Ken McClure - Eye of the raven

‘ 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?’