The Jigsaw Man by Paul Britton Page B

girlfriend several times a week but this won’t be enough. He has another aspect of his sexuality that has to be satisfied.’
    Although the physical assaults were very similar, Painter picked up on the differences and asked why there had been no anal assault on Lynda or attempt to hide her body.
    ‘A murderer isn’t always uniform in his actions. Sometimes circumstances are different and don’t allow replication, or a victim can alter events by something she says or does. At the same time, the killer will have become more confident in the time between the murders and this will affect his actions. I want to ponder that for a little longer. From a psychological point of view the vaginal and anal attacks have to be separated, because given there was no confusion over the genitalia in either case, they were intended as separate acts, and I’m not clear what sequence they happened in.’
    Baker asked, ‘Is there a chance that he knew the girls?’
    ‘Yes - or knew of them,’ I said.
    ‘Is there any particular reason why he chose them?’
    This is a question that I’d asked myself the previous evening, propping two snapshots of the girls on my bookshelf. Both were pretty in a young way, yet they were clearly capable of being viewed sexually by a person who was interested in women rather than children.
    This predator had gone out looking for a victim who fitted certain criteria. She had to be old enough to be sexually stimulating for him but also non-threatening so that she wouldn’t attack him or ridicule him in a way that spoiled it for him. Lynda and Dawn were perfect - old enough to be sexually attractive but young enough to be insecure and unworldly. That’s why he’d chosen them.
    When I finished, we sat and had another coffee while Painter told me about developments. Since the kitchen porter’s release more than a thousand messages had been logged by the incident room at Wigston Police Station. Fifty officers were working on the double-murder hunt, concentrating on Dawn Ashworth because her death was still fresh in the public’s mind.
    Two Detective Inspectors, Derek Pearce and Mick Thomas, were in charge of the suspect and house-to-house teams. They were retracing their steps, interviewing suspects and asking every witness if they could remember just a little bit more. Meanwhile, the Leicester Mercury prepared a special four-page edition containing every known fact about the murders. Special constables delivered it by hand to every house in Narborough, Enderby and Littlethorpe.
    On 18 December Crimewatch UK screened a reconstruction on BBC1 focusing on the youth seen running out of Ten Pound Lane at 5.30 p.m. Thirteen million people watched the programme and afterwards sixty viewers rang in from as far afield as London and Northern Ireland. The hunt went on.
    *
    In the meantime, I began listening to the police interviews with the kitchen porter. Slipping the first tape into the cassette player, I heard the seventeen-year-old begin answering questions confidently but in a quiet voice. He said that he’d known Dawn about three weeks and had seen her walking about the village. That Thursday, 31 July, had been his day off and he’d slept until ten or eleven. In the afternoon he rode his motorbike along King Edward Avenue towards Narborough. Near the motorway bridge he saw Dawn walking towards the gateway into Ten Pound Lane.
    ‘How did you know it was Dawn?’
    ‘By her hairstyle and the way she walked. So I knew it were Dawn.’
    ‘Do you know her very well?’
    ‘Just by looks. That’s all.’
    ‘What was she wearing?’
    ‘A sort of white skirt and a yellow or white jacket. I thought I’d stop and talk to her and ask her where she was going, and that. Then I thought, I’ve got to get home and do this oil because it might be running out quick. It got to leaking drip, drip, drip fairly fast, so I just drove straight home.’
    When told about the motorbike seen parked under the bridge and the youth seen