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.
THREE
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.
After half an hour, Steven concluded that there was nothing of any great significance to be learned from the cuttings. He decided that he needed a break before moving on to the Hector Combe material and checked his watch before deciding that he should phone his daughter before going out to get something to eat.
Jenny lived in the village of Glenvane in Dumfriesshire in Scotland with his sister-in-law, Sue and her solicitor husband Richard who had two children of their own, Mary and Robin. She had lived with them since the death of her mother — Steven’s wife and Sue’s sister, Lisa, who’d died of cancer some three years ago — and she’d now settled in as one of the family. Steven saw her as often as he could and he tried to spend every second weekend in Glenvane, work permitting. In addition he phoned Jenny twice a week to get her news about school and her friends.
‘ How are things?’ asked Steven when Sue answered the phone.
‘ Absolutely fine,’ replied Sue, her great good nature shining through as always. Sue was the most relaxed person Steven knew. She saw the good in everyone and could find positive things to take from situations where others might find only gloom and despair. In this she was almost matched by her easy going husband, Richard who was a partner in a law firm in Dumfries where he took care of the commercial property side of the business. The couple had taken Jenny into their family seemingly without a second thought when Lisa had died, something Steven would be ever grateful for. The weeks and months following Lisa’s death had been the darkest time of his life.
‘ How’s my little monster?’
‘ She’s fine. I spoke to her teacher at the gate this morning; Jenny’s a born organiser, she said — quite happy as long as everyone does things her way!’
‘ Sounds like her,’ said Steven.
‘ I’ll put her on.’
Steven heard Sue call out Jenny’s name and heard the faint reply, ‘I’m busy.’
‘ It’s your daddy,’ Sue called out.
Steven heard the running feet and then the breathless, ‘Hello Daddy, I’m painting an elephant.’
‘ What colour are you painting him, Nutkin?’
Steven heard Jenny’s fit of the giggles. ‘Not a real elephant, silly, a painting book elephant!’
When he’d finished talking to Jenny, Steven went out to find something to eat. His culinary skills did not go much beyond heating up packet meals so take-away food tended to play a significant role in his life. Tonight he returned with a selection of Chinese food from the Jade Garden where he was a once-a-week regular. He reheated it in the microwave before taking a Stella Artois from the fridge and moving everything through on a tray through to the living room where he watched the early evening news on Channel 4 while he ate.
Trouble in the Middle East, trouble in Ireland and trouble in Zimbabwe, was followed by party political squabbles at home over farm subsidies. There was a warning about dearer food prices and an ‘and finally’ story about a kitten marooned on a log floating down a river in Kent and the efforts of the emergency services to rescue it. Steven finished eating and switched off.
The file on Hector Combe related a very different story to that of David Little. Little’s file — up until the time of the computer pornography incident — was a glowing record of personal achievement and academic success; Combe’s recorded a lifetime of mental illness and criminal activity. Born the illegitimate son of a Glasgow prostitute, he had shown a propensity for violence from an early age, being taken into care at the age of seven and failing to fit in with three separate sets of foster parents by the time he was nine. At this point he had already established himself in police records as a juvenile tearaway.
A teenage life of crime punctuated with periods in various corrective institutes and hospitals had established Combe among the criminal fraternity as a true Glasgow hard man — a man without fear and without conscience. He was assessed by the psychiatric fraternity as a borderline psychopath when he was fourteen and had killed his first victim by the time he was eighteen — a twenty-three year old man who didn’t like the idea of Combe chatting up his
