The Blooding (25 page)

Susan Kelly had first encountered Colin Pitchfork at the bakery Christmas party. He'd asked her to dance and everyone was having drinks and a good time so she accepted. While they were dancing, a bit too closely to suit her, his hand dropped a few inches down from the small of her back.

He pulled back, grinned, and said, "Kelly's come up trumps getting a girl like you for a wife. How'd you like to go outside?"

"For what?" she asked.

"For a fuck," he answered.

He didn't seem to be that drunk. The fiery young wife of Ian Kelly said to Colin, "Unless you want a sharp kick between the knees you better watch your mouth. And your bloody hands!" With that she whirled and stormed back to their table.

All she'd said to her husband was "I don't like dancing with him. The way he leers just gives me the creeps." And that was true enough.

She later wished she'd told Ian about it instead of leaving it. Perhap
s i
f she had, he'd never have agreed to help his co-worker with the "little spot of bother" that had come up in his life.

"I been sent a letter about the blood test," Colin told Ian at work, in the presence of another employee.

It wasn't the first time he'd mentioned it, and they were all aware of the Narborough murders and the mass blood testing.

"So take the test," the other employee said.

"I'm scared to go up," Colin said. "Scared to death of cops."

"I'll go up with you," the other man offered. "Only a bunch of coppers and a little needle, isn't it?"

Colin dropped it, but a few days later, he took Ian Kelly aside and said, "I can't take the test!"

"Why?" Ian asked.

"I already took it! See, this other bloke, he had a spot of trouble from flashing and doing robberies when he were young. Scared they'd try to put it on him because of that record, so he talked me into it. I didn't think they'd bother with me. I didn't even live in the bleedin village when that first girl got killed. But now they sent me a letter too! I'm in trouble because of him!"

Ian told Colin he was sorry to hear about his troubles, but didn't know what to advise. Ian later said, "If he'd offered me two hundred quid or something I'd have thought there was something wrong, but he didn't say that. He just said I could do it for him. That I got nothing to worry about."

Then toward the end of January, Colin took Ian Kelly aside again. This time he was more desperate.

"The twenty-seventh!" Colin said. "I got to give the blood on the twenty-seventh! Why wouldn't you do it? I did it for the other bloke and I didn't know him near as well as you know me! Now I might get nicked if they find out I gave blood twice! Look, I got kids. You don't have no kids. You can keep me from getting in trouble!"

"He had them kind of eyes," Ian later said, "eyes that look like they could kill you."

Ian said to Colin, "Okay, get off me back, I'll do it."

"We got to go to a photo booth," Colin told him. 'We got to do it right."

That afternoon Colin Pitchfork drove in his Fiat with Ian Kelly to the photo booth at the Leicester railway station in London Road. They took a strip of passport-sized photos.

But on the day of bloodletting, Ian Kelly became ill. His temperatur
e s
hot up to 103 degrees, yet he somehow made it through the workday with the help of medication he'd gotten from the chemist's shop.

"It's like I'm in a bloody sauna!" he told Colin that afternoon. "I got me a bleedin chest infection, mate. I'm sick!"

"Just hold on long enough to do the test tonight," Colin told him. "Then you can go to bed and take your pills."

Later that afternoon when Carole was at work, Ian Kelly reclined in Colin Pitchfork's living room trying to watch television while Colin sat at the table working on his passport with a razor blade. He cut around his photo and slid it out from under the embossed plastic lamination. He cut Ian's photo slightly larger and slid it back inside the stamped plastic shield. He pressed the edges with a bit of liquid sealant and it looked surprisingly good.

"Bingo! It's done!" he said to Ian.

Then Ian was schooled on answers to questions about the names of Colin's kids and when they'd been born. But Ian was coughing too much, was too fever-wracked to get any of it into his head. He went home to rest until it was time.

The Pitchforks had a friend and neighbor named Mandy, an exuberant young woman who'd always found Colin to be an easygoing fellow and very fond of his children. At a later time she said of him: "On numerous occasions he made minor passes at me and invited me to bed, and pushed his body and private parts against mine when he passed by. I always treated these incidents lightly, and he often called round my house as a friend."

On the 27th of January she agreed to baby-sit while Colin went off to be bloodied and Carole went to school.

Early that evening Colin arrived at Ian Kelly's home in Leicester, went up to the bedroom and privately talked his ailing friend into getting up from his sickbed. Ian's temperature was approaching 104 degrees, but, as Carole always said of Colin, he was persuasive. Five minutes later they went out the door together. It was the first and only time Colin would ever visit the Kelly house.

When they got to Danesmill School on Mill Lane in Enderby that Tuesday night, neither man noticed how cold it was--Ian because he was weak, light-headed, burning with fever; Colin Pitchfork because he was more worried than he'd ever been in his life.

After he went inside I sat in the car for five minutes and then I thought, This is bloody daft! I moved the car round the corner out of the way and lef
t i
t. I walked round the block up to the main road, back down; then back up to the playing fields so I could see across. So if suddenly a police van or car shot out there toward the chip shop I'd know something was wrong!

He waited in the darkness. The school was in the same street where Dawn Ashworth had lived. Just down the road was a lane leading to a footpath, to the place where she'd died. And inside the school, policemen were waiting for his blood.

"There were rows of coppers in there," Ian later recalled. "All in civilian clothes. I were shaking like a leaf from the fever. I sat down and waited."

Ian hardly realized it when the name was called. "Colin Pitchfork!" "That's me," Ian Kelly answered.

Ian sat at the table facing the detective and signed Colin's name and filled out a form. A detective sergeant examined the passport and driving license. There were quite a few young men there because the blooding was only in its first month. It was a valid passport so no Polaroid was necessary. The consent form was signed by Ian and he was escorted to a physician who took the blood and saliva samples, to which the detective attached labels.

Colin Pitchfork had thus officially complied voluntarily by giving samples of blood and saliva, proving his identity with British passport number P413736B, along with a valid driving license.

When Ian Kelly emerged from the school, Colin Pitchfork watched and waited, but left Ian shivering in the road until he was sure it was safe. Then Colin emerged from the shadows and called out. When they got to the car, Ian Kelly gave Colin Pitchfork the passport and wallet.

"Everything all right?" Colin asked.

"Yeah," Ian answered. "Doddle, dead easy."

Colin drove Ian Kelly to his house in Leicester, dropped him and said, "Cheers, mate. And mum's the word."

Before Carole got home from school that evening, Colin had scratched a mark on his inner forearm with a compass point, and stuck some adhesive plaster over the wound.

When she saw it, Carole said, "I thought they'd just prick your thumb."

"No, they used a needle and jabbed it in me arm!" he said. "And I didn't like the attitude of them coppers. Treated me like a criminal, they did."

Then he made a big fuss, as he always did when removing an adhesive plaster. He couldn't bear the pain. He clipped around it with a scissors and pulled it off as if removing sutures. He showed her the wound.

"Look at that," he said. "And they made me chew on a piece of cloth. Me bloody arm is killing me."

"You baby!" she said. "A teeny pinprick."

"They took a photo cause I only had a driving license," he told his wife. "They may bring it round here to show people to prove it's me."

When the hand-delivered letter arrived at the little house in Haybarn Close saying that Colin Pitchfork's test was negative, essentially eliminating him from the murder inquiry, Carole Pitchfork showed the greater relief. In fact, her relief was greater than she dared admit to anyone, even herself.

There wasn't much time for Carole to savor the small victory of forcing Colin to take that blood test. He began wallowing in depression again.

"What's wrong with you?" Carole finally asked him.

It was a few days after the test. He sat staring and sighing. Her way, as she put it, "was just to fly off the handle and cause a row when he was like that." So she did: "For chrissake, just tell me what's wrong, whatever it is!"

He looked up at her with tears welling and admitted his affair with Brown Eyes. "She had a baby," he said, "and it were stillborn! My baby daughter!"

Carole was never sure what she said next, if anything. She slammed out the door and went to Mandy's house, not returning until evening. Locked out of the bedroom, Colin slept on the settee that night.

The next day she had to talk to him about it for the sake of her sanity.

"I can't believe it! This woman is abrasive. She's domineering. She's not your sort at all. She's thirty years old if she's a day. By your standards she's a bleedin hag!"

"Didn't you ever suspect?" he asked curiously.

"It crossed my mind. But no, I couldn't ever believe that. Not with her"

"Look," he said, trying to be reasonable, "it's been going on for over a year and you didn't know, did you? It's not doing you any harm then, is it?"

"One question, you bastard. Did she ever hear of the pill?" "Forgot to take it a few times," he said.

"Yeah, for a year. Did she forget every time?"

"Maybe she wanted to trap me," he said.

Later, Carole Pitchfork thought about it. About him, about herself, about the way he viewed things.

"I actually believe he had this rosy picture," she told a friend, "of us taking that woman into court for a grand fight to get custody of his baby. He probably had a fantasy of bringing baby home where we'd all live happily, with me as the mummy."

"Get the hell out of my life," she told him, and he did.

When Colin was gone the phone calls started. Brown Eyes began ringing Carole and writing notes. It got so bad that whenever the phone rang, Carole hated to pick it up.

"Are you sure you know where Colin is?" the telephone voice would say. "He might be here with me. Anytime I want him, he will be here with me!"

While Brown Eyes recuperated at her parents' home, Colin went to visit her daily. He'd stay for half an hour and talk sadly about the baby. He offered to pay for the funeral and they buried the infant at Wigston Cemetery. Colin stood at the grave and wept.

Three months later, Brown Eyes' mother arrived at her house unexpectedly and caught her daughter and Colin Pitchfork in an act of sex down on the living room carpet. The outraged woman took her grandchild home to her own house and made her daughter promise never to see Colin again.

The interlude was over. Colin Pitchfork had seemed to relish living a soap opera, but the star-crossed bakers were even cautioned by their foreman at work. Brown Eyes never saw Colin outside of the job again.

She referred to him as a very gentle person.

During their estrangement Colin visited Carole and the children frequently, and even babysat when she was at work or school. The children missed their father a lot, and he wanted to come home.

"The idea of you seeing other men actually eats me up!" he told Carole. "Now I know what's what. I've learned a lesson."

"I weighed it," she later remembered. "The effect his absence had on the kids. And as usual . . ."

When Carole let him return home in March they still slept apart. And she began monitoring the mileage on his car and motorbike, writing down the numbers on the odometers. When there was too much mileage, he'd always have some plausible excuse.

It didn't seem possible to her that he could be going out "on a wander," looking for girls to flash. He couldn't be regressing to that, and yet . . .

Carole Pitchfork never knew how easy it was to disconnect an odometer temporarily. Nor did she understand that there was another world out there belonging only to him, a world of heightened reality. While he lived out a mere shadow life with her in Haybarn Close, during those phantom days.

Chapter
23.

Bloodprint

I am in blood

Stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more
,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

--Macbeth, Act III, Scene 4

They had a dozen GP's taking turns at the blooding, some of whom also practiced as police surgeons and dealt with sick prisoners, Breathalyzers and police medical exams. The inquiry got them on the cheap, at PS72 for a two-hour blooding, and a good doctor could bloody forty men.