Blooding Page 5

  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 bio-chemistry 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 was promoted 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. He had 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 £1,100, and when the purchase somehow fell through, he wrote another one for £1,100 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.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  She got some looking after, all right. When he was through scrubbing, that cottage was clean enough to impress Joan Crawford. But his former spouse didn’t go back home to say hello to the dog. She went to live in Hong Kong with another man, who was a former colleague of Derek Pearce. The torch still flickered.

  Kath and Eddie Eastwood had been trying for weeks to get the coroner to release Lynda’s body for burial. They were repeatedly told, “We must maintain control of the remains until all forensic work is completed.”

  Eddie said it just went to show how the authorities treat poor people, but Kath said stoically, “I suppose they know best.”

  Perhaps, but in the length of time Kath was denied her daughter’s body, they could have taken apart the two-hundred-piece skeleton of Lynda Mann bone by bone. They could have dissected every organ, grouped and subgrouped five quarts of blood drop by drop. The hair could have been catalogued strand for strand, and clothing fibers subjected to more scrutiny than the Shroud of Turin. Whatever they needed or thought they needed, the coroner’s people maintained custody of the body of Lynda Mann for more than ten weeks.

  Finally, on the 2nd of February, Kath was allowed to bury her daughter in the cemetery by All Saints Church—a few minutes from where she’d lived, a few steps from where she’d died. More than a hundred people, including Supt. Ian Coutts, attended the funeral. Several other detectives observed, and made a video of the mourners, looking for what, they weren’t certain.

  “We got the best stone we could afford,” Kath Eastwood said. “We expected it to cost two or three hundred pounds, but it cost nearly eight hundred.”

  Eddie said, “It were over one thousand quid all together, the funeral. I called Social Security for help and they says they can only spend twenty! ‘She wasn’t stillborn!’ I told them. You can’t bury a fetus for twenty quid!’

  “We go to the grave regular,” he said. “It seems daft to talk to a grave, but people do. It helps.”

  “It’s somewhere to go,” Kath Eastwood said. “It brings solace to my mum. She likes to visit Lynda’s grave.”

  The carved inscription on the heart-shaped stone read:

  LYNDA ROSE MARIE MANN

  Taken 21st November 1983

  Aged 15 years

  We didn’t have time to say goodbye,

  but you’re only a thought away.

  Kath kept all of Lynda’s clothes. Some people told her to get rid of them, but she couldn’t. Eventually Eddie put them up in the attic.

  “I kept having a dream,” Kath said. “I dreamed of Lynda fighting. Of being dragged down.”

  She wished she could dream of other things, perhaps a dream of Lynda bringing a cup of coffee to her bedside on Christmas morning. That was the kind of memory she wanted to relive in dreams, but the recurring dream was always the same. Of Lynda being dragged down by a looming shadow without a face.<
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  8

  Visions

  By mid-February the murder squad had distributed a thousand posters of an artist’s impression of the spiky-haired youth, and had put together a twenty-minute video about the murder which they showed at local schools and shopping centers, and even at a disco where youths gathered who might’ve known Lynda. The video described several of the promising leads and witnesses they had yet to locate, primarily the spiky-haired youth.

  By late February they had a brand-new one: “the somber girl.” This lead was phoned in to the incident room by a witness who’d spotted a young couple strolling by Copt Oak Road on the night of the murder. It looked to the witness as though they’d been arguing, because the girl was in “a somber mood.” The man was six feet tall, slim, and wore an “unfashionable coat,” according to the caller. The girl, of course, was thought to be Lynda Mann.

  Suddenly they had a new sighting of Lynda reported, this one in Leicester city center where she’d been reportedly seen with a punk who had three-inch spiky bleached hair. It was known that Lynda used to go into Leicester every Saturday, so the police treated this one seriously.

  The various leads were driving the inquiry’s man-hours into the thousands. It was perhaps with a note of desperation that after showing the video in a disco at Croft, the Mercury announced that murder squad spokesmen were saying, “We are closer.” But they were not.

  They took their show on the road; the video was seen at more local shopping areas and schools, more discos in the surrounding areas, and even by shoppers in Leicester city center.

  In March, Supt. Coutts was telling journalists that the girl seen at the bus stop on the night of the murder was Lynda Mann. After examining thousands of leads, Coutts had to believe in something. Because the punk never came forward, he would remain the strongest lead. Ian Coutts had it fixed in his mind that he was one of the two people seen at the bus shelter, and the other had to have been Lynda.

  “She wasn’t the kind o’ lass to go wi’out a struggle,” the Scotsman repeated to the end. “He must o’ been someone she knew.”

  During the Caroline Hogg murder inquiry Derek Pearce had learned for the first time how to look at pedophiles, discovering through that exhaustive and futile investigation that there were far more sexual deviates living in the villages than he’d ever thought possible. A sexual offense was reported every day, and since everyone knew that the number of reported sex crimes never reflects the true extent of the problem, he always wondered how many occurred. How many in Narborough, or Littlethorpe, or Enderby? How many had their man himself committed before he’d killed Lynda Mann?

  Blood testing was done on many of the most promising suspects. The best they could get out of the forensics laboratory was “He could’ve done it” or “He might’ve done it.” A subtlety that escaped Pearce.

  Sometimes they’d be told he could not have done it, because they couldn’t find the PGM 1 + factor. Yet even if police sent in a sample not from the PGM 1 +, A-secretor group, they were told that another 40 percent of the blood group couldn’t be ruled out. Science was vague, ambiguous, mysterious. The police believed they’d never get an answer from scientists with all their “probably’s” and “possibly’s” and “maybe’s.” They blood-tested some of the huge number of workers brought in to build the new housing estate by The Black Pad, many of whom lived nomadic lives in tinker caravans. It required enormous investigative time to verify the alibis of these itinerant workers.

  There were many theories and arguments about whether or not the chest bruises, one darker than the other, could have come from the killer’s knees while Lynda Mann was being strangled, and many debates as to whether or not the bruise on her chin was caused by a blow of sufficient force to knock her out. Those in favor of the knockout theory had to deal with the biting of her tongue. That was covered by saying it had happened when she was coming around, the instant he applied the ligature. All of this was a subtle way of questioning the opinion of their commanders that Lynda must have known her killer.

  One night in The Rosings they were brainstorming while Derek Pearce was in his frenetic bird-dog mode. “Come on, lads, what do you think? How do you fall? Let’s come up with something!”

  So someone did: a tall, rangy detective constable who parted his red hair in the middle and let it hang down lank on both sides. He looked like one of those earnest schoolmasters from the old prewar films they ran late nights on the telly. Or, as one detective put it, using the ultimate epithet of cops the world over: “like a social worker.”

  What the DC came up with was: “Has anyone considered that a woman might have done it?”

  It may be that Derek Pearce’s brown eyes pulsed and swelled behind his eyeglasses. Maybe that repertory company beard of his started to twitch, or maybe he simply began his trick of levitation. Whatever, someone sensed a moment was forthcoming and switched on the tape recorder.

  Pearce waited until all eyes were on him, until not a few cops leered like expectant hyenas. Then he said, “Yes, there might be a lot of women in these villages who prowl about at night with a plastic bag full of come concealed in their purses.” He paused to let them consider that before continuing: “Mind you, not just common ordinary come. Oh dear, no. But bags full of PGM one-plus, A-secretor come!” They say he was a foot off his chair for the denouement: “And then they take their bloody missiles of PGM one-plus bloody come, and like some demon bloody bowler, they hurl it at the crotches of the victims they bloody well strangle before they stroll home for tea and bloody biscuits!”

  The brainstorming was over for the evening. The tape machine was switched off. Everyone gathered up belongings and put things in drawers. The DC who dared to look like a social worker decided to call it a day. They all left Pearce to be spotted by Heathrow traffic controllers as he hovered between the campaniles and the towering chimney.

  The murder squad had been decreasing in size as the clues petered out. From 150 officers, they’d dropped to 50, then 30, and by April they were down to 16, and suddenly they were 8.

  The Caroline Hogg inquiry had entailed a lot of work and ended in disappointment, but they’d always believed her murder had been done in Scotland and the body dumped on them. Lynda Mann was different. She belonged to them.

  “The answer is right here,” Coutts always said, and Pearce agreed.

  “I never came to work,” said Pearce, “without thinking that today we find him.”

  But by Easter it was essentially over. Coutts went to Derek Pearce and said, “We’ve got to close it down. They won’t let us go on.” Then he added, “I havena’ come in second many times in ma life.” He choked back whatever else he wanted to tell his inspector.

  At the last assembly in the cricket pavilion where he had so often addressed them in freezing weather with steam blowing from his lips, Ian Coutts thanked his officers, told them how grand they had been and what a privilege it was to have worked with them. And when he began to express his personal regret that they would not be allowed to continue, the tears welled and he hastily concluded and left the room.

  Some of them said it was difficult to believe that the Scotsman could cry. They said he was the archetypal soldier Scot, so hard and tough. But Ian Coutts had been born near Glasgow, a city known for tough, friendly, emotional people.

  “If ever a man deserved a result from hard work, it was Jock Coutts,” Pearce said. “He put all he had into the enquiry on Lynda Mann.”

  When it was over, DSgt. Mick Mason returned to Wigston Police Station after personally seeing to it that the files were transferred to a nominal Lynda Mann incident room set up in the communications headquarters of the Leicestershire Constabulary.

  By summer, the eight officers had dwindled to only a pair: Mick Mason and one other. They had other duties, but still took occasional calls from someone who’d spotted a spiky-haired youth, a running youth, a crying youth, a husband, a boyfriend, a brother-in-law, or a neighbor with a fiendish glint who’d ogled a ma
tron suntanning in the backyard of a cottage in Enderby.

  By the end of the inquiry they’d given about 150 blood tests to potential suspects. The results were more than disappointing.

  In August it ended altogether. When it was over they had a list of about thirty suspects who were “possibles.” There were no “probables.”

  Before the incident room was closed and the murder squad was disbanded and returned to divisions, there was one contact made with a villager that later proved noteworthy. A lad, fourteen years of age, was reported by several villagers as being a “bit of a nuisance.” He was a curious youth, usually seen riding around the village on a bike with cowhorn handlebars and derailleur gears. Sometimes he prowled the streets and parks and footpaths. He liked to jump out at women and girls, to frighten them.

  “He’s always mucking about” was how it was put by more than a few villagers.

  Mick Mason interviewed the boy. He lived with his family in Narborough, by the Foxhunter Roundabout. He used to be interested in CB radio but as he was getting older he longed for a motorbike.

  He didn’t seem overly bright, was quiet spoken and didn’t give the detective any trouble. He answered perfunctory questions and Mason was satisfied.

  Mick Mason had a mental picture of Lynda Mann through contact with Kath and the family. Mason had made regular visits to the Eastwoods, and when they’d come to the incident room, Kath would always walk up to Mick and give him a hug, because, as Pearce put it, “he’s that sort of bloke.”