Ken McClure - Eye of the raven

‘ Doesn’t look too lucky from where I’m sitting,’ said Susan, eyeing Steven’s bruises.

‘ It has occasional drawbacks,’ conceded Steven. ‘But it’s the kind of job where I can do things my way. They set me a puzzle and I try to make sense of it.’

‘ You must have had to change the way you think,’ said Susan thoughtfully.

Steven looked at her as if impressed. ‘Absolutely right,’ he said. ‘It was the single biggest change I had to make. I had to switch from thinking along logical lines, using acquired knowledge and experience and start thinking laterally, tangentially and in any other direction you care to mention. I had to learn to think the unthinkable, consider the impossible, and discard no detail in case it might become valuable at a later date or when some other fact came to light. How did you know that?’

Susan smiled and said, ‘It’s largely what I had to do when I decided to make research my career. Medicine’s not the only profession with lots of misfits in it. The situation’s much the same in science. Like being a doctor, being a research scientist carries a certain social status with it, so the job attracts its fair share of exam passers, people who have qualifications coming out their ears but don’t have the imagination of a turnip. They can remember facts and think logically but that’s as far as it goes. The ability to think like a researcher is something you can’t teach. You either have it or you don’t. The best you can do as a teacher is to encourage students to try and look at problems from different angles. Like you say, think the unthinkable, consider the impossible. Whether of course, they are capable of doing it is something else again.’

Steven smiled, pleased that they seemed to be on the same wavelength. The waiter arrived with their Canarian-style dish and they paused to make admiring comments about its presentation before Steven asked, ‘So what unthinkable thoughts are you working on at the moment?’

To Steven’s surprise Susan seemed to freeze and look him straight in the eye. She wasn’t smiling so he imagined that he had offended her in some way. ‘I’m sorry…’ he began. ‘I didn’t mean to…’

Susan shook her head as if to indicate he was misinterpreting things. She said, ‘The ghost bands that appeared on the gel, I’ve just thought of a reason.’

Steven put down his knife and fork.

‘ An unthinkable reason,’ said Susan. ‘The semen sample you gave me to analyse contained semen from two men, not one. They were just present in vastly different proportions…’

Steven felt a shiver on the back of his neck and his mouth become dry.

‘ The victim must have had sex earlier with someone else.’ said Susan.

‘ But she was thirteen years old. She’d been babysitting on her own all evening,’ said Steven.

‘ It’s not unknown for thirteen year old girls to have boyfriends,’ said Susan. ‘And she wouldn’t be the first babysitter to invite her boyfriend round to keep her company.’

‘ From all accounts she wasn’t the type,’ said Steven. ‘According to her mother and even her friends, she’d never had a boyfriend and wasn’t particularly interested in boys. If anything, she was a bit behind her contemporaries in that respect. Horses were her passion. She spent all her free time helping out at the local stables.’

‘ I see,’ said Susan.

‘ So what does that leave?’

‘ Like I said, it was probably an unthinkable idea,’ said Susan.

‘ Let’s not throw it out just yet,’ said Steven. ‘Supposing you’re right and these ghost bands are actually the DNA profile of a second man…’

‘ Yes?’

‘ The original forensics report suggested that some attempt by Julie’s attacker had been made to clean her up after the assault… but yet the scientists involved had no difficulty in getting enough semen to carry out their analyses…’ murmured Steven, remembering what Carol Bain had told him.

‘ Which suggests that the cleaning had taken place before the rape, not after?’ said Susan.

‘ Which brings us back to earlier sexual activity,’ said Steven. ‘Would it be possible to amplify the ghost bands up and display them on their own?’

‘ The computer can do it. What are you thinking?’

‘ All the males in Julie Summers’ village were DNA fingerprinted at the time of the murder. We could run a second check against the new DNA fingerprint. See if we can find a second match.’

‘ If the boy was her own age he might not have been tested,’ said Susan.

‘ You’re right,’ said Steven. ‘It was probably over-sixteens but it’s worth a try.’

‘ Don’t ask me how long it’s going to take,’ said Susan. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’

Later, as Steven lay in bed, thinking about what Susan Givens had come up with, he had to admit that a rendezvous with a secret boyfriend would seem to be the most obvious explanation for the ghost bands on the gel if they really did indicate the presence of a second man’s semen. Julie would have washed afterwards and that would explain the relative difference in amounts. It would also account for the traces of soap found by the forensic lab in the samples taken at the time. Fine, except that he still felt sure that Julie didn’t have a boyfriend. The girl who emerged from the files hadn’t even reached the first, stumbling, fumbling, holding-hands stage of life. But there was something else bothering him, something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on; then he realised what it was. It was a small detail but one he now remembered. The lab had reported the presence of a small quantity of detergent, not soap. He got out of bed and searched through his file on the murder. He felt his pulse rate rise as he found the relevant section. The lab had not only reported the presence of detergent, it had also identified it as one he was familiar with, Virkon.

Steven paused, looking at the name and then moved on to the next paragraph where Ronald Lee had opined that the rapist had made some attempt to clean Julie up after the event. Lee had omitted to note that Virkon was a detergent used in microbiology labs. You wouldn’t find it under the sink in the bathroom or in domestic situation. This fact, which Lee had overlooked — perhaps because he was so familiar with the product himself — had just become highly significant. The chances of Julie Summers having washed herself with Virkon after having sex with some secret boyfriend were, in his estimation, virtually zero.

‘ So where the hell did the Virkon come from?’ he murmured as he got back into bed and turned off the light. His eyelids became heavy before any answer was forthcoming other than the possibility that Lee’s lab had contaminated the samples themselves. After a last check to see that he’d set the alarm on his watch as he planned on having an early start, he fell asleep, thinking that, on past performance, that was entirely possible.

The address he had for Charlotte Little was that of her parents who lived in the seaside town of Cromer on the north coast of Norfolk. Steven wondered about that as he turned off the main road south and slowed down for Norfolk country roads. He could understand her having gone back to her parents with the girls after the trauma of the trial and Little’s conviction but to still be there some eight years later, he found a bit odd. It was of course possible that her former marriage to a child killer had interfered with the formation of new relationships. He remembered the note in the file recording Charlotte’s refusal to appear in a television programme about the experiences of families of convicted offenders. But even at that, he thought she might have moved out into a place of her own. What details there were of the divorce settlement suggested that she had got everything.