A Touch Of Frost (17 page)

The door was kicked open and Webster entered with the two cups of tea, his expression making it quite clear how much he relished being asked to perform these menial tasks.

“Thanks, son,” muttered Frost, who had learned that it was best to ignore the constable’s repertoire of frowns, scowls, and grimaces. He disturbed the mud of sugar with his ballpoint pen and took a sip. “Tastes like cat’s pee.” He swivelled in his chair. “Something important we had to do this morning. For the life of me I can’t remember what it was.”

“The dead man in the toilets. You had to break the news.”

“That was it!” exclaimed Frost.

“Mr. Dawson phoned,” Webster told him.

“Dawson?” Frost screwed up his face. “Who’s he?”

“The father of the missing schoolgirl. He wanted to know if there was any news. I told him we’d circulated her description.”

Frost nodded. “Ah yes. Young, clean-cut, clean-shaven Karen. If she doesn’t turn up soon, I’ll have to try and sneak a chat with the mother without the father being present. There are one or two things about Karen that don’t quite add up.” His attention was caught by a note in his own writing which he had circled in red as important. He studied it with a puzzled frown. “ ‘PM 10.00’? We’re not expecting Mrs. Thatcher are we?”

“The postmortem,” explained Webster wearily.

Frost tipped the remainder of his tea into the waste bin and reached for his mac. “Life is one round of constant pleasure. Come on, son, we mustn’t be late.”

There was a brisk knock at the door. “Not today, thank you,” called Frost.

The door opened and Mullett walked in. His expression didn’t indicate that his life was one round of constant pleasure. Frost quickly pulled the crime statistics from his in-tray and put them in the centre of his desk as if he were working on them. “Sorry, Super. Didn’t know it was you.”

Mullett gazed stiffly around the room. What a shambles the place was. Piles of paper everywhere, even on the window ledge, where the piles were held down by unwashed teacups. There were even salted peanuts and bits of potato crisp dotted around the floor. “This office is a mess, Inspector. An utter and disgusting mess!”

“We were just about to tidy it up as you knocked, sir,” lied Frost cheerfully. “Shift the muck off that chair, son, so the Super can sit down.”

Webster removed the dog-eared stack of files, looked for somewhere to put them, then decided his own desk top was the only free space. He offered the chair to the Superintendent who declined it with a disdainful sniff. He wasn’t going to risk his brand-new uniform on that. His eye caught sight of the overtime returns in Frost’s in-tray. “Some talk of the men not getting their overtime payments for last month, Frost.”

“Yes,” agreed Frost. “It’s that bloody computer. It’s always going wrong.” He stared Mullett out, then remembered the busy morning he had planned. “Have you just come in to give me a bollocking, sir, or is it something important? I’ve got a hell of a lot to do. They’re filleting Ben Cornish down at the morgue in half an hour.”

“I’ve something more important for you than that,” snapped Mullett. “Roger Miller . . . the hit-and-run. I’m putting you in charge of the investigation.”

“Right, Super,” said Frost. “I’ll have the little bastard put away for you, don’t you worry.”

Mullett gritted his teeth and wished he hadn’t let Allen talk him into this. “You don’t understand, Frost,” he said, and told him just what was expected of him.

Sergeant Johnson, the duty station sergeant for the day shift, had been down to the cells to check on the occupants. He was irritated to find that Frost had let Wally Peters stay the night, with the inevitable result. The cell was being hosed down now.

“Mr. Frost!” he yelled sternly as Webster and the inspector cut across the lobby on their way to the car park.

“Yes, Johnny?” called Frost from the door.

“We’ve got a friend of yours downstairs. He’s piddling all over the floor and stinking the place out.”

Frost’s face creased in mock perplexity. “What is Mr. Mullett doing down there?” he asked.

He hovered in the hall, by the letter box, waiting, and as soon as the boy pushed the newspaper through he grabbed it, opening it up to the headlines. The big story was COACH CRASH HORROR—FIVE KILLED! Nothing about the attack. He turned from page to page, his eyes racing over the various headlines. Nothing. Back to the front page. And there he found it. Four blurred lines of stop-press squeezed as an afterthought down in the bottom right-hand corner.
Woman attacked in Denton Woods. A woman was assaulted and raped late last night in Denton Woods. Police are looking for a man believed to have carried out similar assaults in the area over the past few months.

Four lines! He felt like crying. It was so unfair. Part of his pleasure was reading about it afterward. Sometimes the papers included an interview with the girl in which she described her terror at what had happened. He loved reading about it. It made him feel excited all over again.

Four lines. Four miserable little lines. And the paper was lying this time. It said he had raped her. He hadn’t. He couldn’t. He had picked her because he thought she was a young, untouched schoolgirl. But she was a tart. A dirty bitch with painted breasts who sold herself to men and was probably crawling with disease. She’d even tried to pick him up two nights before. The cow, the slag. Wearing those clothes to lure him on.

He screwed up the paper and hurled it to the floor, then went into the bedroom and took the well-thumbed book from its hiding place. Time was running out. He would try again tonight. For a young one. He opened the book and started to read.

They had arranged the unpleasant jobs in this order: first, the call on Mrs. Cornish to break the news about her son, Ben; second, the postmortem. But for Frost, arrangements were made be broken. There was another call he now wanted to make first. “A quick diversion, son,” he said, pulling the burglary report from his pocket and filling Webster in on Lil Carey and her sovereigns. “Could be the break we’re looking for with these petty robberies. Shouldn’t take us more than a couple of minutes.”

Webster looked at his wristwatch. There was no way they were going to make the postmortem in time. They were late already, and here was Frost making yet another detour.

“Pull up there, son. By the lamppost.”

Sunford Street was a row of dreary-looking terraced houses. Out of the car, across the pavement, and they were in the porch of number 26, a house even drearier-looking than its neighbours. Frost hammered away at the knocker. They heard low, shuffling footsteps from within, then a harsh female voice demanding to know who they were.

“Jack the Ripper and Dr. Crippen,” called Frost through the letter box. “Come on, open up. You know bloody well who we are. You’ve been giving us the eyeball through the curtains ever since we pulled up.”

The clanking of chains being unhooked, keys turned and bolts drawn, then the door creaked open. Facing them was a small, wiry old dear wearing a moth-eaten fur coat over a too-long nightdress, the bottom of which was black with dirt where it constantly dragged over the floor. Her ensemble was topped by an ill-fitting, ill-suited brown nylon wig in a Shirley Temple bubble style; it wobbled and threatened to fall off each time she moved her head. Her face was knee-deep in make-up, the cheeks rouged like a clown’s. She was at least seventy years old and possibly much nearer eighty.

“Tell your mummy the cops are here,” said Frost.

“Never mind the jokes,” she retorted. “Where was you while I was being robbed?”

“Paddling in pee down a toilet,” answered Frost. “Can we come in, Lil?”

She took them into the front downstairs room, a cold, damp little box packed tight with heavily carved, gloomy furniture treacled with dark-oak varnish. In the centre of the room a knock-kneed table sagged under the weight of bundles of ancient newspapers tied with string. A piano, complete with candle holders, cringed sulkily in a corner; it, too, carried more than its fair share of bundled newspapers. The one window was hidden by thick, dusty, velvet curtains, tightly drawn so that passers-by couldn’t get a glimpse of the treasures within.

Frost thumbed through one of the yellowing newspapers. “Looks as if Mr. Atlee’s going to win the election,” he said. He pushed it away. “Right, Lil, so what happened?”

“You know what happened, Inspector,” she said, the wig wobbling furiously. “I put it all down in that form. It’s all rotten forms these days. Soon you’ll have to fill up a form to go to the lavatory.”

“I fill up a bucket myself,” murmured Frost. “My hairy colleague can’t read, Lil, so tell him what happened.”

She gave Webster a searching look and decided he just might be worthy of her confidence. “You listen, young man, because I’m only saying this once.”

The day before, she had travelled to Felby, a town some fifteen miles away, to visit her sick sister. She left the house at three, catching the 3.32 train from Denton Station. A few minutes before leaving she had checked that the sovereigns were safe. She was indoors again by ten o’clock that night but, tired out after the journey, went straight to bed.

“If I’d known my life’s savings had been stolen, I wouldn’t have slept a wink,” she said. “First thing after breakfast I went to the hiding place and I nearly had a seizure on the spot. The tin was empty—all the money I had scraped and saved for, my little nest egg, my burial money—all gone. They should bring back hanging.”

Poor old girl, thought Webster. “Where did you keep the tin?”

“In the piano.” She waddled to the corner, removed two piles of newspapers and opened the piano top, then, standing on tiptoe, plunged her hand into the depths. With a twanging of strings, she pulled out a biscuit tin decorated with pictures of King George V and Queen Mary. This she opened, holding it out by the lid to demonstrate its complete emptiness.

“It’s empty, all right,” agreed Frost. “I’ve never seen a tin more empty. Who else knew where you kept it hidden?”

“No-one!” she said.

“The thief knew,” said Frost.

“Was anything else taken?” asked Webster.

She wobbled the wig from side to side. “No, thank God. I’ve checked everywhere. Just my seventy-nine golden sovereigns.”

“What sort of sovereigns, Lil?” asked Frost.

“They were all Queen Victoria,” she answered. “My old mother, God rest her soul, left them to me on her deathbed.”

“Would you know them if you saw them again?”

“I know every mark, every scratch on them. I’d know them as if they were my own children—and I miss them as much as if they were.” She dabbed her eyes and trumpeted loudly into a large handkerchief which looked as if it, too, dated from Queen Victoria’s time—and hadn’t been washed since. The wig slipped down over one eye.

“And the tin was put back again in the piano?”

She nodded.

Frost prodded his scar. The same old pattern, a quick in-and-out job, but this time the thief knew exactly what he was after and where to find it. So how did he get in? The window, perhaps?

He squeezed past the table and pulled back the curtain, then tried to open the sash window. It wouldn’t budge. Early in its life it had been thickly painted with cream paint which had seeped over the catch to seal it tight. So the thief didn’t get in that way. More than likely he came in through the front door.

The front door almost wilted under the weight of the hardware attached to it—bolts, bars, and various heavy-linked security chains. But none of these could be applied from the outside, and when Lil went to visit her sister, all that had secured the door was the door lock. It looked solid enough, but, as in many of these old houses, the pattern was such that the lock could easily be snapped back with a flexible piece of plastic.

“Odds are he got in through this door,” he told Webster, “but you’d better take a look around the rest of the house in case there’s any sign of forced entry.” He gave the old dear a grin. “You’d better go with him, Lil, in case he pinches anything. You know what sticky fingers we cops have.”

Webster didn’t think it at all funny, especially as Lil took the remark seriously and followed him suspiciously through every room of the house.

Left on his own, Frost quickly began opening drawers and peering inside. Then he lifted the bundles of newspaper off the piano lid so he could get to the keyboard. Lying on the yellowed keys were various bank-deposit books, post-office savings accounts, and building-society savings books. He quickly thumbed through them to see how much money the poor old dear had. That done, he shuffled through a wad of family-allowance books kept together by a thick rubber band. These were at the other end of the keyboard. He was prevented from studying these in detail as he heard footsteps descending the stairs. Quickly, he replaced everything where he found it, moved to the window, and put on his most innocent expression.

Webster had found no signs of forced entry, but he was shocked at the poverty-stricken conditions in which the old lady lived. The bedroom was a horror with no heating, bare boards on the floor, and old coats on the bed instead of blankets.

They knocked on a few doors, but none of the neighbours would admit to seeing anyone suspicious lurking about the house the previous day. There was little else they could do, apart from Lil’s suggestion that they should inform Interpol.

The biscuit tin was dropped into a plastic bag to be tested back at the station for alien prints, and then it was time to go. She saw them out, plucking at Frost’s arm as he was about to leave. “Please get my money back for me, Mr. Frost.”

Frost shrugged. “If we can, Lil, but we’ve got a lousy track record. We haven’t recovered a penny of anyone’s money up to now.”

With her lower lip quivering she looked pathetically at Frost, as if he had told her that her entire family had been wiped out in an air crash.

“It was my burial money,” she said, blinking hard to hold back the mascara-streaking tears.

Webster felt choked-up as he slid into the driving seat. “Poor cow,” he said. “I feel so sorry for her . . . and you should see the rest of the house. She probably hasn’t got two half-pennies to rub together.”