the Blooding (1989)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  -RICHARD M. SUINN, Fundamentals of Behavior Pathology

  While Carole was pregnant, Colin became "unsettled" again, and he started complaining more. He'd worked at the bakery since he was sixteen years old and he was tired of the grind, having to be at work at 5:00 A. M. He ought to try other things, he said.

  "Perhaps I'll try writing," he announced.

  "First you should try reading a book or two," she answered.

  Carole read a book a day sometimes, the kind you forget an hour later, but at least she read. Colin didn't read except on holiday, perhaps one book a year. He looked at the newspaper and Reader's Digest and that was all.

  "Perhaps I'll just start looking round for another job," he said from time to time.

  "The grass was always greener for him," Carole recalled. "When we had a son, he wanted a girl. His job was too boring. Our house was too small. There was always something wrong."

  At the time, Carole Pitchfork wasn't aware that the restlessness she saw was prompting more romantic entanglements, more risk& Life in Littlethorpe was happy enough for her. Her father and husband were still not friends, but at least they got along, now that Colin was appearing more domestic. Even through the terrible twos when their son was, like all children his age, a fair handful, Colin was ever patient. He never spanked the child or shouted at him. Carole told her friends that she could yell her head off to no avail, but Colin had only to raise his voice an octave and the tot would pay attention. Colin Pitchfork wanted a girl, but their second child, born in January of 1986, was another boy.

  That spring things were back to normal in the villages as far as the footpath killing was concerned. Most seemed satisfied that The Black Pad murder had been an aberration--an explicable tragedy that happens and is never repeated. The killer must have been passing through, perhaps on his way to London. He could've stopped anywhere and done his terrible deed.

  Carole recalled that when the constable had come to their home on the house-to-house check during the Lynda Mann inquiry back in 1983, Colin had been quite willing to answer the policeman's questions even though there was some concern about his past record for flashing. But the Pitchforks were never bothered again after that first visit, so they seldom talked about The Black Pad affair. Only once, that she could remember.

  Commenting on that time in Leicestershire when the county seemed to be a repository for bodies, Colin said to Carole, "This seems an ideal place to commit murder."

  When she asked why, he said, "Because there's so many unsolved murders being investigated."

  A seventeen-year-old girl who worked at the Queens Road shop of Hampshires Bakery met Colin Pitchfork when he brought baked goods in the company van. He seemed to her like a decent sort of chap, a good family type who always talked about a son he adored. He was so quiet spoken that she had trouble understanding him. Sometimes it was necessary to move closer.

  One day in November she was washing up in the kitchen of the bakery when she was startled by hot breath on her neck. She whirled to find him there, grinning. She tried to shove him away, but he didn't budge. Then he put his hands on the boiler, on either side of her, and stared. This time she shoved past him and went back to work. He laughed and made light of it the next time he made a delivery.

  In May of 1986, she was about to celebrate her eighteenth birthday and several employees were invited to a party in her honor. Colin Pitchfork was given the job of baking and decorating the cake for the do, and stopped by her home to make arrangements. He seemed very nice and she thought perhaps she'd misjudged him. He invited her to a pub for a drink one evening and she went.

  When they left the pub he drove her home but missed the road to her house.

  "I took the wrong turning," he said, but after a few minutes he took another wrong turning and she found herself on a lonely country lane.

  He stopped the car abruptly, leaned over and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

  "No! Take me home!" she told him.

  He complied meekly, drove her home and said good night.

  Except on her job, she didn't see him anymore. But he did leave poems with her. There were five altogether. In one of the "love poems" he expressed a fervent desire to impregnate her with his child.

  She failed to respond to the invitation and her lack of interest in a creative act to replicate part of himself may have annoyed him enormously.

  The love poems stopped, and the poet returned to the prospect of a dreary life in the bakery with a remote possibility of being a foreman someday.

  The supervisor of Colin Pitchfork at Hampshires Bakery had this to say about his subordinate: "He was a good worker and timekeeper, but he was moody. Almost a barrack-room lawyer at times. And he couldn't leave women employees alone. He was always chatting them up."

  Colin had been employed at Hampshires since August of 1976 when he'd started as an apprentice baker and confectioner. During all those years his barrack-room lawyering had gotten him sacked several times. But somehow he'd always manage to talk his way back into the gaffer's good graces before the dismissal order came into effect.

  Along with Colin's boss, Carole must've had a notion about Colin's attention to female employees. She was always ringing the bakery on some pretext or another to check on him, to make sure he was there.

  He'd had to attend technical colleges as part of his training, to get his apprentice papers, but he'd despised the classroom part of it. What Colin liked about his job was the artistry, the decorating of cakes. Colin's photograph appeared in the newspaper because of one of the cakes he'd done. It was an impressive job, beautifully composed. He'd sculpted a night rider's motorcycle with colorful icings. But he was asked to pose beside the cake for a publicity photograph.

  That was an extraordinary photo session. The cake's creator looked about as sanguine as a hostage in Beirut. In what should have been a happy news photo he seemed to be staring warily at the lens, at some terrible threat that a newspaper photo might spawn.

  In July, 1986, Colin became depressed, for no reason Carole could fathom. He seemed always tired but couldn't get to sleep. He went to a medical center and was given some sleeping tablets. Carole didn't find out until a later time what was on his mind: his lover's pregnancy.

  The affair with the woman he called Brown Eyes hurt Carole most of all. She simply couldn't begin to comprehend that one when it came to light. Leslie had been young and pretty, but this one? It seemed impossible.

  Brown Eyes worked as a baker in the Hampshires shop on King Richard II Road. She had a baby of her own and was in the process of getting a divorce, her husband having left one month earlier. According to the gossip Carole got from Colin, the tall young woman had once thrown boiling jam on a fellow employee. But there must've been an unspoken message received or imagined by Colin Pitchfork.

  One evening he showed up at her home and simply said to her, "Everyone at work has a bet that I daren't come round for a cup of tea." "And you were cheeky enough to do it."

  "At least I'm honest," he said, and she invited him inside.

  He had his tea and they chatted for fifteen minutes. Then he was off, heading for home on his moped.

  But he came back, regularly, and always uninvited. Brown Eyes didn't turn him away. She needed him to commiserate about her failed marriage and found him to be what she called "a sympathetic friend."

  Soon the others at work started noticing. Colin was too solicitous and attentive to her. He started lifting heavy things off the shelves so she wouldn't have to.

  On a cold day in December she was wearing knee socks and he told her, "I like white knee socks."

  For a month he came and went from her house, kissing her only on the cheek. But one day in December things took a turn.

  "The sex began," she later said. "It happened about once a week, on weekdays only. There was never any real foreplay involved. Just straightforward sex."

  As with Leslie, Colin invited Brown Eyes to his home and introduced her as "a friend from work." Sh
e brought her infant along and even babysat for the Pitchforks.

  After Carole had her second child in January, Brown Eyes continued to visit, and when Carole went back to work, Colin and Brown Eyes would often be there at the house decorating a cake or playing with all three children.

  They were just the best of friends, Colin said to Carole, who told herself that this woman wasn't his type. She wasn't innocent. She wasn't young. She wasn't a virgin.

  The happy arrangement teetered when Brown Eyes announced to Colin that she was pregnant, but Colin responded in his measured quiet way. He overwhelmed her by saying he was pleased. Colin advised her to keep the baby or abort it, as she saw fit, and if she chose an abortion he'd gladly pay for it. He seemed concerned, and visited her often to discuss the decision.

  She made an appointment with an abortion clinic, but at the last minute canceled. She decided to have Colin Pitchfork's baby, come what may.

  When she told him of her final decision, he said, "Good. Now see a doctor and take care of yourself. I'm happy. I've always wanted a girl."

  During the late summer and fall of 1986, when the shocking murder on Ten Pound Lane had the villages in the grip of terror once again, notices were posted of a special bus pickup to Brockington School. The pickup was in Littlethorpe, by the Pitchfork home.

  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.

  --
. TAmEs 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.