R. Wingfield - A Touch of Frost

Another roar of laughter from upstairs. The Chief Constable must have told his unfunny joke and Mullett’s pants would be wet from uncontrolled giggling. Frost stared at the ceiling sadly, then brightened up. Surely Mullett and the Chief Constable wouldn’t stick it out right to the bitter end. As soon as they’d left, he’d be up there, and would he make up for lost time! He ambled over to the desk and offered Wells a cigarette.

“Ta, Jack.” Wells flinched back as the flame from Frost’s gas lighter seared his nose. “You’ll never guess what Mullett’s latest is: He reckons the lobby wants brightening up. He only wants vases of bleeding flowers all over the place.”

Frost was only half listening. For some reason the face of Ben Cornish swam up in his mind, the dead eyes reproaching him for something he had overlooked.

Then he realized he hadn’t told Wells who the body in the toilet was.

“Ben Cornish? Oh no!” Wells slumped down in his chair. Cornish was one of his regulars, nothing too serious… public nuisance, drunk and disorderly… but lately he had been on drugs. Hard drugs. “He was only in here a couple of days ago, stinking of me ths and as thin as a bloody rake. I gave him a quid to get something to eat.”

“I doubt if he bought food with it, Bill. I don’t think he’s eaten properly for weeks. When I saw him tonight he looked like a Belsen Camp victim on hunger strike. I reckon the jar of his stomach contents tomorrow will be absolutely empty. Whatever he bought with your quid was squirted straight into his arm with a rusty syringe.”

“I bet his mother took it badly.”

Frost smacked his forehead with his palm. “Damn and bloody blast… I knew there was something I’d forgotten to do. I’ll have to nip round there. Any chance of some tea first?”

“Shouldn’t be long, Jack,” said Wells, adding with a note of smug triumph, “Webster’s making it.”

Frost stepped back in amazement. “How did you get him to do that?”

“Simple. I gave him an order. Why shouldn’t he make it? He’s only a bloody constable.”

“He may be just a bloody constable now,” said Frost, ‘but he used to be an inspector, and half the time he thinks he still is one.”

The subject of their conversation, Detective Constable Martin Webster, twenty-seven, bearded, was in the washroom filling the battered kettle from the hot tap for speed. He banged six fairly clean mugs on to a tin tray and slurped in the milk from a cardboard carton.

Is this what he had come to? A flaming tea boy? Six months ago he had been an inspector. Detective Inspector Martin Webster, wonder boy of Braybridge Division. Braybridge was a large town some forty-three miles from Denton.

Shipping him to this dump called Denton was part of his punishment, just in case being demoted wasn’t enough, and the cherry on the cake was being saddled with that stupid, sloppy, bumbling oaf Jack Frost, who wouldn’t have been tolerated as a constable in Braybridge, let alone an inspector. How did a clown like Frost make the rank? Someone had tried to tell him that the man had won a medal, but he wasn’t swallowing that… not unless they handed out medals for sheer incompetence. Police Superintendent Mullett, the Divisional Commander, seemed to dislike Frost with the same intensity as he detested Webster. “I’m not happy having you in my division,” Mullett had told him. “I accepted you under protest. One further lapse and you’re out…”

So how did Frost manage to get Mullett to recommend him for promotion? Webster smiled ruefully to himself. It probably helped that Frost didn’t stagger into the station roaring drunk and punch his superior officer on the jaw. The memory made him shake his right hand. His knuckles still ached. So hard did he clout Detective Chief Inspector Hepton, that he believed, at the time, he had broken the bones of his hand.

He’d remember that night as long as he lived. The day before, he’d had that damn-awful row with his wife, Janet. The rows had been getting nasty, but this one was the worst ever. Janet didn’t know how badly things had been going for him at the station. There had been complaints about his treatment of suspects. All right, perhaps he had been a mite overzealous, but he was getting results. But then there had been those two incidents, one after the other, where one prisoner had a black eye, and the other bruised ribs, and they’d screamed ‘police brutality’. Both had been resisting arrest and were swinging punches, but Detective Chief Inspector Hepton had preferred to believe them rather than one of his own officers. Hepton had threatened to take him off CID work and put him back into uniform.

He hadn’t told any of this to Janet. All she got was his bitterness, his resentment, and his temper. He couldn’t remember how that last row started. It had built up until he swore at her and called her filthy names. Reacting angrily, she had whipped her hand across his face. He deserved it. That’s what made it so hard to take: He bloody deserved it. He should have let it go, apologized, begged her forgiveness. But he had reacted without thought, the back of his hand cracking across her mouth, splitting her lip, making it bleed. She just looked at him with contempt, face white, blood trickling, then she slowly walked out, slamming the door behind her.

Later, the phone call from her mother’s, saying she was leaving him.

That’s when he should have swallowed his pride and gone after her. Instead he preferred to wallow in self-pity and drink himself stupid on the contents of the cocktail cabinet.

And when he finally staggered into the station, unshaven, eyes red-rimmed, there was Hepton, Chief Inspector-bloody-Hepton, waiting for him, barring his way, that nagging, jarring voice scratching away at his raw nerve ends like a fingernail dragged down a blackboard.

And then things were very blurred. He recalled flinging a punch. An almighty punch which spun Hepton around, knocked him into a filing cabinet, and sent him crashing to the floor. Then the room was full of people, angry, shouting, holding him back. Someone must have taken him home because he next remembered waking in his own bed the following morning, his head split by wedges, hoping against hope that it had all been some ghastly drunken nightmare. But Janet wasn’t in bed with him. The house was empty, her clothes gone, and his fist swollen and hurting like hell.

Suspension, Disciplinary Tribunal, demotion to constable, and transfer to Denton and to Jack Frost, the cretin of the year.

“Webster. How much longer are you going to be making that bloody tea?”

Wells’s voice, calling from the lobby, dragged him back to the present. The room seemed to be in a thick mist, outlines blurred and indistinct as the kettle boiled its head off. A roar of delight from the party upstairs. God, how he could do with a drink. Just one. But they’d warned him. Be drunk on duty just one more time…

He turned off the gas ring and made the tea.

In the lobby, Frost and Wells were huddled together exchanging moans. Young Collier was at the Underwood, splashing correction fluid over a typed report as if he were painting a wall. Frost lowered his eyes guiltily as Webster handed him the mug of tea, knowing that he should have taken the detective constable with him on the Ben Cornish job. Indeed, it would have been better if he had then Webster would have been the one floundering about in the wet and nasty instead of him. But he was finding the hair shirt of Webster’s permanent scowl a mite too much to take without the odd break. He pulled the mug toward him. “Thanks, son. Looks good.”

Wells accepted his tea without comment, but Collier, looking up from his remedial work, said, “Thanks very much, Inspector… sorry, I mean Constable,” which provoked a muffled snort of suppressed laughter from the sergeant.