Ken McClure - Eye of the raven

‘ 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.

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.