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to a previously undisclosed crime as his side of some automatic quid pro quo, which would bring him salvation in the afterlife. It also explained his outrage when Lawson hadn’t quite seen it that way. For Combe, Lawson had been a fool who didn’t know the rules.
    Steven found it slightly disturbing to recognise that Combe was exactly the kind of individual who could and would have committed an offence like the Julie Summers murder while, on paper, it appeared totally out of character for Little. Combe had confessed: Little had always maintained his innocence. The evidence however, said that Little was the guilty man.
    Steven closed the curtains and switched the lights back on. He started going through the forensic evidence offered at the trial, not that this was in any way complicated. The DNA pattern obtained from Little’s buccal swab, taken at the start of the investigation, was a perfect match for DNA obtained from the semen found at the scene of the crime. Steven held the photographs of the sequencing gels up in front of him and noted that they were clear and identical. ‘Game, set and match,’ he murmured.
    He paused for a moment to wonder why Little had not tried to avoid giving a sample with the other men from the village. He was a medical scientist so he must have known the significance of what he was doing and that his DNA fingerprint would be certain to convict him and yet there was no report of him being unavailable at any time or appearing reluctant to comply with the police directive. In his job, he could easily have arranged to have been out of town at the time, visiting another university perhaps or even going abroad in connection with his work and yet he had apparently been one of the first to have a smear taken.
    On further reading, Steven thought that he had found the reason. Traces of detergent had been found on Julie Summers’ vulva, in her vagina and anus. The pathologist had ascribed this to an attempt being made to clean her up after the attack. Little must have underestimated the sensitivity of the test, which only required a minuscule amount of semen, or thought that he’d been more thorough than he had in cleaning up after him.
    As he read on, Steven noted that there seemed to be a dearth of any corroborating evidence offered at Little’s trial. He found this puzzling. It was most unlike the Prosecution in any trial not to use every scrap of evidence available to them even if it amounted to overkill. They had alleged correctly that Little knew the dead girl but this had never been in question; she’d been a babysitter at his house. They had pointed out to the jury that he lived in the same village and that he was alone that weekend as his wife happened to be away visiting her parents because her father was ill. They had gone on to suggest that, through local chatter, he would probably have known where Julie Summers was baby-sitting on the night in question and had lain in wait for her. He had then, they alleged, taken her into nearby woods and raped and strangled her before returning home to where his own children lay sleeping.
    Little had vehemently denied all this but in the face of such damning evidence all he could manage to say after sentence was pronounced was, ‘There has been some awful mistake.’
    Despite the conclusive nature of the DNA match, Steven still found himself wondering why no other forensic evidence had been presented. It was possible that the Procurator Fiscal’s office had decided that it wasn’t necessary but a mention of matching clothes fibres or mud from the scene of the crime on the accused’s shoes or even scratch marks on his face might have given a more rounded feel to the prosecution case.
    No mention had been made at the trial of the girl’s fingers having been broken in a struggle as the pathologist had suggested in his PM report. Why not? Why had there been no mention of scrapings taken from beneath her fingernails in order to establish a forensic