R. Wingfield - A Touch of Frost

Tommy tried to smile to show he knew it was all a bluff, but the smile wouldn’t come. “You’ve got to believe me, Mr. Frost. I didn’t do it.”

“I don’t care if you did it or not,” Frost said. “All I want is a bloody confession.” Then he seemed to have second thoughts and settled down again in the chair. “I’ll listen to one fairy story and one only, Tommy, and then your teeth get knocked out.”

Croll opened his arms in appeal. “It happened just like I told you, Inspector… I heard the right signal. I opened the door and wham, I’m coshed — I’m out cold.”

“Balls!” snapped Frost. “That little tap you got wouldn’t have knocked out a four-year-old.”

Croll chewed his lower lip and his eyes sized up the hairy thug. “All right, Mr. Frost. I’ll tell you the truth.”

“Good,” beamed Frost, motioning for Webster to change roles from heavy to shorthand writer.

“It was like I told you before, Mr. Frost, right up to the time where I got the signal to open the door. I opens it and there’s this geyser wearing a Stan Laurel face mask and holding a cosh of some sort. He clouts me round the nut, but I reckon he hadn’t done it before, because he didn’t hit me very hard. Anyway, I figured that if I didn’t drop down unconscious, he’d welt me a damn sight harder the second time, so I fakes it and down I go. I lies there, dead still, until he’s grabbed the money and gone.”

“So when he’d gone, why didn’t you start banging and yelling?” asked Frost.

“I was going to, honest. Then I suddenly thought what Mr. Baskin might do to me if he found out I’d been faking and hadn’t put up a fight. So I thought I’d better carry on faking. I didn’t even yell when Mr. Baskin booted me in the ribs.”

Frost puffed out the tiniest stream of smoke through compressed lips.

“So tell me about Stan Laurel. Describe him.”

Croll gave a noncommittal shrug. “Medium height, medium build. I hardly saw him.” His nostrils twitched as the smoke from the inspector’s cigarette wafted over. “I couldn’t half do with a fag, Mr. Frost.”

“You’ll have a lighted fag stuck right up your arse if you can’t come up with a better description than that, Tommy boy,” said Frost.

Blinking hard, Croll gulped as he tried to think of something that would satisfy the inspector. “Well, he stunk of scent… after-shave, I suppose… and he had these poncey shoes on.”

Frost caught his breath. “What sort of shoes?”

“Expensive shoes. You could see the quality they must have cost a packet. As I lay on the floor he stood near me, his shoes inches away from my face. I know them off by heart. Sort of brown and cream with a woven pattern.”

The inspector stretched his arms out above his head, then massaged the back of his neck. “You might have helped us there, Tommy.” He heaved himself up from the chair. “You might have helped us a lot. Now, we can either lock you up or set you free and let Mr. Baskin know where you are. What do you prefer?”

“Locked up, Mr. Frost.”

“Well,” smiled Frost as if bestowing a great kindness, ‘as a favour to you.” He shook some cigarettes from his packet and pushed them over, then he called in the uniformed man and asked him to lock up the prisoner. That done, he flopped back into the chair, clasped the back of his neck with his interlocked fingers, and purred contentedly at tjbte ceiling.

“Have I missed something?” asked Webster.

A beam from Frost. “I’ve got a feeling in my water, son. One of my hunches.”

“Amaze me with it,” Webster said without enthusiasm.

“Fancy shoes, son. Brown-and-cream fancy shoes. Roger Miller has got a wardrobe full of them; we saw them when we had that little nose around his flat.”

“Thousands of people have got brown-and-cream shoes,” said Webster as he sneaked a look at his watch. He wanted to be in the canteen for lunch at the same time as Susan Harvey and was hoping that this bumbling half-wit of an inspector wouldn’t detain him much longer.

But Frost had no intention of being hurried. “Try this out for a scenario, son. Roger is in Baskin’s ribs for a lot of money. He knows Baskin will get very nasty if he isn’t paid.”

“We’ve been through all this,” sighed Webster.

“That was when I thought Baskin had nicked Roger’s motor. Just hear me out,” insisted Frost. “Roger hasn’t got the money to settle his gambling debt, so he gets the bright idea of stealing it from Harry Baskin. He gets his girl friend with the mole on her bum to help she’s got all the inside gen and she’s the one who phones pretending to be the nurse, while Roger, in his Stan Laurel mask, does the dirty deed.”

“It’s a possible theory,” sniffed Webster, patently unimpressed and more concerned with getting this stupid conversation over and done with.

“I haven’t finished, son.” Frost stood up and began to pace about the room. “I’ve always worried about the way that licence plate came off the Jag. But what if it was meant to come off?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“They knew what Baskin would do to them if he ever suspected, so they badly wanted an alibi. An alibi that would put Roger miles away. Everyone knows his flash motor. So the girl friend puts on one of Roger’s caps, drives the Jag round and round the old people’s flats, bashing into dustbins, trumpeting away at the horn, making sure no-one could avoid seeing the car. And just in case no-one got the registration number, she chucks the licence plate out of the window for the cops to find. When the police followed it up, Roger would say, “Yes, officer, it was I who caused the public nuisance,” pay his fine and for fifty quid he’s bought himself a cast-iron alibi for the time of the robbery. What went wrong, of course, was the girl knocking down that old man. That sodded everything up. There was no way Roger was going to say he was driving after that.” He sneaked a glance across to Webster to see how this was being received.

It wasn’t being received too well. Webster immediately saw the flaw in the reasoning. “Very ingenious… except for the fact that Miller didn’t owe Baskin any money. He’d settled his debts two days before the robbery.”

Frost stopped dead in his tracks. “Damn and bloody blast!” he shouted. “I’d forgotten all about that.”

The door opened and the sergeant from the motor pool walked in. “Been looking for you everywhere, Mr. Frost,” he said. “You borrowed a car from the pool this morning.”

“Did I?” said Frost, a nasty feeling of more trouble starting to creep up his back.

“Yes, sir. When that stolen Vauxhall was found you wanted to get over there in a hurry. You told us your assistant was using your own car so you took one from the pool and promised you’d bring it straight back.”

“We came back in your Cortina,” said Webster.

Damn! thought Frost. I must have left the flaming pool car down that lane. He patted his pockets for the keys. He didn’t have them. “I must have left them in the ignition,” he admitted sheepishly. “Still, no problem. I’ll nip over and bring it back. I know where it is.”

“You don’t know where it is, Mr. Frost,” the sergeant told him grimly. “At this moment it’s being hauled up from the bottom of a canal in Lexington. Lexington police have arrested two joyriders.”

“Bum holes!” said Frost, now feeling very depressed. “I don’t think it’s going to be my day.”

Thursday day shift night shift

It wasn’t going to be Webster’s day either. Before he had the chance to explain about his lunch date with Susan, he was dragged by the inspector out through the back way to the car park. Frost was anxious to make himself scarce before Mullett learned about the pool car fiasco.