The Blooding (24 page)

As terrible a tragedy as it was, the footpath murder inquiry did not seem to be an event about which a young mother like Carole Pitchfork should fret unduly, as long as she was prudent where she walked. And most of the time now, she drove the car wherever she needed to go.

Colin didn't watch television much, having to get up so early to work at the bakery. Yet he watched Crimewatch UK and all the news bulletins about the Ashworth inquiry, especially after the release of the kitchen porter, when the villagers were distressed and confused.

Carole arrived home from work ahead of schedule on the night they announced the kitchen porter's release. She liked to pop home unexpectedly, just in case.

"Bunked off early," she said, finding him glued to the television. "They let him go," he said.

"If he wasn't the one, now what?" she said. "I don't think they'll catch anyone until it happens again."

He shook his head and said, "They just haven't a clue, have they?"

"Colin wouldn't balk at having a go at something," Carole said. "He always wanted to try racetrack rallying but it cost sixty quid a day and we couldn't afford it. But if we could've, he wouldn't have balked at having a go.

Whatever it was he cared to have a go at, you could be sure it was something for him, whether or not she was interested or included.

"The life of the family had to revolve around Colin," she recalled. "And I had to be at his beck and call. Even when I started asserting myself by going to college."

Carole had some ideas about getting a proper education now, but whenever she'd get excited about a college class schedule and try to share it with him, he'd listen a moment or look at her material and say, "Looks like a load of bullshit to me."

"You use other people's egos to step on just so you can improve your own," she told him. "You pull me down to build yourself up."

"I ain't a college man with fancy theories. So leave off."

"There you go," Carole told him. "What you're really doing is comparing yourself to your brother and sister. Just as you've always done."

"You're too clever by half, he said. "Know everything, but know bugger all!"

The young mother was yearning to learn and grow, and learning about her husband was to be a large part of her curriculum. Yet, in retrospect, she couldn't really say that he'd ever tried to learn anything about her.

"Colin's like an adrenaline addict," Carole told her closest friends. "Always needs something to psych him up. He can talk and talk, and I have to listen. Bores me silly with details about his schemes, but we never talk about me. Never about my work."

As to his unstated feelings about Carole's job, she later reflected on them by saying, "My work must've threatened him because it was a world he had no control over. I was the boss there. People would do as I say. I
wanted to take a course in certificate qualification for social work, in order to become a probation officer. He claimed we couldn't afford it, but I came to realize it was because he was afraid he'd lose his grip over me. Another person in his family with an education. He couldn't bear that."

Of Colin's easygoing, quiet-spoken ways, Carole said, "He never raised a hand in our house no matter how much I yelled at him, but make no mistake, he was in control. To an outsider it might not appear so, but Colin Pitchfork couldn't have lived with someone without being totally in control."

Worrying about his prematurely receding hairline and expanding waistline, about getting bald and going to fat, Colin played squash at the Leisure Centre in Enderby and sometimes attended the Littlethorpe Judo Club, but his attempt at more strenuous athletics ended when he hurt his knee playing rugby in October, 1986. He was on medical leave for eight weeks, and they celebrated Carole's twenty-sixth birthday in November while he recovered. His leg wasn't much good until the end of the year.

The inactivity was making Colin unsettled again. He'd always wanted to set up a business based upon cake decorating. Not ordinary cakes like those he baked at work, but exquisite cakes, made to order. Customers would commission the designs and he'd sell accessories to go with his own creations. They'd be very expensive, but the best cakes anywhere.

Carole Pitchfork had heard variations on that theme since they'd been married. She'd heard dozens of schemes and watched him write down figures, and compute loan payments, and add up the interest they'd have to pay on a loan.

She finally said, "Look, I'm sick to death of all that scribbling on bits of paper. Get on with it!"

And then she felt guilty for not being more supportive and quickly offered encouragement. "You can do almost anything you set out to do! You're bright. Brighter than me. Your mind turns to almost anything. Just do it. I'll back you up, whatever you decide."

But Carole had serious doubts he'd ever leave his job to try the scheme. In the first place, he'd be afraid it wouldn't be the best cake-design studio in all of Britain.

"He had to live up to certain expectations," she said. "He had to think he'd achieve greater success than his sister and brother, or he'd never make a move as far as a career's concerned."

"I'll have a real cake-design studio," he promised. "You'll see."

He even had a name for it. Their older child's middle name was
Ashley and the baby's was James. The studio would be called James Ashley's.

He used a few of those unsettled days to paint a charming mural on the wall of the children's bedroom. It was a colorful cartoon of Thomas the Tank, the blue train engine with enormous eyes and a huge smile that whistles through the children's storybook on various adventures. The mural was six feet by twelve feet, skillfully executed. In it, Thomas was steaming into Narborough Station, chugging into the dreams of the sleeping village tots. Carole was proud of that mural.

Yet the everyday life Colin led seemed to him demeaning and bogus. And once he remarked wistfully to Carole that marital sex was not as exciting as the other kind. But he quickly admitted that the other kind would destroy their marriage. And anyway, he was usually too tired for sex. Carole had to take the initiative most of the time. There was a way to arouse him. He liked her to wear long white socks. The kind a schoolgirl wears.

Chapter
22.

The Test

Connected to the antisocial personality's moral insensitivity is his lack of any feelings beyond the superficial.. . . The antisocial personality is typically cynical, ungrateful, disloyal and exploitative. He has no empathy or fellow feeling and therefore cannot comprehend on an emotional level how his actions hurt others. Other people are there to be used. As for giving or receiving love, these are beyond his capabilities. As a consequence of his lack of strong feelings the sex life of the antisocial personality is typically manipulative and faithless.

--
. T
AmEs F. CALHOUN, Abnormal Psychology: Current Perspectives

For Colin Pitchfork, January, 1987, had to have been the worst month of his life. Brown Eyes had worked at the bakery until the last week of that month when she started getting severe pain in her legs. The pain got so bad that one day she couldn't get out of bed to go to her job. Later that afternoon, the twenty-nine-year-old woman delivered her own baby.

"I pulled it out, and put it up to my chest," she told authorities. "I saw it wasn't breathing and I tried to give it mouth-to-mouth. Then I rang a doctor and my parents."

She was taken to hospital by ambulance. At 7:45 P
. M
. that night
,
Colin Pitchfork arrived at her bedside in tears, asking where their baby's body was. When he was told it was at the Leicester Royal Infirmary, he said he wanted to go there and view the remains of his daughter.

In fact, he wanted to do what Robin Ashworth had been forced to do five months earlier.

There was another reason why January had to have been the worst month in the life of Colin Pitchfork. He'd received a letter from the police about the voluntary blood testing, and was given a date and time to report. He told Carole he was afraid to give blood.

"Why?" Carole demanded.

"The flashing!" he said. "Don't you know the coppers're going to take one look at that flashing record and give me trouble?"

"That was a long time ago," she said. "That won't be a problem." "You don't know them," he said. "They're looking for somebody. Anybody."

"Well then, give them the blood and they'll see they're not looking for you, won't they?"

"Meantime they'll give me all sorts of bloody hell," he grumbled. When the second letter came two weeks later and he again failed to report, Carole started getting uneasy.

"This no longer makes any sense, Colin," she said. "You are going to take that test. Now I'm the one demanding it, not the bleedin coppers!"

"And if I get chucked in the nick for me past record while they waste time sorting out the test, will that satisfy you?"

"Take the test," she said.

Carole Pitchfork's anxiety was unfocused. If there was ever a fleeting specter of recognition it remained too fearsome to face.

In late January, a twenty-five-year-old employee at Hampshires Bakery was approached by Colin Pitchfork and asked to accompany him to the loading bay. When they were alone Colin told a strange story about having been arrested for flashing when he was very young. Colin talked about the massive blood testing going on in his village and said he was afraid to give a blood sample because of his admittedly unreasonable terror of police. He asked his fellow worker if he'd consider giving it for him. Colin said how easy it would be to insert his friend's photo into C
. O
lin's passport. He offered the co-worker PS200 for his trouble.

The baker turned him down at once, saying that Cohn should forge
t t
he past.

Colin said, "Think about it."

The same day, Colin approached him again and said, "You could do it easy. There's no way it can be traced."

But the baker again refused him, advising Colin that his fear of policemen would be dissipated by confronting it.

Colin had another acquaintance and fellow baker at Hampshires who'd offered him a bed for a few days if he ever again got kicked out by Carole. Colin told this baker a story of how he'd been arrested as a younger man for a flashing offense after he'd been unjustly accused by some hysterical females who'd seen him urinating.

"I were innocent," he said, "but that didn't matter none, and it wouldn't matter now. I could be set up because of me past record!"

"It's too serious a charge to be setting you up," the baker assure
d h
im.

"Well they might make a mistake on the test, mightn't they?" Colin argued. "I'm scared to go up there."

"If they did set you up, a solicitor would tell you to plead not guilty and you could demand a new test," the baker said. "You got nothing to fear."

"I can agree with what you say in principle," Colin said, "but I'm still too bleedin scared of coppers to go."

"I wouldn't be afraid if I was you."

"Then do it for mel" Colin urged. "I can't offer you no more than fifty quid but you're welcome to it. You could use my passport. I can put your photo inside the embossed stamp. It's a minor trick. No problem at all."

"Your fear just ain't rational," the baker said. "I'll go with you to the test. You'll have me right there with you for moral support."

Yet another baker, an eighteen-year-old, was approached by Colin Pitchfork that same week and was told the same flashing story. But this young man told Colin it wasn't right and he absolutely wouldn't do it. Colin never bothered him again.

A "charge hand baker" for Hampshires had occasion to talk to Colin that week. Colin went to the older man's home and wept yet again over the death of the baby. Colin told the baker he was going to the mortuary to take a photo of the infant. He also gave the older man the four-page murder supplement that the Leicester Mercury had delivered to every home in the three villages. The baker had expressed interest in reading about the murders.

The death of his daughter was simply breaking his heart, Colin told him between sobs. He wasn't in the mood to chat about murder. The river Soar was dryer than Colin Pitchfork.

Ian Kelly was quick to say, "I'm English, not Irish. All the Irish Kelleys have two e's in the surname."

Not true, but Ian had heard it somewhere and accepted it on faith. He was like that, accepting things on faith.

"He's very easily led," his young wife explained in his presence.

He was twenty-four years old, and worked at Hampshires as an oven man. He knew Colin as second in command to the foreman. Ian had never socialized with Colin Pitchfork away from the job but they got on well enough at work.

Ian had worked at Hampshires for only half a year. He'd gone to community college for three years to learn baking and confectionary, and admired the work Colin could do, especially the night rider on the motorcycle. He knew Colin had a special flair with cake decorating that few could match.

Ian had a shy, sincere way of talking and he was appealing in a pallid, wispy sort of way. He looked as though he could use protection, and his twenty-one-year-old wife, Susan, was probably the right woman for the job. Of Spanish parentage, she was sturdy, assertive and generous. She could usually take care of herself and Ian as well.