"A Touch of Frost" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wingfield R. D.)

I

wonder if I could have a word with Detective Inspector Frost?”

The traffic lights glowed an angry red in the darkness as Webster ignored them, speeding the car straight across the road junction. “Slow down, son,” Frost murmured. “There’s four hundred acres of forest to search. The odd second isn’t going to make much difference.”

Frost’s request received the same sort of treatment as the traffic lights, and Webster’s foot pressed down on the accelerator. Watching the street lights zip past at seventy-five miles an hour, Frost checked that his seat belt was fastened, then fumbled in his pocket for the photograph of the missing girl and studied it gloomily. I hope this body isn’t Karen Dawson, he told himself. I’d hate to be the one who had to break the news to her father. Break the news! He sat up straight and banged his fist on the dashboard. “Knickers! We were supposed to be breaking the news to Ben Cornish’s old lady. What time is it?”

Webster twisted his hand on the steering wheel so he could see his wristwatch. “Ten past one.”

Frost settled back in the seat, relieved it was too late to do it tonight. “We’ll do it tomorrow, first thing. It’ll be our number-one treat before the post-mortem.” He paused for a second. “Are you any good at breaking bad news, son?”

“No,” said Webster hurriedly. The inspector wasn’t dumping that rotten job on him.

“Pity,” sighed Frost. “I’m bloody hopeless. How do you tell someone their son was found dead, choked in his own vomit, floating in a pool of piddle. There’s no way you can tart up that sort of news.”

They were approaching the dense blackness of the woods. Frost scrubbed the wind-screen with his cuff and squinted through, trying to locate Charlie Alpha. “There it is, son,” he yelled, pointing to the white-and-black Ford Sierra tucked neatly into a lay-by. Webster coasted the Cortina snugly in behind it.

The wind slashed at them as they left the warmth of the car. Frost wound his scarf tighter and buried his hands deeply into his mac pocket as they trudged along a path in search of Jordan and Simms, the Charlie Alpha crew. Webster was the first to spot the dots of torch beams bobbing in the distance.

The path they followed twisted and turned, so it was nearly five minutes before they heard low voices. A sharp turn, and just ahead of them were the two uniformed men, Jordan and Simms, greatcoat collars turned up, huddled against the trunk of an enormous oak tree, dragging at cigarettes. At the approach of the detectives they spun around guiltily, pinched out their cigarettes, and snapped to attention.

“Hard at work, I see,” said Frost.

They grinned sheepishly. “Have you come to give us a hand, then, sir?” asked Jordan, who sported a drooping, Mexican-bandit moustache.

“You mean to say you haven’t found her yet?”

“Found her, sir? Some nutter phones the station and says there’s a body behind a bush, and me and Simms are supposed to search four hundred acres in the dark. It’s bloody ludicrous.”

Frost showed them Karen Dawson’s photograph. “There’s a chance it might be this kid. She’s fifteen years old, missing from home since one o’clock this afternoon.”

They studied it under the light of Simms’s torch. “Why should it be her?” asked the moon-faced Simms. “As many as twenty teenagers around here go missing every week.”

“A man was reported lurking inside her house as she came home from school. She hasn’t been seen since,” said Webster.

Heads turned toward him. They hadn’t seen the bearded bloke before.

“Are you the ex-inspector?” asked Simms. “The one who got kicked out of Braybridge?”

Another sneering bastard, Webster thought, his hands balling into fists. “What if I am?”

“Rotten luck,” commented Simms mildly.

The oak offered shelter from the wind, and Frost was in no hurry to move on. He offered his cigarettes around. Only Webster, with an impatient jerk of his head, declined to accept one. Jordan’s lighter did the rounds.

Webster looked out on to the dark mass of trees which seemed to stretch on and on for miles. “It’s hopeless with only the four of us. We should ask the station for reinforcements.”

Frost forced out a stream of smoke which the wind snatched and tore into shreds. “A full-scale search would have to be properly organized, so it couldn’t even begin until the morning. Let’s give it a whirl ourselves first -unless anyone else wants to chip in with a suggestion?” He looked hopefully at the two uniformed men, who shook their heads, engrossed in studying the branches of the oak tree. They were paid to do what they were told, not to work out campaign plans.

“Right,” said Frost, pulling himself up straight. “Lacking evidence to the contrary, we’ve got to assume that there is a body a girl alive or dead. While we’re assuming, let’s give ourselves a bit of incentive and make her alive… not only alive, but a rampant quivering nymphomaniac with enormous knockers, fully prepared to bestow her hot lusty favours on the man who finds her.”

Jordan and Simms grinned. At least Frost was making it interesting.

“Right,” he continued. “Now keep that dirty picture in mind while we transfer our attention to the herbert who tripped over her and phoned the station.”

He dropped his cigarette end to the ground and crushed it under his heel. “It’s late at night. So what was he doing skulking behind bushes? Obvious answer: He wanted to do a pee and, either ashamed of or too modest to flaunt his equipment, decided to commune privately with nature behind a convenient bush, only to find this nympho’s supine body. So he bottled it up and legged it to the nearest blower to call the cops. How does that sound?”

They paused to consider this. It sounded feasible.

“Sergeant Wells said the man was phoning from a public call box,” Frost continued.

“I noticed a phone box near where we parked the car,” offered Webster.

“There are phone boxes all over the bloody place,” said Jordan gloomily.

“We’ve got to start from somewhere,” said Frost, ‘and that’s as good a place as any. We’ll go up the main paths, searching behind the bushes on either side. If we can’t find anything, we’ll go to another phone box. And if we have no joy in a couple of hours, we’ll call in the heavy mob from the station.” ‘

It was Simms who found her. And by pure chance, because Frost’s reasoning was completely wrong. After getting himself entangled in a flesh-clawing clutch of blackberry thorns, he made a wide detour to take him clear of another thicket and bramble. He squeezed through a tight gap between two bushes.

And there she was, white and still, lying on her back.

She was naked, her cold, still flesh gleaming like silver in the harsh moonlight.

“Here!” yelled Simms. “Over here.” He directed his torch beam into the sky like a beacon, then knelt beside her, shining his torch on her face. He shuddered. Her face was a swollen, bloody mess, the eyes puffy and blackened, the nose misshapen and broken. Blood from her nose had clotted, forming a sticky mask all over the lower part of her face and neck.

The body was blood-streaked, scarcely an inch free of livid bruises.

Scattered on the grass around her were items of ripped-off clothing. She looked dead. He touched her. Her body was icy. He bent his ear to the wreckage of her mouth, holding his breath as he tried to detect the slightest whisper of life. Nothing at first, only the hammering of his own heart, but then the faint wheezing rasp of tortured lungs. Fumbling with the buttons, he dragged off his greatcoat and draped it over the girl.

There was a crash in the undergrowth as Frost lumbered through, Webster hard on his heels. “She’s still alive,” Simms told him. “Some bastard’s smashed her face in.”

Frost dropped to his knees and made his own check for signs of life, feeling for the pulse in her neck. Satisfied, he called over his shoulder to Webster. “Radio the station. We want an ambulance bloody quick. And you can tell Sergeant Wells, with my compliments, that the party’s over. We’ve got another rape victim.”

As Webster was radioing through, Frost studied the extent of the girl’s injuries. It took some resolve to look at her face, which must have been kicked. He suspected the jaw was broken as well as the nose.

Jordan was the last to arrive. He stared down at the girl, and what he saw made him shudder.

“See what the bugger’s done to her neck,” said Frost, indicating bruises cut deeply into the flesh where the rapist’s fingers had gripped and squeezed her into unconsciousness.

“The same pattern as the other one,” observed Simms dispassionately. “That nurse he raped over at the golf course. But she wasn’t beaten up anything like this.”

Webster switched off the radio and dropped it into his pocket. “Ambulance on its way,” he reported. Frost, still bent over the girl, acknowledged his message with a grunt, then ordered Simms out to the main road to home the ambulance crew in.

“Is it Karen?” Webster asked, only to wince and turn his head away as Frost moved back so Webster could see what the animal had done to the girl.

“If it is, then she’s nothing like her photograph,” muttered the inspector. “The poor cow’s been kicked in the face. Give me just five minutes alone with the bastard.”

He pulled back the greatcoat so he could examine the rest of her. She was naked except for thick black stockings, the tops banded by sexy red garters. The stockings were short, coming not much higher than her knee, then there was an awful lot of white thigh. Somehow, it reminded Frost of dirty French postcards he had seen when he was a kid, all black underwear and white flesh. Her body, like her face, was mapped with huge green-and-yellow bruises. As gently as he could, Frost ran his hands along her sides. He thought he could detect at least two broken ribs. She moaned softly as he touched her.

Could this possibly be young Karen? There was no way he could tell from the face. The body looked too well developed for a kid of fifteen, but girls seemed to be maturing earlier and earlier these days. He frowned and bent forward. The nipples. There was something odd about them. The colour was wrong. He took out his handkerchief and rubbed. The red came off. It was lipstick. Lipstick? He stood up and stared at the red on the handkerchief, unable to believe it. It couldn’t be Karen.

“It’s Karen, all right,” called Webster, and he showed Frost the school blazer he had picked up from the grass. “And there are pieces of school uniform all over the place.” His torch stabbed out at the straw boater, the gym slip, the navy-blue knickers.

“I’ve found this, sir,” called Jordan, pulling a white plastic carrier bag out of a clump of nettles. Frost delved through the contents… sweater, jeans, bra… a complete change of clothing. Also a purse which held about a pound’s worth of silver, a worn, Yale-type key, and three packets of male contraceptives.

School uniform, red garters, painted nipples, and contraceptives. It wasn’t making sense. And the Yale key, its chromium plating wearing away, looked far too old to be the key to the Dawsons’ elegant front door. He put everything back into the bag. Where was the ambulance? It should be here by now. As if in answer, the piercing warble of a siren came floating over the trees.

Deep in thought, Frost followed the trail of flattened grass back to the bush where the rapist had stood hidden, waiting. He looked along the empty path, from where the girl would have come, trying to put himself into the mind of a man who would do such things to a kid.

Muffled sounds came from his jacket pocket. His radio was trying to talk to him.

“Sergeant Wells calling Inspector Frost.”

“Yes, Bill, what is it?”

“Message from Detective Inspector Allen. He’s on his way with a full team. He said don’t anyone touch anything until he gets there.”

“I won’t even touch my dick,” said Frost.

“Is it Karen Dawson, Jack?” asked Wells. “I’m getting phone calls every five minutes from her father asking if there’s any news.”

“Hard to tell. The way the bastard’s rearranged her face she could be anyone… Karen, Bo Derek, or Old Mother Riley. Keep stalling her old man. We might want him to identify her, but I’ll be back to him as soon as there’s anything positive. Over and out.”

He pushed the radio back into his pocket. No surprise that Allen was taking over. Allen was in charge of the “Hooded Rapist’ investigation and would want to get Frost as far away as possible the second he took command.

Car doors slammed, then Simms pushed his way through the bushes to report that the ambulance men were hot on his tail. “Do you want me and Jordan to start looking around, sir… to see what we can find?”

He shook his head. “We’ve been ordered not to touch anything. Mr.

Allen is on his way, so we can expect an arrest in seconds.”

Out of sight behind him, Webster grinned. It was common knowledge that Frost and Allen didn’t get on, but then, coldly efficient Allen was a real detective, unlike the clown in the mac. Webster had successfully led many rape cases back in his old division. Tomorrow he would request a transfer to Allen’s team.

“Where the hell are you?” came a cry for help from the ambulance men, floundering about in the dark. Simms waggled his torch like a cinema usherette and yelled, “This way!” then, lowering his voice, said to the inspector, “Something a bit odd about the girl, sir. Did you notice?”

“Painted nipples, you mean?”

“No, sir. Something else… lower down.”

“If it was something else, then I have missed it.” Frost pulled back the greatcoat again and Simms directed his torch. “I keep feeling like a dirty old man every time I do this, Simms. What am I supposed to be looking for?” The torch beam moved down and pointed. “Oh!” exclaimed Frost, very surprised.

He replaced the greatcoat and straightened up. “You’re probably too young to be told this, Simms, but that feature is known to us men of the world as “the sleek bikini line.” You can buy special shavers for it. Webster’s wife has one. That’s why he grew a beard he didn’t want to share the same razor.” He called Webster over and showed him.

“It’s got to be her,” said Webster. “It’s got to be Karen.”

Frost still couldn’t convince himself. “This is hardly bikini weather, son. Still, we’d better get her father to meet us at the hospital, just in case.”

The ambulance men forced their way through and lifted the girl on to a stretcher, covering her with thick red blankets. “Anyone travelling with her?” one asked.

“No,” Frost told him, ‘but we’ll be sending a woman police officer to the hospital as soon as we can.”

As the ambulance pulled away, a convoy of cars containing Detective Inspector Allen and his team roared up. There was a barrage of overexcited shouting and door-slamming as everyone piled out, immediately silenced when Allen bawled that they were all to get back inside their cars and wait. “No-one to move until I give the say-so.” He didn’t want people trampling all over the evidence before he had a chance to see it, especially as some of them were clearly the worse for drink.

Detective Inspector Allen, a wiry man with a thin sour face and a permanent sneer, looked sharp, alert and efficient despite being dragged away from the drinking party well after midnight. His assistant, Detective Sergeant Vic Ingram, slightly unsteady on his feet, his breath redolent of whisky fumes, was a thickset, charm less man of twenty-nine, cursed with a foul temper and a vindictive streak. He hated the newcomer, Webster, and delighted in giving him menial tasks to perform. If Webster hesitated to comply, he invariably taunted him with his stock response: “Too lowly for a detective inspector, is it? Well, you’re a detective constable now, Sunshine, and a bloody rotten one at that.” It was rumoured that Ingram was currently having domestic trouble, which everyone thought served him damn well right. He certainly had a cracker of a wife, much lusted after by all the red-blooded station personnel and, by general consensus, far too good for him.

“You’ve let the damn ambulance men take her away,” complained Allen. “I wanted to see her.”

“Then you should have got here quicker,” said Frost.

“Fill me in,” said Allen curtly.

Don’t tempt me, thought Frost. He told Allen how they had found her and the extent of her injuries.

Allen listened intently, his eyes flicking from side to side, missing nothing. When he saw that Webster, contrary to his instructions, was holding the girl’s school hat in his hand, he raised an eyebrow to Ingram and jerked his head toward the detective constable. Used to his master’s sign language, Ingram swaggered over to Webster and snatched the hat away.

“You bloody wally, don’t you understand English? You were told not to touch anything.”

Webster snatched his hands from his pockets, ready to swing and to hell with the consequences. “Who are you calling a wally, you drunken slob?”

Quickly, Frost, the peacemaker, thrust himself between the two men.

“Now cool it, lads. We’ve got more important things to attend to.”

“You heard him, Inspector,” appealed Ingrain. “He called me a drunken slob.”

“All he meant, Sergeant,” said Frost soothingly, ‘is that you’re a slob, and you’re drunk. No disrespect was intended.” Over his shoulder he ordered Webster to wait for him in the car.

Ingram, swaying, spoiling for a fight, glowered as -Webster stamped off. Allen decided to continue as though nothing had happened. Somehow, Frost always got the best of these unsavoury encounters.

“You reckon the victim is this teenager, Karen Dawson?”

Frost hunched his shoulders. “It’s possible. We’re getting the father over to the hospital to identify her.”

“Let me know as soon as it’s confirmed. I’ll be there later.” Then, seeing Frost was making no attempt to move, he added, “Thank you, Inspector, that will be all.”

Back in the car, Webster waited, seething. Frost slid into his customary position. “Denton General Hospital… first on the left, then follow the main road.” As Webster jarred the car into gear, Frost radioed through to the station requesting them to contact Max Dawson and ask him to meet them at the hospital. That done, he slouched back in his seat, digging deep for a cigarette before he said, “Ingram’s a provocative bastard, son. He’s out for trouble. Try not to rise to his bait.”

Webster growled a noncommittal reply, his eyes straight ahead, looking for the left turnoff.

“What you must remember,” Frost continued, ‘is that one punch and you’re not only out of the division, you’re off the force. You should also remember that Ingram is a great big bastard who could probably knock the living daylights out of you.”

“Spare me the sermon,” muttered the detective constable, spinning the wheel to turn into the main road.

“It’s not a sermon,” said Frost, ‘it’s the gypsy’s warning.” Webster was well down the wrong road before Frost added, “Sorry, did I say left? I meant right…”

Demon General Hospital had originally been a workhouse and was built, like the public toilets, in the reign of Queen Victoria, when things were meant to last. So it was as strong and solid as a prison, but not as pretty and nowhere near as comfortable. Over the years it had sprouted additional wings and outbuildings and was now a sprawling melange of various styles of municipal architecture. It stood on the outskirts of Denton and was dominated by the huge, factory-type chimney poking from the boiler house where, according to Frost, the incinerator was fuelled by amputated arms and legs.

They waited for Max Dawson in the porter’s lodge, a small, partitioned cubbyhole just inside the main entrance. The night porter, a bright-eyed old man with a nicotine-stained walrus moustache, was pouring creosote-coloured liquid into three enamel mugs. Milk was added, then sugar was shovelled in from a tin marked Sterile Dressings. Frost always seemed to know where to get a free cup of tea at any hour of the day or night.

“Get that inside you, Mr. Frost,” said the porter, sliding a mug over.

“And you, young fellow.”

Webster smiled his thanks.

They sipped, blinked, and shuddered.

“What’s it like, Mr. Frost?” asked the porter.

“Delicious, Fred. Do we have to sign the poison register?”

The old boy cackled, showing teeth browner than his tea. “Your lot are keeping us busy tonight, Mr. Frost,” he said, rolling a hand-made cigarette from a pouch of coarse, dark tobacco. “First the old tramp in the morgue, then the poor kid who was raped, and last, that old man who was run over by a hit-and-run.”

“I hope we’re getting our usual discount for bulk,” said Frost, steeling himself for another swig. “Hello, you’ve got a customer.”

Someone was rapping on the frosted-glass panel over the counter. The porter slid it back to reveal a young woman in her early twenties, her bust in the high thirties, and her hair dark with a hint of auburn. She wore a light-blue raincoat over which was slung a white shoulder bag. Her eyes sparkled with pleasure when she saw the inspector.

“Hello, Mr. Frost.”

Frost was up and out of his seat. “Good Lord, it’s sexy Sue with the navy-blue knickers. What are you doing here, Sue? They don’t do pregnancy tests after midnight you know.”

She smiled, showing teeth as perfect as her figure. “Inspector Allen sent me. I’ve got to stay with the rape victim and try and get a statement. He said you’d have the details.”

Frost trotted out the details, adding that the girl hadn’t yet been identified but that a man who might be her father was on his way over. He caught sight of Webster staring at the girl in wide-eyed approval, his tongue almost hanging down to his stomach. It was the first time he had caught his assistant without a frown on his face. “Sorry, Sue, I should have introduced you. The bearded gent at my side is Detective Constable Webster.”

“I’ve seen you about the station,” she told him, warming him with a loin-tingling smile. “I’m Sue… Detective Constable Susan Harvey.”

“Take Sue up to Casualty,” Frost told Webster. “Ward C3.”

And for the first time, Webster obeyed an order without a display of resentment.

Frost returned to his tea, sipping slowly as the porter puffed away at his evil-smelling homemade cigarette.

“We used to see a lot of you when your wife was here, Mr. Frost.”

“That’s right, Fred.”

“How is she? Did she get better?”

“No,” said Frost, ‘she didn’t get better.”

The main doors opened and footsteps rang out on the tiled passage. Frost went out to meet Max Dawson, who was shaking with rage. Beside him stood his wife, wearing a silver-fox fur. She was crying.

“Is it true?” hissed Dawson. “Is it true?” “That’s what we want you to confirm,” Frost told him. He drew Dawson to one side and said quietly, “It might be better if your wife stayed down here, sir.”

“No,” said Clare firmly. “She’s my daughter. I want to be with her.”

“How bad is she?” asked Dawson as they walked towards the lift.

“She’s taken a very nasty beating. I think her nose, jaw, and ribs are broken,” Frost answered.

Dawson sucked in air angrily. “When you find the swine who did it, let me have him,” he pleaded.

“I think there’d be quite a queue, sir,” said Frost, pausing to look around as a clatter of footsteps chased after them.

“Mr. Frost!” called the porter. “Telephone call for you. Ward C3 they say it’s urgent.”

An icy cold hand clutched at Frost’s heart and squeezed hard. Karen

Dawson was in ward C3. Had she died? Phase don’t let her be dead. The

Dawsons had followed him and were watching him intently. He took the phone, then turned his back so the parents couldn’t see his face. “Frost,” he said quietly.

It was Susan Harvey’s voice on the other end. “Inspector, I’m with the rape victim. Did you say Karen Dawson was only fifteen?”

“That’s right, Sue. Why?”

“Then this can’t possibly be her. It’s not a girl, it’s a woman

… she’s thirty at least.”

Thirty! Flaming hell, thought Frost. “Are you sure, Sue? I’ve got the parents with me.”

“There’s no doubt at all, Inspector.”

He handed the phone back to Fred, took a few deep breaths to compose himself, then slowly turned to face the Dawsons.

Max Dawson was pacing up and down, unable to keep still, anxious to be with his daughter. His wife, who had sat down on one of the wooden benches that lined the corridor, stood up anxiously as Frost approached, trying to read the message in his face.

He gave them both what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “It’s all right, Mrs. Dawson, it’s all right…”

Dawson pushed himself forward. “All right? How can it be all right?

My daughter’s been beaten and raped, and you tell us it’s all right.”

Frost took a deep breath and plunged up to his armpits into icy water. “I’m afraid we’ve worried you unduly. The girl who has been raped isn’t your daughter.”

Clare caught her breath, then began to laugh hysterically. Her husband grabbed her shoulders and shook her roughly. Still she laughed: He slapped her face… hard, the pistol-shot sound echoing on and on down the long corridor. She gasped, her hand touching the red mark on her face, then she shrivelled and burst into tears, dropping on to the bench.

Dawson stared into space for a while, then said, “Not my daughter

… ?”

“No, sir. It turns out she’s a much older woman.”

The look of concern returned to Clare’s face. “But it could be Karen. She’s very well developed for her age. We’ve got to check.” She stood up and frantically tried to push past Frost to get to the lift and the ward. He gently restrained her.

“It couldn’t possibly be Karen, Mrs. Dawson. The victim is at least thirty maybe even older…”

Dawson froze, staring at the detective in open-mouthed incredulity. “Am I hearing you correctly? You thought this woman, this thirty-year-old woman, was my daughter? My wife and I have been worried sick because you told us our daughter had been raped and beaten, and all the time… all the time it was a thirty-year-old woman!”

All Frost could do was shuffle his feet, mumble how sorry he was, and wish that Dawson would push off home so he could face his own humiliation in private.

With a sudden lunge, Dawson grabbed Frost by the lapels of his coat. “Sorry? Is that all you can say?” Then, with a look of contempt, he pushed him away and wiped his hands down the front of his coat. “You stupid, bloody incompetent fool, I’m not going to soil my hands on you.” He took his wife’s arm and led her out. At the main doors he paused. “Find my daughter, you bastard,” he said, and then they stepped out into the dark.

Frost flopped down on the bench, which was still warm from Mrs. Dawson, and fumbled for his cigarettes. Opposite, on the wall, a large red-and-white sign frowned its disapproval: No Smoking… Please! His hand returned from his pocket, empty. “As you’ve said please,” he said aloud.

He heard someone clearing his throat. He looked up and there was Webster. “Did you hear all that, son?”

Webster nodded.

“A stupid, incompetent fool!” Frost repeated. “And he’s right.. . that’s just what I am.”

From his inside pocket he again took out the photograph and studied it. He would have to start thinking of Karen as a schoolgirl again, far too young for boys, too young to keep contraceptives in her handbag. So who was the anonymous victim, and why the fancy dress?

He pushed himself up from the bench. “Come on, son, let’s nip up to ward C3 and see what we can find out.”

“It isn’t our case,” protested Webster.

“I know, son. My trouble is I’m such a nosey bastard.”

Sue Harvey was waiting for them by the door of C3, a small side ward with only four beds. “The doctors are with her now,” she whispered, pointing to the end bed, which was screened off by curtains.

After a few minutes the curtains jerked open and a small Asian doctor in a white coat emerged, followed by the night nurse. Behind them, on the bed, a white huddle, absolutely motionless. The night sister whispered something to the doctor and pointed to the two detectives. He examined them with tired eyes, then walked over.

“How is she, Doc?” asked Frost.

“Still unconscious. She has been punched, kicked, and badly beaten. There are two fractured ribs, a broken nose, fracture of the jaw, and hairline skull damage. In addition, she has severe bruisings, and contusions all over her body. There are external marks on the throat, which is badly swollen, indicative of manual strangulation; also, of course, internal bruising. I imagine she was rendered unconscious, then repeatedly kicked and punched while she was lying on the ground.”

“Would the beating have been before or after she was sexually assaulted?”

The doctor frowned and looked puzzled. “Sexually assaulted? Who said she was sexually assaulted?” He turned to the night sister and spread his hands in appeal. “Did I say she was sexually assaulted?”

It was Frost’s turn to frown and look puzzled. “Are you saying she wasn’t raped?”

“Raped? If my patient had been raped, do you think I am such a damn fool I would not have mentioned it?”

Frost shook his head, then wiped his face with his hands. He just couldn’t believe this! “You’re quite sure, Doc? You wouldn’t like to nip over and take another look?”

Indignantly, the little man pulled himself up to his full height. “Are you questioning my competence, Inspector? I have examined her. There are definitely no signs of recent sexual congress, nor of any attempt of forced sexual congress. You obviously cannot take in what I am saying, so you will please excuse me. I have other patients to attend to.” He pushed past them, bustling out of the ward, his white coat flapping behind him.

Frost scratched his head and tried to make sense of this unexpected development. “Not raped? He stripped her off but didn’t rape her. It’s like unwrapping your Mars bar then not eating it.”

“Perhaps he was disturbed before he could actually do it,” suggested Webster.

“Disturbed?”

“The bloke who made the anonymous phone call -perhaps he barged in on them at the crucial moment?”

Frost rubbed his chin. “I can’t buy that, son. I had a quick look at her clothes. There was no blood on them, which means he kicked and punched her after he’d stripped her. If he had time to kick her, he had bags of time for the old sexual congress.” He shrugged. “Still, it’s not our case anymore. Let Inspector Allen solve it.”

The ward door was barged open by a wheeled stretcher manoeuvred by a theatre orderly who had come to collect the patient for surgery. Through the open door Frost suddenly spotted Detective Inspector Allen, with Sergeant Ingram at his side, purposefully advancing toward the ward. He had no wish to be around when Allen learned of his foul-up with the victim’s age, so he quickly looked for a way of escape. With a quick wave to Sue, he hustled Webster through a rear door, down some dimly lit stone stairs, then along another empty, winding corridor.

“You seem to know your way about,” commented Webster.

“My wife was in here,” explained Frost. “I used to come every day.”

The detective constable remembered being told that Frost’s wife had died recently and thought it best not to ask further questions. They turned right into the main causeway, which had wards leading off from either side.

Frost stopped and pointed. “Look! The place is crawling with filth tonight.”

Webster saw a young police constable, dark curly hair, small moustache, leaning against the wall, engaged in animated conversation with a ridiculously young night nurse who had a wisp of stray hair escaping from her cap. Webster scratched his memory for the man’s name; he had been introduced to so many people. Then he remembered. Dave Shelby, married with two young children but with the reputation of being woman-mad, or ‘crumpet-happy,” as Frost had crudely termed it.

Catching sight of the inspector bearing down on him, Shelby quickly whispered something to the girl, making her blush, then in a loud voice, said, “Thank you very much, Nurse.” She hurried off, giving an apologetic smile to Frost as she passed.

“Stay away from him, love,” Frost called after her. “He meets men in toilets after dark.” To Shelby, he said, “You want to try and stay off it for five minutes, son it can make you go blind.”

Shelby grinned nervously. “Just passing the time, sir. I’m a respectable married man.”

“So was Dr. Crippen,” sniffed Frost. “Anyway, what are you doing here?”

Shelby jerked his thumb at the glass-ported swing doors behind him.

“I’m with the hit-and-run victim. They’re operating on him now.”

Frost squinted through one of the portholes. Not much to see. A huddle of green-robed figures, working silently. One of the robes was smeared with blood.

“Rather him than me. It looks like an abattoir in there.”

He looked over Shelby’s shoulder. Farther down the corridor all alone, an old lady was sitting. She looked bewildered and frightened.

“That’s the victim’s wife,” whispered Shelby. “She slept through it all. Didn’t even know her husband had got out of bed until a neighbour knocked to tell her he’d been run over.”

‘ Poor old cow,” muttered Frost. “What are his chances?”

Shelby gave a hopeless shrug. “His skull is smashed, he’s hemorrhaging internally, and he’s seventy-eight years old.”

“The car that hit him was supposed to have shed its licence plate,” said Frost. “Have we traced the driver yet?”

“I don’t know, sir. I’m not really on this one. Mr. Allen pulled the area car off to help with the search for the rapist.”

“That reminds me said Frost, staring closely at him have you been up to your larks tonight?”

Shelby started visibly. “What do you mean, sir?”

“The woman who was attacked. You haven’t been in Denton Woods tonight with your little truncheon at the ready?”

A wave of relief seemed to wash over the constable. “No, sir,” he said, forcing a smile. “It wasn’t me.”

But you have been up to something, my lad, thought Frost, and for a minute you thought I was on to it. Well, I’m not on to it. I’m not that clever… I can’t even tell the difference between a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl and a thirty-year-old woman.

They had to pass the old lady on their way out to the car. She reached up and clutched at Frost’s arm. “My husband she said they’re operating on him. He is going to be all right, isn’t he?”

“Of course he is,” beamed Frost. “He’s going to be fine.” He gave her a reassuring pat.

They walked on.

“Why raise her hopes?” asked Webster. “He’s going to die.”

“Then you bloody tell her,” said Frost.

Tuesday night shift (5)

“I can’t give you any sort of description,” said the man. “I never saw him.”

“You must have seen something,” said Wells. “How are we supposed to arrest him if we don’t know what he looks like?”

The phone rang.

“Answer that, would you Ridley,” yelled Sergeant Wells. “I’m attending to someone.”

The man he was attending to had been robbed at knife-point while drawing cash from the automatic cash dispenser at Bennington’s Bank. “He stuck a knife in my back,” said the complainant, ‘then he grabbed the money and ran. By the time I’d plucked up courage to look around, he’d gone.”

“Was he short, tall, fat, thin, white, yellow, or what?” asked Wells.

“All I can tell you is he was a bloody fast runner,” said the man. “He went off with my money like a dose of salts.”

The phone kept ringing.

“Excuse me a moment, sir,” said Wells. He pushed open the door to the corridor and shouted, “Ridley!”

The toilet gurgled and roared, then Ridley appeared, doing up his belt.

“The bloody phone’s ringing,” snapped Wells. “You know I’m here on my own.”

“I’m entitled to go to the toilet, aren’t I?” argued the constable.

“Not when we’re short-staffed, you’re not.” He turned back to the man.

“And how much did you say was taken, Mr. Skinner?”

“Forty-five pounds. Nine five-pound notes.”

“Any idea where Mr. Frost is?” called Ridley, holding the mouthpiece against his chest.

“You’re on Control,” snapped Wells. “You’re supposed to know where everyone is.” It was really getting far too much. Every available man had been commandeered by Mr. Allen after the rape attempt in Denton Woods. Even young Collier had been roped in, leaving only Wells and the controller, PC Ridley, to run the entire station. He wasn’t good enough to go to their lousy party, but he was good enough to run a division almost single-handed.

“There’s been a robbery and a coshing over at The Coconut Grove. They got away with more than five thousand quid.”

“Hard bloody luck,” said Wells. “This gentleman’s lost forty-five pounds, and he was here first.”

The lobby doors crashed back on their hinges, and in bounded Frost in his party suit with the sodden trouser legs and his everyday mac and scarf. With him was the new bloke, the bearded ex-inspector Webster.

Ridley waved the phone. “Mr. Frost!”

While Webster went on to the office to make a start on the crime statistics, Frost ambled over to Ridley. “Yes, Constable?”

“Robbery at The Coconut Grove, Mr. Frost.”

“Sorry, I’m only doing bodies down public lavatories tonight,” replied the inspector. At Ridley’s look of reproach, he sighed and said, “All right. Take the details.” He crossed to the corridor and yelled, “Webster! We’re going out again.” Then he caught sight of Wells struggling to get a report form into the typewriter. “Everything all right, Sergeant?”

“No, it bloody well isn’t,” snarled Wells, ‘and I’m too busy for small talk.”

“I’ve seen a lady with rouged nipples,” said Frost.

“Are you going to take my details?” demanded the man who had been robbed.

“Just a moment, sir,” said Wells, waving him off as if he were intruding on a private conversation. “You saw what Jack…?”

Before it had time to blink at being brought out into the light, the crime statistics return was stuffed back into the filing cabinet and Webster was once again behind the wheel of the Ford Cortina, driving off into the night. As the car skirted the woods, they could see the firefly dots of torches dancing among the trees, where Allen’s team continued its painstaking search.

The Coconut Grove was part of a large leisure complex development on the outskirts of Denton, just north of the woods. It consisted of clubs, bars, restaurants, bingo halls, a theatre, a sports pavillion, and myriad other amenities. The police suspected that it catered for the odd spot of prostitution on the side, but they hadn’t been able to prove anything. It was run by a dubious character called Harry Baskin whose other enterprises included a chain of betting shops.

Baskin had bought the land cheap. No-one thought he’d get planning permission for his leisure complex because, under the new town development plan, the area was designated for agricultural purposes only. But, to everyone’s astonishment, planning permission was granted. A couple of months later, the chairman of the planning committee resigned and retired to the

Bahamas. Some cynics unkindly suggested that these two events were connected, but no-one said so to Baskin. People who got on the wrong side of Harry Baskin suddenly found they had become extremely accident-prone.

Harry Baskin! Webster wondered where he had heard that name before?

“He runs some betting shops, doesn’t he?”

Frost nodded.” He has thirty-seven all over the country. He also has subtle ways of making reluctant losers pay up. The punter wakes up one morning to find his dog’s had its throat cut, or that his car has mysteriously self-combusted… little nudges like that. No-one owes Harry money for long.”

Leaving the main road, they followed large illuminated signs which beckoned this way to den ton fabulous leisure complex. A sharp turn, and there it was, a cluster of buildings in gleaming black-and-white mock marble, spangled with tasteful neon signs… Bingo… Fish and Chips… Striptease. Most of the satellite buildings were in darkness, but Frost steered Webster across a car park to the rear section, which a discreet blue neon sign proclaimed to be the coconut grove.

They went through revolving doors into a dimly lit foyer where their way was barred by a wall of flesh, the bouncer, a hefty, ex-wrestler in evening dress. He had been watching the approach of the mud-splattered Ford and had seen the two men get out. His orders from Mr. Baskin were to exclude potential troublemakers, and these two were trouble if ever he’d seen it, especially the load of rough in the crumpled mac.

“Sorry, gentlemen. Members only…” he began, moving forward to urge them back through the exit doors.

“American Express,” said Frost, waving his warrant card under the man’s nose. “Tell Harry Baskin the filth are here.”

The bouncer muttered a few words into the house phone, then led them through a passage to a door marked Private… No Admittance. Above the door an illuminated sign in red announced Engaged… Do Not Enter. The bouncer rapped with his knuckles. The sign turned green and said Please Enter.

Baskin, dark and swarthy, in his late thirties, swivelled morosely from side to side behind a huge desk which contained nothing but the remains of a smoked-salmon sandwich. He wore a midnight-blue evening suit, the sleeves of the coat pulled back slightly to ensure an unrestricted view of oversized solid gold cuff links, which clanked on his wrists like shackles. Everyone’s in evening dress tonight but me, thought Frost, his trousers still damp about his ankles, his shoes squelching slightly as he walked.

On the walnut-veneered wall behind Baskin were framed and signed photographs of the various celebrities who had visited the leisure complex boxers, film stars, pop stars their arms around, shaking hands with, or handing charity cheques to a smiling Harry Baskin. But he wasn’t smiling now. His face was black with anger and furrowed in a frown that could give one of Webster’s a hundred-yard start and still romp home. He didn’t seem very pleased to see Frost.

“Oh, it’s you, Inspector!”

“I’m afraid so, Harry,” acknowledged Frost, sitting uninvited in the visitor’s armchair and rubbing his legs against the upholstery to dry his trousers. “All the good cops are busy on a rape case. A woman attacked in the woods earlier tonight I hope you’ve got a cast-iron alibi?”

“Do me a favour!” pleaded Baskin, the cufflinks rattling as he flicked a hand to dismiss the bouncer. “I can get all the crumpet I want without moving from this desk. They come knocking on my door begging for it.” He jettisoned the remains of the sandwich into a bin. “I’ve had one hell of a night. First the bloody stripper doesn’t turn up, then the so-called cordon bleu chef burns the bloody meat pies, and lastly, this stinking robbery. So forgive me if I find it hard to raise a smile.” He jabbed a finger in Webster’s direction. “What the hell is that?”

Frost introduced the detective constable.

Baskin found it possible to smile thinly as he recognized the name. “Webster! The cop they kicked out of Braybridge! Blimey, we’re getting all the rejects tonight, aren’t we? You’d better watch out for him, Mr. Frost. He beats inspectors up.”

Webster fought hard to keep his face impassive, but behind the mask his anger was building up a rare old head of steam. It wouldn’t take much

…

Frost bounced a thin smile back to the club owner. “He also beats up cheap crooks, Harry, so I wouldn’t upset him if I were you. He could knee you in the groin so hard those ladies you mentioned would be beating on your door in vain. What do you say we get down to business?”

Baskin stood up and carefully adjusted the lines of his dinner jacket.

“This way.”

He took them through a maze of passages to an office near the rear entrance, its door newly scarred with deep gashes in the wood. Webster dropped to one knee to examine it. Baskin looked down with a sneer. “You needn’t get out your magnifying glass, sonny. My men did that. We had to axe our way in. A bloody good door ruined.” He opened the bloody good door and showed them into a small cell of a room… concrete floor, grey emulsioned walls, and a single high window fitted with iron bars. A cheap-looking light-oak desk and a non-matching hard-backed chair comprised the furnishings. On the desk stood a phone and a wired switch.

Baskin checked that the corner of the desk was clean, made doubly sure by treating it to a flick of his silk monogrammed handkerchief, then sat on it.

“A lot of our trade is done by cheque and credit card, but we also get a fair amount of cash sloshing about. It jams up the tills, so twice a night we empty them, bring the cash here to be counted and checked, and then it’s taken to the night safe at Bennington’s Bank. There’s a security man on guard in this room all the time the money’s here. He locks himself in. Take a look at the door.”

They examined the inside of the door, which had two strong bolts top and bottom, a double security lock, and a thick iron bar which could be slotted into holders set tight into the concrete walls.

“Simple but effective,” continued Baskin, swinging his leg as he spoke. “We bung the money in the bank’s special bags, then a second security guard nips off to fetch the motor to take it to the night safe.”

“Do you use the same car each time?” asked Webster.

“Do I look that stupid, sonny?” scoffed Baskin. “If anyone wants to rob me, I make it bloody hard for them. A different set of wheels, a different time, a different route each night.”

Webster said, “And who decides on that?”

“I do, sonny, and I keep it to myself until the very last moment.”

“Don’t call me sonny,” snarled Webster.

“Touchy little sod, isn’t he?” grinned Baskin.

Frost had wandered across the room. Taped to the wall behind the desk was a collection of black-and-white glossy photographs, all of nudes, most of them strippers who had appeared at the club. As he scrutinised the various poses, he said, “So, you’ve got one man locked inside, another fetching the car. Then what?”

“The motor’s brought right up to the rear entrance, just outside here. The driver nips in, taps a prearranged signal on that door. The bloke inside gathers up the money bags, unlocks the door, and within five seconds he’s inside the car on his way to the bank.”

“Is it a different signal each night?” persisted Webster.

“Of course it’s a different bloody signal. I work it out myself and don’t tell them until the very last minute. If the bloke inside gets the right signal, he opens the door; if it’s wrong, he presses that switch, which raises the alarm. This was tonight’s signal.” He rapped out a short pattern of taps on the desk top.

“I can name that tune in one,” muttered Frost, seemingly much more interested in the pinups than in the robbery. “It sounds foolproof to me, Harry. Don’t change it.”

Baskin raised his eyes to the ceiling and sighed theatrically. “You’ll have me in stitches, Mr. Frost, with your droll humour. Well, it wasn’t so bloody foolproof tonight, was it? Croll locks himself in with more than five thousand quid. His mate, Harris, waddles off to fetch the motor when, guess what? There’s an urgent phone call for Mr. Harris in the foyer. From the casualty ward of Denton Hospital… matter of life and death. The wooden tops in the foyer call him over the Tannoy. He legs it across the foyer, picks up the phone and this tart says, “Hold on a minute, please, and we’ll get the heart specialist.” As it happens, his old lady has a wonky ticker, so he swallows it and holds on.”

Frost said, “Who spoke on the phone? A man or a woman?”

“A woman supposed to be a nurse, wasn’t she, the bloody slag. Anyway, this burke, this cretin, this lump of horse manure, just holds on for bloody ever listening to sod all. After about six minutes of deafening silence, it suddenly occurs to him that perhaps he’s being taken for a mug. He hangs up and dials his old lady’s house… and she answers the phone, bright and cheerful, fit as a bleeding fiddle. So then it’s his turn to have a heart attack. He nip’s back here, wallops out the signal. No reply. He tries again. Nothing. Finally he plucks up the courage to come and tell me about it. Me and the boys come running. Takes us nearly ten minutes with a sledge hammer and an axe to smash our way in and… surprise, surprise! The money isn’t there any more, but Croll’s out cold on the floor, blood trickling from his head, a surprised look on his stupid face, and a pain in the leg where I booted him.”

Frost poked a cigarette in his mouth and scratched a match on the desk top. “So what happened? How come the foolproof scheme didn’t work?”

Baskin stared at the desk top and tried to erase the mark of Frost’s match with a spit-moistened finger. “You tell me. The ambulance took him away before I could get any proper answers.” He took out his silk handkerchief and worried away at the mark on the desk. “That won’t bloody come off, you know.”

Frost puffed a smoke screen over the blemish. “What did you say his name was?”

“Croll… Tom Croll.” Baskin didn’t miss the quiver of recognition from the inspector. “Don’t tell me the little bastard’s got form? Don’t tell me I’ve employed an ex-con to guard my bloody money? I’ll break both his bleeding legs.”

“Live and let live, Harry,” soothed Frost. “If he doesn’t mind working for a crook, why should you mind employing one? Tommy Croll’s done the odd bit of time, but only for petty stuff. He hasn’t got the bottle to pull off a stunt like this. Where’s the other guard, Harris, the one who got the dodgy phone call?”

Baskin seemed preoccupied in watching his cuff links glitter in the light. “He… er… had a bit of an accident walked into a door hurt his nose and blacked both his eyes. I sent him home to recover.”

“You’re a nasty piece of work, Harry,” Frost told him. “I hope he sues you.”

“What was the exact sum of money taken?” asked Webster, realizing that Frost had asked a lot of questions but hadn’t touched on the basics.

“Five thousand, one hundred thirty-two pounds,” answered Baskin. “One of our slack nights the end of the week it could be nearer twenty grand.”

Webster jotted this down. “And what time did the robbery take place?”

“Round about five past eleven,” said Baskin casually.

Frost, whose eyes had again been drawn to the magnetic north of the breasts and bottoms of the pinups, spun around. “Five past eleven?” he said incredulously. “That’s more than four hours ago!”

Baskin spread his hands. “So what? I had no intention of calling you in, but my expensive lawyer told me that as a crime’s been committed I’ve got no choice. Your being here is just a formality to satisfy our insurers. What’s a lousy five thousand quid to me? It’s chicken feed! I can stand the loss, but what I can’t stand is the humiliation. He who pinches my purse steals trash, but he who filches my good name gets both his bloody legs broken. So I’ll find the bastard myself. Just take the details, go to the bar and have a free drink on the house, and then push off and forget all about it. Leave the hard work to me.”

Frost shook his head. “Sorry Harry, but we like to beat our own prisoners up. It’s one of the few pleasures we’ve got left. What was the money packed in?”

There was a black fibreglass attache case in the corner. Baskin picked it up and showed it to the two men. “It was in two cases like this.” He held it out for Frost to examine, but the inspector wasn’t there.

“Where’s the old git got to?”

“The old git’s down here,” called a voice from behind the desk where Frost, on his knees, was almost rubbing his nose on one of the photographs. “Just admiring your art collection, Harry.”

Making no attempt to hide his contempt, Baskin said, “If dirty pictures turn you on, I’ll find some. But in the meantime, could we just concentrate on the matter in hand?”

Still preoccupied with the nude, Frost asked if anyone had seen anything unusual at the time of the robbery.

With a snort, Baskin said, “No-one saw a bleeding thing. Some slag legs it off with five thousand quid of my money and no-one sees anything!”

Frost seemed to lose interest in his questions. He ripped a photograph from the wall and held it nearer the light.

The old fool’s going senile, thought Webster, deciding he had better take over. He opened the door and walked the short distance to the rear entrance. Down a couple of steps, and he was out in the car park where the night wind hurled a few handfuls of rain in his face. Despite the lateness of the hour, there were still quite a few cars dotted about. At 11.05, when the money was snatched, the area would have been crawling with motors and surges of arriving and departing customers. A man strolling to his car with a couple of small fibreglass suitcases, perhaps concealed under a mac, would attract no attention at all.

He stepped back into the building to escape the rain squall and bumped into Harry Baskin, a huge cigar wedged in his mouth.

“I left your inspector dribbling over that tart’s photo. I suppose the poor old git hasn’t had a woman since his wife died and it’s making him go funny.” He pushed Webster aside to stare at a car turning off from the road and splashing over puddles as it crossed the car park. “Who the hell is this?”

The new arrival was a Ford Escort, one of the pool cars from the station. Two men got out, heads down, and made their way to the front entrance. As they passed under an overhead light, Webster identified them. Detective Inspector Allen and his charming sidekick, Detective Sergeant Ingram. He nipped back to the office to warn Frost.

The inspector was now sitting on the corner of the desk, looking quite pleased with himself. He only grunted when told about Allen, but as soon as Baskin returned, he snatched up the photograph of the stripper and asked the club owner if it had been retouched.

Baskin frowned. “What do you mean?”

“This lady seems to be devoid of hair in an area where I would expect to find some.”

Baskin took the photograph, holding it at arm’s length. “Don’t you know nothing? Strippers have to make themselves look more artistic before they perform in front of an audience. The raw human body is quite repulsive if left to its own devices, you know.”

Frost dropped his cigarette on the floor and gave it the full weight of his foot. “You said earlier that one of your strippers didn’t turn up for work?”

“That’s right. Paula Grey, the stripping schoolgirl.”

Frost turned to Webster like a stage artist awaiting an ovation, and Webster had the grace to reward him with a silent hand clap. The old fool wasn’t always as stupid as he made out.

“She does a routine in schoolgirl uniform,” continued Baskin. “It gives the dirty old men in the audience a cheap thrill to think they’re watching a juicy young bit of under-aged crumpet peeling off. To be honest, we have to keep the lighting well down so they can’t see how ancient the old cow really is we don’t want to put the punters off their meat pies.” A sudden thought hit him and he stopped in his tracks. “Here, you’re not suggesting she was involved in this robbery, are you?” He warmed to this theme. “Hold on, though. It makes sense. I should have twigged the minute she didn’t turn up to do her routine. She had inside knowledge… and she could have pretended to be the nurse on the phone.”

“No,” said Frost, ‘it couldn’t have been her. While you were being robbed, she was out in die woods getting herself booted in the kisser by the famous Denton “Hooded Terror”.” Baskin listened, shaking his head in amazement, as the inspector told him what had occurred.

“Who in his right senses would try to rape Paula, Inspector? You could have her any time for the price of a packet of fags, and if you didn’t have the price she’d lend it to you.” He grimaced with irritation as the door crashed open and Allen and Ingram barged in. “What the hell? This is a private office. Get out!”

Allen ignored Baskin and stared past him to the scruffy figure by the desk. “What are you doing here, Frost? I told you this was my case.”

Baskin looked from one inspector to the other.” Blimey, you’re not going to fight over it are you? Just find the joker who robbed me and you can split the money up between you.”

“Robbed you?” cried Allen, his lips quivering as he fought back a smile. “Dear, dear, dear, what a tragedy! How much was taken? A not inconsiderable sum, I trust?” He shook with silent laughter. Ingram, leaning against the wall, obediently joined in.

“I’ve already had this patter from your number-two comic,” snorted Baskin, nodding his head in Frost’s direction. “If you’re not here about the robbery, then what the hell do you want?”

Allen folded his arms and rocked with smug satisfaction on the balls of his feet, biting his lip to stop himself from laughing too soon. How he was going to love telling Frost that the girl he had identified as a fifteen-year-old school kid was an old scrubber. What sort of idiot could make a mistake like that? “Do you know a girl called Paula Grey, Mr. Baskin?”

But, annoyingly, before Baskin had a chance to reply, Frost chimed in with, “Paula Grey? That name rings a bell!” He knuckled his forehead in mock concentration, then snapped his fingers triumphantly. “Got her! Paula Grey, the stripping schoolgirl. She works for Harry. She’s the girl who was attacked in Denton Woods tonight. Didn’t you know that, Allen?”

Allen, completely put out, stopped rocking. “Of course I damn well knew that. I’ve just taken a statement from her. But how did you know?”

Frost shrugged modestly. “Intelligent deduction.”

“Is this a private conversation, or can anyone join in?” asked Baskin peevishly.

Allen transferred his attention to the club owner. “Your employee Paula Grey was savagely attacked tonight. She claims you had threatened to sack her if she turned up late for a show.”

“That’s right,” nodded Baskin.

“She overslept,” Allen continued grimly, ‘so, to save time, she put on her stage clobber in her flat and took a shortcut through the woods, and that’s where it all happened. The bastard jumped her, chucked something over her head, then squeezed her throat until she passed out.”

Baskin took his cigar from his mouth and shook the spit from the end. “If he was after a nice young bit of the other, he must have been broken-hearted when he took the cloth from her face. I think the poor old cow draws her old-age pension next month.”

“You’ve got a heart as big and warm as Golders Green Crematorium,” observed Frost.

“He’s right, though,” said Ingram, moving to the centre of the room. “We think that’s why he beat her up instead of raping her. He only likes young stuff, and Paula was a great big turnoff.”

The malicious glint in Allen’s eye warned Ingram he would pay for having stolen his master’s thunder.

Taking advantage of the situation, Webster thought he’d try a spot of ingratiation in the hope it would improve his chances of being transferred from Frost to Allen. “How’s the search in the woods going, sir?” he asked, politely.

“Search?” shrieked Allen. “Don’t talk to me about the search. It’s a farce! I doubt if half of the search team are sober. I’ve called it off until tomorrow morning.” His head moved from Webster to Frost. “I’m holding a briefing meeting tomorrow, at nine. You were there when the victim was found, so I want you to attend.”

“Sure,” said Frost, wondering how he could fit in some sleep. “I’ll have to be away pretty sharp, though. I’ve got to go to a post-mortem.”

Telling Baskin he’d be back in the morning after he’d taken statements from the two security men, Frost signalled to Webster, busily engaged in a silent scowling match with Ingram, that it was time to leave. They were almost through the door when Allen fired his parting salvo.

“You will have the overtime returns done by the morning, won’t you? You know it’s the last day if we’re to catch the computer.”

“Sure,” said Frost automatically while his brain shrieked at him in horror. The bloody overtime returns! Was it time for them already? In the worry of trying to get the crime statistics off, he’d completely forgotten the damn things. Quickly he closed the door behind them before Allen could think of any more horrors he should have done.

As they crossed the car park, heads down against the slanting rain, he told Webster to remind him about doing the overtime figures the minute they got back to the office.

“Sure,” said Webster. It seemed to be the ‘in’ word.

They didn’t make it to the station. Control diverted them to Denton Hospital to follow up a complaint about a man prowling around the nurses’ sleeping quarters.

Ridley was most apologetic. “Sorry to dump this one on you, Inspector, but there’s no-one else available.”

“I hope you realize, Constable,” replied Frost sternly, trying to keep the delight from his voice, ‘that you’re stopping me from doing the overtime returns.”

Tuesday night shift (6)

“It was horrible,” said the little nurse. “He had these awful red, staring eyes… and his mouth was all dribbling.”

I’d be all dribbling if I caught a sight of you in the buff, thought Frost.

The little nurse in her shortie nightdress was all excited now she was the centre of attraction, and she was reliving her ordeal for the benefit of three other young nurses, none older than twenty and all in various stages of undress.

“I’d taken everything off… everything… when I realized I hadn’t drawn the curtains. I went to the window to do it, and there he was.”

The lucky bastard! thought Frost.

A thrill of excitement ran through her audience. “I screamed,” she went on. “I thought he was trying to get in, and all the time I kept thinking about that nurse who was raped. I was terrified.”

Frost leaned forward and patted her warm, quivering young arm. “Don’t worry, love. We’ll get him.”

A pointed cough of disapproval from Sister Plummer, the eunuch in charge of the harem, made Frost snatch his hand away hurriedly. Sister Plummer was the supervisor of the Nurses’ Home, a gaunt, miserable-looking woman in her late fifties, with a hatchet face, and beady, suspicious eyes. “She looks just like the nurse who shaved me for my appendix operation,” Frost later confided to Webster. “She used to think a man’s dick was just a handle to lift him up by.”

Webster returned from searching the grounds. “No signs of anyone,” he announced, wishing it had been him who stayed with the half-dressed nurses and Frost who floundered about in the dark and the cold.

The nurse’s shortie nightie was starting to slip down, and inch by inch, her beautiful, firm, young, creamy breasts were emerging like mountains through clouds. Frost was pondering ways to make his questions last until the crucial moment, when the eunuch said, “Nurse! Cover yourself!” and the treat was terminated.

“From the direction he was running,” said the little nurse, “I think he went into the main hospital building.” Now she tells me, thought Webster.

“Hadn’t you better start searching the hospital, Inspector?” rasped Sister Plummer. “It’s time the nurses were in bed. They’ve all got busy days tomorrow.” The nurses all looked too wide awake and excited for sleep, but Frost was forced to take the hint.

“We’ll go through the place with a fine-tooth comb,” he assured them.

“If he’s still there, we’ll find him.”

Frost and Webster returned to the main building.

“How do you intend to carry out this search?” Webster asked.

Frost grinned. “You didn’t think I was serious, did you, son? That was just to keep that little nurse happy. This bloke isn’t going to hang about in the hospital. He’ll be miles away by now.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“True, son,” agreed the inspector, ‘but this place is a bloody rabbit warren. Even if he were here, we’d never find him, so we won’t bother looking.”

“He could be the rapist,” insisted Webster, determined that things should be done properly. “He’s already had one nurse.”

Frost laughed scoffingly. “The rapist, son? Do you think a man who strips off juicy young birds and has his wicked way with them is going to be satisfied with peeping through a window? This was just a Peeping Tom, getting a cheap thrill from a flash of snowy-white thigh, and don’t I envy the bastard. That little nurse was a goer if ever I saw one.”

At four o’clock in the morning the hospital was a desolate and cheerless place. Frost told Webster that more patients died at this hour than at any other time of day. “If you hear a trolley, odds are it’s got a body on it…”

They trekked the labyrinth of corridors, past wards illuminated only by the night sister’s desk lamp, past a group of anxious relatives talking to the little Asian doctor, who was shaking his head sadly “Another body on its way,” said Frost past abandoned oxygen cylinders and trollies piled high with red hospital blankets.

It was as they approached the turnoff that would lead them to the exit that the nurse screamed.

They ran, Frost panting, out of breath, well behind the constable.

“There!” yelled Webster.

Ahead, a nurse, white-faced, stumbled toward them in blind panic. She looked up, mouth open, ready to scream again when she saw the two strange men hurtling toward her. Webster was the first to reach her. He waved his warrant card. “It’s all right, Nurse, we’re police officers. What happened?”

Too terrified to speak, she looked from Webster to Frost, her mouth working, then, still trembling she pointed back to the open door of a storeroom. At last she was able to speak. “A man in there. I went to get some clean sheets. He was horrible…”

“Let’s take a look,” said Webster, moving cautiously into the dark of the storeroom and groping for the light switch. The fluorescent tubes seemed to resent being woken up at such an unearthly hour, but finally, with a half-hearted crackle, they flashed and flooded out cold, blue light.

Inside the large room were racks of wooden shelving, all neatly stacked with folded blankets, bed linen, rubber sheets, and pillows. No sign of a lecherous intruder. Webster walked around inside. “Can’t see anyone,” he said to the nurse, who was hovering anxiously by the door.

Braver now that she had company, she joined him, her head turning from side to side, looking, wanting to prove that she hadn’t imagined it. “There was someone here,” she insisted.

Frost wandered in after them, his nose twitching. “There’s a hell of a stink in here…” He sniffed again, his eyes slowly scanning the racks, missing nothing. “I spy with my little eye… someone on the top rack… there!”

Webster followed his finger but couldn’t see anything. He grasped the wooden supports and shook the racks as if he were shaking apples from a tree. “Come on, you bugger. Down you get or I’ll drag you down.”

A heap of blankets on the top shelf heaved, then slithered to the floor. A dirty brown overcoat struggled out, then two red-rimmed eyes peered down at them. Webster turned his head away in disgust as the smell wafted down to hit him in the face.

“I wasn’t doing no harm,” whined the man.

“No harm?” cried Frost, “You’re stinking the place out.”

“What are you after drugs?” demanded Webster as the old man, a tramp in his mid-sixties, climbed stiffly down.

Short and stooped, he had tiny, red-rimmed, deepset eyes; his face was greasy and black and grey with stubble. His nose, large and route-mapped with tiny red veins, cried out for the urgent attention of a handkerchief. Matted hair flopped over the dirt-stiffened collar of the brown overcoat, which had been made many years ago for someone much bigger. His hands, the nails chipped and black, reached up to the top shelf for a bulging brown carrier bag which he clutched protectively to his chest.

Frost identified him from the very first sniff. “Blimey, Wally, hasn’t the hospital got enough germs of its own without you bringing yours in as well?”

“I’m an old man, Mr. Frost. Just looking for a place to rest my poor head for the night.” A dewdrop shimmered at the end of his nose. He gave a juicy sniff, which temporarily delayed its further descent.

“So you rested your poor head against the window of the nurses’ bedroom?”

“I didn’t know there was anyone in there… honest. I just happened to look in as she happened to look out our eyes sort of met.”

“Sounds like something out of True Romance,” said Frost. “So if you weren’t after an eyeful of naked nurse, what were you after? And what have you got in that bag?”

He reached out for it, but Wally shrank back, clutching the bag as tightly as he could. With difficulty, Frost managed to prise it from the tramp’s greasy grasp and looked inside. Scraps of clothes, bits of food and a three-quarters-full wine bottle. “I hope you haven’t stolen someone’s specimen,” said Frost, pulling out the cork and cautiously sniffing the contents. “It’s either me ths or the stuff they pickle human organs in. Is this what you’ve sneaked in to pinch?”

“On my dead mother’s grave, Mr. Frost,” the tramp whined, “I haven’t come here to pinch anything.” A mighty sniff reprieved another dewdrop that was in danger of obeying Newton’s law of gravity. “I’m just a poor old man looking for shelter.”

“Well, you’re not going to find it here,” said Frost, ‘so push off before I kick you out.”

“I’m an old man, Inspector. Send me out in the cold and I’ll die.”

“Promises, promises,” said Frost. “Why don’t you go and kip where you usually doss down?”

“I couldn’t go to my usual place. There was a policeman standing outside.”

“A policeman?” queried Frost. “Here… what usual place are you talking about?”

“The public convenience behind the Market Square. Me and Ben Cornish usually kip in one of the cubicles.”

“You won’t kip with him anymore,” Frost said, and, as gently as he could, he broke the news.

The tramp, genuinely upset, clutched the wooden rack for support. “We was good mates, me and him, Inspector. Ben wasn’t eating properly. He was on drugs used to inject himself with a needle. I told him it would kill him in the end, but he wouldn’t listen.” He reflected sadly for a while, then said, “Did he have any money on him? He said he was going to give me some for food. He promised me.”

“Sorry, Wally. He had no money. In fact he had sod all,” said Frost.

“Now beat it.”

The tramp’s face fell. “You’ve got to arrest me, Mr. Frost. Put me in a cell for the night. I looked at that nurse… saw all of her body. I lusted after her. I thought carnal thoughts. I deserve to be locked up.”

“You shouldn’t have run away, Wally. She said she fancied you. Now hop it, or I’ll tell my colleague to boot you out.”

‘ Please, Inspector. Look at the weather out there. You’ll be signing my death warrant if you send me out in that!” He pointed dramatically to the windows, and, on cue, the wind lashed and hammered its fists at the glass.

Against his better judgement Frost relented. “All right, Wally. Go to the station and tell Sergeant Wells I want you locked up for the night. Tell him I suspect that you’re an international diamond smuggler.”

The dirt around the tramp’s mouth cracked as he bur bled his gratitude. They watched him shuffle painfully down the corridor, his arms folded around the carrier bag which contained everything he had in the world. Then the dead face of Ben Cornish swum filmily in front of Frost, the eyes insisting, “You bloody fool… you’ve missed something.” As he later realized, Wally had shown him the answer, but he hadn’t seen it.

Webster was saying something.

“What was that again, son?”

Webster’s quartz digital was shoved under his nose. “Four twelve. We’d better get back to the station.”

Frost winced. The station meant the crime statistics and the overtime returns and all the other mountains of paper work that had to be attended to. He thought hard. Surely there was something else they could do instead of going back. Then he remembered Tommy Croll, the security guard from The Coconut Grove. Why not interview him? That should waste a good hour.

“I’m looking for a bloke called Croll,” he told the nurse as she pulled sheets down from the rack. “He came in tonight with concussion.”

“Then you’re in luck, Inspector,” she said. “He’s in my ward.” She frowned at her tiny wristwatch. “But it’s very late.”

“I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important, Nurse,” said

Frost. And what was more important than avoiding the crime statistics?

They followed her into a small ward where a ridiculously young student nurse was crouched over a desk with a shaded lamp, anxiously watching over the twin rows of sleeping, snuffling, and moaning patients, and hoping none of them died on her before the other nurse’s return.

“All quiet,” she reported with relief. No sooner had she said this than one of her patients called out and started bringing up blood.

“Another one for the morgue,” Frost whispered to Webster.

“Mr. CrolPs in the end bed,” called the nurse as she and the student dashed off to attend to the crisis.

Their shoes squeaked as they tiptoed over the highly polished floor to the far bed where a weasel-faced man, his forehead decorated with a strip of sticking plaster, was sleeping noisily. Frost undipped the charts from the end of the bed and studied them. “Hmm. Both ends seem to be in working order. Give him a shake, son.”

Webster’s gentle shake was about ten on the Richter scale. Croll snorted, choked in mid snore then jerked his eyes open, flicking them from side to side as he tried to identify the shapes looming over him in the dark. He groped for the bedside lamp, blinking in surprise as he switched it on.

“Hello, Tommy,” said Frost, his voice generously laced with insincere concern. “How are you?” He scraped a chair across to the bed and sat down.

“Mr. Frost!” Croll fumbled under the pillow for his wristwatch. “It’s quarter past four in the morning!”

“I know,” agreed Frost. “As soon as they told me you were in here, I dropped everything to come and see how you were. You’re a hero, Tommy, a bloody hero.”

“Hero?” echoed Croll uneasily. He never knew how to take the inspector.

“The way you fought like a tiger to try and stop Mr. Baskin’s money being nicked. How’s the poor head?”

Croll touched the sticking plaster and winced. “Terrible, Mr. Frost.

Stabbing pains like red-hot knives.”

Frost nodded sympathetically and stared down the ward. The two nurses had managed to calm the patient and were now straightening and smoothing the bedclothes. “Tell us what happened, Tommy.”

“Not a lot to tell, Mr. Frost. It was all over so quickly.”

“That’s what my girl friends used to say, Tommy.”

Croll forced a grin. Frost always made him feel uneasy. And he wished the inspector would tell him who the bearded bloke hovering in the background was. He had such a miserable face, he looked like an undertaker. “It was like this: Bert went to fetch the car, like always, and I locked myself in. After about five minutes I get the signal. Naturally I think it’s Bert.”

“Naturally,” agreed Frost.

“I unbolts and flings open the door so he can come in when, wham, I’m welted a real right crack round the ear hole.”

“Did you see who hit you?” the bearded bloke asked.

“No, I didn’t but I sodding-well felt him,” replied Croll, his hand again tenderly touching the sticking plaster. “It knocked me out cold. The next thing I know, I’m in here with this roaring great headache. I can stand pain, Mr. Frost, but this is just as though my skull was split open.”

“I saw a bloke with his skull split open once,” said Frost. “A bus had gone right over his head a double-decker, full of passengers even eight standing on the lower deck.

You could hear this scrunching and this squelching and then blood and brains squirted out all over the place. His eyes popped right out of their sockets. We found them in the gutter. I had a job eating my dinner that day.” He switched on a smile as he recalled the nostalgic moment, then abruptly switched it off. “What did you do with the money, Tom?”

Croll, still shuddering from the description of the bus victim, was knocked off balance by Frost’s sudden change of direction. “Money? What money, Mr. Frost?”

“The 5,132 quid you and Bert Harris pinched,” said the bearded one.

“May I drop dead if I’m not telling the truth, Mr. Frost Croll began, his hand on his heart, but Frost cut in before he tempted fate further.

“It had to be an inside job, Tommy. Whoever did it had to know the arrangements and the signal for tonight. Only three people knew: Mr. Baskin, Bert, and you…”

Croll’s head sunk back on the pillow, his eyes showing how hurt he was. “That’s a wicked thing to suggest, Mr. Frost. Look at me wounded in the line of duty. I nearly had my head smashed in.”

“But it wasn’t smashed in enough,” explained Frost patiently. “If your brains had been splattered all over Mr. Baskin’s floor and halfway up his wall, well, I might believe you, but as it is…”

And before Croll realized what he was up to, Frost’s hand had snaked out and ripped the sticking plaster from his forehead. Croll yelled and clapped a hand over his wound, but Frost had already seen it.

“A waste of bloody sticking plaster, Tommy. I’ve seen love bites from toothless women cause deeper wounds than that.”

“I’m injured internally, Mr. Frost,” said Croll, putting a finger to his forehead to see if he was bleeding. “It don’t show on the outside.”

More activity in the ward. The Asian doctor, who seemed to be the only doctor on duty in the entire hospital, flapped in and made for the patient who had called out. Frost now saw that the front of the student nurse’s uniform was one dark, spreading stain of blood. The other nurse was rigging up apparatus for a blood transfusion. She signalled to Frost that she wanted him to leave.

“We’ll chat again tomorrow, Tommy,” said the inspector, moving away from the bed.

Croll pushed himself up. “Mr. Frost, I didn’t do it. I swear.. .”

“I believe you,” beamed Frost. “Just tell me where you’ve hidden the money and I’ll believe you even more.”

When they reached the main corridor they had to press back against the wall so that an orderly, pushing a patient in a stretcher, could pass by. The patient, head swollen by a turban of bandages which were almost as white as his bloodless face, looked a hundred years old.

It was the hit-and-run victim.

At four forty-five in the morning Denton Police Station was a dreary mausoleum, and the flowers Mullett suggested would have made it look more funereal than ever. It echoed with cold emptiness. Only two men were on duty, Police Sergeant Wells and Police Constable Ridley, the controller. Wells, slumped at the front desk, stared at the ticking time bomb the computer had presented him with. The licence plate found at the scene of the hit-and-run had been trotted through the massive memory banks of the master computer system at Swansea. The print-out read:

Registration Mark: ULU 63A

Taxation Class: Private! Light Goods

Make/ Model Jaguar 3.4

Colour: Blue

Registered Keeper: Roger Charles Miller Address: 43 Halley House, Demon.

What the computer didn’t say was that Roger Miller was trouble. Big trouble. He was the son of Sir Charles Miller, member of Parliament for the Denton constituency. And Sir Charles was even bigger trouble. He had money and he had influence, owning businesses as diverse as security organisations, newspapers, and commercial radio stations. He constantly criticised the police in his newspapers, and he was a permanent thorn in the side of the Chief Constable. And it was his son, Roger, a twenty-year old spoiled brat, who had brought seventy-eight-year-old Albert Hickman to the brink of death.

Wells twisted his neck to see what luck Ridley was having in contacting Detective Inspector Frost. “Control to Mr. Frost, come in please.” Over and over, Ridley repeated the message, flicking the receive switch and getting only a mush of static in response. “Still no answer, Sarge.”

“Damn!” said Wells, reaching for the phone. He dialled the first two digits of Mullett’s home number, then changed his mind and banged the receiver down. “Do you think I should phone Mullett?”

“That’s for you to decide, Sarge,” was Ridley’s unhelpful reply.

“You’re in charge.”

“I’m not bloody in charge. Frost is in charge… or he should be.

He’s the senior officer.” Again his hand reached out for the phone. Again he hesitated. Thanks to Frost, Wells was back in his familiar no-win situation. If he phoned Mullett he’d be castigated for disturbing him and for not using his initiative. And if he didn’t phone, Mullett would say, “Where’s your common sense, Sergeant? If someone as important as Sir Charles Miller is involved surely it doesn’t need a modicum of common sense to realize that I would want to know about it.” In either event, it would give the Superintendent a tailor-made excuse for turning down the sergeant’s latest promotion application.

Wells felt like breaking down and weeping at the injustice of it all when suddenly he was dragged away from his self-pity by a most unpleasant smell, which elbowed its way across the lobby. The sergeant’s head swivelled slowly until he located the source.

“Clear off,” he said, happy to have someone to snarl at. “Get out of here before I turn the hose pipe on you.”

A brown over coated figure clutching a carrier bag tottered toward him.

“I’ve come to be arrested,” said Wally Peters. “Mr. Frost sent me.”

As Wells searched for a suitable expletive, Ridley called out excitedly from Control. “There’s Mr. Frost, Sarge.” Wells spun around in time to see Frost and Webster pushing through the main doors.

“I’m here, Mr. Frost,” the tramp announced proudly.

“Yes,” agreed Frost, ‘we smelled you from the top of Bath Hill. But I must dash,” and he went charging through the other door and up the corridor.

“Hold it a minute, Inspector,” yelled Wells, chasing after him.

The light was on in Frost’s office. Relieved, Wells hurried forward and opened the door, but inside he saw only Webster, frowning at the car licence plate lying across Frost’s desk.

“What’s this, Sergeant?” he asked, picking it up.

Wells waved it aside. “None of your business. Where’s the inspector?

We’ve got a bloody crisis on our hands.”

Webster put down the licence plate and sat at his own desk. “He said something about going scavenging.”

“Scavenging?” Wells sank down in Frost’s chair. “What’s he playing at? The man’s supposed to be an inspector; why doesn’t he start acting like one?”

“You sound just like our beloved Divisional Commander,” said Frost, staggering back into the office bearing a tray piled high with goodies: sausage rolls, sandwiches, crisps, pork scratchings, and salted peanuts. A clinking noise came from his bulging mac pockets. “It’s party time, folks,” he announced, pushing papers and the licence plate to one side to clear a space on his desk for the tray.

From pockets that seemed far too small to contain them came can after can of lager, a seemingly endless supply of miniature spirit bottles, and even a box of expensive cigars. “You shall go to the ball, Sergeant,” he said.

Wells’s eyes widened. “Where did you get these?”

“From the canteen the party.” He still hadn’t finished off-loading, pulling more bottles from his inside jacket pockets. Proudly, he surveyed his haul. “They didn’t invite us to their stinking party, so we won’t invite them to ours.”

In the top drawer of his filing cabinet he found three chipped enamel mugs and slopped in three generous helpings of seven-year-old malt whisky. One mug went to the sergeant, the other to Webster. “Help yourself to tonic and salted peanuts. Sorry we haven’t got any ice.”

Webster glared at his mug and pushed it away. “Are you trying to be funny?”

Frost could only look puzzled. Then the light dawned. “Sorry, I forgot. You’ve signed the pledge, haven’t you, son? The beard that touches liquor will never touch mine.”

This had the effect of sending Wells into a fit of uncontrollable giggling, a fit that Webster’s scowl only seemed to amplify.

Frost shared the contents of Webster’s mug between the sergeant and himself. He pushed the tray toward the constable. “Well, at least have a sandwich or some peanuts.” Webster flicked a hand in curt refusal.

“If you’re not going to join the party, go and look after the lobby,” Wells ordered. When Webster stamped out, the sergeant slipped into his chair and washed down some cheese and onion crisps with a long swig from his mug. He felt warm and happy. It wasn’t such a bad shift after all. He was trying to remember why he had been feeling so miserable before Frost came in.

Frost buzzed Control on the internal phone. “Mr. Ridley? If you wish to attend a booze-up, report immediately to Mr. Frost’s office.” He hung up and lit one of the cigars. “This is great, isn’t it, Bill? All we want now to make it complete are some pickled onions and a naked woman.”

“I wouldn’t object if there were no pickled onions,” giggled Wells, unbuttoning the collar of his tunic. Frost’s office seemed very warm. He felt the radiator, but it was stone cold. As he was trying to puzzle this out he remembered what he had wanted to talk to the inspector about.

“Jack, we’re in a crisis situation. Do you know anything about this hit-and-run?”

“Yes,” said Frost, puffing out smoke rings almost as large as car tyres. “We saw the poor sod spewing blood at the hospital.”

“Is he still alive?”

Frost removed the cigar and shot a palmfril of salted peanuts into his mouth. “Just about. I don’t think they’ll be cooking him any breakfast, though.”

“Damn,” said Wells, his worst fears realized. He emptied his mug in a single gulp. “We’ve had the computer feed-back on the licence plate. The car belongs to Roger Miller.”

Frost stopped in mid sip He put the mug down slowly. “Sir Charles Miller’s son?”

“Yes,” agreed Wells dolefully, regarding the interior of his empty mug. “It’s tricky, Jack, flaming tricky. If we don’t play this one right we could end up in the soft and squishy.” It took him several attempts to say ‘soft and squishy.”

“Roger Miller,” repeated Frost, his eyes gleaming. “Well, if we can chuck that little sod in the nick, the night won’t be entirely wasted.”

Tapping at the door, Ridley looked in. “You said something about a drink, Mr. Frost?”

“More than a drink Frost told him, pouring out a quadruple shot of whisky’ – a party, a celebration. We’re going to arrest an MP’s son tonight. Help yourself to nosh.”

Ridley thanked him and took his drink and a ham sandwich back to the control room.

“Plenty more when you’ve finished that,” called Frost, biting into a sausage roll and coating both himself and the desk in a snowstorm of flaky pastry crumbs. The phone on his desk rang. “Shut up,” he ordered. “We’re having a party.” It rang on and on until he shook it free of food crumbs and picked it up. “Frost… OK, put them through.” He listened. “Thanks for telling me. Good night.” He fumbled the phone back on the rest. “That was the hospital, Bill. The hit-and-run victim just died.”

Wells stood up. “You’d better phone Mullett, Jack. This could be dynamite.”

Frost waved him back into the chair, then refilled the sergeant’s mug. “Sod Mullettj Bill. I want to handle this my way.” He went to the door and yelled for Webster to come in. “Put your coat on, son, we’re going walkies. We’ve got to arrest a piece of puke called Miller.”

R. D. Wingfield

A Touch of Frost

“Miller?” said Webster, as he unhooked his coat from the rack. “You don’t mean Roger Miller?”

“What do you know about Roger Miller?” asked Wells.

“I saw the name on a car-theft report on Collier’s desk. When he went off he left a lot of his work unfinished, as I expect you know, Sergeant.”

Wells didn’t know. He hadn’t checked. “I’ve only got one pair of hands. I can’t do every bloody thing.”

Frost put his mug down very carefully and gave Webster his full attention. “Let me get this straight. Are you trying to tell me that there’s an unprocessed car-theft report on Collier’s desk, that Roger bloody Miller phoned us earlier this evening reporting his Jag had been nicked?”

Webster nodded.

“It’s not my fault, Jack,” protested Wells, “I didn’t have time to look on his desk. Mr. Allen had no right to take Collier away.”

“Never mind whose fault it was,” said Frost. “What time did Miller phone in?”

Webster went out, returning with the report in his hand. “Eleven twenty-four,” he said.

Frost sighed with relief. The old boy was run over at 10:58. “He runs someone down, then he reports his car was stolen. Did he really think we’d fall for that?”

“Do you mind telling me what this is all about?” requested Webster.

Frost stood up and shrugged on his mac. “It was Roger

Miller’s car that knocked that old boy down.”

“I see,” said Webster.

Slinging the scarf round his neck, Frost yelled for Ridley to contact PC Shelby on the radio.

“Dave Shelby has just come in,” Ridley shouted back. “He’s in the locker room.”

Frost dashed down the corridor and into the locker room. Shelby, busy ramming something into his locker, whirled around with a start. “You frightened the life out of me, Mr. Frost,” he said, quickly slamming his locker door and turning the key.

Hello, thought Frost, what are you up to now, my lad? When he had time, he’d check. “Got a job for you, Shelby. See me in my office now.”

Back in the office, Wells, fighting hard against the effects of the three brimming mugfuls of Scotch, was insisting that Mullett would have to be told about the MP’s son. “Let me arrest him first, then tell him,” replied Frost.

“Mr. Mullett won’t like that,” said Wells.

“I don’t really believe I was put on this earth just to make Mr. Mullett happy,” replied Frost. Shelby walked in, and his eyes lit up when he saw the drinks and the food.

“Grab a sandwich and get this inside you,” said the inspector, draining his mug and filling it up for the constable. “Don’t sip it, swig it you’re going straight out again. The hit-and-run victim is dead. Do you know if any of the witnesses could identify the driver?”

Shelby bit into a sandwich. “No, sir. All they saw was the car roaring off.”

“We’ve checked the registration,” Frost told him. “The motor belongs to Roger Miller, the MP’s son, and he’s trying to kid us his motor was stolen and he wasn’t driving.” He pushed the car-theft report into

Shelby’s hand. “I want all these details checked, double-checked and then checked again, right? We’re dealing with a slippery sod, and I want to be one jump ahead of him.”

“Right, sir,” confirmed Shelby, raising his mug in salute.

“I want this bastard nailed, right?”

“You’re not being objective, Jack,” said Wells, wondering why his headache was starting up again. “He might be innocent.”

“Don’t complicate matters, Bill. I haven’t got time to be objective. Hickman is dead, and Miller is as guilty as hell.” He massaged some life into the scar on his face. “The problem is going to be proving it.”

He twisted the scarf around his neck and was halfway across the lobby before he remembered to nip back into his office and stuff most of the remaining miniature spirit bottles into his mac pockets.

“There are a lot of thieving bastards in this station,” he explained. Then he took one of the miniatures and handed it to the sergeant. “Send this down to Wally Peters with my compliments. Tell him to have a good-bye drink to Ben Cornish.”

Wells exploded. “We don’t give booze to prisoners, Jack. Besides, you know him. One drink and he’ll piddle nonstop all over the cell floor.”

“Your trouble,” said Frost reprovingly, ‘is that you expect everyone to be too bloody perfect.”

Tuesday night shift (7)

Roger Miller lived in Halley House, a newly built, multi-storeyed block of expensive service flats. Webster parked the Cortina alongside a public call box on the opposite side of the road and looked out at the towering hulk of Halley House, which loomed ever upward to the night sky. At that hour of the morning the only lights showing came from the entrance hall on the ground floor. “What’s your plan of campaign?” he asked the inspector.

Frost grunted and shifted in his seat. He didn’t use plans of campaign. His method of working was to close his eyes, lower his head, and charge. “Haven’t given it a thought, son,” he admitted. “We go in, chat him up, and see what happens.”

“If I were in charge,” said Webster pointedly, indicating that his way was the right way, “I wouldn’t mention the hit-and-run. I’d let him think we were here about his allegedly stolen car.”

“What’s that supposed to achieve?”

“It could lull him into a sense of false security. When he’s off his guard, we wham into him about the hit-and-run.”

“Then he cracks up, breaks down and confesses, like they did in those Perry Mason films?” Frost pursed his lips doubtfully. “I’m afraid not, son. He’ll know what we’ve called for the minute we poke our sticky fingers in his bell push.”

“How will he know?” demanded Webster.

“Because you don’t get two CID men calling for a chat at this hour of the morning just because someone’s taken your motor for a walk.” He drummed a little tune on the dashboard with his fingers. “But I can’t think of anything better, so we’ll try it your way. You conduct the interview, I’ll just chip in with the odd remarks as and when the muse grabs me by the privates.”

“If I’m going to question him, I want to know what sort of person he is,” said Webster, a firm believer in groundwork.

“His father is stinking rich, a Member of Parliament, and a pompous slimy bastard. Master Roger is exactly the sort of son a pompous slimy bastard deserves. He’s arrogant, he’s nasty, and he gets away with murder because of his old man. And if that didn’t make you hate him enough, he also seems to be able to pull the most fantastic birds with throbbing tits and nipples sticking out like sore thumbs.”

“Sounds a right little charmer,” grunted Webster, ‘but I reckon I can handle him.”

Frost unhitched his seat belt and opened the door. “I’m sure you can, my son. But if you feel like giving him a welt, warn me so I can look the other way and swear blind I never saw anything. Come on, let’s get over there.”

The wind tried to push them back as they raced, head down, across the road. Some sort of down draught caused by the design of the twenty-three-storey block created a whirlwind effect at the base, and they had to fight against it.

Three marble steps led up to bronze-and-glass doors which were security-locked and could only be opened with a key, or if one of the tenants pressed a release button from his apartment. Frost shook them until they rattled, but they refused to open. Through the plate glass they could see the red-carpeted lobby, the reception desk, and the lift. Beside the main doors was a bank of bell pushes marked with the flat numbers. Miller’s number was 43. Frost gave the appropriate button a jab. Nothing happened. He tried again, then stepped back to stare up at the rows of windows. No lights were showing.

“Everyone’s asleep,” muttered Webster.

“Not everyone, son,” said Frost, “When you’ve knocked down and killed some poor old sod, you don’t go to sleep. You stay awake and plan the lies you’re going to tell the fuzz when they call.” He wedged his thumb in the bell push and leaned his weight on it for a good minute. “That should wake the bugger up.”

It didn’t wake the bugger up. No response. “He’s either not in or he’s determined not to answer,” said Frost.

“Well, if he won’t answer the door, there’s not much more we can do,” said Webster.

Frost withdrew his thumb and looked at all the bell pushes. At the bottom was a button marked Caretaker. He thought for a moment, then smiled. “You come with your Uncle Jack and I’ll show you a way of getting inside someone’s place that they never taught you at police college.”

Wondering what the old fool was up to now, Webster followed him back across the road to the phone box. Frost draped his handkerchief over the receiver and dialled the number of Demon Police Station.

“Denton Police,” answered a tired-sounding Sergeant Wells.

“I’m phoning from outside those new flats at Halley House,” said Frost in a low voice. “There’s a man on the balcony of the fourth floor trying to break into one of the apartments.”

“Can I have your name please, sir?” asked Wells as Frost whipped away the handkerchief and hung up.

“Back to the car, son, quick.”

In the car, Frost’s hand hovered expectantly over the handset, snatching it up as Control called through.

“Control to Mr. Frost, come in, please.”

“Frost.”

“Ridley here, sir. We’ve had a report of someone trying to break into the flats at Halley House. You’re near there, aren’t you?”

“Right outside,” answered Frost. “We’ll attend to it right away.”

The caretaker, an obsequious Uriah Heep in a thick grey dressing gown, kept yawning and jingling his bunch of keys like the jailer at the Bastille. “This is most disturbing,” he said. “The tenants won’t like it one bit. But how could anyone climb up to the balconies from the outside?”

“These cat burglars can get up anywhere,” said Frost, wishing the man would just give him the keys and go. “It was the third balcony along the fourth floor.”

“I’ll come up with you,” said the caretaker. “I don’t want any of my tenants to be disturbed. It’ll give the place a bad name.”

But Frost was quick to decline his kind offer. “He could be armed. We don’t want to expose you to any danger.” The keys were zipped into his hand. “Thank you, sir. If you hear any gunfire, dial