Free The Jigsaw Man by Paul Britton

investigation into Dawn Ashworth’s murder and he would take me through the inquiry from day one.
    Dawn had a part-time job during the school holidays, working at a newsagent’s shop in Mill Lane, Enderby. On 31 July she left the shop at 3.30 p.m. According to a friend, ‘She was happy and in high spirits all afternoon being very excited about going on holiday with her parents to Hunstanton on Saturday.’
    At home, Dawn told her mother she was going to have tea with schoolmates in Narborough. She’d by home by 7.00 p.m. because she was going to a birthday party for a little boy for whom she babysat. She even dropped back into the newsagent’s shop to buy a box of Smarties as part of her gift.
    She left the shop at 4.00 p.m., heading for Narborough. Dawn was five feet three inches tall and wore braces on her teeth. She had dark brown straight medium-length hair. She was wearing a mid-calf-length white skirt, a white sleeveless polo-neck top and multicoloured sleeveless top with a denim jacket. She was known to have only Ł10 on her.
    The most direct route to the homes of her two girlfriends was via Ten Pound Lane, a mixture of farm track and footpath that ran from the sports fields of Brockington School, Enderby, between fields to the east of Carlton Hayes Hospital until it emerged onto the Leicester-Coventry road at Narborough.
    To the east, running almost parallel to Ten Pound Lane, was the M1 motorway which cut across the eastern tip of Narborough and turned directly north through Enderby near the sports fields.
    Dawn had a choice as she walked towards Ten Pound Lane. She could turn left over the motorway footbridge and then follow a path to King Edward Avenue, or turn right and take the shorter route down Ten Pound Lane.
    In Narborough, Dawn visited several friends and the last person to see her was Mrs Valerie Allsop, the mother of one schoolfriend from Carlton Avenue. She’d seen Dawn walk past the front window as she was leaving.
    Dawn appears to have then retraced her steps, walking towards home. A passing motorist sighted her at 4.40 p.m. crossing King Edward Avenue, as she headed towards the farm gate across the entrance to Ten Pound Lane.
    Her half-naked body was found by police at noon on Saturday in a corner of a field next to the footpath. It was almost totally concealed by grass, nettles, twigs, branches and leaf litter which had been heaped on top.
    Painter opened the first album of crime scene photographs. With the foliage cleared away, Dawn was visible lying on her left side with her knees pulled up toward her chest. She was naked from the waist down although her underpants were hooked around her right ankle and white shoes were on her feet. Her bra was pushed up over her breasts and a trail of dried blood was smeared across her left thigh. She’d been in the field a considerable time in the middle of summer and the insects had found her first. Although her eyes were closed, the lids and orbits were marked out in a creamy white mucus left by their passage.
    I wanted to look away. I wanted to give the young girl some semblance of decency and turn the camera aside. Taking a deep breath, I turned the pages, mentally noting the numerous scratches, insect bites and nettle stings on the body.
    Painter turned to the pathology report, explaining the important details. Dawn had two abrasions on her upper left forehead, a swelling over her left cheek and bruising from the left eye down to her jaw-line. There was a cut inside her mouth caused by her braces and other abrasions on her face, chest and the back of her neck. Some of these injuries occurred when her body was being moved and concealed, according to the pathologist.
    She died of manual strangulation and possibly received a knife-hand blow before a stranglehold was imparted, possibly a forearm pressed against her larynx by an assailant behind her.
    Dawn, a virgin, had been viciously raped and sodomized. The pathologist reported, ‘When one considers the