The Blooding (3 page)

"Down a friend's," Lynda replied.

Margaret later said that Lynda "was her normal cheerful self."

At 7:30 P
. M
. Lynda arrived at the Blackwells'. Karen had been Lynda's best friend for seven months, and they'd known each other since primary school and at Lutterworth. They were in different classes with different teachers, but were the same age and shared adolescent confidences.

Lynda gave the PS1.50 to Mrs. Blackwell who in turn would give it to an agent for Kay's Catalogue Club. Mrs. Blackwell signed the club card, reporting the payment toward the donkey jacket.

The Blackwells liked and approved of Lynda Mann. "A quietly spoken, well-mannered young lady," Mrs. Blackwell said of her daughter's best friend.

Then Lynda said, "Well, I'm off to Caroline's to collect a record I've loaned her."

Caroline lived in Enderby, about a fifteen-minute walk from the Blackwells', up Forest Road, near The Black Pad.

"I knew it was about half seven," Caroline later said, "because Lynda was in and out the door before the music for Coronation Street came on the telly."

Lynda walked up Forest Road, toward the streetlight where a footpath leads off toward the pastureland belonging to the psychiatric hospital and joins The Black Pad, the lonely path that angles down toward the cemetery behind Narborough church.

Lynda saw a figure standing by the lamppost. He had placed himself in the light like an actor on his mark. He was not far from the gate of the Carlton Hayes psychiatric hospital. On that gate was a sign warning motorists who might enter through the gateway. The sign said: DEAD SLOW!

Kath and Eddie Eastwood had themselves a pleasant evening. First they attended a ladies' dart tournament at the Carlton Hayes Social Club. Then they were off to The Dog and Gun, a favorite pub of Eddie's where he managed to win a few pints of bitter playing darts until 12:10 A
. M
. One of his victims was a local policeman, which evoked the expected jokes about getting back some of the taxpayers' money from the coppers.

The Eastwoods arrived home about 1:30 A
. M
. and found Susan waiting up.

"Lynda's not home!" Susan said.

Eddie Eastwood drove around village streets and checked teenage gathering spots. One of the places Eddie searched on foot was The Black Pad, near the Eastwood home. They were building a new housing estate of upmarket homes on one side of the footpath, opposite the psychiatric hospital's pasture. The workers already had the foundation poured and lumber stacked, but hadn't done much framing.

Eddie walked the length of the unlit Black Pad, alongside the housing development. It was then that he noticed how really bright and clear it was. Walking The Black Pad at night was usually a bit unnerving, and the moonlight helped.

Eddie called the Braunstone Police Station at 1:30 A
. M
. to report Lynda missing. A policeman took down the information, but policeme
n t
he world over don't get very worked up about fifteen-year-olds a few hours late.

"But she's always home by ha' past nine," Eddie told the officer. "Unless we know, she's always here!"

When Eddie had searched The Black Pad, it seemed logical to him to look toward the side where the new construction was under way. If there were any teenagers up to mischief, or, God forbid, if anything bad had happened in that dark lane, he'd find evidence there by some lumber pile, he thought. The other side of the footpath was protected by a wrought-iron fence more than five feet tall, a permanent barrier separating The Black Pad from the grounds of the psychiatric hospital. Near the top of the stanchions the black iron bars curved toward the footpath like a row of iron claws, menacing those who walked The Black Pad.

He had seen nothing move, and heard nothing except the tree limbs, bare of foliage. They groaned in the wind under a blue-black sky, a glittering moon, a few shredded clouds. Edward Eastwood had never thought to look toward the hospital side as he picked his way through the darkness down the black tarmac footpath. He had passed within a few yards of his stepdaughter, Lynda Mann.

Chapter
4.

Mannequi
n h
ospital porter who often used The Black Pad as a shortcut between Narborough church and Carlton Hayes Hospital was on his way to work at 7:20 on Tuesday morning, November 22nd, when he glanced through the wrought-iron fence, toward the wooded copse and grassy fields of the hospital grounds, white with frost on that cold morning. He saw what looked like a partly clothed mannequin lying in the grass by a clump of trees. He stopped and gaped. She was naked from the waist down. There was a smear of red about her nose. He was not sure if she was real.

The porter ran out of The Black Pad onto the road and flagged down a car driven by a colleague, an ambulance driver from the hospital. The ambulance driver and the porter jogged back to The Black Pad and looked through the fence.

"Is it a dummy?" the porter asked.

The ambulance driver ran to the head of the path and found the iron gate wide open. He entered the grassy field and approached. Lynda Mann's jeans, tights, underpants and shoes were in a rolled-up heap about ten or fifteen feet away. Her legs were extended straight out, her head turned to the right. She was supine with the upper part of the donkey jacket hiked under her head, the sleeves partly pulled up her arms. Her chin was bruised and there was bright coagulated blood from her nose.

Her scarf was wrapped around her neck and crossed at the back, and a piece of wood about three feet long lay under her fight leg.

Perhaps the ambulance driver was familiar only with victims very much alive and breathing, including those who screamed and thrashed inside straitjackets. Maybe he felt the need to display medical training in the presence of the porter. For whatever reason, he reached down and felt the throat for a pulse, even though rigor was present throughout.

Lynda Mann was white as china. As rigid and cool as a shop mannequin.

It had been an unforgettable year for the Leicestershire Constabulary. The county police agency averaged about one homicide a year and usually that was a domestic killing. But that year had seen four murder inquiries, two of them major, culminating in the tragic discovery in July of the body of five-year-old Caroline Hogg, who'd disappeared from a fun fair near her home in Edinburgh.

The Leicestershire police always believed that the child's killer had arbitrarily dropped her body by the A444 road while passing through from Scotland to some southerly destination, but because they'd found the body, they had to launch an inquiry from their end.

Detective Superintendent Ian Coutts, born and reared near Glasgow, went up to Scotland for assistance with the Hogg case, and to gain access to the Edinburgh computer. The fifty-year-old Coutts was a "typical Glaswegian": gregarious, outgoing, tough, solid and compactly built. It wasn't hard to imagine broad foreheads like his greeting adversaries with a "Glasgow kiss," the kind that leaves many a bloody nose in northern pub brawls.

It took an enormous amount of work to back-record and convert material that had to be manually accessed with the Leicestershire card index system.

Then there had been the Osborne murder, the case of a pet groomer brutally stabbed to death and left on Ayelstone Meadows. That one had required a scene-of-crime fingertip search for evidence in ferocious driving rain. They'd remember that one. On the Osborne inquiry they'd had to access a West Yorkshire computer and put their material into it. Until that terrible year they'd always had sufficient data-processing capability in their own computer terminals.

There was a joke making the rounds of the Leicestershire Constabulary that year: "Did you hear the good news? Yuri Andropov died. The bad news is they dropped his body in Leicestershire."

But until November of 1983 there had never even been a murder inquiry in the villages of Narborough, Enderby and Littlethorpe.

The detective chief superintendent in charge of Leicestershire Criminal Investigation Department was forty-seven-year-old David Baker, a twenty-seven-year police veteran. Baker was a family man with an accommodating style. He looked more like an avuncular shopkeeper than a policeman, but he was, in the words of close associates, "one hundred percent copper." He had five kids, and managed a squash game at least once a week in a losing battle with middle-age spread.

At 8:30 A
. M
. Chief Supt. Baker arrived in Narborough, logging his location as "a wooded copse running alongside a footpath known as The Black Pad." There were many police officers already at the scene, and Baker called at once for a Home Office pathologist. The Lynda Mann murder inquiry had officially begun.

Several detectives, and thirty uniformed officers along with tracking dogs, began searching the copse, the fields, the building site by the footpath, and The Black Pad itself. When the pathologist arrived he made notes: that rigor was present, that there was blood showing at the nostrils, that there were scratch marks on the upper right cheek and below the right orbit, that the tip of the tongue was protruding through the clenched teeth of the strangled girl. The police had thought that her legs were painted with some sort of brick-colored leg makeup, but learned from the pathologist that extreme cold had produced the effect.

The pathologist noted that there appeared to be "matted seminal stains on the vulval hairs."

For the Eastwoods the memory of the day would forever be hazy. Eddie went to his job and told his workmates that his daughter was missing. When he was informed about a body having been discovered alongside the footpath he left work and drove straight to The Black Pad, finding the area cordoned off by several bobbies and detectives already trying to organize a house-to-house inquiry.

Eddie tried to push through a barricade, but was stopped by one of the policemen.

"That's my daughter!" he told them. "I think that's my daughter, Lynda!"

The policeman began talking to him and making notes while Eddie
Eastwood had the thought all frightened survivors have at such a moment: Well, of course! It's all a mistake!

He later remembered the policeman saying, "Go home. We'll call on you."

The rank of inspector in the British police service is the equivalent of lieutenant in most American police forces. One of the CID inspectors, Derek Pearce, had just come off the aborted Caroline Hogg inquiry. And Pearce absolutely hated leaving an inquiry "undetected."

Derek Pearce was the kind of whom they say, "You either like him or you don't." They also say that Pearce had the ability to rise to the top of the police totem if only he weren't constantly being dragged back down by Derek Pearce.

Members of the Lynda Mann murder squad asked to name the brightest detective among them responded:

"Derek Pearce."

"Oh, Derek Pearce, of course."

"Pearce, no doubt."

"Derek Pearce, but . . .

There would always be a "but" with a man like Derek Pearce. Some of the adjectives preceding his name were: immature, talented, abrasive, ruthless, charming, insensitive, generous. But everyone called him complex. A driven perfectionist, he expected everyone to do the job as well as he would.

To get an idea of his energy you'd only have to watch him for an hour. If he was on his feet talking to someone he'd rise on his toes, or rock back on his heels, or slide, or bounce, or sway. If he pursued his listener through a doorway he'd stop, grab each side of the jamb, and do what looked like calisthenics or yoga: pushing, pulling, rising, settling. They said if you could harness that energy you could power British Rail.

He did everything at his own pace, from driving a car (daringly) to mixing beer, Scotch and vodka (daringly). And Derek Pearce fed on stress. If the job didn't supply enough anxiety, he'd find some. John McEnroe would understand.

Pearce was thirty-three years old, just under six feet tall, and slim. But he seemed very slender. Anyone who survives such an energy overload seems very slender. In a pin-striped suit he could've been a young barrister at Crown Court. His thatch of darkest-brown hair and Royal Shakespeare Company beard were closely cropped. He could've played Petruchio in
Kiss Me Kate.

Pearce's glasses made his brown eyes dilate when he was flying into someone's face. Occasionally he was imprudent enough to take intensity-fueled flights at superior officers.

His four-year, childless marriage to a policewoman had just ended, and Pearce lived alone with a very large English sheepdog named 011ie. Police work was his life.

Pearce had been off the Hogg inquiry only one day when he received the word from a fellow detective inspector: "We've got another murder. This one's in Narborough."

"You're winding me up!" he said. "Tell me it's a joke!"

"It was a quirk of fate that I got on the case at all," he later recalled. "The other DI had to go to the Crown Court, and it isn't easy to get out of it when you're summoned to the Crown Court."

"It's all yours," he was told by the court-bound DI. "Cheers, mate." Pearce immediately organized the call-out of a squad that would grow to 150 men and women.

When Derek Pearce got to the crime scene that day, he was told by Chief Supt. Baker to drive to the home of Edward Eastwood and bring him to identify the body which they were reasonably certain was that of his stepdaughter, reported missing the night before.