The pathologist, Reid, a tall man in his early forties who was soft-spoken and had a habit of punctuating his remarks with an unsure half smile and a look at everyone as if to reassure himself that he wasn’t upsetting anyone, greeted him cordially. The only other person present, apart from a mortuary attendant, was the Grampian policeman, DI Teal. He was a short, thickset man who acknowledged his presence with a nod.
Reid was already gowned and aproned. He invited Steven to do the same, indicating a row of clothes pegs with gowns and aprons hanging from them. There was a wooden-slatted bench below under which was a neat row of white Wellington boots. Steven went for full overalls while Teal made do with an apron over his double-breasted suit.
The attendant brought out Lee’s body from the refrigerated vault and Steven grimaced when he saw that the tree stump that had skewered Lee had been left in place. It had been sawn off at the base to permit retrieval of the body from the riverbank but the jagged stump was still protruding from his chest. A look of agonised horror was etched on Lee’s face as if he had seen what was coming as he fell.
‘ Not a pretty death,’ said Reid, again with his half smile.
‘ Poor bugger,’ murmured Teal.
Reid started his external appraisal of the body, recording his findings into an overhead microphone as he did so. When he said, ‘The body has slight contusions to the left side of the neck and adjacent shoulder,’ Steven interrupted and asked if he could take a look for himself. Reid stepped back and extended an invitation with a gloved hand. Steven took a closer look then asked for a magnifying glass before doing so again.
In the background Reid said, ‘I’m not quite sure what your interest is in this case Doctor. No one had the grace to tell me.’
Steven was aware of the pathologist and the policeman exchanging glances when he didn’t answer but for the moment he pressed on with his inspection, moving down to Lee’s torso and paying close attention to his waist where he concentrated on more marks he found there. ‘I think I’ve found something,’ he said, straightening up and inviting Reid to take a look for himself.
‘ Ah,’ said Reid, ‘I see what you’re getting at,’ said Reid. ‘These marks together with the marks on the deceased’s neck would suggest that he was held firmly from behind before…’
‘… being pushed over the cliff,’ completed Steven.
‘ Very possibly,’ said Reid.
Teal, rolled his eyes skywards and said, ‘You’re saying this was murder not suicide?’
‘ I rather think we are,’ said Reid with his half smile.
The policeman nodded as if this were unwelcome news. ‘I don’t suppose any prizes are on offer for figuring out what actually killed him,’ he said, eyeing up the wooden stake protruding from Lee’s chest.
‘ 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.
NINE
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.