Ken McClure - Eye of the raven

‘ Just John’s nature, I suppose. I’m not sure I know what you mean,’ replied Carol.

‘ What do you think would have happened if John Merton hadn’t covered for Dr Lee?’

Carol thought for a moment and said, ‘I suppose matters would have come to a head much sooner.’

‘ Perhaps that might not have been a bad thing?’

Carol moved uncomfortably in her seat. ‘In retrospect, I suppose not,’ she conceded. She raised the palms of both hands, trying to fend off an unpleasant notion. ‘Who can say?’ she said. ‘What’s done is done. It’s always easy to be wise after the event.’

‘ John wasn’t always successful in protecting Dr Lee, was he?’ asked Steven.

Carol looked defensive.

‘ I mean there were occasions when things slipped through, things that defence counsel exposed and exploited. It must have been a bit embarrassing?’

‘ I suppose.’

‘ Guilty men walked free on occasions?’ asked Steven.

‘ Unfortunately yes,’ said Carol in a low voice.

‘ Did John apply for the position of head of the lab when Ronald Lee was forced into retirement?’

‘ No,’ said Carol with a decisive shake of the head. ‘There was no question of that.’

‘ Why not?

‘ He wasn’t medically qualified. That’s a requirement.’

‘ I see,’ said Steven. ‘Well, thank you for your help, Miss Bain.’

Steven checked his watch as he left the building and saw that he had forty minutes to kill before his meeting with Susan Givens. It would only take him ten minutes to drive to Edinburgh University’s science campus in Mayfield Road so he stopped at the first hotel he came to and ordered some coffee. It came on a silver tray accompanied by a small plate of shortbread fingers.

Steven sat in the lounge, which at 3 o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, was deserted. This encouraged him to take up cup and saucer in hand and wander around the room viewing the eclectic mix of artefacts that for some reason hotel lounges always managed to accumulate. He supposed that there might be a large warehouse somewhere that prospective hoteliers called up in order to buy assorted junk by weight. ‘Forty kilos of Victoriana please.’

He moved to one of the large windows and looked out on the car park and what had once been an impressive orchard beyond. It now lay neglected and overgrown, a tangled mess of intertwined boughs and ill-defined paths, one of them leading to the tumbledown remains of a greenhouse without glass. It looked a mess but only because the human eye searched for order and functionality. Here, nature was simply reclaiming her own. The tangled branches had buds on them. They were very much alive. In a few years there would be no trace left at all of man’s efforts to order the garden because the green stuff had one big advantage over cinder paths and brick walls, it had DNA, the self-replicating life force. It was no contest.

Susan Givens was discussing experimental results with one of her research students, a Chinese boy, when Steven arrived.

‘ I’ll be with you in a moment,’ she smiled.

Steven took in the stunning view of the city from the window of her office, which looked out due north to Edinburgh Castle. The conversation continued in the background.

‘ The graph shows big rise,’ said the Chinese boy enthusiastically.

‘ But so does the control culture,’ countered Susan, holding up two sheets of graph paper in front of her and comparing them critically.

‘ Not so much,’ insisted the boy. ‘I think result is significant.’

‘ The control doesn’t show as big a rise because you’ve plotted it on a different scale from the experimental culture,’ said Susan. ‘I think you should go away and plot them on the same scale and then you will see there’s no significant difference.’

The boy left her office, peering closely at the graph he held up to his face, the paper almost touching his glasses. Susan shut the door behind him and turned, wearing a smile. ‘You know,’ she said. ‘It’s amazing just how much people see because they want to see it.. ’

Steven found her smile disarming. ‘Not a breakthrough then,’ he said.

‘ Not even a tap on the door.’

Susan Givens was a good-looking woman in her mid thirties, slim and dark-haired with a smooth olive skin. She exuded a confidence that suggested she might be capable of spotting a phoney at two hundred yards on a foggy night.

‘ I understand you’d like me to carry out some DNA work for you, Doctor?’ she said.

Steven handed over the polystyrene box and said, ‘This contains a number of semen samples, which were collected at the scene of a rape and murder of a young girl eight years ago. This is a buccal swab extract taken at the time from the man who was subsequently convicted for the crime. It was the matching of these two that sent him down for life. Steven took out another small packet from his briefcase and said, ‘This is a buccal swab that I took myself from that same man yesterday. I need to be sure they convicted the right man.’

Susan took the samples and asked, ‘Is there any reason to believe that they didn’t?’

‘ Every reason and no reason at all,’ replied Steven.

‘ And I thought bullshitting was the province of my students.’

Steven smiled. ‘I’m sorry, I have no concrete reason to believe that there’s a problem but there are factors surrounding the case that have made me feel uneasy. I need to be sure there has been no mistake.’

‘ You said eight years ago?’

‘ The girl, Julie Summers, was murdered in January of 1993.’

‘ I’m just trying to think how good DNA fingerprinting was at that time,’ said Susan.

Steven opened his briefcase and took out the forensic lab’s photographs of the DNA gels. ‘These are what the forensic lab submitted in evidence,’ he said.

‘ They’re good,’ said Susan admiringly. ‘In fact, they’re very good indeed. I didn’t think they had the software at that time…’

‘ Software?’

‘ I’m sure it’s nothing significant but I don’t think these are photographs of the actual DNA gels they ran in the lab. Call me suspicious, but they’re too clean. They’ve almost certainly been tidied up — or digitally enhanced, if you prefer. It’s my guess that someone used Adobe Photoshop or some other imaging software on them.’

‘ You’re telling me they’ve been altered?’ asked Steven, feeling a surge of excitement at the prospect.

‘ That might be going too far,’ said Susan, taking a closer look, this time using a magnifying lens. ‘They’ve probably just been cleaned up for aesthetic reasons.’

‘ Is that normal practice?’

Susan shrugged and said, ‘It’s more common than people let on. There’s really nothing wrong with it as long as it is confined to tidying. If of course, people were to use it to actually add or remove elements to or from the gel then you’d be entering the realms of scientific fraud.’

‘ Would it be easy to add or remove elements, as you put it?’ asked Steven.

‘ Very,’ replied Susan. ‘Once the hard data is converted to a computer image, the world’s your digital oyster.’

‘ I can understand the temptation, particularly in a research lab,’ said Steven. ‘If the presence or absence of a single band on a gel can make the difference between an exciting result and nothing.’

‘ But the repercussions can be equally great,’ said Susan. ‘If a researcher were caught doing that, his or her career would be over.’

‘ Have you ever known someone to try?’ asked Steven.

‘ Scientific fraud has always been with us,’ said Susan. ‘And we’re not just talking about ambitious students taking shortcuts. Scientists of world renown have fallen from grace over it. Common or garden arrogance is usually the cause. Some scientists believe so strongly in their theories that they dismiss their continued failure to come up with supporting evidence as some kind of technical difficulty. Frustration leads to manipulation of the data to show that what they believe must be true — or worse still, they’ve occasionally been known to browbeat their research students into coming up with data to support their pet theories. This is why we have rigorous peer review of work before it gets published in the journals.’