The Blooding (11 page)

Some three months earlier Barbara had changed jobs and was now being kept busier working customer liaison at Next, a purveyor of upmarket fashion and one of the fastest-growing businesses in the UK. With headquarters in Enderby, Next had introduced a new shopping concept to Britain, the idea that a woman could go into a large store, have her hair done, buy coordinated wallpaper and furniture, and then shop for clothes, all in one place. When Barbara had applied for the job it was part-time and she had a lot of time to tend to her large garden. As the job took on more hours, becoming full-time on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, it meant that Dawn had to do more housework, provoking a few disputes between mother and daughter.

When the school term had ended in June, Robin and Barbara had been disappointed with Dawn's grades. Robin's way to handle it was to take Dawn to task, present clearly and concisely why he judged her performance substandard, and then leave it. He wasn't the type to complain to his daughter about school grades.

"I never expected Dawn to pursue an academic career," he later said. "She was gifted at drawing. More of an artistic type. She could do a picture without even being taught about perspective and things like that. She could really see"

Actually, Robin was not all that certain about many of the roads he'd taken. He didn't know if he should've gone to university instead of getting his advanced education in night school. Would it have meant a better position? He wasn't a man to let off steam. Was that the proper way? He pondered such matters.

Robin was, as he put it, "the kind who worried about small things. I
used to feel nervous and apprehensive about jobs and thin .4: at work. Enough to make whoever I was with feel the tension."

Never having been quite sure about decisions he'd made or postponed in his own life, he couldn't fret too much about his daughter's underachieving in academics, particularly since she was generally sensible and rather mature, perhaps more comfortable with herself than he had ever been with himself A reasonable man could hardly demand much more than a child who could really see.

During the first week in July, Robin had taken the entire family to Tall Trees Caravan Park in Norfolk where they'd stayed in a friend's caravan. Dawn had been excited about another holiday trip to Hunstanton that was coming up. She had a part-time job that summer working at the newsagent's shop in Enderby, and she was spending her money on all sorts of fashion magazines and clothes. The Ashworths had regularly received good reports from Dawn's employer at the shop. She was said to be a reliable, likable girl who seemed to know everyone in the village.

In high summer, Dawn began going out nearly every evening to the home of her friends in Narborough. Robin and Barbara didn't like her being out so much even on summer's light nights, but Dawn had agreed always to be home by 9:30 sharp. Occasionally, if there was something special afoot, Dawn would. ring her dad and ask for a lift.

On the morning of July 31, Robin woke his daughter to go to her job. She was a bit cross and grumpy, complaining that he should have woken her earlier.

Dawn did her job that day as usual, and nothing extraordinary occurred in the shop. An employee later said that two girls came in whom Dawn was temporarily "on the outs with," and Dawn had a few mildly catty things to say about them, but it was just adolescent bickering.

The Ashworths lived only a few minutes from the newsagent's shop, and after receiving her wages at 3:30 P
. M
. Dawn walked home. She told her mother she was going to have tea with her friends Sue and Sharon, in Narborough. Barbara told Dawn to be home by 7:00 P
. M
. because she and Robin were going to a birthday party for a friend's little boy.

That made Dawn decide to add some sweets to the present she'd already bought for the child, so she returned to the newsagent's shop and bought a fifty-pence box of Smarties to include with the other small gift. She also bought a pale-pink lipstick.

She had ten pounds with her when she left the shop at 4:00 P
. M
., heading for Narborough. She was wearing a white polo neck pullover
,
covered by a multicolored loose-fitting blouse. She wore a midcalf white flaring skirt, white canvas pumps, and carried her blue denim jacket.

The most direct route to the homes of her two girlfriends in Narborough was by way of the footpath. Dawn had frequently been warned about the village footpaths by her parents.

"She was aware that there was a killer about," her father said. "Dawn was years ahead of herself and never queried important rules. She was well acquainted with the Lynda Mann case."

Two of the village girls saw Dawn that afternoon, walking past Brockington bowls and tennis courts, heading toward Ten Pound Lane. There'd been a Midlands summer shower that afternoon, the kind where one minute there's brilliant sun and the clatter of birds, and next there's rain slamming on the roof, followed almost immediately by silver storm light.

A teenage boy also saw Dawn that afternoon as she neared the verdant footpath. He said that Dawn was a cute and bubbly girl, but he hesitated to speak because he didn't know her well enough. "Her hair was sticking up on top as if she had gel on it," he later said.

Dawn reached the fork and had a choice. She could walk left on the path over the motorway and then parallel with the motorway to King Edward Avenue--or to the right, toward Ten Pound Lane. Since the Lynda Mann murder her father had repeatedly told her always to walk over the motorway. But it was broad daylight and she was growing up, and, in her mother's words, "blossoming and changing, day to day." She chose the shortcut and walked down Ten Pound Lane, which was sodden from the shower and smelled of rotting leaves.

Dawn emerged from Ten Pound Lane, crossed King Edward Avenue and cut through the hedge to Carlton Avenue. She called at the house of Sharon Clarke, knocked and was met by Sharon's mother.

"Is Sharon there?" she asked.

"No, she's just gone with Sue," Mrs. Clarke said. "Perhaps you'd like to try Sue's house."

"I will," Dawn said. "Bye!"

A few minutes later she knocked at the door of Sue Allsop's house. When the door opened Dawn said, "Hi. Are Sue and Sharon there?" "No, I'm sorry, dear, they're not here," Mrs. Allsop said. "Probabl
y g
one to the village. Why don't you go look for them?"

Dawn Ashworth decided not to look for her friends in Narborough village. A neighbor of the Ailsops standing in her kitchen saw Dawn heading back toward the motorway.

A passing motorist later said he sighted Dawn Ashworth at 4:40 P
. M
. crossing King Edward Avenue, walking toward the farm gate, about to enter Ten Pound Lane.

I was riding the motorbike when I saw her cross the road. She walked through the gate there to the lower footpath. I parked the motorbike a short way from the main road and I put me hat on the handleclip. When I walked through that gate a gut feeling was saying, No no no no nol But the other side of me was saying, Just flash her. You've got a footpath. You've got all the time in the world. Even if she runs off screaming no one will ever see you. No one will ever know! Who's going to know?

Ten Pound Lane was perhaps the loveliest of the village footpaths. By the lower road, it was entered through a wooden farm gate. At that point, the path had been covered partway with black tarmac about two feet wide, but soon it ran out and you walked on a grassy dirt track.

On the motorway side were fields of hay dotted with poppies, sprinkled with a bit of heather. And on the other side was a mini-golf course, and then farmland bordering the Carlton Hayes Hospital, protected by a five-foot fence. A profusion of nettles and brambles, along with birch, elm, and tangled hawthorn bushes, on both sides of the path created a veritable tunnel of green where the path got narrow, where it snaked toward the psychiatric hospital and away from it.

Villagers were sometimes solicited in newspaper ads to buy pyracantha and berberis. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds wished to provide "life-saving berries for your hungry garden visitors." There were pyracantha and berberis both, tangled in the impassable wall of blackthorn that bordered Ten Pound Lane.

It was an ideal place to walk a dog. The whole path from King Edward Avenue to Brockington School took only fifteen or twenty minutes to cover, walking briskly. And on the upper side, toward Enderby village center, there were lights and a playing field for soccer. But before you emerged at that point, the net of foliage would brush your face as you walked. And you had to pass through the dark places where only a few spangles of dappled sunlight filtered down onto the footpath.

Some of the trunks in the thickets were a foot in diameter where the path narrowed to one foot, where it was most overgrown and studded with jutting rocks, where you passed through a narrow green tunnel. The sk
y o
ver your head could actually disappear for a moment in that lush green tunnel on Ten Pound Lane.

Robin Ashworth left work at 4:40 P
. M
., and a short while after he got home, the phone rang. It was Sue Allsop asking for Dawn, explaining that she hadn't been home when Dawn dropped by. Robin told Sue he was sorry but Dawn hadn't come home yet.

After Sue rang off he decided to take the dog for a stroll. Sultan was an English setter he'd bought Barbara as a birthday present, but as Sultan grew older he needed a man's voice to keep him in control, so he'd become Robin's dog. Robin and Sultan walked the footpath that led to Blaby Road.

When Robin returned, he changed clothes for the party, but when Dawn wasn't home by the 7:00 P
. M
. deadline, her parents were worried enough that Barbara went alone just to deliver the birthday presents. Barbara returned anxiously at 7:30 P
. M
., but Dawn still had not returned.

Barbara then drove to Sue Allsop's house and learned from Sue's mother that Dawn hadn't been seen since 4:30.

Barbara Ashworth wasn't quite frantic, not yet. Not until she searched the village streets and found both Sharon and Sue on a seat opposite the newsagent's shop in Narborough. The girls had no idea where Dawn could be.

Then Robin and Barbara began to search in earnest with the help of friends. Robin even walked the footpath bridge by the motorway, by Ten Pound Lane. Three or four joggers passed him as he walked. When he covered The Black Pad later that night it was hard to stay in control, hard not to think of the other girl, even though in high summer the light nights had brought to middle England a beautiful silver sky, with a pale wash of crimson cloud.

When the search proved futile, Robin and Barbara wanted to call the police at once, but realized they'd be asked what time Dawn was supposed to be in. They knew they'd be advised that Dawn had probably forgot they were going out, and would be home by the regular time: 9:30 P
. M
.

They waited until 9:30, but Dawn did not come home. They rang the police at 9:40.

Just as Eddie Eastwood had done on a freezing autumn night in 1983, Robin had searched all the logical places and tried to retrace Dawn's probable route from her friend's home in Narborough. Just as Eddie Eastwood had done, Robin Ashworth walked the footpaths. And just as Eddie
Eastwood had done, Robin walked within a very short distance of his daughter, lying by the field Eddie had just mown, nearly halfway down Ten Pound Lane.

The next day, Friday, August 1st, found a large number of local policemen and tracker dogs searching the Narborough area for Dawn Ashworth. The significance of senior detectives being present at the footpath was lost on no one. A footpath by the mental hospital. A sensible fifteen-year-old girl who'd been happy at home. MA vu. The fields between Narborough and Enderby and the tree-lined footpaths were searched with negative results.

Robin and Barbara Ashworth spent Friday at home with two police inspectors who gave them what Robin called "a fair old grilling." The police didn't seem to accept anything they were told at face value but went off and checked each fact concerning Dawn Ashworth and all of her friends.

The house, garden shed and bungalow were searched, even up to the eaves in the roof. They didn't ask for an article of Dawn's clothing for their tracking dogs, which seemed to be trained only to look for disturbed undergrowth. A policewoman examined every page of the Leicester telephone directory to see if Dawn had marked or underscored anything of significance. As with any missing fifteen-year-old, it was generally surmised that she might have run off, especially given no evidence of foul play.

"No," Barbara Ashworth told them. "She's not run off. When she was five minutes late I knew something was wrong."

"She knew we were going out to see friends last night," Robin Ashworth told the detectives. "If she didn't want to walk home, she'd have rung up. She knew I'd come round and pick her up. Dawn never hesitated to ask me for a lift."

One of the detectives said, "She may've just gotten a bit angry with you--about the extra chores you said she's been given lately."

"I tell you there's something wrong!" Barbara Ashworth repeated endlessly that day.

Still, the policemen looked as though they'd heard it all many times before, as indeed they had. A detective looked at a school photo of Dawn taken two years earlier and asked, "Is this a good likeness?"