R. Wingfield - A Touch of Frost

They ran, Frost panting, out of breath, well behind the constable.

“There!” yelled Webster.

Ahead, a nurse, white-faced, stumbled toward them in blind panic. She looked up, mouth open, ready to scream again when she saw the two strange men hurtling toward her. Webster was the first to reach her. He waved his warrant card. “It’s all right, Nurse, we’re police officers. What happened?”

Too terrified to speak, she looked from Webster to Frost, her mouth working, then, still trembling she pointed back to the open door of a storeroom. At last she was able to speak. “A man in there. I went to get some clean sheets. He was horrible…”

“Let’s take a look,” said Webster, moving cautiously into the dark of the storeroom and groping for the light switch. The fluorescent tubes seemed to resent being woken up at such an unearthly hour, but finally, with a half-hearted crackle, they flashed and flooded out cold, blue light.

Inside the large room were racks of wooden shelving, all neatly stacked with folded blankets, bed linen, rubber sheets, and pillows. No sign of a lecherous intruder. Webster walked around inside. “Can’t see anyone,” he said to the nurse, who was hovering anxiously by the door.

Braver now that she had company, she joined him, her head turning from side to side, looking, wanting to prove that she hadn’t imagined it. “There was someone here,” she insisted.

Frost wandered in after them, his nose twitching. “There’s a hell of a stink in here…” He sniffed again, his eyes slowly scanning the racks, missing nothing. “I spy with my little eye… someone on the top rack… there!”

Webster followed his finger but couldn’t see anything. He grasped the wooden supports and shook the racks as if he were shaking apples from a tree. “Come on, you bugger. Down you get or I’ll drag you down.”

A heap of blankets on the top shelf heaved, then slithered to the floor. A dirty brown overcoat struggled out, then two red-rimmed eyes peered down at them. Webster turned his head away in disgust as the smell wafted down to hit him in the face.

“I wasn’t doing no harm,” whined the man.

“No harm?” cried Frost, “You’re stinking the place out.”

“What are you after drugs?” demanded Webster as the old man, a tramp in his mid-sixties, climbed stiffly down.

Short and stooped, he had tiny, red-rimmed, deepset eyes; his face was greasy and black and grey with stubble. His nose, large and route-mapped with tiny red veins, cried out for the urgent attention of a handkerchief. Matted hair flopped over the dirt-stiffened collar of the brown overcoat, which had been made many years ago for someone much bigger. His hands, the nails chipped and black, reached up to the top shelf for a bulging brown carrier bag which he clutched protectively to his chest.

Frost identified him from the very first sniff. “Blimey, Wally, hasn’t the hospital got enough germs of its own without you bringing yours in as well?”

“I’m an old man, Mr. Frost. Just looking for a place to rest my poor head for the night.” A dewdrop shimmered at the end of his nose. He gave a juicy sniff, which temporarily delayed its further descent.

“So you rested your poor head against the window of the nurses’ bedroom?”

“I didn’t know there was anyone in there… honest. I just happened to look in as she happened to look out our eyes sort of met.”

“Sounds like something out of True Romance,” said Frost. “So if you weren’t after an eyeful of naked nurse, what were you after? And what have you got in that bag?”

He reached out for it, but Wally shrank back, clutching the bag as tightly as he could. With difficulty, Frost managed to prise it from the tramp’s greasy grasp and looked inside. Scraps of clothes, bits of food and a three-quarters-full wine bottle. “I hope you haven’t stolen someone’s specimen,” said Frost, pulling out the cork and cautiously sniffing the contents. “It’s either me ths or the stuff they pickle human organs in. Is this what you’ve sneaked in to pinch?”

“On my dead mother’s grave, Mr. Frost,” the tramp whined, “I haven’t come here to pinch anything.” A mighty sniff reprieved another dewdrop that was in danger of obeying Newton’s law of gravity. “I’m just a poor old man looking for shelter.”

“Well, you’re not going to find it here,” said Frost, ‘so push off before I kick you out.”

“I’m an old man, Inspector. Send me out in the cold and I’ll die.”

“Promises, promises,” said Frost. “Why don’t you go and kip where you usually doss down?”

“I couldn’t go to my usual place. There was a policeman standing outside.”

“A policeman?” queried Frost. “Here… what usual place are you talking about?”

“The public convenience behind the Market Square. Me and Ben Cornish usually kip in one of the cubicles.”

“You won’t kip with him anymore,” Frost said, and, as gently as he could, he broke the news.

The tramp, genuinely upset, clutched the wooden rack for support. “We was good mates, me and him, Inspector. Ben wasn’t eating properly. He was on drugs used to inject himself with a needle. I told him it would kill him in the end, but he wouldn’t listen.” He reflected sadly for a while, then said, “Did he have any money on him? He said he was going to give me some for food. He promised me.”

“Sorry, Wally. He had no money. In fact he had sod all,” said Frost.

“Now beat it.”

The tramp’s face fell. “You’ve got to arrest me, Mr. Frost. Put me in a cell for the night. I looked at that nurse… saw all of her body. I lusted after her. I thought carnal thoughts. I deserve to be locked up.”

“You shouldn’t have run away, Wally. She said she fancied you. Now hop it, or I’ll tell my colleague to boot you out.”

‘ Please, Inspector. Look at the weather out there. You’ll be signing my death warrant if you send me out in that!” He pointed dramatically to the windows, and, on cue, the wind lashed and hammered its fists at the glass.

Against his better judgement Frost relented. “All right, Wally. Go to the station and tell Sergeant Wells I want you locked up for the night. Tell him I suspect that you’re an international diamond smuggler.”

The dirt around the tramp’s mouth cracked as he bur bled his gratitude. They watched him shuffle painfully down the corridor, his arms folded around the carrier bag which contained everything he had in the world. Then the dead face of Ben Cornish swum filmily in front of Frost, the eyes insisting, “You bloody fool… you’ve missed something.” As he later realized, Wally had shown him the answer, but he hadn’t seen it.

Webster was saying something.

“What was that again, son?”

Webster’s quartz digital was shoved under his nose. “Four twelve. We’d better get back to the station.”

Frost winced. The station meant the crime statistics and the overtime returns and all the other mountains of paper work that had to be attended to. He thought hard. Surely there was something else they could do instead of going back. Then he remembered Tommy Croll, the security guard from The Coconut Grove. Why not interview him? That should waste a good hour.

“I’m looking for a bloke called Croll,” he told the nurse as she pulled sheets down from the rack. “He came in tonight with concussion.”

“Then you’re in luck, Inspector,” she said. “He’s in my ward.” She frowned at her tiny wristwatch. “But it’s very late.”

“I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important, Nurse,” said

Frost. And what was more important than avoiding the crime statistics?

They followed her into a small ward where a ridiculously young student nurse was crouched over a desk with a shaded lamp, anxiously watching over the twin rows of sleeping, snuffling, and moaning patients, and hoping none of them died on her before the other nurse’s return.