Ken McClure - Eye of the raven

Currie and his team could hardly believe it when DNA evidence from the forensic lab said that a mistake had been made and that Mulvey was innocent of the crime. In an embarrassing volte-face, they were forced to release Mulvey and start the hunt all over again. For Bobby Mulvey however, it was a case of out of the frying pan into the fire. He was set upon that same night by a mob who were unaware of the real reason for his release and who had put it down to some legal loophole being exploited by some clever-dick lawyer in an age when the system always seemed to be on the side of the offender.

This had been due to Currie and his superior, Supt. George Chisholm, being extremely reluctant to admit their mistake in public and even less keen to explain the circumstances under which Mulvey’s ‘confession’ had been obtained. They had issued a fudged press statement listing ‘technical factors’ as the reason for having let Mulvey go and carefully avoided using words like ‘innocent’ with reference to Mulvey or ‘mistaken’ with regard to themselves. They had removed the police guard on the Mulveys’ home and it was only hours before Bobby Mulvey was dragged from it and beaten senseless. Not content with that, one of the mob had carved the words ‘rapist’ on his back with a Stanley knife while his mother looked on helplessly.

Bobby Mulvey spent three weeks in hospital recovering from his injuries during which time his mother decided that enough was enough. She recognised that she was getting too old to look after her son and that no one else would do it when she was gone — especially after seeing what the establishment in the shape of the police had put him through. Mary Mulvey had mixed a cocktail of every pill and sleeping tablet she could find in the house and added it to the cocoa that she and her son had every night before bed. She and Bobby ended their lives together on the carpet of their living room floor, the outside walls of their cottage daubed with obscenities and its broken windows letting in the winter rain.

Currie, now under almost intolerable pressure to find Julie’s killer and make an arrest, could hardly believe his luck when the forensics lab came up with a DNA match for the crime. The suspect, David Little, a professional man living with his family in the same village as Julie, had given a DNA sample along with all the other males in the village at the outset of the murder investigation. He didn’t have a police record but he had previously been reported to the police for being in possession of pornographic material found on his computer at work. He had subsequently been released without charge.

Little’s DNA fingerprint proved to be an exact match for the semen found in the victim and it transpired that he knew Julie quite well. She had acted as a babysitter for him and his wife on several occasions in the recent past. Little had maintained his innocence throughout but the evidence against him was so overwhelming that he went down for life with a judge’s recommendation that he spend at least twenty-five years in prison.

In the aftermath of the case the tabloid press, wishing to distance themselves from all blame and looking for a new angle to sell papers, decided to concentrate on the Mulveys’ tragic suicide. They suddenly felt the need to ‘expose’ what they called ‘the heavy-handed methods’ used by the police in the investigation and cited this as the main reason for its tragic outcome for the Mulveys.

They openly accused the force of being responsible for the deaths of ‘two of society’s vulnerable people’, charging them with the age-old tactic of picking up the ‘local loony’ as a quick fix whenever public interest was high in a case. In doing so they managed to broaden their remit by resurrecting doubts that had been expressed about several other cases over the years. The public at the time had been happy to jump on the press bandwagon, mainly to assuage their own guilt in the affair.

Currie had been forced to take early retirement from the force on health grounds, as had his superior officer, George Chisholm. George Hutton, the police surgeon who had failed to protect Mulvey and process the complaint lodged by his mother about the injuries he’d received at the hands of Currie and his team was also put out to grass, as was the forensic pathologist involved in the case, Ronald Lee.

‘ So why the hell would Combe pull a stunt like that?’ muttered McClintock, still sounding puzzled.

‘ No doubts at all?’ ventured his sergeant.

‘ The DNA evidence was perfect,’ said McClintock. ‘It was a one hundred percent match for Little. The odds against it being wrong were countless millions to one.’

‘ So maybe Combe just wanted to make trouble for the force by bringing up that Mulvey business all over again?’

‘ I think I like that idea better,’ grunted McClintock. ‘That would be entirely in the bastard’s nature.’

‘ So we just forget it?’

‘ No, we do things by the book. We dig out the file on the Julie Summers case; make sure there was no margin for error — as indeed there wasn’t — and then we’ll forget it.’

An hour later, when he came back from a meeting with his superintendent who had been telephoned personally by the governor of The State Hospital about the confession, McClintock found the Julie Summers file on his desk. The first thing that struck him was a small sticker on the front cover saying that a copy of any material added to the file after the closing date of May 4th 1993 should be forwarded to the Sci-Med Inspectorate at the Home Office in London without delay.

‘ Wonder what their interest was…’ murmured McClintock. He knew that they were a small body concerned solely with hi-tech crime in science and medicine. He supposed that the so-called confession of Combe to the murder would have to be appended to the Summers file.. or would it? McClintock toyed with the notion of burying it somewhere else but then thought better of it. There was always a chance that the story might leak out to the press. Half the bloody nation seemed to be on the phone to the papers these days. No, he would play this strictly by the book and forward a copy of the confession to London. The chances were that Sci-Med would probably just file it themselves after seeing it for what it was — the ramblings of a now dead psychopath.

John Macmillan, head of the Sci-Med Inspectorate looked thoughtful as he closed the Julie Summers file in front of him and pushed the desk intercom button. ‘Send Dunbar in will you, Miss Roberts.’

In the outside office Steven Dunbar smiled at Jean Roberts as she indicated that he should go through. ‘Don’t let him bully you,’ she said conspiratorially.

‘ I’ll try not to,’ replied Steven in a stage whisper. In truth he got on very well with John Macmillan and had done ever since joining Sci-Med as one of their medical investigators.

The Sci-Med Inspectorate had been set up under the directorship of Macmillan as a small, specialised Home Office unit whose function it was to investigate possible wrongdoing in the world of science and medicine. These areas of modern life had become just too technical for the police to keep up with and, while they had specialised units to deal with fraud and crime in the art world, they were often very much at sea when it came to many areas of science and medical technology. Sci-Med’s small team of specialist scientists and doctors filled the gap and carried out preliminary investigations to establish facts before — if necessary — handing over their findings to the police with their recommendations.

Although Steven had qualified as a doctor, he had never practised medicine in the conventional sense. He had joined the army straight after his registration year and had served with the Parachute Regiment and on attachment to Special Forces on assignments that had taken him all over the world. In the process, he had become a specialist in field medicine, having been called upon to apply his medical skills under a variety of trying and testing conditions ranging from surgery under the stars in Iraq to setting broken bones in the South American jungle.