Ken McClure: Eye of the raven

Little had been thirty-five at the time of the trial; he would now be forty-three, maybe forty-four. He had been married with two children, both girls, who would now be thirteen and ten. They had lived in the same village as Julie Summers, after moving out there from rented accommodation in Edinburgh where they’d been living since their return from the states. This had been in the summer of 1992 when a large, comfortable, family house had come on to the market.

It was difficult not to think that Little had had everything going for him at the time of the murder. He had a job he loved, the recognition of his peers, four million pounds in research grants and as much autonomy to apply them as he could ever have hoped for. He had a wife, two kids and a nice home and he had thrown the lot away because… he needed the body of a schoolgirl.

It seemed incredible but Steven knew well enough that, where sex was the driving force, logic and common sense often went out of the window. It was something that had been documented time and again throughout history. You could be President of the USA and still think that a quick blowjob was worth risking your place in history.

Steven noted that a police psychiatric report had found Little to be uncooperative and aggressive but had found no evidence of personality disorder save for his continuing insistence of his innocence and a reluctance to even contemplate his own guilt.

Little’s wife, Charlotte, had divorced him within a year of his conviction and had subsequently severed all links with him. She had moved with the girls away from the district and was last known to be staying with her parents in Cromer in Norfolk. She had recently declined an invitation to take part in a Channel 4 documentary about the suffering experienced by the wives and families of convicted killers.

Steven referred again to the supplementary file on Little and saw that his academic record was outstanding. From humble beginnings as the only child of an insurance agent and a nursery nurse, he had gained a first class degree from Edinburgh University in medical sciences, and a subsequent D. Phil. from Oxford with a thesis entitled, ‘Mammalian Cell Differentiation, Cause and Control’. He had gone on to carry out post-doctoral research on transgenic mice at UCLA in California and then come back to do a second post-doc at the University of Leicester in England before returning to the States to join the so-called brain drain with a move to Harvard where he took up a tenure-track position in the spring of 1990.

After two years however, his wife had become homesick and he had succumbed to pressure to at least consider a move back to the UK. Rumours on the scientific grapevine had led to him being offered the job at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh and this had tipped the scales in favour of a return. Apart from generous funding for his work it had been made clear that he would be granted a personal chair at the university within a year of his return. The idea of being Professor Little in sole charge of his own unit had heralded a new life for the Little family. Unfortunately, thought Steven, it had also signalled an end to the short one of Julie Summers.

A list of Little’s scientific publications was appended to the file along with a note of his awards and achievements. There was a copy of his medical records, background reports made at the time of the trial and a psychiatric assessment made after his committal to prison. The bottom line was simple. Little was a highly intelligent, if abrasive man and no one quite knew why he’d done what he’d done. He was currently a Rule 43 prisoner in Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow. He did not have visitors.

The only clue in the files to what went on inside David Little’s head was the incident at the University lab at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh. A computing officer, who had been working on a network connection fault, reported by Little himself, had discovered a large amount of hard-core pornographic material being stored on the computer in Little’s office. The man had immediately passed on his findings to the authorities.

Steven suspected that the university would much rather he hadn’t in the circumstances. The last thing it would have wanted at that time would have been any kind of a scandal leading to the dismissal of the man they’d gone to so much trouble to recruit and the subsequent loss of grant money and prestige that would mean. The nature of the material on the disk however, and the fact that a written report had been lodged, had taken matters out of their hands and obliged them to call in the police.

Little had denied all knowledge of the offending material and pointed out that his computer — like all the computers in the unit — was open to use by research students and any other members of staff who might care to use it when none other was available. Computers were generally not regarded as personal property within university departments and confidentiality where required was usually effected through password protection and the saving of sensitive material to removable disks.

In the circumstances, both the police and the university authorities were happy to embrace this get-out clause and were able to head off any potential embarrassment by dismissing the whole affair as a student prank. No further action was taken and the business did not reach the newspapers.

‘ I wonder,’ murmured Steven. From what he’d read about Little, the man did not strike him as the type of person that research students would play pranks on. His reputation was such that he would be held more in awe than in any disregard. Practical jokes were usually reserved for those members of staff that the students held in low esteem and, while it may have been common practice to share computers in the labs, he couldn’t really see Little — as head of the unit — having shared his. He thought it strongly possible that Little had downloaded the material himself and that this was in fact an indication of the true nature of the man.

There was also the matter of the incriminating material itself. It comprised a large number of photographs downloaded from a site specialising in sexual sadism practised on young girls. One such print was included in the file and was captioned, ‘Tracy learns her lesson’. It showed the back view of a naked girl being whipped by a man wielding a metal-studded strap. The scars of her back were raw and bleeding and the welts on her buttocks made Steven wince.

‘ Power trips, Dave? Is that what you were all about?’ he murmured.

Steven made himself some more coffee and then turned to the newspaper cuttings of the case. Press coverage had been extensive and, in general, the mood of the articles followed a well-established pattern. Horror had been followed by outrage, which in turn had been followed by criticism of the police and then a general outpouring of anger featuring much use of the words, ‘beast’ and ‘monster’ when the simpleton, Mulvey, had been arrested.

Steven noted that the tabloids, after using up all their vitriol on Mulvey, had been distinctly reticent when it came to their treatment of Little when he had finally been arrested and charged — as if they had been embarrassed by Little appearing on the scene when they had already convicted Mulvey. He saw the clear change of tack when they started to blame the police for the Mulveys’ deaths. Little, the real killer, was variously dismissed as, quiet, non-descript, inadequate, enigmatic, and obsessive. ‘The beast with brains’ as one of the papers labelled him.

Little’s glittering research career was given no mention, in keeping with the Press’s tradition of saying nothing good about those who’d been convicted. One of the broadsheets had done a piece on what they saw as an increase in the incidence of professional men being convicted for serious crimes, citing several members of the medical profession who’d been convicted in recent years of the murder of their patients.