To the best of my understanding no exhibits such as the knife were seen or examined during the Hutton Inquiry.
The knife was never shown to the Kelly family. Only a photograph or "photocopy" of the knife was shown.
The verbal descriptions given of the knife in evidence to the Hutton Inquiry suggest that it was a pruning knife with a curved blade similar to that in the photograph below. The knife found at Harrowdown Hill was of a different make from the knife shown in the image and had, if I understand the evidence correctly, a folding blade.
Dr. Hunt in his postmortem report says that the knife found at the scene is a candidate for being the knife that inflicted the wounds. It may be a candidate, but is it a credible candidate?
We can have no definitive impression of the knife found at Harrowdown Hill in the absence of public disclosure.
The knife shown in the first photo is relatively new. The point of a knife supposedly 40 or 50 years old may be substantially blunter than that shown in the photograph.
It seems to me likely that the sharpness of the point of a concave blade is potentially crucial. By contrast, in a No.10 scalpel blade the blade is convex and can incise without the need for a particularly sharp point. With a convex blade such as that shown below the sharpness of the point of the blade is markedly more important, in my view.
There are technical difficulties in sharpening the blade on the curved part of a knife such as that shown. Over 40 or 50 years it seems to me to be likely that the point may well have become significantly more rounded than that shown in the image.
In addition, Mai Pederson has stated that David Kelly had difficulty in sharpening a knife since he couldn't hold a sharpening stone. It seems that 1992 is the most likely time of the right elbow injury, suggesting that David Kelly might not have fully been able to sharpen the knife (if it was his knife) for something of the order of 11 years!
I very much doubt that a 40 or 50 year old imperfectly sharpened pruning knife can have been used in the circumstances of Harrowdown Hill by a man, said by Mai Pederson to have difficulty cutting steak, to produce the wounds described in the postmortem report.
To produce the wounds which Dr. Nicholas Hunt described in his postmortem report I believe you would need to use a blade with characteristics more like those of the blade shown in the following picture.
The sharp point is, I believe, essential to achieve the depth of wounds which Dr. Hunt describes, given the circumstances which applied at Harrowdown Hill. The point need not be of the extreme pointedness shown in the image. Other Stanley blades (or similar) would be adequate, I believe.
Note too the razor-sharp or scalpel-sharp blade that disposable knives such as a Stanley knife blade has. That sharpness of blade can cut human skin and tendons.
My interpretation of the description of the wounds is that they were more likely to have been made by a sharp-pointed, scalpel-sharp blade such as that above and to have been made by a third party standing or kneeling to the left of the body.
No knife with a blade having the characteristics of a very sharp point and scalpel-sharp blade was found at Harrowdown Hill.
If I'm correct that a blade of that nature is needed to produce the wounds described by Dr. Hunt then how is the absence of such a knife at the scene to be explained?
Surely it's, at a minimum, highly suggestive of the presence of a third party who removed the real weapon.
What would be the point of a third party removing a "suicide" weapon? That makes no sense.
What would be the point of a third party removing a murder weapon and, hypothetically, planting a pruning knife?
Well, that would make it look like suicide.
And making it look like suicide is something that a murderer would find a very desirable outcome, I would suggest.
An alternative credible candidate blade is the blade for a retractable knife such as that shown here.
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