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soda pop, eating sweets. They were able to prove that Lynda had been there once or twice with other teenagers. It was quite close to her house, closer yet to The Black Pad. They worked the lead exhaustively, but The Woodlands didn't seem to figure in the murder.
    Many of the day center patients had no community ties and no family ties. They could be in Carlton Hayes for treatment one day and arrested the next day in Wales or Scotland. The inquiry teams were looking at te n t housand hospital patients, and many of them, according to the beleaguered detectives, were potential suspects.
    Almost immediately phone calls began flooding the incident room, the most promising being about a "spiky-haired youth." The person on the phone claimed to have seen him at 8:00 P . M . at the junction of Forest Road and King Edward Avenue, just a two-minute walk from the wooded copse where they found the body of Lynda Mann. The witness had been driving down the dual carriageway when the spiky-haired youth and a female companion stepped onto the road, forcing him to slam on the brakes. "The girl was wearing jeans and a donkey jacket," he said. "The young man had a dyed punk hairdo. Amazing hair. Like a pot of geraniums cropped off flat."
    Within a few days after the description was reported in the Leicester Mercury, the police received a tip on another important suspect seen running on Kipling Drive in Enderby on the night of the murder. He couldn't have been a jogger, the caller told them. He was wearing ordinary street clothes.
    Along with the reports on the spiky-haired youth and the running youth was another message given priority by Supt. Courts. Three witnesses reported seeing a young couple in the bus shelter on Forest Road sometime after 8:00 P . M . on November 21st. The description of the girl closely matched that of Lynda Mann. It was a lead that Coutts believed corroborated the message about the spiky-haired youth in the street.
    Locals told police there were no spiky-haired punkers in the villages, at least not one whose head resembled a flower pot full of cropped geraniums. Courts said there was, and that they'd find him.
    Nurses at Carlton Hayes Hospital reported being too terrified to walk from the hospital to their quarters at Sylvia Reid House, just steps from The Black Pad.
    "I knew something like this would happen!" a nurse told police. "We're scared to death!"
    She wanted the car park in front of their building lit, and demanded that police arrest the prowlers and vandals who came by and tossed stones at their windows.
    On the eighth day they got a call from a nurse who claimed to have heard a frightened scream on the night of the murder. "A female shouted, `No, no, nor " she told detectives.
    "There's a strong possibility that this was Lynda," Supt. Baker said to reporters. He called the lead "promising."
    But Derek Pearce didn't get excited about the scream heard by the hospital nurse. The scream was timed at 8:40 P . M . and he knew Lynda Mann had left her friend at 7:26. Despite theories about the girl at the bus stop he believed that nearsighted Lynda Mann had walked to her terrible fate immediately after leaving her friend's house. Straight into an ambush.
    "And besides," Pearce confidentially told his men when no bosses were about, "in a madhouse, screaming might be the normal means of communication."
    The running youth began to loom larger during the second week. He'd been seen by another witness who'd been walking his dog, a witness who claimed the youth looked as though he was being chased. Described as a teenager, five feet seven inches tall, with dark collar-length hair, this one may or may not have been the original runner. The police realized there could've been several young men running home on such a cold night.
    They began tracing anyone at all who'd been in the general area that night. A teenager had been seen getting off the bus outside a pub in Narborough. The driver could say only that he'd picked the boy