Night Frost (12 page)

   Harry shuffled out and the two men sidled across. Warning them to wait with a movement of his hand, Rickman darted over to the shop door and squinted through the glass to make sure no-one else was coming, then lowered his voice. "Who sent you—Les?"

   "Yes," replied Frost, equally conspiratorial, wondering what the hell this was all about.

   "You can’t be too careful," said Rickman, unlocking a door behind the counter. He ushered them through. "Some of this stuff’s dynamite." He clicked on the light. The room was full of shelved books and magazines with lurid covers of naked, sweating, entwined men and women. In boxes on a table were stacks of soft porn videos.

   "Les said you had something special," suggested Frost, signalling to Gilmore, who was fumbling for his war rant card, to hold his horses.

   Rickman leered and tapped the side of his nose knowingly. He unlocked a cupboard. More videos, this time in plain white boxes with typed labels.

   "There’s everything here," he said proudly. "All tastes catered for—men with men, women with women, with kids, animals  . . . any permutation you want. Fifty quid a time—return it undamaged and I’ll allow you twenty-five quid off your next purchase."

   "I don’t know that I’ve got that much money on me," said Frost, reaching for his inside pocket.

   "I take Access . . . American Express . . . any card you like."

   "What about this one?" asked Frost.

   Rickman stared at a warrant card. His jaw dropped. "Shit!" he said.

   A ring from the shop bell and a boy’s voice called, "Papers ready, Mr. Rickman?"

   "By the counter. Take them and go." He waited until the bell signalled the boy’s departure. "Look, officer. I’m sure we can come to some understanding." He brought out his wallet and pulled out two £50 notes.

   "Give the gentleman a receipt for a £100 bribe," said Frost, holding out his hand for the money. "I’ll read you the numbers."

   Hastily, Rickman stuffed the banknotes in his pocket. "You misunderstand me, Inspector."

   "I hope I do," replied Frost. "You’re in enough bloody trouble as it is." He read some of the labels on the videos and shuddered. They were very explicit.

   Rickman fumbled for a handkerchief and dabbed sweat from his face. "I don’t usually indulge in this sort of stuff. Harmless soft porn, yes, but not the hard stuff. I met this bloke in a pub . . ."

   Frost cut him short. "Save your fairy tales for the officer down the station." He sent Gilmore to the car to radio for someone to collect Rickman and the books and videos.

   "You try and do people a good turn and this happens," moaned Rickman. "What bastard shopped me?"

   "We’ve been watching this shop for months," lied Frost. He had taken an instant dislike to the podgy newsagent. Some of the videos involved schoolgirls. He wondered if Paula Bartlett was tied in with this in some way. He stared at the fidgeting Rickman and slowly lit a cigarette. "We’ve found her, you know."

   "Found who?"

   "Paula."

   "Paula Bartlett . . . my news girl?"

   Frost nodded.

   "Is she . . ." He steeled himself to say it. "Is she dead?"

   Another nod.

   "Oh, that’s terrible." His face was screwed tight in anguish.

   "Yes," said Frost. "And you should see what the bastard did to her. It would make a good video for you to sell."

   The shop bell tinkled again as Gilmore returned. He’d also asked Bill Wells to phone his wife and say he would be late, but had got short shrift from the sergeant.

   Frost sat on the corner of the ice-cream cabinet. "Tell me about Paula."

   "A really nice, sweet kid," said Rickman.

   "They’re always nice when they’re dead," said Frost. "Tell me what she was like while she was still alive."

   Rickman shrugged. "She was a nothing. A dull kid. A bit of a pudding. Never laughed. Hardly ever spoke. Did her work. That was all."

   Again the shop bell quivered and rung and an old woman shuffled in. "We’re closed," said Frost, taking her by the arm and steering her out into the street. He reversed the Open/Closed sign and rammed home the bolts.

   "Tell me about the day she went missing."

   "I’ve already told all this to the other detective . . . the ferret-faced bloke. An absolutely normal day. She left as usual to go on her round and that was the last I saw of her."

   "Had she complained about men molesting her . . . or following her?" asked Gilmore.

   "Not to me, she didn't. She hardly spoke a bloody word to me."

   Frost ambled over to the counter and glanced at the paper Rickman had been reading. He studied the naked Page Three girl, his cigarette drooping dispassionately. "How was young Paula set up? Well stacked, was she?"

   "No different to most of the other girls. They mature so bloody quickly these days . . . see them at fifteen you think they’re twenty. Mind you, Paula didn’t flaunt it. She used to wear loose woolly cardigans and things like that."

   "Did she go out with any of the newspaper boys?"

   "No. Between you and me, I don’t reckon she’d ever been with a boy or knew anything about sex."

   Frost raised his eyebrows. "Why do you say that?"

   "Something that happened three months ago. I’m in the shop sorting out the papers for the rounds. Only two of the kids were in, Diana Massey and Jimmy Richards."

   "Who are they?" asked Frost.

   "They were both in Paula’s class at school—both just turned fifteen. Anyway, I’m sorting out the papers when I realize they’ve both gone missing. Well, not that I mistrust anyone, but I keep the day’s takings in that other backroom there until I can get to the bank, so I sticks my head round the door and what do you think I saw?"

   "Tell me," said Frost.

   "Diana’s on the floor, jeans round her ankles, he’s on top of her, jeans ditto and they’re having it away on a stack of
Radio Times
. Fifteen flaming years old. Didn’t even stop when I yelled at them."

   "I don’t think I would, either," observed Frost. "Anyway, I heard a gasp behind me. I turned and there was Paula Bartlett. She was staring at them horrified. She dropped her papers and just ran out of I shop. It was obvious to me she didn’t know what the hell they were up to. Innocent, that’s what she was."

   "If our plumber lets us down, we’d better check out this Jimmy Richards," said Frost. "He might have acquired taste for innocent newspaper girls."

   While Gilmore was noting down the address, an area car drew up outside and two uniformed officers rattled the door handle. Frost let them in. "Stack of pornographic gear in the back," he told them. "Take it and our friend here down to the station and charge him under the Obscene Publications Act."

Back to the car. Gilmore slammed the door, hoping this would wake up Burton who didn’t deserve to sleep after causing all this trouble, but to no avail. He was fastening his seat belt when the damn radio called for the inspector

   Frost reached for the handset as Gilmore slumped back wearily, waiting for the worst.

   "Can you do a quick job for me, Inspector?" asked Sergeant Wells.

   "No," replied Frost. "Gilmore’s got to get home. He’s left his wife on the boil."

   "It’s on your way, Jack. Probably a false alarm. Number 46 Mannington Crescent. A pensioner, Mrs. Mary Haynes. She lives there on her own, but yesterday’s milk is still on the doorstep and her cat’s meowing like mad inside. The milkman’s phoned us. He thinks something might have happened to her. Take a look, would you?"

   "This is uniform branch stuff," snapped Gilmore.

   "The only spare car is loaded down with your filthy books," Wells snapped back.

   Frost sighed. "OK, Bill. We’re on our way."

The houses in Mannington Crescent were just waking up. A milk float was outside number 46. They parked behind it and Frost shuffled over to the milkman and flapped his warrant card.

   Relieved at their arrival, the milkman blurted out the details. "Might be nothing in it, but she’s usually so regular. She’d never go away and leave her cat and it’s meowing like hell in there and yesterday’s milk is on the step."

   "Couldn’t she have run off with the lodger?" yawned Frost, following the man to the doorstep.

   "She’s seventy-eight years old!" said the milkman.

   "Well—hobbled off with the lodger, then?"

   "She hasn’t got a lodger," said the milkman.

   Frost yawned again. "Another brilliant theory shot up the arse." He moved to one side to let Gilmore tackle the door. 

   Gilmore jammed his finger in the bell push. "The bell don’t work," said the milkman.

   Gilmore hammered at the knocker.

   "I’ve already tried that," said the milkman. 

   Ignoring him, Gilmore hammered again. Silence. A look of smug triumph on the milkman’s face. "What did I tell you?"

   Across the road a fat woman in a shortie nightie called, "Milkie! You haven’t left me any milk." The milkman signalled he was coming over and she waddled back into her house, acres of fat bottom wobbling below the hem of her nightdress.

   Frost winced. "It must be my day for horrible sights. You’d better carry on with your round, Milkie. Thanks for phoning."

   "What do you think?" asked Gilmore, who was staring at the Cortina, where Burton, oblivious to all this, was still asleep on the back seat.

   Frost looked up and down the street, hoping to see the reassuring sight of a uniformed constable who would take the responsibility from him, but no such luck.

   The downstairs window was heavily curtained and held firmly closed by a security catch of some kind. Frost did his letter-box squinting routine, seeing only an empty passage with a pot plant drooping dejectedly on a side table. There was an open purse on the side table, a small bunch of keys alongside it. He straightened up wearily. It looked bad. The old dear certainly wouldn’t leave the house with out her purse and her keys. "We’ll have to break in."

   Gilmore picked up the bottle of milk from the step and used it to smash one of the coloured glass door panels. He put his hand through and turned the lock. They stepped inside.

   The first door they tried led to the kitchen. From a dark corner two green eyes flashed, then a plaintive mew. Frost took some milk from the fridge, slopped it into a saucer and watched the cat’s frantic lappings. He tried the back door, but it was firmly bolted on the inside. Gilmore looked in the other downstairs room, a musty-smelling, rarely used lounge.

   The cat finished the milk and waited expectantly, its tail swishing. Frost topped up the saucer. "Hundred to one she’s upstairs, son. Dead in bed. Nip up and take a look." As Gilmore’s footsteps thudded overhead, Frost found a tin opener on the draining board and opened a tin of Felix which he emptied on a plate for the cat.

   A sudden yell from Gilmore sent him running. "Inspector! Up here. Quick!"

   She was on the bed. She had been knifed repeatedly in the stomach and her throat was a gaping, open wound. The body was cold. Ice cold.

"I know you’ve got no-one to send," Frost told a complaining Sergeant Wells, "but I want four of them." He pressed the handset against his chest so he couldn’t hear the sergeant insisting this was impossible. "I can’t manage with less than four. I need people knocking on doors before everyone leaves for work. Over and out." He clicked the switch, cutting off Wells in mid-moan and returned to the house.

   Gilmore was waiting for him in the bedroom, anxious to show him a mess of blood on the carpet, hidden behind the open door. A lot of blood. On the floor, a crumpled heap that was her best black coat. "He was hiding behind the door. He slashed her as she came in to hang up her coat, then dumped her on the bed."

   Frost nodded glumly. Gilmore was probably right, but knowing where he killed her wasn’t going to help them catch the bastard. "Sod that bloody milkman," he said "We could have been in bed and asleep by now."

   Burton thudded up the stairs. He had been sent out to knock on doors. "Two things, Inspector. A woman across the road says the old lady visited Denton Cemetery every Sunday afternoon to put flowers on her husband’s grave. She saw her leave about three. The bloke next door—a Dean Reynold Hoskins—says the old lady knocked him up on Sunday afternoon just after five, all agitated. She reckoned someone had nicked her spare front door key which she kept hidden under the mat in the porch, but when Hoskins looked, there it was."

   "Have you checked to see if it’s still there?" Burton nodded and held up a bagged key. "Hoskins called her a silly cow and went back to his own house. She kept ranting on about it not being in the same place she’d left it."

   "The poor bitch was right," said Frost. "There’s no sign of forcible entry, all doors and windows are internally secured. The killer must have let himself in through the front door. He was already in the house."

   Gilmore grunted begrudgingly. He couldn’t fault the inspector’s logic.

   "Right," continued Frost. "He got in after she went off to the graveyard at three. He wouldn’t have hung about after slicing her up, so we can assume he left fairly soon after five. Knock on more doors. People usually go deaf and blind when there’s been a crime but someone must have seen or heard something. And ask if it was general knowledge that she secretly kept a spare key under the mat."

   "Right," said Burton, swaying slightly.

   The poor sod’s dead on his feet, thought Frost. "I’ve got some more men coming soon, Burton. You can go home when they arrive."

   The detective constable shook his head. "I can hold on for a while, sir."

   Stifling a yawn, Frost wished there was someone to tell him to go home. He wouldn’t refuse. He turned his attention to Gilmore who was waiting to speak.

   "I’ve checked her purse," Gilmore told him. "Empty except for a membership card for All Saints Church Senior Citizens’ Club and a hospital appointment card. Nothing else in the house appears to be disturbed or taken."

   "A few quid," said Frost. "I can’t believe the bastard ripped her up for the few quid in her purse." He let his gaze wander around the bedroom, which smelt stalely of blood and lavender furniture polish. He lit a cigarette and added the smell of tobacco smoke. On the wall above the veneered walnut dressing table hung a framed black and white wedding photograph, the bride in white and the groom in morning dress amidst a snow shower of confetti. That same bride was now in funeral black, eyes wide open and staring up at the yellowing ceiling. Her dress and the bed-cover were rusted with gummy gouts of dried blood.