R. Wingfield - Hard Frost

Frost knew he should have checked before he asked. The backs of the hands showed slashes and stab wounds. They were inflicted as she tried to defend herself.

"This is right outside my league," said the pathologist. "You'll have to get Mr. Drysdale to do the autopsy."

"All right," said Frost. "Put her back in the fridge until he gets here."

The junior technician helped the mortuary assistant to slide the torso on to a trolley then, with a look of distaste, carefully picked up the head and dropped it into a large polythene bag which he also placed on the trolley.

They met Cassidy as they were walking back to the car. "Stabbed," said Frost tersely. "About eleven times. Dead before she was chucked in front of the train."

Cassidy barely concealed a smirk. "I knew this case wasn't as straightforward as you tried to make out."

"Nothing I touch turns out to be bloody straightforward," said Frost ruefully.

"Have they done the autopsy?"

"They've sent for Drysdale. If it's anything more complicated than an ingrowing toenail, this bloke doesn't want to know."

"I'm going to pull Snell in," announced Cassidy.

"Don't be a prat," said Frost. "You want to start putting pressure on the husband."

"The husband couldn't have done it. Snell broke in, started to stab the kid when they all woke up and started screaming. He panics and silences them with the pillow. The mother runs in and he has to kill her as well."

"Then why didn't he leg it and leave her? Why try to make out her death was suicide?"

"I don't know, but I'm going to find out."

"I'll give you a better scenario. The husband comes back from work to find his wife smirking all over her face. She tells him she's killed his kids to pay him back for leaving her on her own, night after night. He takes it amiss and goes berserk, stabbing her again and again. He realizes suspicion must fall on him, so he carts the body away and tries to make her death look like suicide."

"He couldn't have done it," repeated Cassidy, stubbornly. "He's got a watertight alibi. Three people can confirm he was in that store until nearly two o'clock in the morning."

"Then recheck his alibi… see if we can break it." He turned to Liz. "Is he still in hospital?"

"Yes. They should be releasing him tomorrow."

"Good. He was taken there straight from the house, so he was still wearing the clothes he had on that night. Get those clothes. I want Forensic to do a proper job for a change and go over every inch of them for bloodstains… there must have been one hell of a lot of blood." Back to Cassidy. "You'd better hang on for the autopsy. Drysdale should be here any minute. I'll make my way back to the house and wait for Forensic and the Scene of Crime boys."

Cassidy wasn't happy at the way he was being ordered about. After all he was, if only temporarily, the same rank as Frost. But he decided to swallow it. It looked as if there could well be some embarrassing foul-ups with this case so it would be better if Frost was in charge. "Right."

He went back through the swing doors of the mortuary to wait for the Home Office Pathologist.

Liz dropped Frost off at the house in Cresswell Street and drove on to the hospital. The constable on duty, young PC Packer, handed over the front door key. "Go and get yourself a cup of tea or something," said Frost. "I'll be here for at least an hour." Packer nodded gratefully. It was boring standing on guard, nothing to do, no-one to talk to except when he was fending off questions from the inquisitive. There was a burger bar in the main road. He'd nip off there for a bite to eat in the warm.

Frost let himself in and closed the door behind him. In the oppressive background of silence small sounds seemed to be exaggerated. The lounge door creaked as he pushed it open. The curtains had been drawn to stop people peering in and the room was in darkness. He clicked on the light. Was the woman killed here and taken away? If so, there should be blood, but he couldn't see any.

He clicked off the light and went along the passage to the kitchen where there were still unwashed mugs on the small table. He should have got someone to tidy up after they left. Blue polythene sheeting had been laid over the floor to protect it from the feet of everyone tramping in and out. He hitched a section back and peered down on to blue and white vinyl. Blood would have screamed. There was none. The white surface of the tall fridge freezer gleamed coldly. He took a look inside. Near the top, an opened tin of Heinz baby food.

Over to the back door. At some stage one of its glass panes had been broken and a makeshift repair of a sheet of plywood nailed over the gap. The bottom of the ply was loose where the nails had been wrenched out, making it possible for anyone outside to squeeze a hand through and reach the key. This had been noted the night before, but not much attention was paid to it as the case then seemed uncomplicated.

He left the kitchen and went down the corridor, the soft padded creak of his footsteps following him. The children's bedroom still breathed Johnson's baby powder. The beds, stripped of their clothes, were icy to the touch. Across the room, on a shelf, a row of soft toys, animals, golliwogs, dolls, stared reproachfully at him. As he turned to leave, his heart froze. A child's voice cried, "Mummy."

It was a doll. A bloody doll on the floor and he had trodden on it. He picked it up and put it on the shelf with the others.

Shaken, he hurried off to the darkened lounge where he sat and smoked. The heavy curtains insulated the room from outside noises, but kept in the stifling silence of the house. It was chilly and he shivered. At one stage he was jolted from his thoughts by a sound like a child giggling, but when he listened hard there was nothing.

Footsteps up the path and someone knocking at the door. The Forensic team. "Not today, thank you," he said. "I never buy at the door."

He went back to the lounge and left them to it. Painstaking, methodical work was not his forte and he got impatient with people who had to work this way. Young Packer reported back and was sent to check with the neighbours about what they saw or heard last night. If the mother was killed in the house she would have had to be driven to the railway bridge, so did anyone see or hear a car?

A tap at the door. "We'd like to do this room, inspector." He was getting the distinct impression he was in the bloody way.

He moved on to the kitchen. Harding from Forensic was out in the garden examining the door in the wall that led to the outside lane. He saw Frost and hurried over to him. "Something to show you." It was the back door. With rubber-gloved hands Harding eased back the plywood panel and pointed to its jagged bottom edge.

Dots of red and flecks of skin. "Someone forced back the wood to get a hand through so they could turn the key from the inside. The edge of the ply grazed the back of his wrist, drawing blood. Whoever did it would have a nasty scratch on the back of the hand."

"It could have been the father… or even the mother," said Frost. "Forgot their front door key so came in through the back."

"Possible," said Harding. "We should be able to do some DNA testing on the skin fragments. Find a suspect and we could match him to this. You wouldn't need a confession."

"Science is wonderful," grunted Frost. "It's making the rubber truncheon obsolete." Two men from the Forensic team in their gleaming white boiler suits came in. "We'd like to do the kitchen now, inspector."

Nowhere where he could sit and think and be undisturbed. He let them get on with it and caught a bus back to the station.

Cassidy was waiting for him in the murder incident room. He had the results of the post-mortem on the mother. "Numerous stab wounds to the abdomen and heart. The wound to the heart killed her and she would have died almost instantly. Stab marks on her hands where she fought off her attacker."