to set up his own unit here in the UK with joint funding from the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council.’
‘ What exactly was his field?’
‘ Cell biology. He was an expert in stem cell technology. ‘His aim was to make organ transplants a thing of the past and he reckoned he could do it in ten years. The idea was to persuade patients’ own stem cells to repair damaged organs so there would be no need for the introduction of any foreign tissue and the problems of rejection that always brings.’
‘ The stuff Nobel prizes are made of,’ said Steven.
‘ Quite so but instead he raped and strangled a schoolgirl and ended up in prison for the rest of his natural life.’
‘ From what I remember of the case, prison was too good for him,’ said Steven.
‘ A view shared by many,’ said Macmillan thoughtfully.
‘ So what was the update about?’
‘ A convicted killer who’d been serving life in Scotland’s State Hospital at Carstairs for multiple murder, a psychopath named Hector Combe, confessed on his deathbed to a local clergyman that he carried out the crime.’
‘ But there was never any question about the evidence against Little,’ said Steven.
‘ Absolutely not,’ said Macmillan. ‘A perfect DNA match: his semen was recovered from the girl. You can’t ask for better than that.’
‘ So Combe couldn’t have done it.’
‘ No, he couldn’t,’ said Macmillan. ‘Which begs the question, why confess to a crime you didn’t commit?’
Steven shrugged. ‘Maybe he was confused. You said he was dying?’
‘ Of cancer. The report suggests that he was quite lucid when he made the confession. He died shortly afterwards but he was adamant that it was Julie Summers he’d killed. The local police think that he was just trying to cause trouble for them by digging up the past. They took a lot of flak over the case on account of the suicide of the original suspect and his mother. The blame for that was laid at their door by the press at the time. They’ve no desire to see it all over the papers again.’
‘ Understandable. So where do I come in?’ asked Steven.
‘ Take a look at the case file. If you agree with the police assessment we’ll forget it, if not pick away at it, see what you come up with.’
‘ He that pryeth into every cloud may be hit by a thunderbolt,’ quoted Steven with a smile.
‘ But that’s what we pay you for,’ replied Macmillan, handing over the file and adding, ‘Miss Roberts has prepared some extra material for you. Collect it on the way out.’
Steven left the Home Office and took a cab back to his fifth floor apartment in a converted warehouse near the river. It wasn’t quite on the river — Sci-Med pay didn’t quite run to that — but it was only one street back so he could actually see the Thames through a gap in the buildings along to the right. He made himself some coffee and sat down by the window to read through the background material he’d been given.
He started with the original police report on the crime and found it made harrowing reading. Julie Summers had been a bright attractive schoolgirl who had been baby-sitting for a local couple on the evening of January 5 ^ th 1993 while they attended the husband’s works dinner. The couple had been home by twelve but Julie had declined the husband’s offer to walk her home as she lived less than half a mile away. She never made it and was found dead some three days later.
Post mortem examination revealed that she had been raped both vaginally and anally and had been subsequently strangled with her own brassiere. Her panties had been stuffed into her mouth — presumably to prevent her screaming — and three fingers of her right hand had been broken — presumably during the initial struggle.
Steven looked at the photograph of the child supplied to the police by her parents when she first went missing — a pretty girl smiling and eating ice cream — and compared it with the ones taken by the forensics people after her body was found. It was impossible not to feel an overwhelming sense of sadness. Despite his own medical training he actually felt slightly nauseous, maybe because he had a daughter of his own and it was impossible not to wonder, what if?
Just how many of these animals were there? Steven wondered as he paused to look out of the window. How many were out there tonight, just watching and waiting their chance?
He moved on to the photograph the police had taken of David Little. There was certainly no clue from his appearance that he might be one of them but then that was the trouble; lunatics often tended not to look or act like lunatics. How many rapists and killers had subsequently been described by their neighbours as, ‘A quiet man who kept himself very much to himself’? The ugliness of evil was nearly always hidden, just waiting its chance or its trigger.
Little appeared every inch the academic, something under five feet seven according to the police height scale he stood against. He had a mop of frizzy hair, narrow sloping shoulders, a thin waspish looking face, perhaps suggesting petulance or even arrogance, thought Steven and wore small, metal-framed glasses to complete an image that could have been taken from the Hollywood drawer marked, ‘assorted boffins’.
Steven skimmed through the information that Rose Roberts had included in the file about Little’s work and had to admit to being impressed. Unlike so many proposed research projects these days, which were little more than cleverly worded attempts at extracting grant money from the research councils in order to keep their proposers in a job, it sounded as if Little’s work had a real chance of success. It made the man’s conviction and imprisonment all the more tragic.
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
