A Touch Of Frost (29 page)

Mullett felt the cold of approaching bad news and shivered. “Yes, Frost?”

“PC Shelby, sir. They’ve found him in a ditch about three miles from here, just off the new Lexington Road.”

“Is he all right?” whispered Mullett. A silly question because he already knew the answer. The expression on Frost’s face simply screamed it out.

Frost looked down at the blood on the lane. “No, sir. He’s dead.”

“That must be him,” said Webster as the car headlights picked out the figure of a man flagging him down. The man in a thick overcoat and muddy boots was a farm labourer. He had found the body.

“He’s down here,” said the man, his boots clomping as he took them down a winding lane that snaked back to the farm where he worked. They followed in silence. Tall boundary hedges on each side made the lane very dark. A little way down, and they could hear the gurgle of water. It reminded Frost of the previous night when he’d followed Dave Shelby down those steps to the body of Ben Cornish. The clomping of boots stopped. The man pointed to where the lane started to make a lazy curve and where a drainage ditch, some two feet deep, hugged the side of a hedge-bordered field. From behind the hedge the plaintive lowing of cattle quivered gently in the darkness.

“He’s in there,” said the farm labourer. “In the ditch.” He wasn’t going any farther. He had seen it once. He didn’t want to see it again.

The two detectives moved forward. A narrow verge, overgrown with lank grass, separated the ditch from the lane. Flattened grass lurched over and combed the surface of muddied water which overflowed slightly at that point because of some obstruction. Webster fumbled for his torch and clicked the button.

A waxen hand, bobbing gently up and down, poked through green slime. The body was sprawled facedown in the stagnant murk. The water made the police uniform look jet black.

“I tried to pull him out,” called the labourer from the other side of the lane. “I thought he might still be alive. But when I saw his face . . .”

Frost knelt on the wet grass and plunged his hand through the slime to grab Shelby’s hair so he could lift the head. As it broke through the surface, Webster stifled a cry and Frost felt his stomach writhe in protest.

The head, dripping water and blood, had only half a face. The left-hand side was bloodied pulp with part of the cheek and lower lip flapping down, showing teeth and bone. There was no left eye, only a spongy red socket, and the forehead was pocked with embedded lead shot. Frost couldn’t look any more. He released his grip, letting the head fall back in the ditch with a hollow plop. He dried his hand by wiping it on his mac.

Webster was the first to speak. “Shall we get him out?”

“No,” said Frost, staring into the distance. “Not until the police surgeon has seen him. You know what a fussy little bastard he is.” What is this, he thought, a rerun? I said all this last night.

After taking a few details, they let the farm labourer get off home. Then a scene-of-crime officer arrived with his expensive Japanese camera and his ultra fast colour film and took flash photographs of the ditch, the grass, and the bobbing white hand. Nothing else to photograph until the arrival of the police surgeon.

“There he is,” called Webster, watching a car gingerly nose its way up the lane, pulling up a few feet away from the two detectives. Slomon climbed out, nodded briefly to Frost, then peered into the ditch. “Have I got to get down there?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Frost, “you bloody well have.” Just let Slomon try to skimp this examination.

The doctor returned to the car for his Wellingtons. He pulled them on, removed his coat, and rolled up his shirt sleeves. Then, very carefully, he stepped down into the ditch. “I’d like some light, please.”

Three torch beams homed in on him as he busied himself with his instruments and thermometers. In spite of the difficult working conditions, Slomon took his time, determined not to repeat the fiasco of the previous night. He explored the body very carefully before clambering out.

“At a guess, he’s been dead between four to six hours,” he reported, drying his hands on a towel from his car. “Impossible to be precise in these conditions, but the postmortem will pin it down.” He rolled down his sleeves and shrugged on his jacket. “Again, the postmortem will confirm, but I’m pretty certain he was dead before he was dumped in the ditch. He wouldn’t have survived long with those injuries, anyway.”

The poor bastard wouldn’t have wanted to live with his face looking like that, thought Frost. “Can we move him, Doc?”

“I don’t see why not. The pathologist won’t be able to do much with the body as it is.” Slomon went back to his car promising his written report within the hour.

The scene-of-crime officer seemed too busy with his camera to help, so Webster and Frost pulled off their shoes and socks, rolled up their trouser legs, and stepped into the ditch. The water was as cold as death as it lapped around their bare legs, and their feet sunk into squelchy black mud. With Frost taking the shoulders and Webster the legs, they heaved. Shelby was heavy and stubborn. He clung to the bottom. They gritted their teeth and pulled. Suddenly, the body tore free from the grip of the thick mud and emerged through the slime, the head with its hanging flaps of flesh flopping down, streaming dirty stinking water. The proceedings were punctuated by blinding blue flashes ripping into the darkness as the scene-of-crime officer took photograph after photograph.

They laid Dave Shelby on the grass verge, well away from the flattened grass that Forensic would want to crawl over and examine. The scene-of-crime officer brought a plastic sheet from the boot of his car and they draped it over the body.

From the dark distance they heard the plaint of an ambulance siren, then saw its flashing blue light bobbing over the top of the hedges as it picked its way through the winding lane. But before it reached them, other car headlights flared. The Rover and the Ford. Mullett, Allen, and Ingram approached, their faces set.

Frost stepped back from the covered body. Mullett bent over and lifted a corner of the plastic sheet, then, his face screwed up as if in pain, turned his head. “Such a waste. A fine young officer. Such a wicked waste.”

He moved away, his place taken by Allen, who knelt by the body, a torch in hand, peering at the horror of the shattered face as if examining a suspect piece of steak from the butchers. At last he replaced the sheet and straightened up.

Mullett was finding it difficult to control his emotions. “Whoever did this,” he said, “I want him. I don’t care how many men it takes, I want him.” To Frost he said, “I’m putting Mr. Allen in charge. You will take over his cases.”

“Right,” acknowledged Frost, who hadn’t really expected Mullett to allow him to handle an investigation of this importance.

Mullett cleared his throat and shuffled his feet. He spoke to Frost but didn’t look at him. “Someone’s got to tell Shelby’s wife,” he said.

His wife! Young Mrs. Shelby, not much more than a teenager, with two kiddies, one three, the other eighteen months, and a third on the way.

“I thought you’d be doing that, sir,” said Frost.

Mullett stared straight ahead and slapped his palm with his leather driving glove. “I want the news broken gently,” he said. “If she sees the Divisional Commander turning up on her doorstep . . . I understand she’s pregnant . . . the shock . . . It might be better if you . . .” He let the rest of the sentence hang.

“You’re ordering me to do it, then?” asked Frost, determined not to volunteer.

“Er, yes,” muttered Mullett, wishing the inspector wouldn’t drive him into a corner like this. “It would be best.”

For you, you bastard, but not for me, thought Frost bitterly. “All right, Super. If you say so.”

Mullett, relieved to have wriggled out of the unpleasantness, put on his sincere expression. “And tell Mrs. Shelby that if there is anything at all I can do to help in her moment of sorrow, she has only to ask. Her husband was one of my finest officers.” As Frost moved off, he called after him, “And tell her we’re going to get the swine who did it.”

“Yes, that should cheer her up no end,” muttered Frost as he called Webster over and opened the door of the Cortina.

Lying back wearily in the passenger seat, he shook the last cigarette from the packet. “This is one bloody job I hate, son. I’ve done it enough times, so I ought to know.” A stream of smoke hit the windscreen and spread out. “Back to the station, first. There’s something I’ve got to do.” He had remembered the candid photographs in Shelby’s locker. He didn’t want some well-meaning person parcelling them with the dead constable’s effects and sending them to his widow.

The mood at the station was one of cold shock and white-hot anger. “He was a bloody good bloke, Jack,” said Bill Wells. “One of the best.” Frost said nothing. Shelby’s death had upset him as much as it had anyone, but Shelby wasn’t a bloody good bloke. He was shifty, lazy, a lecher, and a liar.

He made his way to the locker room. It was empty. He found the key that worked before and opened up Shelby’s locker. The camera was there but the photographs were not. He swore softly and locked up, then went to rejoin Webster in the car.

They sped through the main roads, all traffic lights with them just when Frost wanted delay, wanted to put off as long as possible the moment when Shelby’s wife opened that door.

Shelby’s two-storey semi was on a corner—its downstairs lights behind bright-red curtains glowed welcomingly. Webster slid the car into an empty parking space on the other side of the road and switched off the engine. Frost made no attempt to move. He found a fresh packet of cigarettes and slowly stripped off the cellophane. He took his time lighting a cigarette to his satisfaction, then crushed it out in the car’s overfilled ashtray. “Damn and sodding blast!” he cried. “This is what Mullett’s paid his inflated bloody salary for, to do lousy jobs like this.” He scrubbed at his face with his hands and seemed to cheer up now he had got that off his chest. “Come on, let’s get it over and done with. You go and find a woman neighbour who can stay with her, and I’ll break the news.”

Through a red-painted gate and up a small path to the front door, where he thumbed the buzzer. Excited voices from inside. Quick, light footsteps, then the door opened slowly. A child, a three-year-old boy in light-blue pyjamas and smelling of Johnson’s bath soap, regarded him with a puzzled frown. “I thought you were my daddy,” he said.

“Is your mummy there?” Frost asked, again mentally cursing Mullett for being a cowardly bastard. This was going to be harder than he thought.

A young woman opened a door at the end of the hall. When she saw Detective Inspector Frost standing there, and not her husband, the colour seeped from her face and she briefly held the doorframe very tightly to steady herself. “Go in the other room and play for a bit, Tommy,” she told the child, doing her best to keep her voice sounding normal. As the boy pushed past her, she walked slowly to the front door.

“Hello, love,” said Frost, realizing he had forgotten to check at the station to find out what her first name was. “Do you think I could come in? I’ve got something to tell you.”

She took him to the kitchen, looking in at the lounge on the way through to make sure the children were all right. A small, warm, friendly kitchen. Frost could smell something cooking the appetising aroma of a casserole, a meal that could be kept in the oven on a low heat for ages without spoiling. Ideal if your husband was inclined to come home late. On the small kitchen table, which was laid with a white tablecloth, were two place settings. She invited Frost to sit, then went over to the hob to stir something in a saucepan, her back to him. He remained standing.

Very busily engaged in stirring what didn’t need stirring, she asked, “Is he hurt?”

“He’s dead, love,” said Frost bluntly. Her back stiffened. She carried on stirring, the spoon clack, clack, clacking against the side of the saucepan.

“I knew something was wrong when I phoned the station. They kept saying he was working late, but I knew.”

“I wish you’d cry,” said Frost. “I wish you’d bloody cry.”

And then her face crumpled and her body was racked with sobbing.

Frost held out his arms and gripped her tightly. “That’s right, love, just cry.” He could feel her scalding tears running down his face, trickling on to his neck. He held her, saying nothing, sharing her grief. Then she was still. “How did it happen?” she whispered.

“He was shot, love. He was trying to stop a cowboy with a gun.”

She moved away from him and rubbed her face dry with her apron, then she turned off the oven and the hob and slumped down heavily in one of the chairs at the table. Frost pulled out the other chair and sat next to her, his face wet and stinging from her tears.

“Are you all right?” she asked him.

“Me?” said Frost in surprise. “I’m fine, love.” But his hands were shaking.

“He was a marvelous husband,” she said, “really marvelous. He idolized me and the kids. We were all he lived for. He would never look at another woman, although they kept looking at him. They all fancied him, he was so good-looking, you see; but he was mine. We loved each other.”

“I know,” said Frost. The phone rang. “I’ll get it,” he said.

The voice at the other end said “Denton Echo, here. Could I speak to Mrs. Shelby, please?”

“Piss off,” said Frost, hanging up. It rang again. He disconnected it from the wall. She was bound to be plagued by the media, all eager to know what it felt like to be the widow of a policeman who had had his face blown off. He made a note to get her calls intercepted and to ask the station to place a man on guard outside the house. That was the least Mullett could do for her.

“People will have to be told,” she was saying. “His parents. It will break their hearts.”

Frost nodded. She was trying to sound calm, but he could see she was on the edge of hysteria. Where the hell was Webster with that woman neighbour?

An excited shout, followed by a fit of giggles, came from the other room. “Will the kids be all right?” he asked.