The Blooding (10 page)

Magistrates read probation reports and ordered him to perform 150 hours' service to the community during the next 12 months.

As to his misfortune, Eddie Eastwood said, "English law and the people who administer it have no finesse. No respect for people like me."

It may well be that the travails of Eddie Eastwood would have taken place regardless of the events on The Black Pad, but there are subtle changes that take place among survivors, as all families of murder victim
s k
now. Murder, particularly the murder of children, often produces a complicated, even insidious emotional aftermath.

On the second anniversary of Lynda Mann's death, an unknown person once again placed a small cross there in the wooded copse beside The Black Pad.

Chapter
11.

The Kitchen Porter

Like the neighboring village of Narborough, Enderby has an old stone church that's outlasted everything else, the parish church of St. John Baptist. One of two churches in Enderby, it's just across the road from a Church of England school, long since closed down. Like the one in Narborough, the little churchyard of St. John Baptist is full of old headstones, but in modern times the vicars needed more burial ground and so a cemetery was consecrated behind the church.

The seven Enderby pubs, a lot for a village this size, served the needs of hundreds of quarry workers when quarrying was the area's main industry. Many granite walls in Enderby were cut from those quarries and still exist in the old part of the village.

Rows of terraced brick homes, formerly belonging to quarry workers, stand as good examples of substantial no-frills Victorian housing. As many as twenty-five are sometimes blocked together in a row, differing only in the color of paint on doors, rain gutters and window casings.

With seven boozers in the village, the young people have their own. Inside theirs, the decibel level from recorded music, teenage guzzlers and fruit machine gamblers could terminate pregnancy.

But a short walk toward the old part of the village, where the roofs are slate instead of tile, leads to quiet cozy pubs with decent kitchens for a bit of beer-soaked steak or "boozy beef." The New Inn still has a thatche
d r
oof, and The Dog and Gun was established in 1650. The pavement in that part of the village is three feet wide, and the two-inch "curbs" hardly qualify.

It seems certain that Enderby will change from a village to a town long before Narborough does. It isn't that the village has so many more people than the combined total of Narborough and Littlethorpe, but that the residents aren't as steadfast in retaining the character of a village, having allowed more shops and businesses. And it isn't just that Enderby has more of the quarriers' terraced homes and fewer Georgian houses and Tudor cottages. It has to do with attitudes.

The police say that the young people in Enderby are more "anti" toward the cops, whereas the youngsters in Narborough are more "pro"-- friendlier Narborough being more middle class. Yet some newcomers to the villages say that the adults in Enderby are more welcoming, being more working class then their neighbors in Narborough.

The residential streets and lanes of both villages are a mixture of architecture and economic circumstance. The teenagers of both villages attend school at Lutterworth, a town with many lovely Georgian buildings, some six miles away.

For their part the police deal with class distinctions by defining homes on their burglary computer as "council, private, or very high class" for the upmarket and crusty.

It was difficult to say to which village he belonged, living there by the Foxhunter Roundabout. His mailing address was Narborough, but Enderby was just as accessible to a highly mobile teenager. During the spring of 1986 the boy was no longer riding about village streets on his bicycle with the cowhorn handlebars. He was seventeen years old by then and had gotten his first motorbike.

He was six feet tall, built large in the hips and thighs. He still never bothered to comb his scruffy hair, and didn't change his jeans very often. His clothing was spotted with grease and oil even more than before, and his fingers were encrusted with grime now that he was tinkering with engines. With physical maturity his brow was a bit more overhung, but he'd probably long have the boneless expression of a child. For sure, he smiled a child's smile, a secret smile, like a giggle suppressed. He was still known as a quiet-spoken loner.

But one of the villagers, the local locksmith, saw with his own eyes that the "nuisance" hadn't outgrown his bothersome ways. The locksmit
h w
as browsing with his small daughter in the video shop a few doors from his home. The tiny shop did double duty, for it also served as the Narborough Taxi Company. A young woman handled the videos for hire and dispatched taxis.

The locksmith noticed the boy enter the shop and go over to the video collection. A teenage girl happened to bend over to pick out a cassette, and the boy moved behind her, running his hand up between her legs.

Everyone in the shop was shocked except the boy. He just showed his secret little smile as if to say, "Anything wrong?"

The locksmith, formerly a British Army judo instructor, strode up to the boy and said, "I'll bang your head in if I ever see you do that again!" He didn't respond. He looked at the man and smiled.

"He just stared," the locksmith later said. "As though he didn't quite understand. I would never let my daughter anywhere near that lad."

Despite his love for motorbikes, despite being nearly full grown, the seventeen-year-old seemed to prefer the company of young children. There was a family of six living just down Narborough Road, a family he liked to visit after school. The oldest boy was two years younger than he. The youngest girl was nine years of age. Though he ran errands for her parents and sometimes gave her rides she didn't like him very much.

According to the child, "He looked and smelled like a fish, so I called him Fishface."

One afternoon she was playing outside when he arrived on his motorbike to visit her older brother. She had a hairbrush in her hand and after they did some name calling back and forth she walked up and smacked his motorbike with the brush. He took the brush away and shoved the bristles against her nose.

"Who's a fishface?" he taunted, then slapped her across the face. She ran and told her father, who ordered the boy to go home and warned him never again to put his hands on the children.

But the following Saturday, he returned. The little girl called him Fishface once again and he chased her down on foot and tackled her. She bit him.

When she talked about it later, she said, "He pulled me knickers down and put his finger in me money box. It hurt! He were wearing black motorbike gloves."

A fourteen-year-old girl, who'd seen him pursuing the child, tracked them and found him with his hands inside the child's pants.

"Get off her or I'll kill you!" she said, picking up a stick and striking at him.

The boy called them both a few names, including "slag," ran back to his motorbike and sped for home.

Six days later he came back when the little girl's parents weren't home. This time he entered the house and said he was going to wait for her older brother to return. The little girl's eight-year-old brother was there, and both children told him to get out. The nine-year-old girl again called him Fishface.

He hit the brother who ran upstairs crying. When he was alone with the little girl she punched him, and dashing through the house to get away, she fell and bumped her head. While she was lying on the floor crying, he knelt down and pulled at her underpants.

"He poked and hurt me inside me privates again," she later said.

The seventeen-year-old had stripped her underpants down to her knees when the family dog growled and leaped on his back. With one child crying upstairs, one screaming downstairs, an Alsatian snarling and barking, he retreated to his motorbike.

The nine-year-old girl was afraid to tell her mother about the incident, but described it to her thirteen-year-old sister. The sister wanted to inform their parents, but the younger child cried and made her sister promise not to tell.

Then one afternoon in May of 1986, the child was down the road with a teenage girl who fancied another motorcyclist. The three of them were off on a side road in a secluded spot near a housing estate. The older girl and the other cyclist were sitting on a motorbike kissing when Fishface drove up on his motorbike.

When the seventeen-year-old offered to trade the little girl a bite of his chocolate flake for a kiss, she hopped on his bike and kissed him. After all, sometimes he was nice to her. He'd even given her a necklace for her ninth birthday. But then he began fondling her. He stopped when she began shouting for the others to make him get his hand out of her pants.

It appeared that he was still having a lot of dangerous problems with them, the ones he called slags, dogs, whores, and bitches. No matter how young they were, they just didn't like him.

"He's not very bright," his mother later said of him. "He's a bit down in his age group, education-wise. But he's all right."

He was not all right. But he was employed. He'd gotten a job at Carlton Hayes Hospital as kitchen porter, and they referred to him more grandly as "catering assistant."

It seemed to amuse him. When asked about his job, he'd show his secret little smile and say, "I'm a kitchen porter. I hand out food in a lunatic asylum. I work in a loony bin!"

Before the end of the school term in 1986, the police issued a new appeal through the Mercury for village residents to come forward with clues in their relentless hunt for the murderer of Lynda Mann.

The article said:

Even though it was such a long time ago, police still hope that someone, casting their mind back to that Monday night, can come up with the killer.

And once again, a police spokesman reiterated the unswerving opinion:

Police are convinced she had a pre-arranged engagement with someone on the night of her death, and that she was the girl spotted with a man at the bus stop in Forest Road, Narborough, between 8:05 P
. M
. and 8:30 P
. M
. on the night of the murder.

The police were soon to be dissuaded of that opinion.

Eddie Eastwood and his family had not recovered from their economic reversals and talked continuously of getting away from the village, making a fresh start in some other part of England. Eddie still had trouble finding and keeping suitable employment and still complained of his arthritis, which had gotten steadily worse. During an unproductive summer, in the waning days of July, Eddie was offered a day job by a local farmer. The job entailed mowing a field of young seed hay, which was to be harvested later and used for horse feed. The field was between the M1 motorway and a footpath that provided a shortcut between the Narborough and Enderby village centers. It was a pleasant walk along that footpath. A gate opened from it onto the field that Eddie mowed.

The footpath was called Ten Pound Lane, or sometimes Green Lane, because it was so overgrown, so lush and lovely in summer.

Within three days of Eddie Eastwood's mowing, that field would be swarming with police, and Ten Pound Lane would become more feared than The Black Pad.

Chapter
12.

Ten Pound Lane

In the Enderby home of Robin and Barbara Ashworth was what some thought to be the sweetest family photo they'd ever seen: The Ashworths and their two children, Dawn and Andrew, were standing in a row, their arms linked, each with a genuine smile. The handsome family had posed in front of the bay window of their terraced home in Mill Lane. There were sixty panes of glass in that Georgian bay window, devilish to clean, but a nice architectural touch. The Ashworths had a spacious four-bedroom house and a large bungalow on a third of an acre, with gardens out back.

On July 31, 1986, Robin Ashworth was forty years old. An engineer for British Gas, he was introspective, placid, boyish looking. Not given to pique or temper, he was the sort who, schooled in science, believed in being reasonable and logical with his children. Dawn, who was just fifteen, and her lanky thirteen-year-old brother, Andrew, had a blend of both parents' coloring. Neither had their father's tousled, charcoal-brown hair, nor their mother's fair hair and blue eyes. The children's hair was more of a coffee brown. Dark-eyed Andrew was a quiet boy, polite, rosy-cheeked like his mother. Dawn's eyes were blue-hazel, often described as bright and expressive, suited to her effervescent personality. Neither of the Ashworth children had ever given much bother to their parents.

As Barbara Ashworth put it, "We thought we'd had every blessing.

Robin had a sister and I had a brother, so when we had Dawn followed by Andrew, it was ideal. Perfect. Just right."

Having been an older sister herself, Barbara said, "I often thought things were unfair when I was a girl so I always saw Dawn's side of a disagreement. I'd try to get down to her level and view things the way she did. If there was a row, it was between Dawn and me to work out. In my era we didn't discuss a lot of things with our mothers, but in this day and age you can. I'd go upstairs and cry on Dawn's shoulder, and she'd do the same. We'd just clear the air."

They were a family who believed in talking about problems. Robin in the deliberate, reasonable way an engineer might present a proposal at the gas works, Barbara with a big-sister chat, followed by a few tears and a hug. They were a rather good mix, Robin and Barbara Ashworth.