‘ I’m sorry,’ said Steven. ‘But…’ His mobile phone went off and he excused himself, walking over to the window to take the call. It was McClintock.
‘ For what it’s worth, Combe was blood group, O negative.’
‘ It’s worth a very great deal,’ said Steven. He turned back to Samantha. ‘You didn’t make a mistake,’ he said. ‘John Merton did.’
‘ John did?’ exclaimed Samantha as if it were the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard. ‘John didn’t make mistakes. He was the one who held the lab together.’
‘ Maybe “mistake” was the wrong word,’ said Steven, reluctant to divulge too much. ‘But in this case you were right and he… wasn’t. The blood was O negative.’
Samantha sighed deeply and bowed her head in silence for a few moments then she looked up and smiled. She said, ‘It’s silly but I can’t tell you how much this means to me. I know I was only a junior in the lab at the time and my “mistake” was discovered almost immediately but the thought of having made it has been in the back of my mind ever since. To this day I tend not to trust myself. I always check everything twice on the ward.’
‘ Well, it’s a mistake that never was,’ said Steven. ‘You got the blood group and type absolutely right. I promise you.’
‘ But how could John have got it…?’
‘ Tell me about John Merton,’ interrupted Steven.
‘ I don’t think I can tell you any more than I did last time. I really didn’t know him that well.’
‘ Everyone I’ve spoken to has told me that it was really him who ran the lab and covered up as best he could for Dr Lee’s shortcomings but no one has ever been able to tell me why. Were they close friends?’
‘ I don’t think so,’ said Samantha. ‘In fact, I sort of got the impression that John maybe despised Dr Lee a little.’
‘ What made you think that?’
‘ Just the way he looked at him some times, sort of superior, if you know what I mean. But then, John had a bit of a chip on his shoulder.’
‘ About what?’
‘ Sounds awful but I think it was the old working class thing. He was always making jibes about the ‘establishment’ as he called it. The whole country was run by public school twits in his opinion. Maybe he thought his background was holding him back. I don’t know but he certainly seemed bitter about something.’
‘ Was he married?’
‘ No. The story was that he’d been engaged at one time but the girl had called it off; something else he felt bitter about by all accounts.’
‘ So he didn’t have a girlfriend, or even a boyfriend for that matter?’
‘ None that I ever saw,’ said Samantha. ‘But I think it was definitely girls that John was interested in. I saw the inside door of his locker once. It’s a wonder some of these girls didn’t catch their death of cold.’
Steven smiled. ‘Did you ever visit him at his home?’
‘ Never,’ said Samantha. ‘I don’t think anyone in the lab was ever invited to John’s place. From what he said from time to time I think it must have been full of computers anyway. That seemed to be his big passion in life. He was a bit of a jacket in that respect.’
‘ Anorak,’ Steven corrected with a smile.
‘ God, yes, I’m always getting that wrong.’
Steven thanked Samantha for her help and apologised again for interrupting the party.
‘ I’m so glad that you did,’ said Samantha. ‘You’ve made my day.’
‘ Mine too,’ thought Steven as he returned downstairs and started walking back along the corridor. It was now clear that John Merton was the man he was looking for. It was Merton, not Lee or any of the others who’d been Verdi’s contact in the lab. Instead of stopping Lee making mistakes and generally looking after him, as everyone thought, Merton had actually been introducing mistakes, some of which, he would subsequently ‘discover’ and blame on Lee, others he would deliberately let through so that Verdi could question the evidence and get his clients off. Lee of course, conveniently got the blame for everything. All he needed now was for Verdi to confirm it.
But it was Merton’s role in the Julie Summers case that Steven now concentrated on. Merton had deliberately conned a subordinate in the lab into believing she had made a mistake in typing the blood found under Julie’s fingernails. Being very junior, Samantha Egan had accepted it, especially when Merton had apparently repeated test in front of her but, unknown to her, he must have switched the samples. Group A positive blood wasn’t hard to find. Almost half the population had it. It could even have been his own.
If Ronald Lee had succeeded in carrying out the DNA fingerprinting on the scrapings, as had been his intention, he would have come up with Hector Combe’s DNA fingerprint. Merton must have persuaded him — as he had Samantha Egan — that he had made some mistake and shown him his version of the test, one that matched the profile of the semen belonging to David Little. As this would have appeared to make more sense in the circumstances, Lee must have believed him and been grateful.
So why had Merton gone to such lengths to fit David Little up for a crime that he did not do and what kind of pathological mind lay behind it? It had to be pathological. No normal person could have done such a thing. Samantha Egan had said that Merton had a chip on his shoulder but this was something else. It was several orders of magnitude different. Merton was a lunatic.
There was still no doubt however, that David Little’s semen had been found in Julie’s body. How had Merton managed to arrange that? There was no obvious answer. As far as he knew there was no direct link between Merton and Little and only a secondary one between Verdi and Little’s wife, Charlotte. Steven decided that there were two people he had to speak to. One was Paul Verdi, now that he knew who his associate was and the other was David Little. He had to ask Little just who hated him that much and why.
Knowing that he would probably not be able to see Verdi until the afternoon, Steven set out for Barlinnie first thing in the morning. He found Little a bit better in terms of his health than last time. He was lying on his bunk reading but he was not at all pleased to see him.
‘ I thought I told you to fuck off.’
‘ You had every right to,’ said Steven. ‘I gave you false hope when I didn’t mean to.’
‘ Fine; Te absolvo; now fuck off,’ said Little.
‘ I know that you didn’t rape and murder Julie Summers,’ said Steven.
Little stared at him, his dark sunken eyes betraying nothing. At length he broke the silence and said, ‘Do you know, no one has ever said that to me before. Not even my wife.’
‘ A man named, John Merton framed you. Ring any bells?’
‘ Merton?’ repeated Little. ‘I did know a John Merton once but that was many years ago.’
‘ Could you have given him cause to hate you?’ asked Steven.
‘ We were medical students together,’ said Little. ‘We were friends. We shared a flat.’
Little stopped talking and appeared to be lost in thought.
‘ But something happened between you?’
‘ Neither of us came from a wealthy background so we didn’t have much money to play a round with,’ said Little. ‘We lived on cornflakes and beans and toast for the last couple of weeks of every term then suddenly John wasn’t poor any more. He seemed to have money coming out of his ears. He told me that a rich relative had died but he was lying. I found out that he was supplying a foreign pharmaceutical company with human glands. He was stealing them from corpses in the med school,’ said Little. ‘I tackled him about it told him that it was a stupid and dangerous thing to do because the corpses hadn’t been screened for diseases that could be passed on through the glands he was selling.’
‘ What did the company want them for?’ asked Steven.
‘ They were extracting growth hormone for sale abroad. The practice was banned in this country because of the possibility of transmitting Creuzfeld Jakob Syndrome but the extract was still being used abroad.’