by Ken McClure
‘ I came to tip you,’ replied McClintock. ‘Santini just about went through the roof when the Home Office directive came in. I think he’s considering putting out a contract on you.’
Steven smiled.
‘ Don’t laugh,’ said McClintock. ‘I’m the hit man.’
‘ Then let me buy you a beer so you’ll leave your prints on the glass,’ smiled Steven. He led McClintock through to the hotel bar where he was true to his word.
‘ Seriously,’ said McClintock. ‘The powers that be have already been on to Sci-Med asking just what the fuck you think you’re up to.’
‘ And what were they told?’
‘ Some guy called Macmillan told them that you must have had good reason for putting your inquiry on a more official basis and that was as much as they needed to know. That’s what I call backing up your people,’ said McClintock admiringly. ‘I wish I could say the same for my lot’
Steven smiled.
‘ But do you know the best bit?’ said McClintock leaning across the table conspiratorially. ‘When Santini asked the DCC what would happen if he refused to co-operate with the Sci-Med directive, he was told to look out his lollipop because he would be on school crossings within the week. Like the Titanic, that went down really well!’
Steven almost choked on his beer.
‘ Don’t ever let on to Santini that I told you that,’ said McClintock.
‘ I won’t,’ Steven assured him. ‘And thanks. I’m grateful.’
‘ I just hope you know what you’re doing,’ said McClintock, finishing his beer and getting up to go.
Steven found himself hoping much the same thing as he went back upstairs. He connected the modem of the laptop to the phone socket in the room and logged on to Sci-Med where his first message was decoded as DUNBAR GREEN, indicating that he now had full operational status. There followed details of numbers and codes to be used during the course of the assignment. Two credit cards would be delivered to the hotel first thing in the morning. He was also requested to contact the duty officer at Sci-Med directly with any immediate requests.
Steven called and asked that the Grampian Police authority be informed of his being in their area on the following day and that he would like to be present at the post mortem examination of Ronald Lee. He gave the man the name of the Grampian police officer, DI Teal that McClintock had given him as a contact name, thinking that this might be quicker than depending on things coming from the top downwards. The duty man called back just before eleven p.m. to say that the post mortem on Lee had been rescheduled from 9am to noon to give him time to get up to Inverness. He was given the address of the city mortuary, elementary directions and the name of the pathologist who would be carrying out the autopsy, Dr Robert Reid.
Steven did not sleep well. He was haunted by dreams of Hector Combe laughing at him from the gates of hell while an angry Mary Lee accused him of being responsible for her husband’s death. ‘Just leave it alone,’ advised Peter McClintock repeatedly in the background while Santini stood in the road stopping his progress by holding up a lollipop stick with ‘Stop’ written on it. Any argument he tried to mount was countered by Combe grinning at him and making a snapping gesture with his fingers as he whispered, ‘this little piggy went to market… Snap! This little piggy stayed at home… ’
Steven woke with a start before the third snap and found that he was bathed in sweat. He looked at his watch and saw that it was just after three, the hour when the human spirit was at its lowest ebb and problems were magnified most. He lay slowly back down on the pillow and watched the moving shadows of the tree branches on the ceiling as the wind rose and fell outside. He knew that the sense of unease he felt stemmed from the fact he was acting on instinct rather than on any firm grounds for suspicion. He just had the feeling that something was dreadfully wrong about the Julie Summers case although at the moment it was hard to see exactly what. What did he hope to prove? If he didn’t know the answer to that — and he didn’t — it was no wonder that the local police were thoroughly pissed off with him.
Steven was on the road by seven in the morning. He had been warned that it might take some time to get across the Forth Road Bridge in the morning rush hour and so it proved with heavy traffic backed up on the approach roads. As he waited, he watched a small helicopter circle mockingly overhead and guessed that it would be reporting traffic conditions to a local radio station, informing commuters that there was a traffic jam where there was a traffic jam every morning.
Once over the bridge and on to the M90, he made good progress as far as Perth but then slowed as the motorway came to an end and he was funnelled back on to a trunk road where the slowest vehicle determined the speed of the convoy until overtaking became possible — usually on intermittent small sections of dual carriageway.
Steven still reached Inverness in plenty of time and found the morgue where the PM on Lee was to be performed before parking the car and stretching his legs with a walk by the River Ness until it was time.
The pathologist, Reid, a tall man in his early forties who was soft-spoken and had a habit of punctuating his remarks with an unsure half smile and a look at everyone as if to reassure himself that he wasn’t upsetting anyone, greeted him cordially. The only other person present, apart from a mortuary attendant, was the Grampian policeman, DI Teal. He was a short, thickset man who acknowledged his presence with a nod.
Reid was already gowned and aproned. He invited Steven to do the same, indicating a row of clothes pegs with gowns and aprons hanging from them. There was a wooden-slatted bench below under which was a neat row of white Wellington boots. Steven went for full overalls while Teal made do with an apron over his double-breasted suit.
The attendant brought out Lee’s body from the refrigerated vault and Steven grimaced when he saw that the tree stump that had skewered Lee had been left in place. It had been sawn off at the base to permit retrieval of the body from the riverbank but the jagged stump was still protruding from his chest. A look of agonised horror was etched on Lee’s face as if he had seen what was coming as he fell.
‘ Not a pretty death,’ said Reid, again with his half smile.
‘ Poor bugger,’ murmured Teal.
Reid started his external appraisal of the body, recording his findings into an overhead microphone as he did so. When he said, ‘The body has slight contusions to the left side of the neck and adjacent shoulder,’ Steven interrupted and asked if he could take a look for himself. Reid stepped back and extended an invitation with a gloved hand. Steven took a closer look then asked for a magnifying glass before doing so again.
In the background Reid said, ‘I’m not quite sure what your interest is in this case Doctor. No one had the grace to tell me.’
Steven was aware of the pathologist and the policeman exchanging glances when he didn’t answer but for the moment he pressed on with his inspection, moving down to Lee’s torso and paying close attention to his waist where he concentrated on more marks he found there. ‘I think I’ve found something,’ he said, straightening up and inviting Reid to take a look for himself.
‘ Ah,’ said Reid, ‘I see what you’re getting at,’ said Reid. ‘These marks together with the marks on the deceased’s neck would suggest that he was held firmly from behind before…’
‘… being pushed over the cliff,’ completed Steven.
‘ Very possibly,’ said Reid.
Teal, rolled his eyes skywards and said, ‘You’re saying this was murder not suicide?’
‘ I rather think we are,’ said Reid with his half smile.
The policeman nodded as if this were unwelcome news. ‘I don’t suppose any prizes are on offer for figuring out what actually killed him,’ he said, eyeing up the wooden stake protruding from Lee’s chest.
‘ No,’ agreed Reid. ‘But we’ll go through the whole business anyway.’ He was about to start the autopsy proper when something caught his eye and he put down the knife. It was Steven’s turn to swop glances with the policeman when
Reid appeared to take an interest in Lee’s teeth, a task made considerably easier by Lee’s lips already being pulled back over them in his pained death grimace. Reid scrabbled around for a pair of forceps from the tray beside him and extracted a small fragment of material from between two of them. ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken,’ he announced, holding it up to the light, ‘This is latex. My guess is that it came from a glove like the ones I’m wearing at the moment, a surgical glove.’
‘ Lee’s attacker must have been wearing them and Lee bit him during the struggle,’ said Steven. ‘Well spotted, Doctor.’
Reid smiled as he put the fragment carefully into a sterile specimen jar. ‘Looks clean; I don’t think we’ll get any DNA from it but it’s worth a try.’
‘ Probably put his hand over Lee’s mouth to stop him yelling out,’ offered the policeman. He turned to Steven and said, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve any thoughts about motive that you’d care to share with us, Doctor?’
Steven shook his head. ‘I wish I had,’ he said. ‘All I know at the moment is that there is some connection with the death of a young girl who died over eight years ago.’
‘ Julie Summers,’ murmured Teal. ‘Lothian and Borders are going to love this.’
‘ That’s their problem,’ said Steven, noting that Teal must have been briefed about the situation. ‘Right now, Inspector, you have a murder on your hands.’
Steven felt a mixture of guilt and relief; guilt at being pleased that Lee had been murdered and relief at having been proved right in calling a code red. It was possible that Lee’s death might not be connected to the Julie Summers case but the fact that it had taken place the day after he’d questioned him about it suggested strongly that it had. This upped the stakes enormously. Lee must have confided in someone that Sci-Med was taking an interest in the case and that he had been questioned about the evidence. That someone had seen this as sufficient reason for killing him, but why?
The obvious reason would be to keep him quiet, thought Steven, but quiet about what? What kind of screw-up in the handling of secondary evidence could be so damning that someone would want to kill to keep it secret?
Steven told Teal that he wanted to inform Lee’s wife personally about her husband’s murder. He hoped that the fact it wasn’t suicide would remove the feelings of guilt that always affected the nearest and dearest of the deceased. He also hoped that she might mellow in her attitude towards him personally and help him find out whom her husband had been in contact with over the last couple of days.
‘ Please yourself but I’ll have to send in a forensic team to the house,’ said Teal.
‘ Of course,’ agreed Steven. ‘Maybe you could check where Mrs Lee is at the moment? She might be staying with friends or relatives.’
Teal left the PM suite to start things moving and Steven left a short time later, leaving Reid to complete the post mortem. He decided to walk for a bit, mainly to let the fresh air take away the smell of formaldehyde that he feared might still be clinging to his clothes. It was a smell he had loathed from his student days at medical school where they’d used formalin solution to preserve the bodies the classes worked on. The stiffening westerly breeze was today very welcome, carrying on it as it did the scent of wet grass and pine needles.
Despite being convinced that Lee’s murder was connected with his questioning of the man and try as he might, Steven failed to see a motive behind the murder. What could Lee have told him that he didn’t know already? That he didn’t really examine the scrapings from under Julie Summers’ fingernails himself? So what? It didn’t matter… unless of course, what was being covered up was the unthinkable, the possibility that the traces of blood and skin had not matched the convicted man at all.
‘ Jesus Christ,’ murmured Steven.
NINE
Steven’s mobile phone rang. It was Detective Inspector Teal.
‘ You wanted to know about Mary Lee’s whereabouts,’ said Teal. ‘She’s in Glasgow’s Western Infirmary. She took a heart attack while travelling down to her sister’s place in Greenock.’
‘ Shit,’ said Steven. ‘How bad?’
‘ Touch and go.’
‘ I’m on my way,’ said Steven. He set out for Glasgow immediately, pausing only to fill the car up with petrol at a station at the edge of town. He still saw Mary Lee as his best chance of finding out who Ronnie had contacted since his visit to Ptarmigan Cottage.
As he drove south he tried to think through all the logical implications if the fingernail scrapings had not come from David Little. Had a second person been involved in the crime and Lee had coved it up? This would certainly provide someone with a motive for murdering Lee — to head off another deathbed confession — but why would Lee want to cover up something like that in the first place? Blackmail? The involvement of a relative?
Although Steven had trained himself to think the unthinkable and explore every avenue, dismissing nothing without cold, logical consideration, he decided that he was on the wrong track. The situation in Lee’s lab at the time of the murder was such that Lee simply could not have covered up anything on his own. In any case, it was almost certain that someone else had carried out the tests on the fingernail samples so at least one other person must have known about the findings.
According to Carol Bain and Samantha Styles, John Merton had been riding shotgun on Lee for some time — covering up for his shortcomings, keeping an eye on him in the lab and discreetly checking his findings before reports were allowed to go out. Even if Merton had not carried out the analysis himself he would almost certainly have seen the results of the tests and perhaps even been called upon to verify them. If there had been some kind of a problem with the origin of the scrapings, John Merton would have known about it.
Steven thought he could see a possible scenario emerge. Lee, either through incompetence or inebriation, had messed up his analysis of the nail scrapings. Merton, in his role of guardian angel, had tried to cover for him but Lee’s results were such a mess that they defied interpretation. The small amounts of material available had all been used up, making a repeat analysis impossible and leaving the lab with an embarrassing problem. The temptation might well have been to pretend that the analysis of the scrapings had supported Carol Bain’s findings on the semen and to say no more about it. Whatever the truth of the matter, he was looking forward to hearing what John Merton had to say about all this when he finally managed to track him down.
It was just after four in the afternoon when he entered the outskirts of Glasgow and caught what he thought must be the beginnings of rush-hour traffic as he made his way to the Western Infirmary. Progress however, became even slower and it became clear that, despite having a three-lane motorway that cut a great swathe through its centre, Glasgow’s traffic was grinding to a virtual standstill because of road-works.
Steven turned on the car radio to provide distraction from his growing sense of frustration but if anything, inane chatter and mindless pop music only made matters worse. After covering less than a mile in fifteen minutes his phone rang and gave him the news he didn’t want to hear. Mary Lee was dead.
Although the east-bound traffic did not seem to be moving any more freely than the west-bound, Steven took the next exit when it became possible and circled round to join it, thinking that he might as well make a start back to Edinburgh. A lorry driver flashed his lights and he inched out into the nearside lane to become a piece in a slow-moving jigsaw.
Watching a fat man in overalls, sitting in the passenger seat of the white van in the lane beside him, chew gum and gaze at the nude picture in the tabloid newspaper he was reading made him consider Darwinian evolution for a few minutes. He felt it was anything but cut and dried.
When the traffic in that lane finally started to move, it afforded him a temporary view of the high walls of Barlinnie Prison where David Little had been incarcerated for the past eight years. The file said that he was a rule 43 prisoner — in solitary confinement at his own request. S
olitary confinement for life?
Steven grimaced at the thought. How anyone could retain their sanity under such conditions was quite beyond him. He could understand why Little might have opted for rule 43 at the outset of his sentence when, after all the publicity, other prisoners would have been queuing up to establish their credentials as ‘regular guys’ by beating the shit out of him. In prison as in life, all things were relative. Everyone needed someone to look up to and someone to look down on. Child abusers and murderers were welcome in prison because they made robbery with violence seem almost respectable. Beating up a child abuser made you the Lone Ranger. ‘Who was that masked burglar, Mommy?’
On the other hand, it was possible that Little might regard solitary confinement as some kind of penance for his crime. The conditions would be almost monastic — an enclosed order, basic food and endless hours available for contemplation. Perhaps he had even found religion in his now otherwise meaningless existence. He wouldn’t be the first and conditions would be absolutely right for it. Disorientation followed by suggestion — the first rule of brainwashing or religious conversion for that matter. But even if he had, how could he hope to come to terms with having carried out such an awful crime? Could atonement ever be achieved or would guilt stretch out before Little like the expanding universe?
Almost to his own surprise, Steven found himself indicating a left turn and edging across to the nearside lane in order to take the next exit. He had decided that he needed to confront Little personally. If there was the slightest chance that the man now acknowledged his guilt he might well be prepared to answer some questions about what had really happened on that awful night and in particular, how he got the scratch mark on his arm.
Although there had been nothing in the files to indicate that Little had stopped maintaining his innocence, there was a chance that the files hadn’t been updated for some time. As far as society was concerned, Little had been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the rape and murder of Julie Summers. End of story. Whether or not he admitted it was neither here nor there.