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Mann.
    Derek Pearce, who wore eyeglasses in his everyday life, learned something of significance to him: Lynda Mann had had poor eyesight. She couldn't recognize a friend across the street, but adolescent vanity prevented her from wearing glasses, and contact lenses were too expensive for her family.
    Supt. Coutts remained convinced that Lynda Mann must have known her attacker, but then Coutts didn't have to wear glasses to see across the street.
    Pearce wondered if Lynda could have thought she knew the man, perhaps walked right up to him before realizing he was a stranger. When it was too late.
    For a man like Eddie Eastwood, finding himself on the news at ten, given the attention of the national media, it was understandable if he indulged himself a bit. Eddie later said, "The humiliation of the blood test affected me speech. I couldn't give a television interview for three weeks."
    It might be impossible for a cynical policeman to believe that Edward Eastwood could be experiencing anything like the overwhelming grief that Kath suffered, but on the other hand, Eddie had gone looking for his stepdaughter on that bitter night. Eddie had searched the streets and walked The Black Pad under a bright and brittle moon, and it was he who had to view the blood-blackened, ruined body of Lynda Mann.
    They scoffed at the many interviews in which he, as the family spokes.. man, uttered a litany of personal heartbreak while Kath remained silent, stoic, shattered. But perhaps after the permanence of death was absorbed --after the media attention waned, after he had been taken from his bed and made to prove that he hadn't raped and murdered Kath's middle child --perhaps after all that, even a policeman could believe Eddie Eastwood when he said, "I went to a pub in Enderby one day. I went into the back room and just let go. I realized how much we were all victims of the one that done it. I cried like a child, I did."

    Chapter 6.
    Village of Fear
    As darkness fell on country lanes and village footpaths, women and girls rushed to their homes. Many parents insisted on walking or driving their children to school, and some threatened to keep them home until the "fiend" was caught. There were parents waiting at bus stops for weeks after the murder. Villagers in shops and pubs spoke in whispers and eyed one another strangely.
    Rumors spread about a flasher who had exposed himself to another girl on The Black Pad. And a woman claimed to have once been assaulted on a different village footpath. A third told of having been "mugged," of having her purse stolen weeks earlier on The Black Pad. None of these crimes had previously been reported.
    There were calls to the Narborough Parish Council from terrified parents who wanted to light The Black Pad or close it down completely. And because a length of wood was found under the leg of the murdered girl, gossip had it that she'd been beaten half to death with a club before being raped.
    The newspaper headlines referred to Narborough as VILLAGE OF FEAR. So it wasn't just foul weather that left the village lanes so bereft of nighttime foot traffic. Not just winter mist and creeping wisps of fog that made women quicken their steps, under an oppressive stalking sky.
    Chief Supt. Baker decided that it would be most convenient if the incident room could be set up in the village. He requested assistance from Carlton Hayes Hospital and was offered a doctors' residence that the hospital hadn't been using for everyday business. The building was called The Rosings, and the commemorative stone over the door said: A . D . 1906. Most of the brick buildings in the hospital complex had been built at that time, and The Rosings hadn't been remodeled since.
    The murder squad put its computers on the ground floor, and Supt. Coutts worked upstairs, along with several teams, the policewomen, and the card-index civilian workers. Other than that, they had one small room in which to relax and have a sandwich.
    Computer retrieval