The Blooding (6 page)

More than one detective was to describe driving into the hospital grounds on dark brooding nights, thinking of him and wondering if he was peering out a window. Watching and laughing. If you were tired from overwork, if you'd had a couple of pints, it wasn't impossible to fancy you'd heard a soft demented chuckle in the darkness, from just across the cricket pitch.

Chapter
7.

Plea

By the first week in January the police were desperate enough to ask the Mercury to print more pleas for witnesses to come forth. The first request involved two men and a young woman who'd been observed in a coffee shop on Horsefair Street in Leicester. One of the men had been reading an inside page of the Mercury when he abruptly folded up the paper. After the young woman asked him what was in the news, he hushed her by saying he'd tell her when they got outside. The witness who'd observed the incident told police the page the man had been reading was "probably" , which carried a story on the Lynda Mann inquiry. The young man wore a gold earring in his right ear. There were lots of earring wearers reported.

Still another published plea asked for information leading to a "mystery man" who'd scribbled the name of Lynda Mann in a telephone boo
k i
n a local kiosk the day her body was found. That particular clue fizzle
d w
hen the mystery man telephoned police admitting he'd jotted down th
e n
ame while ringing a village friend to ask if he knew the victim's family.

By the end of January the police were publicly releasing well-worke
d i
nformation on a youth who'd entered a wool shop in Narborough the da
y a
fter the murder for a new pair of trousers because his were torn. Th
e s
hopkeeper's suspicions were belatedly aroused because of a published report that police were looking for a beer-bellied young fellow with a tear i
n t
he left leg of his jeans, who'd been seen coming from The Black Pad at 8:35 P
. M
. on the night of the murder.

Now even anonymous calls were prompting large newspaper stories. In early February a young woman rang the incident room at midnight to inform police breathlessly that she knew someone resembling the spiky-haired punk with orange hair cropped like a bunch of geraniums. She had seen the artist's impression in the newspaper and was sure he frequented a public house in Enderby. The police interviewed everyone in and around the public house for a week, but the only geraniums they saw were potted.

By February the murder squad was still nearly one hundred officers strong. They'd taken three thousand statements and followed up some four thousand lines of inquiry. Virtually every young man going through a punk phase in Leicestershire and the surrounding counties had been interviewed. In the beginning they had thought that if they ever found one who was five-ten, slender, who wore boots with laces, and a leather jacket, and a belt with a bronze buckle, and had amazing orange hair, it would have to be their man. But they had found lots of them, all with amazing hair, many with laced boots and leather jackets. None was the punk seen with the girl thought to have been Lynda Mann, the punk who had caused the motorist to brake sharply.

He was, in the words of a team member, "as elusive as the flippin Loch Ness Monster." And the running youth had worn out several teams. They said they'd interviewed more runners in early 1984 than had the British Olympic coaches.

Supt. Ian Coutts was still convinced the spiky-haired youth was their man and that the girl seen at the bus shelter had to have been Lynda Mann. Derek Pearce and many of the others weren't so sure, but everyone believed the killer must be a local man in order to have known about The Black Pad and the gate leading into the wooded copse beside that tarma
c p
ath.

As far as Coutts was concerned, Lynda had probably been friendly with her killer because she wasn't the sort of girl to talk to a stranger, and would've fought for her life if suddenly ambushed. They searched endlessly for a "secret boyfriend," one not known even to her best friends. Someone with whom she might have taken a stroll, along The Black Pad.

The Police Mobile Reserve is a unit of uniformed police officers drawn upon to supplement the divisions, a pool of men for any job. The
PMR did the house-to-house pro forma, and took statements from anyone not alibied.

On January 22nd, Police Constable Neil Bunney of the PMR had on his list a semi-detached house in Littlethorpe, part of a new housing estate in a street called Haybarn Close. The owner of the house was a twentyfive-year-old baker named Colin Pitchfork who'd recently moved into the house with his wife and baby from Barclay Street in Leicester, about five miles down Narborough Road.

Pitchfork's young wife, Carole, answered the door, admitted PC Bunney, and called upstairs to her husband. Everyone in the three villages knew that the police were doing house-to-house inquiries, so the constable didn't have to explain much.

The baker didn't come down for several minutes.

"I had to compose meself," he later said.

What really had the baker worried was that he'd been up in the attic putting down floorboards he'd stolen from a construction site, telling his wife he'd bought them at a bargain sale. He thought for sure he was about to be nicked for the theft, and it wasn't the only thing he'd stolen; he'd also pinched a cabinet unit he thought might fit nicely in the kitchen. He wasn't ordinarily a thief, but the opportunity had presented itself and he wasn't one to pass up an opportunity. Upon talking to the policeman, the baker was extremely relieved to learn that the officer had no knowledge whatsoever of the stolen property.

In that Colin Pitchfork hadn't lived in Littlethorpe at the time of the murder he would've been relegated to a low-priority classification, except that he had been discovered to have had a prior indecency record. It seemed that he was a convicted flasher, and had been from a very early age, so he was on the list. Later, after a computer match-up, he ended up on three indexes: the indecency list, the Carlton Hayes outpatient list because he'd been referred to therapy by the court for one of the flashing offenses, and the house-to-house resident list.

Pitchfork's classification in the incident room was as an unalibied "code four." Code one meant that the suspect couldn't have done it because he was dead, in prison, or his whereabouts had absolutely been proved. Code two meant he'd been alibied by a friend or colleague. Code three was a wife's alibi, which was never very reliable. The inquiry team could end up with a man who was part code two, part code three and part code four, if, for example, he'd seen his wife early in the evening, gone out with friends and then walked home alone.

They were looking for someone who was unalibied between seven and midnight. According to both Pitchfork and his wife, he had driven her to a night class at the community college early that evening while their baby slept in the backseat in a carrycot. The baker then had gone home to his former residence and sat with the baby until his wife was finished with her class. Technically, he was unalibied from 6:45 P
. M
. until 9:15 P
. M
., but he would've had to leave his baby unattended in order to go out and murder.

Psychologists maintain that flashers are a relatively harmless lot, and Pitchfork had no history of violence. Furthermore, he'd moved to Littlethorpe in December, one month after the murder of Lynda Mann. Not having been a villager at the time of the murder, he probably wouldn't have known about The Black Pad and the gate into the copse.

He was not given a high priority, but his diabolical surname caused a joke or two in the incident room. After all, a Pitchfork would have to be guilty of some sort of villainy.

Derek Pearce's father had always wanted him to become a doctor. The older man had been a strict parent: ex-army, railway worker, traffic warden. He'd ended his working career as the curator of the regimental museum in Leicester. Pearce's mother was, as Derek called her, "a mum's mum." Pearce had a brother one year older and two younger sisters, but four weren't enough for Mrs. Pearce. She became a foster mother, and the house was literally crawling with babies. She'd take any and all kinds, with or without birth defects.

When Pearce was nineteen he'd joined the Leicestershire Constabulary on a whim. As a result, his father hardly spoke to him for a year. When his older brother changed his college program from biochemistry to medicine, Derek Pearce was relieved. He hoped that with a budding doctor in the house his father would relent.

A lifelong problem with his inner ear made it difficult for Pearce to walk a straight line. In marching drills at the police training center they'd put him in the middle and let him bang into the shoulders of his colleagues, but he was good at other aspects of police training.

During his first year in the field he won the Harris Cup given to the probationer of the year, and his picture appeared in the Leicester Mercury. That dose of celebrity mollified the old man. Nobody in the family had ever been photographed for the newspaper. His dad was very proud.

By his second anniversary Pearce was transferred into CID, and wa
s p
romoted to sergeant three years later, with an exam score among the top two hundred in all of England. He made inspector six years after that. Everyone said he was a "flier."

Then the flight got diverted. Promotions beyond the rank of inspector are based not on written examinations but on scores given by panels of senior officers, as well as on written recommendations from immediate superiors. Derek Pearce's annual reports were very good, but troublesome words popped up occasionally, words like "arrogant" and "intolerant."

Pearce summed up his management role by saying, "For me life should be nicking villains and being a cop. If theirs wasn't, they were working for the wrong DI."

Nobody doubted his ability to do police work, and Pearce looked after his people by defending them against all outsiders. He was generous in a pub and was good to them when they needed an afternoon off, but he could be ruthless with any subordinate who treated police work "as a job rather than a way of life." If they worked hard and made only honest mistakes he'd administer a verbal "bollicking" that usually went no further. But his bollicking was about as subtle as a wrecking ball.

Stimulus wasn't often needed during the Lynda Mann inquiry. Members of the murder squad maintained they never lost confidence that they'd detect their killer, convinced he had to be a villager. And though it was nearly impossible to match Pearce's intensity for crime detection, he often tried to ignite his subordinates with his unabated energy. Even after long, fruitless, frustrating days Pearce always looked forward to tomorrow.

"What about this idea?" Pearce would say, eyes dilating as he seemed to rise up from his chair, hovering, levitating.

He'd often toss them an idea the others hadn't tried. But if he didn't like his subordinates' ideas, Pearce was canny enough not to discourage them, "unless they were too one-off," as he put it. Pearce believed his job was to keep his detectives enthusiastic, hopeful, excited.

"Where is he? We know he's right here, don't we? What would you like to do? What do you think? Never mind what the gaffer thinks, I'm asking you. Our man's close by us, isn't he? I can feel him. Where is he? Where is he, then?"

They knew he was manipulating them, but strangely enough, it kept them enthused despite themselves.

"Nobody said you had to love him," one of his men said later. "You just felt like throttling him sometimes when he started shouting at you, but he could organize. He could always see the big picture immediately. H
e h
ad a computer for a memory and could sort things out, even if he did talk to you like a bleedin foxhound."

"Where is he?" Pearce would say. "He's right here, isn't he? Come on, let's find him! And, my lads, let's not forget our happy little home."

He could be right there in the hospital itself, Pearce often reminded them. Where they might have more gibbering loonies than a Labour party picnic. More perverts than the House of Lords.

The irrepressible Derek Pearce seldom talked about his ex-wife even with close friends, even if he'd been mixing his drinks. She'd also been a police officer, a few years younger than he, very attractive and with a personality every bit as strong as his. It was a disastrous mix. Everyone who knew him said the torch Pearce carried could've ignited glaciers.

After she walked out on him she'd needed a down payment for a cottage. Pearce wrote her a check for f1,100, and when the purchase somehow fell through, he wrote another one for PS1,100 to go with the first. The solicitor handling Pearce's divorce rang him at that point and said, "I'd like a letter from you stating that you go against all of my advice. I need it for my professional reputation."

When she left him she wouldn't tell Pearce where she was living, but if Derek Pearce was anything, he was a good detective. He searched probable neighborhoods and spotted a vase in a window, a vase she loved. When he found her she was sick in bed with the flu, and had no one to take care of her.

"Why not let me come round and look after you till you're better?" he suggested.

"Maybe," she said.

"And when you're well you might come back home . . . for a visit. To say hello to the dog."