No book about Dr David Kelly could start anywhere other than at the end.
Kelly is found, dead, in a wood near his Oxfordshire home. A public inquiry, headed by Lord Hutton, concludes that Britain’s leading germ warfare expert has committed suicide. Those who question the procedure or the verdict are scorned as conspiracy theorists. Four years later, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the police reveal that there are ‘no fingerprints whatsoever’ on Kelly’s knife, on the tablet packets in his coat pocket or on the water bottle found nearby. This single stark fact — which was simply not mentioned at the public inquiry — seriously undermines the suicide verdict.
There are countless other odd and perplexing aspects to the story. The last person to talk to him commented that Kelly seemed relaxed and normal, had no coat — it was mid-afternoon on a mid-July day in 2003 — and was heading in a direction away from Harrowdown Hill, where he was found, wearing his Barbour jacket, the next morning.
The journalists who had doorstepped Kelly’s house had inexplicably vanished, despite the publicity surrounding his controversial TV grilling by parliament’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee two days earlier.The
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