Free The Jigsaw Man by Paul Britton Page B

same man.’
    Silently, I considered the implications of this statement. If it was the same man, then he had already killed twice. What’s to stop him striking again, I thought.
    Painter drove me to the scene and we parked at the foot of Ten Pound Lane on King Edward Avenue. After checking in at the mobile incident room, a caravan, we walked up a concrete ramp leading to a gate that marked the entrance to Ten Pound Lane. Weak sunlight filtered through the hawthorn bushes on either side of the footpath. Autumn had arrived late and there was still a lot of greenery among the brambles and tangled bushes.
    After a quarter of a mile the path started to narrow and the hedge closed around it creating a narrow green-sided gorge, broken occasionally by farm gates leading to adjacent fields.
    ‘You can see where a lot of it was cleared during the search,’ said Painter, breathing more heavily. ‘In some sections the nettles and brambles were shoulder-high.’
    ‘And she was here at what time?’ I asked.
    ‘A motorist saw her in King Edward Avenue walking towards the farm gate at 4.40 p.m. It would have taken her another ten minutes to reach here.’
    So much undergrowth had been cleared, it was hard to picture the scene as it looked on the afternoon Dawn was attacked, yet I clearly recognized it as a pocket of isolation. First contact had to have been on the footpath and it began with an exchange - a conversation, or a threat, or simply a look. Depending on how Dawn reacted, she may have been able to influence what happened next but I didn’t know enough about her to predict her behaviour.
    She probably died on the path and then her body was taken through or lifted over a nearby gate into the corner of a field. The grass and nettles were quite high because the farmer’s tractor would swing and miss the elbow formed by the hedges.
    A withered bunch of flowers lay propped against the gatepost. Painter said that the Ashworth family had been devastated by the murder and continued to bring flowers back to mark the spot.
    ‘Once you start, how do you stop?’ he asked. ‘Do you say, “Well today I won’t do it any more.” Then how do you get over the guilt of not doing it any more?’
    Unlocking the padlock with a key, we pushed against the gate which groaned on rusty hinges. It would have taken two hands to open, I reasoned, which meant that Dawn had probably been lifted over. I felt the unevenness of the ground beneath my feet and noticed the clumps of stinging nettles and brambles. It all helped to recreate a picture of what had happened.
    We walked further along Ten Pound Lane towards Enderby and I noticed where the footpath forked and one path led towards the footbridge that crossed the M1 and the other to the playing fields. How exposed is the crime scene? I asked myself. Is it possible to park a car on the Ml, walk down the footpath, commit a murder and take off?
    Five fields away, on the western edge of the hospital grounds, was the scene of Lynda Mann’s death. We parked at the Woodlands Day Hospital and walked along Forest Road towards the entrance to the Black Pad.
    A few yards along the black cinder pathway, I looked through the iron fence into the small woodland glade where Lynda’s body had been found. The footpath was now flanked by street lights but in 1983, on a cold November evening, it was very dark and quiet.
    Again we had a teenager who had been acquired on the footpath. She was then taken through a gateway and killed amid the silver birch and holly trees only yards away. Like Dawn, she was found lying with her legs slightly open and a branch underneath. I couldn’t understand the significance of this, if any.
    The postmortem had revealed abrasions on Lynda’s cheek and chin as well as heavy bruising around her collarbone and upper chest. Painter suggested that the killer had knelt on her as he tightened her scarf around her neck. There was no sign of entry into her vagina or anus but dried semen had