The Blooding (26 page)

The murder squad had fine-tuned cajolery by telephone. You coul
d w
alk into the incident room at any hour of the day and hear them at it: "Cornwall isn't that far. What kind of car do you drive?"

Or "Don't you want to visit the girl you left behind?"

Or "Wouldn't your mum just love to see you?"

Derek Pearce called the out-of-town trips "speed runs." "We did them at various doctors' surgeries around the country and knocked off four to five hundred miles a day sometimes, just to get a few blood samples. Since we weren't given funds to stop overnight, we had to put our foot down to make it back home at a decent hour."

Since they got no overtime pay, even for working on rest days, and no meal allowance, the people of Leicestershire got an inexpensive investigation, given the massive scope of it. As Pearce put it: "Our goal in life wasn't to make money. It was to detect murder. These murders."

On many evenings when Pearce had to stay late because of some tedious management task, he'd find one or more of his detectives dropping into the incident room after supper.

"To sort out a thing or two," they'd tell Pearce.

Some of them played hard. One of the policewomen who worked on the inquiry had what she apparently thought was a private understanding with one of the detectives. She'd leave for twenty minutes, usually in the midst of a boring shift when everyone was busy with paperwork. Each time she disappeared, a certain detective would receive a telephone call at his desk, a lengthy telephone call.

Sitting there among fifteen other detectives, he never had too much to say from his end, but his eyes would roll and flutter, and he'd get a cunning little grin on his face. And he wasn't fooling anyone when he'd say things into the phone like "Yes, I think we can accommodate your needs quite nicely. Always glad to help. Cheers, mate!"

After a while, the others decided to let it be known that it couldn't be pulled off right under the noses of veteran police detectives. One night when they all went to the pub for a little do, the policewoman was presented with a gift from the squad: a pair of empty soup tins with the tops removed, joined at the bottom by a fifty-foot string. One of the cans bore the number of the male detective's telephone, and the other was labeled with the number of the "secret" telephone terminal.

"To save steps and shoe leather," the gift givers said.

There were a sizable number of objectors who could be eliminated on paper after their alibis were checked, but many of those who refused did so not because of personal liberties but because they were terrified of needles. The saliva test was all right as a backup, but it didn't provide what the first-phase blood grouping required, and wasn't always good enough for a proper DNA analysis.

One of those who rang in refused to be stuck with a needle but was otherwise cooperative. "Look," he said, "I want to help! I'll come in, but I'll poonch meself in the nose!"

Another said, "I won't have the needle, but I'll let the doctor cut me with a knife. I don't mind the knife. I'll even cut meself with a knife!" Without consulting Freudian textbooks the cops just accepted tha
t t
here were people with a needle phobia, so Pearce agreed to a cutting for one of them.

When the donor showed up, Pearce was astonished: "He was a big strappin bloke! Sixteen stone, and stood six foot up!"

The strapping bloke with the belonephobia was taken to a doctor who said, "We'll cut you and squeeze a few drops onto the card. We'll screen it for a certain blood factor and if it comes back negative, fair enough. But if it comes back positive, you'll come back in for a proper test, okay?"

"Anything! Anything," the donor said. "But I'm not having a needle!"

The doctor said, "Okay, turn your head away and I'll cut your finger."

The mountainous donor turned away and gritted his teeth while the doctor cut his finger and took the blood. The situation was resolved. In that he had no scalpel with him, the doctor made the cut with a needle.

Some of them adamantly refused and wouldn't budge. In fact, an acquaintance of the kitchen porter, who openly resented the way he had been imprisoned by police, refused to come in at all. One of the sergeants went to Derek Pearce and said, "He won't give one."

"What do you mean, he won't give one?"

"He says it's an infringement on his personal liberties."

"Come on," Pearce said, taking the detective and driving to the young man's house.

The objector allowed the cops to enter. As Pearce described him, the young fellow was "dirty and ugly and grimy. The kind of bloke you'd like to take out in the field and shoot."

Pearce didn't shoot him. He talked. His subordinates said that Pearce was "the kind who could talk the knickers off a nun." Even so, it took an hour before the young man promised Pearce he'd come in for blooding the next night. Several detectives made bets that he wouldn't show, but he did.

When he arrived he was just as dirty and ugly and grimy as he'd been the day before. He was also surly, with a total vocabulary of about seventy-five words. He grudgingly answered the questions, filled out the form, walked over to the doctor and disdainfully watched the blood being sucked out of his arm. Then he keeled over on the floor. Out cold.

They ordered an ambulance to take him in for observation, and a detective was detailed to remain at his bedside until he came around. In a piece of profound understatement, Pearce said, "No other police force ever had to do anything like this before."

They had their fair share of people with AIDS and hepatitis. When they knew it in advance, they'd take the saliva tests very carefully. The gauze for the saliva was attached to a folded card, and was designed to drop out so that the subject could catch it in his mouth. They couldn't get people to do it right. Some sucked on the gauze. Some sucked on the card. Some chewed the gauze. Some chewed the card to pieces. Some nearly swallowed the gauze and ended up gagging. It was a disgusting business, they all agreed.

Angry young women would come in with boyfriends and say, "I want him cleared!"

One girlfriend said, "Can you test him for syphilis while you're at it?"

The cops who delivered the letters to the houses used to amuse themselves by telling the donors, "The good news is you haven't done the murders. The bad news is you've got AIDS."

They bloodied quite a few young policemen who lived in the villages, and the new headquarters building was full of officers who worked the motorway around the three villages. Derek Pearce, who'd had a few problems in his day with traffic officers, couldn't wait. "I want to bloody the traffic cops," he always said. "With a very blunt needle."

Halfway through the massive testing Pearce was involved in a personal blooding. He went along on one of the out-of-town treks to pick up a young man who'd agreed to be bloodied at the surgery of a local physician. They collected the nervous lad and drove him to the doctor.

The physician wasn't exactly the doctor-priest gowned for surgery and tended by starched minions at the altar of Hippocrates. This one was the kind who might treat a sick cow if the vet was drunk. Pearce handed the rumpled country doctor a syringe, swab and plaster from the test kit. The doctor had never seen a self-sealing syringe. He couldn't manage to attach the needle. He couldn't locate a vein.

"He had three or four goes with the needle," Pearce recalled, "but he couldn't find a thing."

The victim didn't say much. He just sweated, and muttered, "Blimey."

The doctor dropped a needle on the floor trying to attach it. Then another. He couldn't figure out how to unscrew the plunger in case he ever did get any blood. He made a few more stabs. He started taking divots.

In the end, Derek Pearce became the physician. The two of them slid the needle into what looked like a vein and Pearce held the syringe while the doctor pumped and the donor said, "Blimey."

"We'll send you thirty quid for this," Pearce told the
. D
octor after putting a vial of blood safely in his pocket.

The donor looked like he'd been dueling with Jack the Ripper. "Thirty quid for him?" he said. "I should get sixty!"

"You get our thanks," Pearce assured him. "Isn't that enough?" "Blimey!" said the donor.

Pearce later described the donor as "now needing a prosthesis."

Everyone came to give blood. A former patient from Carlton Hayes Hospital came because his name had turned up on the computer list. The reason it turned up was that he'd gone to the hospital at the time of the Dawn Ashworth murder to borrow crutches! They took his blood anyway.

A transvestite came wearing a red lame dress. They took her blood.

They'd gotten television coverage in Australia, Brazil, the United States, Sweden, France, Holland and had been on the air live in Italy. One night a West German camera crew came to watch the blooding, and interviewed two detectives on videotape.

"Does the process in any way hurt or cause anxiety?" was the on-camera question.

"Absolutely not," the detective said to the camera.

"Do the young men mind giving blood?"

"Absolutely not," the detective answered.

The next man to step before the camera took one look at his blood being siphoned, and keeled over on top of the detective who kept saying "Absolutely not." He was carried out by two bobbies while the camera rolled and the blood flowed, camera or not.

The laboratory at Huntingdon was freezing just about all of the blood by then, and not sending it to Aldermaston for the DNA test. The lab asked the murder squad to stop sending more unless it was "high priority." The laboratory spokesman informed them that the technicians had done a year's work in a few months and were stretched to the limit. They were drowning in blood. There were vials on every shelf. The freezers were full of it. There was more young British blood flowing in Leicestershire than had been spilled at the Somme.

But nothing stopped them. The murder squad sought blood tirelessly. It was their best and only hope. The mere act of the blooding might cause the killer to bolt and run.

They bloodied them all: transvestites, policemen, limpers with borrowed crutches, anyone who fell within the age group. But probably n
o b
looding was as strange as the sample they took from the "Very Reluctant Donor," who said that he would not, absolutely, positively, unequivocally, under any circumstances, surrender a drop of his blood whether they took it with a needle, or a scalpel, or a machete.

He lived in a filthy flat and nothing would move him from his hovel. It was a dilemma worthy of Derek Pearce and maybe an envoy of the archbishop of Canterbury.

Pearce had an idea, rang the Very Reluctant Donor, and said, "How about giving a semen sample?"

"I don't mind that!" the man replied enthusiastically.

The next morning they took him from his filthy flat to a moderately clean doctor's room at Wigston Police Station.

"They stripped him off, tossed his greasy sou'wester in a corner and put him in a track suit," Pearce remembered, "so he couldn't take anything in with him. Wigston was packed like a railway station that day, and he took ever so long in that room alone."

Finally, the Very Reluctant Donor knocked and the cops opened the door. "It's no good at all!" he cried. "I'm trying me hardest and I can't do it!"

The cops huddled again and a few silly ideas were tossed around, but DC John Reid had a thought: "Would a book help?"

"Oh, yes! Ever so!" said the Very Reluctant Donor. "With pictures?"

So a detective was sent to the custody room to see if they could locate a good one, with pictures. Somehow the message got garbled and a magazine was brought to them called Locomotives and Railway Time Tables. And it wasn't even a current edition.

"We'll try again tomorrow," Reid said in frustration.

"No, no! Give me another gol" the Very Reluctant Donor cried, and went back inside the room for a very long time.

He eventually knocked on the door, emerged, and proudly extended his palm. Resting on his filthy fingers was a specimen card bearing a filthy little glop of something or other that made Reid want to retch. It had taken the Very Reluctant Donor exactly thirty-two minutes to stand and deliver. He seemed humiliated by the fact that so much work had brought forth such little product.

He explained it by saying, "See, before I left home I did one for you, ever so much better! But I forgot to bring it with me!"

Some of those who refused to be bloodied did so because they had what they believed were definite alibis. One of those offered to produce several friends he'd been with at the time of Dawn Ashworth's murder.

The newspaper picked up on the issue and Chief Supt. David Baker was forced to issue a statement saying, "There is no reason to suspect him any more than anyone else."

A Midlands television panel presented a debate and examined a larger question: "Does mass screening for murder pose as big a threat to civil liberties as it does to killers?"

An attorney for the National Council for Civil Liberties, a guest on the show, thought it did. He said, "The police letter claims that the test is voluntary, but it implies that if you don't telephone for an appointment there'll be a knock on your door."