The Blooding Read Online Free Page A

rigid and cool as a shop mannequin.
    It had been an unforgettable year for the Leicestershire Constabulary. The county police agency averaged about one homicide a year and usually that was a domestic killing. But that year had seen four murder inquiries, two of them major, culminating in the tragic discovery in July of the body of five-year-old Caroline Hogg, who'd disappeared from a fun fair near her home in Edinburgh.
    The Leicestershire police always believed that the child's killer had arbitrarily dropped her body by the A444 road while passing through from Scotland to some southerly destination, but because they'd found the body, they had to launch an inquiry from their end.
    Detective Superintendent Ian Coutts, born and reared near Glasgow, went up to Scotland for assistance with the Hogg case, and to gain access to the Edinburgh computer. The fifty-year-old Coutts was a "typical Glaswegian": gregarious, outgoing, tough, solid and compactly built. It wasn't hard to imagine broad foreheads like his greeting adversaries with a "Glasgow kiss," the kind that leaves many a bloody nose in northern pub brawls.
    It took an enormous amount of work to back-record and convert material that had to be manually accessed with the Leicestershire card index system.
    Then there had been the Osborne murder, the case of a pet groomer brutally stabbed to death and left on Ayelstone Meadows. That one had required a scene-of-crime fingertip search for evidence in ferocious driving rain. They'd remember that one. On the Osborne inquiry they'd had to access a West Yorkshire computer and put their material into it. Until that terrible year they'd always had sufficient data-processing capability in their own computer terminals.
    There was a joke making the rounds of the Leicestershire Constabulary that year: "Did you hear the good news? Yuri Andropov died. The bad news is they dropped his body in Leicestershire."
    But until November of 1983 there had never even been a murder inquiry in the villages of Narborough, Enderby and Littlethorpe.
    The detective chief superintendent in charge of Leicestershire Criminal Investigation Department was forty-seven-year-old David Baker, a twenty-seven-year police veteran. Baker was a family man with an accommodating style. He looked more like an avuncular shopkeeper than a policeman, but he was, in the words of close associates, "one hundred percent copper." He had five kids, and managed a squash game at least once a week in a losing battle with middle-age spread.
    At 8:30 A . M . Chief Supt. Baker arrived in Narborough, logging his location as "a wooded copse running alongside a footpath known as The Black Pad." There were many police officers already at the scene, and Baker called at once for a Home Office pathologist. The Lynda Mann murder inquiry had officially begun.
    Several detectives, and thirty uniformed officers along with tracking dogs, began searching the copse, the fields, the building site by the footpath, and The Black Pad itself. When the pathologist arrived he made notes: that rigor was present, that there was blood showing at the nostrils, that there were scratch marks on the upper right cheek and below the right orbit, that the tip of the tongue was protruding through the clenched teeth of the strangled girl. The police had thought that her legs were painted with some sort of brick-colored leg makeup, but learned from the pathologist that extreme cold had produced the effect.
    The pathologist noted that there appeared to be "matted seminal stains on the vulval hairs."
    For the Eastwoods the memory of the day would forever be hazy. Eddie went to his job and told his workmates that his daughter was missing. When he was informed about a body having been discovered alongside the footpath he left work and drove straight to The Black Pad, finding the area cordoned off by several bobbies and detectives already trying to organize a house-to-house inquiry.
    Eddie tried to push through a barricade, but