by Ken McClure
Combe appeared to comply but being a good — or indeed, any kind of loser — was not in Combe’s make-up. A month later he turned up at the girl’s home late at night. After savagely beating her he raped her in front of her parents whom he’d tied up and when he was through, he murdered all three of them, the parents by strangulation, and the girl by cutting her throat.
He had showed no remorse when the police arrested him, maintaining that the girl had simply got what she deserved. He actually appeared to have forgotten that he’d also killed her parents when the police read out the charges. Combe was sent to prison for life, the psychiatrists finally awarding him full-blown psychopath status. Steven paused to pour himself a gin and tonic. He felt he needed it.
Combe had been incarcerated in the State Hospital at Carstairs where he had gone on to cause mayhem whenever possible with sudden eruptions of violence, only calming down in the Spring of ’98 when cancer of the jaw had made an appearance on the left side of his face. The disease succeeded in breaking him where the authorities had failed. A desperate attempt to cling to life involving radical surgery to his face followed by intensive chemotherapy when the disease started to spread, took its toll and left him a broken — though still malevolent — shadow of his former self. He had finally died some ten days ago, bitter to the end and lamented by no one, his only legacy being a confession to a crime he could not possibly have committed.
Steven refilled his glass and swivelled his favourite window chair round so he could look up at the sky. He switched out the room lights. It was a clear night and the stars were out despite competition from urban glare. He, like the local police, was puzzled by Combe’s confession. According to what the Church of Scotland minister had written in his report, it had not been made out of any sense of remorse but because he believed that he was entitled to some kind of automatic absolution if he confessed to something before dying. But if the whole thing had been a scam to embarrass the police why had he become so angry when the minister, Lawson, had declined to grant him what he wanted? On the other hand, if Combe had really been intent on gaining absolution, why own up to something he hadn’t done when there must have been plenty he had?
Contrition of course, was not something that a psychopath could understand, Steven reminded himself. True psychopaths had no concept of conscience or regret although many were clever enough to simulate such feelings in order to get by in normal society. They would learn to say ‘sorry’ without any understanding of what the term implied, having deduced by observation that if you did something wrong and then said the word, that was an end to the matter — a simple mathematical equation.
Such pretence of course, was occasionally destined to go badly wrong when the same offence was repeated and saying ‘sorry’ did not have quite the same effect the second time around. Psychopaths couldn’t understand why the ‘system’ had stopped working on such occasions and were often bemused at the exaggerated response of the aggrieved. It therefore made sense that Combe had seen confessing to a previously undisclosed crime as his side of some automatic quid pro quo, which would bring him salvation in the afterlife. It also explained his outrage when Lawson hadn’t quite seen it that way. For Combe, Lawson had been a fool who didn’t know the rules.
Steven found it slightly disturbing to recognise that Combe was exactly the kind of individual who could and would have committed an offence like the Julie Summers murder while, on paper, it appeared totally out of character for Little. Combe had confessed: Little had always maintained his innocence. The evidence however, said that Little was the guilty man.
Steven closed the curtains and switched the lights back on. He started going through the forensic evidence offered at the trial, not that this was in any way complicated. The DNA pattern obtained from Little’s buccal swab, taken at the start of the investigation, was a perfect match for DNA obtained from the semen found at the scene of the crime. Steven held the photographs of the sequencing gels up in front of him and noted that they were clear and identical. ‘Game, set and match,’ he murmured.
He paused for a moment to wonder why Little had not tried to avoid giving a sample with the other men from the village. He was a medical scientist so he must have known the significance of what he was doing and that his DNA fingerprint would be certain to convict him and yet there was no report of him being unavailable at any time or appearing reluctant to comply with the police directive. In his job, he could easily have arranged to have been out of town at the time, visiting another university perhaps or even going abroad in connection with his work and yet he had apparently been one of the first to have a smear taken.
On further reading, Steven thought that he had found the reason. Traces of detergent had been found on Julie Summers’ vulva, in her vagina and anus. The pathologist had ascribed this to an attempt being made to clean her up after the attack. Little must have underestimated the sensitivity of the test, which only required a minuscule amount of semen, or thought that he’d been more thorough than he had in cleaning up after him.
As he read on, Steven noted that there seemed to be a dearth of any corroborating evidence offered at Little’s trial. He found this puzzling. It was most unlike the Prosecution in any trial not to use every scrap of evidence available to them even if it amounted to overkill. They had alleged correctly that Little knew the dead girl but this had never been in question; she’d been a babysitter at his house. They had pointed out to the jury that he lived in the same village and that he was alone that weekend as his wife happened to be away visiting her parents because her father was ill. They had gone on to suggest that, through local chatter, he would probably have known where Julie Summers was baby-sitting on the night in question and had lain in wait for her. He had then, they alleged, taken her into nearby woods and raped and strangled her before returning home to where his own children lay sleeping.
Little had vehemently denied all this but in the face of such damning evidence all he could manage to say after sentence was pronounced was, ‘There has been some awful mistake.’
Despite the conclusive nature of the DNA match, Steven still found himself wondering why no other forensic evidence had been presented. It was possible that the Procurator Fiscal’s office had decided that it wasn’t necessary but a mention of matching clothes fibres or mud from the scene of the crime on the accused’s shoes or even scratch marks on his face might have given a more rounded feel to the prosecution case.
No mention had been made at the trial of the girl’s fingers having been broken in a struggle as the pathologist had suggested in his PM report. Why not? Why had there been no mention of scrapings taken from beneath her fingernails in order to establish a forensic connection with Little? As it stood, Steven was holding the entire case against Little in his hands, two high quality sequencing gel photographs, one taken from the cells on the inside of his mouth and the other taken from semen found in the dead girl.
The jury had obviously not shared Steven’s concerns about the lack of back-up evidence. The DNA evidence on its own had done the trick as far as the Crown case was concerned and they had taken less than twenty minutes to unanimously pronounce Little guilty. A calculated gamble by the Fiscal? wondered Steven, or was there something else behind it?
He leafed back through the file papers he had read earlier and found what he was looking for. It was a list of the people whose heads had rolled in the aftermath of the Summers case. Among them was Dr Ronald Lee, the forensic pathologist. Interesting, he thought. Why did Lee have to go?
The Rev Lawson’s account of Combe’s confession seemed to be confused in parts. It was clear that the man had been deeply shocked by listening to Combe’s graphic account of what he had supposedly done to Julie Summers and Steven got the impression that what he was actually reading was an edited version of it. Lawson had probably done this because he couldn’t bear to repeat some of the details he’d heard.
Steven noted that Lawson had been particularly disturbed by Combe’s account of how
he’d broken the girl’s fingers after she had scratched him. He’d done it methodically, one by one and had made light of it by introducing a children’s nursery rhyme. This little piggy went to market… Snap! This little piggy stayed at home.. Snap!
Steven felt a chill run up his spine as he recalled that there had been no mention of broken fingers at the trial and none in any of the news reports he’d read. He started to check frantically through the cuttings, willing there to be some mention but still nothing. If that was the case… how the hell had Combe known that Julie Summers’ fingers had been broken?
Steven felt his pulse rate rise and he tapped his right thumbnail rapidly against his teeth as he tried to see some way that Combe could have found out about Julie’s fingers. Prison talk maybe? Convicts tended to know a lot of things about their fellow prisoners’ crimes and the prison grapevine was notoriously efficient. He supposed that it was even possible that Little had come into contact with Hector Combe at some point — maybe during some psychiatric assessment procedure — but he would have to find out for sure before he could rest easy. If it turned out that this was the case he would put Combe’s knowledge down to that. If however, it should turn out that there had been no contact between the two, he would be on his way to Scotland to investigate something very disturbing indeed.
FOUR
It had just gone midnight when Steven finally admitted defeat. He had failed to find any reference to Julie Summers’ broken fingers anywhere in the press cuttings or any mention of them in the extracts of prosecution submissions made at David Little’s trial. He sent a brief e-mail to Sci-Med asking them to investigate whether or not David Little and Hector Combe could ever have crossed paths in the prison system and informing them that he would be travelling to Scotland next day on the first available shuttle flight; he’d be in touch.
This was one of the advantages of working for Sci-Med. Red tape was kept to a minimum and investigators were given a free hand to carry out their assignments as they saw fit. Sci-Med administrators were there to support front-line people, not the other way around as had become the case in so many government departments.
As he considered the prospect, Steven found he had mixed feelings about returning to Scotland. True, it was the place where he had met his wife, Lisa — who had been Scots — and where he had spent many of the happiest times of his life, discovering that particular poignancy that beautiful scenery can have when you are in love — but it held bad memories too.
In the early days of their courtship, spending time together had been difficult and largely limited to when Lisa could manage to escape the yolk of caring for an ageing and increasingly demented mother. Lisa had been a nurse at a hospital in Glasgow when he had been sent there during the course of an investigation, which for him had turned into something of a nightmare and from which he had been lucky to escape with his life.
Yet only eighty or so miles away were the rolling hills of Dumfriesshire and the romantic, lonely shores of the Solway Firth where it was so easy to lose your heart to Scotland. It was a region that so many tourists overlooked as they made their way north to the tartan theme parks of the highlands. This was where the village of Glenvane lay with its little cluster of whitewashed houses and cobbled yards born of an age when horses tilled the land and the pace of life had been slower. This was where his daughter, Jenny, lived and was happy among people who cared about each other. Steven had seen the good side of Scotland and the bad, the generosity of its people and their meanness of spirit. When they were good they were very good but by God, when they were bad, they didn’t bear thinking about.
As the aircraft banked over the Firth of Forth to begin its final descent into Edinburgh Airport it afforded the passengers sitting on the left a grandstand view of the two bridges spanning the estuary below. They were bathed in morning sunshine, the huge red cantilevers of the older rail bridge appearing particularly dramatic, standing tall as a continuing testament to Victorian engineering.
As he looked to the west, Steven wondered with some trepidation what the day would bring. He had arranged for a car to be waiting for him at the airport and his plan was to drive out to the village of Upgate in Lanarkshire to speak with the Rev Lawson about his interview with Hector Combe. He was assuming that Lawson would actually be there. There had not been time to contact him or make any more formal arrangement.
As luck would have it, they were testing the prison sirens when he reached Carstairs. At least, he assumed that it was a test sounding in the absence of any sign of any other activity. It seemed reasonable to believe that there would have been plenty had there been a real escape in progress. He still found it an eerie sound however as he looked up at the tall perimeter fence and wondered what the residents in the nearby houses must think when they heard it go off. He imagined doors and windows being double-checked on dark wet nights, fearful glances being exchanged and TV volumes being turned up.
Steven moved through the village slowly until he found the sign directing him to the B road that led over to Upgate, the one that the Rev Lawson would have used on the night of Combe’s death. Like most of the roads around here it ran over bleak moor land, making travellers wonder what it must be like to live here in winter and hoping — as they noticed their mobile phone signal disappear — that the car wouldn’t break down.
Steven’s rented Rover coped without problem and he entered Upgate, looking for a church spire as an indication of where he might find Lawson. There were no other high buildings in the village so he found it without difficulty and turned off into what he read was Mosspark Road to stop outside the less than imposing building of St John’s. He guessed that the grimy Victorian villa standing next to it would be the manse. A metal plaque confirmed this when he reached the gate.
He walked up the cracked and weedy front path to knock on a front door that hadn’t seen paint in many years. His second knock was answered by a woman in her fifties who seemed more than a little put-out to have callers. The lines on her face suggested that she hadn’t smiled much in the last thirty years. ‘Aye, what is it?’
‘ Is the Rev Lawson at home this morning?’ asked Steven.
‘ He’s no’ here,’ snapped the woman.
‘ Will he be back soon?’
‘ Depends.’
‘ On what?’ asked Steven, struggling to maintain a civil smile.
‘ Them at The Firs.’
Steven tried a blank stare instead of asking another question and the woman eventually said, ‘The meenester’s ill. He’s in The Firs. A nervous breakdoon, they say. Ah dinnae ken; a’body’s hivin them these days. A load o’ shite if ye ask me. Ah kin remember a time when folk got oan with their lives without all this brekdoon and stress nonsense.’
Steven figured that a nod might be the best way to pave the way ahead. After a moment he asked, ‘How do I go about finding the Firs, Mrs…?’ asked Steven.
‘ McLellan; ah’m the meenester’s cleaner, no’ that he pays me ower much. Tak a left at the end o’ the street and it’s aboot twa miles oot on the Ayr road. Gie him ma best wishes and tell him he’s oot o’ toilet roll.’
‘ Will do,’ said Steven.
Steven found The Firs without difficulty although he saw the sign a bit late, thanks to overhanging tree branches, and had to back up on the road before negotiating the narrow entrance that led to a an imposingly long drive lined with the trees that had, he presumed, lent their name to the house. He parked on the gravel outside the front door of a large red sandstone villa with an ugly concrete box extension tacked on to its left-hand side. A notice board by the side of the steps leading up to the door proclaimed the house’s credentials as a Church of Scotland Rest and Recuperation Home. Steven took encouragement from this. If the place wasn’t actually a hospital — psychiatric or otherwise — there must be a good chance that Lawson’s condition might not be as serious as he’d feared.
‘ Rev Lawson is here for complete rest,’ said the small, bespectacled figure in the charcoal
suit and dog collar who introduced himself as the Rev Angus Minch, the man in charge of The Firs. He’d been summoned by the lone woman in the front office who had been having a telephone conversation about the colour of bridesmaids’ dresses when Steven had entered. He’d gathered that green was a non-starter.
‘ I promise I won’t keep him long,’ said Steven.
‘ That’s not the point,’ said Minch pompously. ‘Rev Lawson needs complete rest. Every visitor he gets just interrupts the healing process.’
Steven had no wish to enter any kind of argument about ‘the healing process’, which he regarded as an expression seldom used by health professionals but a particular favourite of quacks and those who liked to imagine they knew more about medicine than they actually did.
‘ I’m afraid it’s important that I speak with him,’ he said in a tone that suggested he had the authority to back up his request.
Minch gave a heavy sigh before saying grudgingly, ‘So be it. But if Rev Lawson should suffer a relapse over this, I’ll know exactly where to apportion blame.’
Steven guessed that Minch was a man well used to apportioning blame: he had that air about him. Moral rectitude oozed from every pore. Steven nodded acceptance and was taken by Minch to a small back room on the first floor where they found Lawson sitting, reading in an armchair by the window. He was wearing a dark plaid dressing gown and seemed calm when Minch introduced him — perhaps too calm, he thought. He guessed that he was on some kind of medication. The book he was reading was Arthur Grimble’s, A Pattern of Islands.
‘ I’m sorry, Joseph; this chap’s from something called the Sci-Med Inspectorate, whoever they are,’ snapped Minch with a sidelong glance at Steven. ‘I’m afraid he needs to ask you some questions. I told him you weren’t well but he insists,’ said Minch.
Lawson looked up at Steven over his glasses and asked, ‘About the Combe business?’