Night Frost (48 page)

   Slamming on the brakes, Gilmore backed the car and turned into a dark side road. A dead street of empty windowless houses. Burton’s car stood by the corner. Further down the road another car. A grey Vauxhall Astra.

   At the top of his voice Frost repeatedly shouted, "Burton!" The empty houses flung his words back.

   "On the pavement—there!" Gilmore pointed to some thing black and rectangular.

   They ran over. It was a police radio, its casing smashed and caved in as if it had been stamped on. When Frost picked it up his hand touched stickiness. He stared at his fingers. Blood, fresh and ruby red that glittered in the ray of Gilmore’s torch. Frost yanked his own radio from his pocket and fumbled for the transmit button. He blurted out instructions to Control. "I want every available officer to come immediately to Wedgewood Street."

   "There isn’t anyone to send," answered Control. "They’re all out. There’s a near-riot at the Denton Arms."

   "Call them away and send them here . . . now! We’ve got an officer in trouble!" He switched off before Control could come up with any more stupid objections.

All of the houses had been boarded up with corrugated galvanized sheeting blanking out the windows and heavy planking nailed across the front doors. But on quite a few of the properties vandals had torn away the planking and kicked in the doors. Frost poked his torch beam tentatively into one of the houses and ventured inside. The passage was thick with debris and breathed a sour, mildewy smell. As he shuffled in, the debris moved as rats squealed and scuttled to safety. He lashed out his foot to hasten them on their way. Before he could proceed further the sound of a car, then the slamming of doors. Back to the street where PC Jordan and four other uniformed men were waiting with Gilmore. Five men! Was this all Control was sending?

   "We’re stretched to the limit," Jordan told him. "The pub fight is getting right out of hand."

   Frost stripped cellophane from a fresh packet of cigarettes and passed it around as he quickly briefed them. "My guess is that Burton went in one of these empty houses after Gauld. The flooring’s rotten, the stair treads and banisters are broken, so he could have fallen and hurt himself. But that doesn’t explain his radio." He held it up and showed it to them. "We found it on the pavement, there, and it frightens the shit out of me. Anyway, sod the speculation until we find him. Take a house each and be careful . . . they’re bloody death traps."

   He took the middle property himself, the one nearest to where they had found the smashed radio. It reeked of damp and decay. His torch beam blinked feebly into the blackness, picking out rotting floorboards and slimy rubbish. A door to his right was closed. Warily he turned the handle and pushed. A groaning creak as it swung back on to an empty, dead, urine-smelling room. He moved on, things rustling and scurrying in front of him. To his left, stairs with broken jagged banisters lurching outwards. Another door in front of him. He kicked it open. The kitchen, piled high with rubbish and smelling of bad drains and cats and rotting food.

   Back to the hall and up the stairs, testing each tread care fully before putting his weight on it. Half-way up he stopped and held his breath as he listened. A creaking. There was someone up there. There it was again. The soft creak of a floorboard. "Burton?" He waited. Silence. No! A rustling, then another floorboard creaked. His torch kept flickering. The beam shuddered and died. He gave the casing a welt with the flat of his hand which frightened it into brief life again before it died finally a second time.

   He waited to let his eyes adjust to the darkness and took another step. Then he froze. Something. He stopped dead, ears sharply focused for the slightest sound. Silence. Silence that screamed in the blackness. But there was something someone up there. "Burton?" If it was Burton, why the hell didn’t he answer?

   He rammed the useless torch in his pocket and fished out his matches. Up the stairs to the landing. The match burnt his fingers. Swearing softly, he shook it out and struck another. A door, slightly ajar, to his right. He nudged it open with his foot, then poked the hand with the match inside. He nearly dropped the match. On the floor, in the flicker of the flame, a face. Another match. God, it was Burton, his face a sweat-soaked dirty white, his lips mumbling incoherently.

   Frost dropped to his knees on to a puddle of something wet which soaked his trousers. Another match. He was kneeling in a pool of blood. Burton’s hands were clasped round his stomach. A red trickle oozed from between slippery, red fingers. He was trying to say something. Frost brought his head down to Burton’s lips. "Gauld. The bastard stabbed me." His eyelids flickered and closed.

   "Up here!" yelled Frost at the top of his voice. He tugged out his radio. "Control. Burton’s been stabbed. Get an ambulance over to Wedgewood Street . . . now!"

The ambulance men adjusted the strap around the red-blanketed Burton, then wheeled the trolley up into the ambulance. One of the uniformed men hopped in the back with it.

   "Got a stack of your chaps in Casualty," the ambulance driver told Frost cheerfully as he climbed into his seat. "Blood and broken noses everywhere. A bunch of yobbos breaking up a pub or something."

   Oh, sod! thought Frost. I’d forgotten all about that. He radioed through to the station.

   "We’re being massacred," Wells told him. "Things are getting out of control and bloody Mullett’s not answering his phone in case he should have to make a decision."

   Gilmore tugged at Frost’s sleeve. "Gauld’s been spotted. He’s got into that building site." He pointed in the direction of the giant crane.

   "Damn," said Frost. There were a hundred places Gauld could hide in in the sprawl of the building site. Back to the radio. "We know where Gauld is. Without more men we’ll lose him. Pull more people out from the pub."

   "I can’t," insisted Wells.

   "Just bloody do it. Then phone County and get reinforcements from other divisions," said Frost.

   "Mullett won’t like that. He’ll do his nut."

   "Sod Mullett. Just do it."

   Wells hesitated. "If it blows up in our face, will you take the can back, Jack?"

   "Don’t I always?" said Frost.

The building site covered almost twenty acres and would eventually house a hypermarket, shops, and two tower office blocks which, at the moment, were skeletons of scaffolding and girders. The car picked its way along a muddy, temporary road to the main gates.

   Chain link fencing encircled the area. A notice in red warned
Keep Out. Guard Dogs Loose On This Site
. The main gates were locked and chained, but there was a smaller gate to one side which sagged where it had been kicked in. Beyond the gate a brown and white shape twitched and whimpered in the mud. The knife-ripped guard dog.

   Gilmore’s radio reported the arrival of reinforcements. Three pub-battle-scarred warriors were in position at the back entrance of the site, ready to move in from there. "It’s not enough," said Gilmore.

   "As the bishop said to the actress, son, it may not be much, but it’s all I’ve got." He took the radio and warned the newcomers to be careful. Gauld had a knife and was prepared to use it. "Right. Let’s go in."

   Near the entrance stood a green-coloured Portakabin. Frost tried the handle. Locked. He flashed a torch through a window. Desks, phones and drawing boards.

   Other torches bobbed in the distance as the rest of his thinly stretched team carried out the search. The site was littered with hills and mountains of building materials; earthenware drainage pipes, concrete blocks, bricks on pallets covered with polythene sheeting, bag after bag of cement. And then there was machinery. Bulldozers, earth-moving equipment, cranes, and overshadowing everything, a giant skyscraper of a crane on its tower of scaffolding. The muddy ground had been churned into a Somme battlefield by the wheels of countless lorries.

   It was a slow, laboured search. Heavy items had to be man-handled out of the way, planking covering drainage trenches removed, builders’ huts forced open and searched, canvas and polythene sheeting stripped away. They squeezed between stacks of splintery timber shuttering, crawled under wooden sheds and, finally, mud-caked, dishevelled and disheartened, there was nowhere else to look and Gilmore was wearing his 'I told you so' smirk

   They gathered round Frost who was dishing out cigarettes, forming a tight circle as he struck a match to stop the rising wind from blowing it out. "Now what?" asked Gilmore.

   "We go back and search again, son."

   "He could be miles away."

   Frost’s chin poked out stubbornly. "No. He’s here. Laughing at us. I know it." He held up a hand. "I thought I heard something." Someone’s radio was burbling away about casualties and ambulances and shortage of manpower. "Turn that thing off." The offending radio was silenced. "Now listen."

   They listened. The wind, working itself up into a paddy, rattled chain link fencing, flapped polythene sheeting, and made the temporary overhead telephone wires sing and hum. Almost 200 feet above them, the jib arm of the giant crane, with its warning light on the far end, creaked and groaned and shrieked as if in pain.

   A sudden clatter. All heads turned. Jordan grinned sheepishly. He had knocked over a stack of empty lubricating oil drums.

   Frost shook his head. Whatever he thought he’d heard wasn’t going to repeat itself. Then he clicked his fingers. "The crane. We haven’t looked up there!" Heads turned up and up and up. The distant warning light, a pin-prick of bright against the night sky, seemed almost another star.

   "It’s bloody high," croaked Jordan.

   "Yes," agreed Frost, now wishing he hadn’t suggested it. The damn thing seemed to go up and up and up for ever.

   A yell from Gilmore. "Someone’s up there!" And as the moon elbowed through black clouds, there was Gauld, on the ladder, nearly 100 feet up, clinging for dear life and looking down at them.

   Making a megaphone with his hands, Frost yelled up into the night sky. "You can’t get away now, Gauld. We’ve got you. Come on down."

   The wind fielded Gauld’s defiant reply and hurled it away

   "He’s coming down," exclaimed Jordan.

   "He’s not," said Frost. "He’s going higher."

   Necks craned, they watched until he was swallowed by blackness. "Let’s have some lights," Frost ordered.

   With much difficulty an area car zigzagged, bumped and slid its way towards the crane, and then a powerful spotlight sliced upwards, cutting a steamy white swathe in the night sky and picking out the doll-man as he climbed up and up.

   Gauld was nearly at the top of the ladder and could see the platform of the driver’s cab just above his head. He gripped the rungs tightly with hands that the wind was trying to tear loose. Above him the jib groaned and whined and shuddered. He heaved himself up on to the small platform outside the cab. The protective metal handrail seemed flimsy and inadequate and he kept well back as he looked down, eyes squinting against the blinding spotlight beam. The police were still staring up at him, the one in the dirty mac yelling something which any fool should realize couldn’t be heard at this height. One of the uniformed men was running from a car with something in his hand. A loud-hailer.

   "Be sensible, Gauld. You can’t go anywhere. Come on down."

   Pointless shouting. They wouldn’t hear him. But the cop was right. He couldn’t go anywhere. They had him trapped. God, how had it all gone wrong?

   "Come on down, Gauld."

   The fool was yelling again. Come on down? He ventured another look over the edge. Just looking made him dizzy and he pressed back against the cab, his hands scrabbling for something to hold on to. If they wanted him, they’d have to bring him down.

   Above him the jib gave another tortured scream of pain, then another sound pierced the night. A two-tone siren.

   The fire engine halted outside the gate and a bearded fireman made his way across to the inspector. He looked angry. "You called a vet for that dog? It’s still alive, you know."

   "He’s on his way," snapped Frost, annoyed with himself for not attending to it. He signalled to Jordan who moved out of earshot and radioed through to Control. Frost pointed to the crane platform. "We want to get up there. Would your turntable ladder reach?"

   The fireman squinted up, then shook his head. "You’d need a bleeding helicopter to get up there." He moved to the ladder lashed to the scaffolding and gave it a shake. It didn’t seem very firm "That’s the only way up."

   "Sod that for a lark," said Frost. "Take me up on your turntable ladder as far as it goes. I’ll see if I can’t sweet-talk the bastard down."

The turntable platform gave a jerk, then the ground suddenly hurtled down and Frost had to grab the rail to steady himself as the ladder zoomed upwards. Briefly he chanced a look down, then quickly pulled his eyes away and concentrated on staring straight ahead at the bolts and nuts and rusted metal of the scaffolding as they zipped past.

   After what seemed ages, the ladder slowed and juddered to a halt and the fire officer tugged Frost’s sleeve. "As far as we go."

   Frost looked down. Toy cars, tiny people, miles and miles away. He looked up. Lots more scaffolding roaring up to the sky and the white blob of Gauld’s face staring down at him. "There’s nowhere to run," shouted Frost. "Chuck your knife and we’ll bring you down."

   Gauld yelled something, but the wind snatched and tore the words to shreds. Then the blob of his face withdrew and they couldn’t see him any more.

   "Now what?" asked the fire officer.

   Frost’s neck was aching from craning upwards. He lowered his head. In front of him was the flimsy metal ladder which Gauld had climbed. It didn’t look very safe and was rattling in the wind. He shivered. "If we both went up, we could overpower him."

   "Not our job to overpower nutters with knives," said the fire officer, firmly. "Disarm him and you can have as many of my men as you like. Until then, you’re on your own."