Thesis Submission – “Advancements in Forensic Science...”

In the spring of his twenty-third year Karl Jenkins submitted the thesis that completed his master's degree, and with it closed out the better part of three years in which he had carried the study alongside a working life in the police. He had it bound and handed it in at the department a day inside the deadline, in the same exact and unhurried way he had done everything at the university since he was seventeen.

The thesis was on forensic science and what it had begun to do to the work of criminal investigation. It set out, with Karl's particular thoroughness, the advances that were changing how crimes were proved — the new precision of the laboratory, the kinds of evidence that could now be made to speak, the growing power of method and technical analysis to settle questions that witnesses and confessions had once been left to decide. It argued, in effect, that investigation was becoming a science, and it traced with care the ways the older police craft and the newer laboratory discipline were learning to work together.

What gave the thesis its weight was that he no longer wrote as a student. In the years since his first degree he had become a serving police officer, a constable doing the ordinary case-building work of a suburban division — property crime, the patient assembly of evidence, the linking of incidents that others treated as separate — and he wrote about forensic science now from the inside, as a man who had handled real exhibits and watched real investigations turn on a piece of physical proof. The undergraduate who had once studied crime on paper had become someone who did the work, and the thesis carried the authority of that change.

It had cost him a great deal of his own time. He had begun the degree part-time while still a recruit and pressed on with it through his probation and his first postings, working at it in the evenings and on his rest days across nearly three years, alone and without complaint. Most men would have let one or the other go; Karl had simply refused to, and the thesis he handed in was the product of a discipline that bordered on severity — the work of someone for whom finishing what he had started was less a choice than a law of his nature.

Dr Stephen Cottrell, who had known him since his honours year and supervised that earlier dissertation, found the constable who submitted the thesis recognisably the same young man and yet harder than the student he remembered — more certain, more practised, more wholly given over to the work. The thoroughness was the same, and the composure, and the slight, unsettling completeness of his focus; but they had set, in the years between, into something more formidable.

Karl himself felt the particular relief of a long thing finished. He had set out years before to learn his trade from both ends at once, the practical and the theoretical, and the thesis was the last piece of that — the closing of the longer and more patient half of the effort. He handed in his bound copies, signed for them, and went back to the division and the cases waiting for him, with the whole of his formal study at last behind him.