R. Wingfield - A Touch of Frost

“Get the search organized,” Allen instructed Ingram. “I’ll go and break the news to Mr. Mullett.”

The tiny garden in front of Stanley Eustace’s semidetached house in Merchants Lane was overgrown with weeds, and the lawn had as fine a crop of thistles as Frost had ever seen. Lights were on downstairs and a radio was playing. There was no escape route from the back of the premises, so there was no need for the two detectives to split up.

Frost pushed the door bell. It wasn’t working, so he had to bang on the door with his hand. He tapped gently, hoping it might sound like an insurance salesman and not a visit from the fuzz.

Webster made a point of hanging back, expecting any minute to see the barrel of a shotgun break through a window. Frost could prattle on about Eustace being harmless until he was blue in the face. Webster remembered the story Johnny Johnson had told him only that morning of how Frost thought the Bennington’s Bank gunman was harmless and got himself a bullet in the face to prove him wrong.

No-one seemed to want to open the door, so Frost banged again, a little harder this time. He lifted the flap of the letterbox and peeked through- He was rewarded by a Cinemascope view of a white-slacked crotch approaching. He straightened up smartly as the door opened and Sadie Eustace, Stanley’s well-padded, tough little brunette wife, in white slacks, black jumper, and enormous blue doughnuts of dangling earrings, put her hands on her hips and demanded to know what they wanted.

“Stan in, Sadie?” asked Frost, pushing past her and jerking his head to the stairs for Webster to search the upper rooms.

“Where’s your warrant?” screamed Sadie, following behind the inspector as he opened and shut doors, looking for her husband.

“Warrant?” said Frost, going through the elaborate pantomime of patting his pockets as if trying to locate it. “I’ve got it here somewhere.” By the time he had patted the last pocket he had looked in every downstairs room.

There was a crashing of doors from above. “What’s that hairy bastard doing up there?” cried Sadie, frowning up the stairs where Webster, fearing a stomachful of lead shot, was flinging open doors, then pressing himself flat against the wall a la Starsky and Hutch. The last door he crashed open was the bathroom, where the shock waves sent a mirror tumbling down from a shelf to shatter on the floor. That was when Webster actually did fling himself flat on his face, hugging the carpet and inhaling dust.

“You all right, son?” called Frost up the stairs.

“Yes,” said Webster curtly, standing up and brushing dust from his clothes. “I slipped.” He thudded downstairs to the kitchen where Sadie, her arms folded, her earrings quivering angrily, was glaring at the inspector.

“You come bursting into my house without a warrant ‘

“I thought I had it on me, Sadie,” said Frost, not in the least shame-faced. “My mistake. So where is Stan out selling the loot?”

“Whatever you want him for, he didn’t do it. He hasn’t been out of the house all day. What’s it about?”

“Armed robbery,” Webster told her. Behind her he could see a stripped pine-wood paper-towel dispenser that Stan had fixed to the wall. It was hanging lopsidedly from one corner.

“Armed robbery? My Stan?” She laughed derisively. “Do me a favour!

You’re out of your tiny minds.”

“No doubt about it, Sadie, I’m afraid,” said Frost, trying to fix the paper-towel dispenser in place, then giving it up as a bad job. “It’s got your Stanley’s fingerprints all over it it was a balls-up from start to finish.”

The phone in the hall rang. Sadie stiffened. “Excuse me,” she said, trying to sound casual, but Frost barred her way. “Answer it, son,” he told Webster.

The phone was on a telephone table under the stairs. Webster picked it up and listened. The sound of pay-phone pips, which stopped when the money was inserted. “Hello… is that you, Sadie?” asked a man’s voice. In the background, Webster could hear traffic rumbling past the kiosk. “Sadie, it’s me, Stan. I’m in a spot of bother. I need your help.”

“Stan, it’s the bloody police,” Sadie screamed from the kitchen.

Immediately there was a click, then a splutter of the dial tone.

Webster hung up and returned to the kitchen.

“Stanley?” asked Frost. Webster nodded. “Well, he knows we’re on to him now, son.” He turned to Sadie. Her bosom was heaving and her eyes were ablaze with defiance. “Nice one, Sadie, but what’s the point? He can’t keep running all his life.” She said nothing. Her lethal expression said it all.

They let themselves out. As they closed the door behind them they could hear her crying.

Back in the car Frost was wondering whether to tuck it around a side-turning and wait a while in case Stanley returned, but he decided against it. Even Useless Eustace wasn’t that stupid.

Then the radio called him. Johnny Johnson, sounding grim.

“Yes, Johnny?”

“We’ve just had a phone call, Jack. A Mr. Charles Fryatt. He reports seeing an apparently abandoned police car.”

Frost stiffened. “Where?”

“In Green Lane, the cut-through to the main road.”

Frost felt his heartbeats quicken. “And Shelby?”

“Mr. Fryatt says he saw no sign of a driver, not that he looked very far. He thought he’d better get straight to a phone and tell us. Can you get over there?”

“On our way,” said Frost. “Over and out.”

Green Lane was little more than a bumpy dirt track turning out of Bath Road and almost petering out before it reached Denton Road. The Cortina jolted and shuddered as it picked its way over the potholes and followed the twisting lane down into a depression completely hidden from both main roads.

“Look out!” called Frost and Webster braked abruptly as the headlights swooped down on the bulk of something directly in their path. It was Shelby’s patrol car, the Ford Escort, looking lost and miserable in the darkness.

Cautiously, they approached. The driver’s door gaped open; a stream of police-channel chatter flowed from the radio. Frost’s torch beam pried inside. The keys swung from the ignition, a clipboard with the day’s standing instructions lay on the passenger seat. He picked up the handset and radioed through to Control to report they had arrived at the scene.

“Any sign of Shelby?” Johnson asked anxiously.

“Not yet,” replied the inspector.

“Don’t move!” called Webster urgently. “Just look down, by your feet.”

About an inch or so from where Frost was standing the beam of Webster’s torch glinted on something. The ground was wet. Stained with red. Frost dropped to his knees to examine it closer. He dabbed it with his finger. It was blood. A lot of blood.

“And look there!” called Webster, swinging his torch up to the rear-door window of the patrol car.

The window was a crazy paving of shattered glass, milkily opaque. Embedded in the glass, also held in the paint work of the door, were tiny flattened pieces of metal. Lead pellets, identical to the pellets found in the wall at the pawnbroker’s. Ingram’s theory wasn’t looking so farfetched now.

“Shit!” said Frost. He returned to the handset. “Johnny. It doesn’t look too happy, I’m afraid. There’s blood and shotgun pellets all over the place. You’d better send a full team down here right away.”

Within twenty minutes the area was cordoned off and was droning with mobile generators that fed the many floodlights illuminating the scene. Men from Forensic were crawling, inch by inch, over the car. Scene-of-crime officers were taking photographs with blinding blue flashes, dusting for prints and circling blood splashes and lead pellet pockmarks with white chalk. A group of off-duty men who had spent most of the previous night and this morning combing Denton Woods on their hands and knees now scoured the scrubland on their hands and knees.