the Blooding (1989)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  The DI's, Pearce and Thomas, often went to the blooding. Those were long nights when they bloodied, and sometimes the doctors treated them to dinner. The DI's had to keep it lighthearted for nervous donors as well as weary cops. One night they conducted a lottery where everyone tossed m fifty pence and guessed how many they'd bloody by evening's end. Some of the frightened donors, many of whom had never been in contact with police before, wanted in.

  Then one of them said, "Wait a minute! If I win, how will I know?" "We'll drop the money in your letter box," Pearce told him. "If you can't trust us, who can you trust?"

  "Okay, I'll have a go!" he said.

  Then they planned a prank in which one of the local bobbies, himself scheduled for a blooding, was to pose as a civilian and come in protesting furiously, whereupon four of them were to pounce on him, snap on the handcuffs and carry him to whichever doctor looked most horrified. Supt. Tony Painter got wind of it and stopped that one.

  There was a traveling construction worker from Nottinghamshire whom they particularly wanted to bloody, but he was a fugitive on an assault charge and kept avoiding them. The best they could do after much effort was to leave a message for him to ring the incident room.

  He complied, demanding to speak to a superior officer. Pearce handled the telephone call, and after a long conversation they struck a bargain. The fugitive agreed to be bloodied if Pearce would give his word of honor not to arrest him on the warrant.

  Not only did the fugitive show up on schedule, he brought with him another traveling worker they'd been seeking. Both men were bloodied, and when they were finished and walking out the door, Pearce suddenly appeared and yelled, "Hold on! You can't just walk out!"

  The fugitive crouched, ready to run or fight, or both, but he didn't know about the inspector's offbeat sense of humor.

  Pearce grinned and said, "Fancy a pint or two?"

  He took both men to a pub and stood them some drinks, after which it was discovered they didn't have bus fare. Pearce had to give them five pounds to get back home.

  It was like that: trying to keep everybody interested, entertained and, above all, dedicated. Pearce's own dedication had gotten a boost just before the Ashworths left on their Australian holiday. When he'd taken a can of soda to gardener/cop Phil Beeken at the cemetery, he'd found Barbara Ashworth tending Dawn's grave. Pearce had met her on only one other occasion, but Barbara talked to him in the graveyard for thirty minutes.

  When Pearce returned to the incident room he commented that whenever someone's killed you always hear that the victim was a nice person, but in this case it was true. "Lynda and Dawn were lovely, bubbly girls," he said to his detectives. "Pleasant, helpful, and ever so well liked, weren't they?"

  He really didn't have to arouse any member of the small group that was left. The hunt for the footpath killer had consumed them all. They were becoming more fearful of the rumors that they were going to be closed down.

  The squad held a meeting where everyone put forth arguments to be taken to Chief Supt. David Baker and beyond. They wanted it noted that Dawn Ashworth II had been opened on a restricted budget because the first Dawn Ashworth inquiry had eaten up so much of the budgetary allowance. They pointed out that the reopening should have been treated as a new murder inquiry and budgeted accordingly. They promised not to drag in donors so indiscriminately, but said that in the long run it was still cheaper than a time-consuming verification of alibis. It wasn't their fault, they argued, that the laboratory was months behind in analyzing the blood, perhaps even the blood of the murderer, for all they knew.

  They'd begun getting time-and-a-third pay for working more than eight hours in a day, as well as PS5.54 for a meal allowance. They offered to give it up, as long as the inquiry was kept open.

  They began a renewed search into computer print-outs of everyone in Britain who'd been imprisoned in the interim between the murders of Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth. It seemed a long time between murders for a serial sex killer, at least according to the psychiatric profile.

  There had always been speculation that the kitchen porter, who seemed to know too much, could have had something to do with Dawn Ashworth's murder after all. Several of the police continued to believe that it had been his motorbike seen parked under the motorway bridge. There were bizarre theories about why samples taken from the vaginal and anal cavities had not shown a transfer of fluid back and forth, the implication being that perhaps two men had raped Dawn Ashworth, front and back, with only one leaving a sample. Perhaps one of them was a voyeur who had assaulted the dead body after the murderer was gone! There were macabre theories like that, because that's the way a murder cop's mind works after he's been in the business awhile.

  Each of the sixteen officers still on the inquiry reiterated that morale was high, and that there was no doubt they'd flush him out sooner or later, one way or the other. They debated as to how the footpath phantom might try, or perhaps had already tried, to beat their system. The consensus was that he would induce a brother or close relative to take the test for him. A few thought he might be gambler enough to take it himself and hope that Jeffreys's system was not foolproof, and who among them could say it was?

  Sgt. Mick Mason, like Insp. Mick Thomas, had been on the Lynda Mann inquiry as well as Dawn Ashworth I and II. Only the "two Micks," DC John Reid and Detective Policewoman Tracy Hitchcox had been on all three. Tracy Hitchcox worked with DC Roger Lattimore, who lived in the village and harbored personal fears for his own teenage daughter. Lattimore never forgot to ring the Ashworths or to stop by with hopeful reports as the hopeless months dragged on.

  Mick Mason was the CID opposite of Derek Pearce. Where Pearce was fiery, the kind to shoot from the hip (sometimes hitting his own foot), Mason was deliberate, methodical, with a completeness compulsion. He didn't just dot his i's and cross his t's. They said he duplicated every bleedin i and every ruddy t. He was the kind to stress over the menu at a sandwich shop: Swiss or cheddar? Swiss or cheddar? Swiss or bloody cheddar! But when he finally made up his mind he was implacable.

  Mick Mason would come to work fifteen minutes before he had to and might stay hours after he could have gone home. He was one of the first that Pearce and Mick Thomas had chosen when Supt. Tony Painter wanted a squad on Dawn Ashworth II "to sort out the business once and for all."

  Until you got to know the big middle-aged cop, he was the last you would imagine in a pub after an evening of blooding--after they got the music going and had a few pints--doing his version of Tom Jones doing "Delilah," complete with bumps and grinds! Mick Mason, "the pub singer," had that other side. But he'd been devoted to Kath Eastwood from the day her daughter had been murdered, and always promised her that he'd never forget Lynda, that they'd get the killer. The pub singer was, by his own admission, obsessed with this murder hunt. Possibly, he wanted the killer more than any of the rest of them.

  Mason had become convinced that the motorway runner heading toward Whetstone was their man. His fixation on Whetstone was at first subtle, and later not so subtle. He kept finding reasons for going to Whetstone. He usually sought permission from Derek Pearce who was more likely to approve questionable blooding.

  "I've been for a walk by the motorway," he said to Pearce one afternoon. "Do you know there's a footpath up to Whetstone?"

  Another time he said, "I stopped this chap walking back toward Narborough from Whetstone. He looked like the punk from the Lynda Mann enquiry."

  After several of these, Pearce finally said, "This is one you're dragging in on your own private sweep of Whetstone, isn't it?"

  The murder squad had arbitrarily concluded that a blooding cost about thirty pounds. Pearce finally got to the point where he'd say to Mick Mason about a Whetstone man, "Well, is he worth thirty quid?" which would cause Mason to grin and disappear with blood in his eye.

  Even with Pearce's "when in doubt, bloody him" philosophy, it got a bit much when Mick Mason began tying up the computer with descriptions of punkers, wanting
print-outs on suspects with a residence in Whetstone.

  When frustrated voices were raised in the incident room, when the possibility of closure loomed, nobody even looked up if it was Derek Pearce's voice; they were used to that. But when Mick Thomas started raising his voice, as one later put it, "We'd think, `Blimey! Maybe something is wrong!' "

  The three-month duty charts had been changed to one-month duty charts. As far as the top brass was concerned, the end was near, and that was obvious to the two inspectors. The remaining sixteen held a very tense meeting with Supt. Tony Painter. He informed them that Chief Supt. David Baker was getting great pressure from the chief constable who in turn was being pressured by the Home Office. The inquiry could not stay open indefinitely.

  There was an extraordinary clamor at that meeting. People wondered aloud what the press would make of a surrender after four years of hunting the footpath killer. Sgt. Mick Mason openly suggested they should have the courage to begin blooding other places. Like Whetstone, for instance.

  Tony Painter became annoyed. He said, "You will not mention Whetstone. We will not bloody Whetstone!" Of course, he didn't know that Mick Mason was already blooding Whetstone.

  Derek Pearce jumped in to say, "All right, let's pack it up and go home!"

  Painter rebuked Pearce about the need for a DI to control himself, but the clamor persisted. Somebody actually said that if the inquiry was closed, the Police Complaints Board should bring a complaint against the chief constable himself!

  Baker and Painter and their superiors were facing kamikaze dedication here. Maybe they realized that these last sixteen were foundering in a bloodlust frenzy. They might bloody every goddamn mammal in Leicester.. shire!

  A new television story was aired that didn't exude confidence. Chief Supt. David Baker, Supt. Tony Painter, DI's Derek Pearce and Mick Thomas were all videotaped by a news team during a blooding session. Baker made another appeal. He said, "We have not got that vital piece of information which allows us to put the jigsaw together completely."

  When he was finished, newsmen made sotto voce comments about whether or not the squad had any puzzle pieces. The announcer called Baker's statement "a painful admission."

  More painful to the murder squad was a visit by an inspection team from the deputy chief constable and the high sheriff of Leicester, who, after being given a brief summary of the mountain of work accomplished by the inquiry, had only one comment: The sign they'd posted for civilians that said, COFFEE 10P, TEA 5P, was "unprofessional."

  Such is the policeman's lot, as Gilbert and Sullivan had long ago observed.

  On a more upbeat note, a Midlands newscaster said, "As more men come forward the net slowly closes on the killer. If the police hunch is right, and he is a local man, he dare not run the risk of giving blood."

  On the day of that newscast, David Baker offered a statement to the print media--a prayer almost--that proved to be prophetic. He said, "Somebody's bound to say something in an unguarded moment. Now that's the kind of information we need!"

  The beginning of an answer to Baker's prayer had already taken place on the 1st of August, one year after Dawn Ashworth's murder. It happened in a pub.

  The Clarendon Pub in Leicester was a pub for locals: students, university people, journalists. It was a bit Bohemian in an area that had become trendy. A nice pub, the Clarendon had salmon-colored drapes and valances, coordinated wallpaper, and plush banquettes. It was near one of the Hampshires Bakery outlet shops, off Queens Road.

  During the lunch break on that Saturday afternoon Ian Kelly went to the Clarendon, along with a twenty-six-year-old woman who managed one of the bakery outlets. Another woman and a young man, both Hampshires employees, tagged along.

  They sat in the busy pub having a "cob," a Leicester snack consisting of a roll filled with meat, cheese or anything you fancy. The talk turned to bakery tittle-tattle, centering on Colin Pitchfork, whom the manager of the outlet shop knew by sight and reputation.

  They gossiped about Brown Eyes and her stillborn, and the fact that Colin couldn't stay away from women. As Ian Kelly sipped his drink, a bemused smile crossed his face and he blurted, "Colin had me take that blood test for him."

  The bakery manager said, "What test?"

  "For the murder inquiry?" the male companion asked. "That one, Ian?"

  Ian Kelly got up and went to the bar for another pint. When he was gone the bakery manager turned to the other young man and said, "What's that all about?"

  "It's odd," the young baker said. "Colin asked me to do it too. Offered me two hundred quid to take the blood test. He's just scared of coppers. A weird bloke, that Colin."

  The shop manager was deeply disturbed. She tried to broach another question, but it was lightly dismissed as though the implication was preposterous.

  Still she couldn't get it off her mind. A week passed, and she took aside the young baker who'd been offered the money and said, "What are we going to do about Colin Pitchfork?"

  He said, "Leave it. He's a friend. You don't even know him."

  She couldn't leave it, but she was fearful of involving someone in a double murder--someone who might be innocent--not to mention getting Ian Kelly into police trouble.

  Three days later while the bakery manager stewed, history was made in London at the Old Bailey. Genetic fingerprinting was used in a criminal court for the first time in the case of a man accused of unlawful intercourse with a fourteen-year-old mentally handicapped girl who'd given birth to his baby.

  Dr. Alec Jeffreys was quoted as saying, "The use of the test in a court case is exciting for us. It is an historic occasion."

  The bakery manager knew that the owner of the Clarendon Pub had a son who was a police constable. She inquired but found that the bobby was on holiday. It was six weeks before she rang him up.

  It had been a good summer for Carole Pitchfork. She'd been noticing a marked improvement in her husband's attitude since she had allowed him to return home in March. She felt that he was trying very hard to make a go of their marriage. He seemed to be maturing and accepting responsibility for his past actions. She didn't even have to nag him to change clothes anymore. He was dressing better, as befit a budding entrepreneur.

  His scheme for opening the cake-decorating studio was beginning to jell at last. Colin had been to a banker, and was discussing things like cash flow with an accountant. He'd even accepted a small commission to make a birthday cake for a policeman's twenty-first birthday. It was cleverly conceived and skillfully executed. The policeman loved it. Colin had done an icing sculpture of a bobby's helmet, alongside a set of steel handcuffs.

  Friday, the 18th of September, started off in a river of blood like all the others. Derek Pearce and Gwynne Chambers were on a London run to pick up four blood samples and to interview one man. Whenever they took trips like that they'd call in several times a day. But they got caught in motorway traffic coming back and it was some time before they could get to a phone box. They found one occupied by a girl who had about three pounds, all in tenpence coins, spread out in front of her.

  She gave the impatient detectives a glance or two but wasn't about to give up the phone. They jumped back in the CID car and kept going.

  When they got to the office at 9:00 P. M. there were messages all over the door. One said, "Don't go home!" Another said, "Got a job on!" A third said, "Don't go home. Got a job on!"

  When Pearce got to his desk he found a huge one saying, "DON'T GO HOME!"

  Phil Beeken had taken a telephone message that afternoon from a bobby whose father owned a pub near the Queens Road outlet shop of Hampshires Bakery. Beeky relayed the information from that telephone call directly to Insp. Mick Thomas and they pulled an old house-to-house pro forma from the Lynda Mann inquiry. They compared the signature of the resident of a semi-detached house in Littlethorpe with the pro forma from his blooding in January. The two signatures of Colin Pitchfork didn't match.

  Mick Thomas and Phil Beeken tried to keep each other fr
om getting too excited. After all, signatures can change over a period of three years, particularly with young people. But Pitchfork wasn't a kid. Then they looked at each other and decided, The hell with it! They were over the moon and rising!

  Mick Mason was telephoned at home and given the job of immediately contacting the others from the bakery who'd been present in the Clarendon Pub when Ian Kelly blurted an admission during an unguarded moment. Thomas and Beeken went to the manager's house and took her written statement.

  She began by saying, "This is probably a waste of your time, but my conscience forced me to ring the police." She kept apologizing until they reassured her.

  By the time Mick Thomas and Phil Beeken hooked up with Derek Pearce and Gwynne Chambers later that evening they were practically hyperventilating.

  Mick Thomas said to Pearce, "Roger and Tracy are still in Yorkshire trying to bloody some bloke! You and Gwynne were in London! Everybody else had gone home! I was going crazy with no one to tell!"

  One of them noticed something very peculiar. The conversation in the Clarendon Pub, that unguarded moment, had occurred exactly one year after the day that Dawn Ashworth's body lay undetected in a field by Ten Pound Lane. It seemed to be an omen.

  They unanimously elected to go immediately to a pub, and they did. While drinking his second pint Pearce said that going to bed was out of the question. He wanted morning to come without having to sleep through the interim. Mick Thomas suggested that they'd better not get drunk because of the importance of the following day. But they didn't have to worry--the booze couldn't compete with the adrenaline rush.

  Each man later reported that he spent a near-sleepless night. Each later reported that he felt he was facing the most important day in his police career.

  As far as Pearce was concerned: "It was the most important day of our lives."

  Ian Kelly had not been having an easy time at the bakery since he'd given blood for Colin Pitchfork. It seemed as though too many things were going wrong, and Colin Pitchfork was always around to "help" him. Once when they were making buns, Ian burned them. Colin observed the error and told Ian not to worry, he'd take care of it. Ian later heard that Colin "took care of it" by informing the foreman.