R. Wingfield - A Touch of Frost

A quick in-and-out job with seventy-nine pounds in cash being taken. The thieves always took cash it was instantly negotiable, it couldn’t be traced and it made the task of the police almost impossible. Frost sniffed. He knew Lil Carey. She was an unregistered money lender, lending out small sums of money, usually to housewives, at exorbitant interest rates. She’d never miss seventy-nine pounds. He wished the thieves had got away with more. But then he realized the had been scratched through by the reporting officer and the word ‘sovereigns’ added. Seventy-nine sovereigns! Frost wasn’t sure of the current rate for sovereigns, but that quantity must surely be worth much more than four thousand pounds for the gold content alone; even more if they were Victorian and in mint condition. He stuffed the report in his pocket. They would call on old mother Carey this morning without fail.

The door was kicked open and Webster entered with the two cups of tea, his expression making it quite clear how much he relished being asked to perform these menial tasks.

“Thanks, son,” muttered Frost, who had learned that it was best to ignore the constable’s repertoire of frowns, scowls, and grimaces. He disturbed the mud of sugar with his ballpoint pen and took a sip. “Tastes like cat’s pee.” He swivelled in his chair. “Something important we had to do this morning. For the life of me I can’t remember what it was.”

“The dead man in the toilets. You had to break the news.”

“That was it!” exclaimed Frost.

“Mr. Dawson phoned,” Webster told him.

“Dawson?” Frost screwed up his face. “Who’s he?”

“The father of the missing schoolgirl. He wanted to know if there was any news. I told him we’d circulated her description.”

Frost nodded. “Ah yes. Young, clean-cut, clean-shaven Karen. If she doesn’t turn up soon, I’ll have to try and sneak a chat with the mother without the father being present. There are one or two things about Karen that don’t quite add up.” His attention was caught by a note in his own writing which he had circled in red as important.

He studied it with a puzzled frown. “PM 10.00? We’re not expecting Mrs. Thatcher are we?”

“The post-mortem,” explained Webster wearily.

Frost tipped the remainder of his tea into the waste bin and reached for his mac. “Life is one round of constant pleasure. Come on, son, we mustn’t be late.”

There was a brisk knock at the door. “Not today, thank you,” called Frost.

The door opened and Mullett walked in. His expression didn’t indicate that his life was one round of constant pleasure. Frost quickly pulled the crime statistics from his in-tray and put them in the centre of his desk as if he were working on them. “Sorry, Super. Didn’t know it was you.”

Mullett gazed stiffly around the room. What a shambles the place was. Piles of paper everywhere, even on the window ledge, where the piles were held down by unwashed teacups. There were even salted peanuts and bits of potato crisp dotted around the floor. “This office is a mess, Inspector. An utter and disgusting mess!”

“We were just about to tidy it up as you knocked, sir,” lied Frost cheerfully. “Shift the muck off that chair, son, so the Super can sit down.”

Webster removed the dog-eared stack of files, looked for somewhere to put them, then decided his own desk top was the only free space. He offered the chair to the Superintendent who declined it with a disdainful sniff. He wasn’t going to risk his brand-new uniform on that. His eye caught sight of the overtime returns in Frost’s in-tray. “Some talk of the men not getting their overtime payments for last month, Frost.”

“Yes,” agreed Frost. “It’s that bloody computer. It’s always going wrong.” He stared Mullett out, then remembered the busy morning he had planned. “Have you just come in to give me a bollocking, sir, or is it something important? I’ve got a hell of a lot to do. They’re filleting Ben Cornish down at the morgue in half an hour.”

“I’ve something more important for you than that,” snapped Mullett. “Roger Miller… the hit-and-run. I’m putting you in charge of the investigation.”

“Right, Super,” said Frost. “I’ll have the little bastard put away for you, don’t you worry.”

Mullett gritted his teeth and wished he hadn’t let Allen talk him into this. “You don’t understand, Frost,” he said, and told him just what was expected of him.

Sergeant Johnson, the duty station sergeant for the day shift, had been down to the cells to check on the occupants. He was irritated to find that Frost had let Wally Peters stay the night, with the inevitable result. The cell was being hosed down now.

“Mr. Frost!” he yelled sternly as Webster and the inspector cut across the lobby on their way to the car park.

“Yes, Johnny?” called Frost from the door.

“We’ve got a friend of yours downstairs. He’s piddling all over the floor and stinking the place out.”

Frost’s face creased in mock perplexity. “What is Mr. Mullett doing down there?” he asked.

He hovered in the hall, by the letter box, waiting, and as soon as the boy pushed the newspaper through he grabbed it, opening it up to the headlines. The big story was COACH CRASH HORROR FIVE KILLED! Nothing about the attack. He turned from page to page, his eyes racing over the various headlines. Nothing. Back to the front page. And there he found it. Four blurred lines of stop-press squeezed as an afterthought down in the bottom right-hand corner. Woman attacked in Denton Woods. A woman was assaulted and raped late last night in Denton Woods. Police are looking for a man believed to have carried out similar assaults in the area over the past few months.

Four lines! He felt like crying. It was so unfair. Part of his pleasure was reading about it afterward. Sometimes the papers included an interview with the girl in which she described her terror at what had happened. He loved reading about it. It made him feel excited all over again.

Four lines. Four miserable little lines. And the paper was lying this time. It said he had raped her. He hadn’t. He couldn’t. He had picked her because he thought she was a young, untouched schoolgirl. But she was a tart. A dirty bitch with painted breasts who sold herself to men and was probably crawling with disease. She’d even tried to pick him up two nights before. The cow, the slag. Wearing those clothes to lure him on.

He screwed up the paper and hurled it to the floor, then went into the bedroom and took the well-thumbed book from its hiding place. Time was running out. He would try again tonight. For a young one. He opened the book and started to read.

They had arranged the unpleasant jobs in this order: first, the call on Mrs. Cornish to break the news about her son, Ben; second, the post-mortem. But for Frost, arrangements were made be broken. There was another call he now wanted to make first. “A quick diversion, son,” he said, pulling the burglary report from his pocket and filling Webster in on Lil Carey and her sovereigns. “Could be the break we’re looking for with these petty robberies. Shouldn’t take us more than a couple of minutes.”

Webster looked at his wristwatch. There was no way they were going to make the post-mortem in time. They were late already, and here was Frost making yet another detour.

“Pull up there, son. By the lamppost.”

Sunford Street was a row of dreary-looking terraced houses. Out of the car, across the pavement, and they were in the porch of number 26, a house even drearier-looking than its neighbours. Frost hammered away at the knocker. They heard low, shuffling footsteps from within, then a harsh female voice demanding to know who they were.