Ken McClure - Eye of the raven

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.