t a particularly difficult case in forensic terms because of the semen found on the dead girl and the perfect match they got with the man from the village. I think Carol did most of the DNA work on it although John did some as well. Dr Lee pottered around with fibres found on the dead girl’s clothes. I remember he got a match with fibres also found on the accused man’s clothes but then it turned out that they came from furniture in the accused man’s house and there was no dispute about the girl having been there — I think she had baby-sat for them in the past?’

Steven nodded.

‘ The pantomime really got under way when most of the samples taken at the scene of the crime got chucked out and everyone started running around like headless chickens. Luckily the semen match was so strong that it didn’t matter too much. Dr Lee wouldn’t admit it was him who discarded the samples but everyone seemed to know it was.’

‘ What did you personally work on?’

‘ I was put to work on the scrapings found under the dead girl’s nails,’ said Samantha.

Steven felt his throat tighten but he gave no outward sign of the surprise he felt at this unexpected revelation. ‘What did you do exactly?’ he asked.

‘ I was asked to type the blood that had been found there.’

Steven sensed a certain reluctance in Samantha to continue. ‘And?’ he prompted.

‘ I screwed up,’ said Samantha, casting her eyes downward and self-consciously rubbing her forehead as if still embarrassed at the memory.’

‘ In what way?’ asked Steven.

‘ I concluded that the blood was group “O” negative but it turned out I’d used distilled water instead of saline in the agglutination tests and got false negatives. The blood was actually “A” positive.’

‘ Someone checked your findings?

‘ I was very junior. Someone always checked my work.’

Steven nodded.

‘ John Merton was very kind about it and blamed the bottles being on the wrong shelves. Thank God it wasn’t Carol: she would have shouted my mistake from the rooftops. Anyway, it was that experience that made me decide that lab work wasn’t for me.’

‘ But the scrapings were definitely analysed before they were discarded?’ asked Steven, going for the key question with baited breath.

‘ Oh yes,’ said Samantha, lifting a weight from his shoulders without realising it. ‘Everything was done.’

Steven had to accept that his theory about the examinations not being done was wrong. Lee may not have carried out the work personally but the work had been done and that was the important thing.

‘ Did Dr Lee himself get involved in the analysis of the scrapings?’ he asked.

‘ I think he did,’ replied Samantha, destroying what was left of the Dunbar theory. ‘I don’t think he was very good at DNA work but he liked to go through the motions and John was always on hand to keep him right.’

‘ What was the final outcome?’

‘ The scrapings confirmed David Little as being the murderer.’

Steven smiled at Samantha and said, ‘You have been a tremendous help. In fact, you’ve just told me everything I needed to know.’