R. Wingfield - A Touch of Frost

When he got back to the office, Detective Sergeant Hanlon was chatting up Webster. Hanlon, beaming from ear to ear was bursting with news.

Sod your news, thought Frost, you listen to mine. “We’ve caught the rapist, Arthur. The flower of Denton womanhood can safely walk knicker less in Denton Woods tonight, as long as you stay at home.”

Hanlon giggled. “Well done, Jack.”

Frost slumped into his chair. On his desk was a subscription list for the widow of PC Shelby. He saw Mullett was down for fifty pounds so, out of spite, he put himself down for sixty, which he could ill afford, and tossed it into the out-tray. He looked up to see Hanlon grinning down.

“Why are you still hanging about, Arthur? Do you fancy me or something?”

Hanlon pulled up a chair. He had a lot to tell. Charlie Bravo had sped off to the pawnbroker’s shop in time to arrest the man who was trying to sell Glickman a further quantity of stolen sovereigns.

“Marvellous!” exclaimed Frost. The earlier message from Control had completely slipped his mind. “I’m solving so many cases these days, I can’t keep track of them all.”.

“You haven’t solved this one,” retorted Hanlon. “I have. They’ve coughed the lot and I’ve charged them.” He handed Frost the carbon copies of two statements.

“Why are there two statements?”

“Because there are two prisoners,” explained Hanlon. “They’re brothers.”

Responding to Glickman’s phone call, Charlie Bravo had roared round to the pawnbroker’s and apprehended Terry Fowler, twenty-four. Fowler had thirty-three Queen Victoria sovereigns in his possession. He was brought back to the station and searched. Six packets of a substance believed to be heroin were found in his jacket. The drug squad was informed, and a team went to Fowler’s digs, where they arrested his brother, Kevin, twenty-five. The room was systematically searched. Taped to the back of the wardrobe was a plastic bag packed tight with white powder, which tests confirmed to be heroin of the type being pushed around Denton for the past couple of weeks. The drug squad was overjoyed. They had found the two new pushers.

“The Drug boys will take all the credit for this, Arthur,” said Frost, skimming through the statements, ‘just as you’re trying to take all the credit from me.”

The brothers, Trevor and Kevin Fowler, came from Poplar, east London, but were now of no fixed address and were continually moving around the country. Two weeks ago they arrived in Denton, taking a room in a bed and breakfast boarding house near the railway station. The metropolitan police knew them and had tele printed details of their past form, which included petty theft, robbery with violence, and possession of drugs.

“If they’ve only been in Denton a couple of weeks,” observed Frost, ‘then we can’t push all those petty housebreakings on them.” This was a big disappointment. He had been hoping to clear up his backlog of unsolved burglaries in one fell swoop.

“They only admit to the sovereigns, Jack, not to anything else,” said Hanlon. He showed Frost the recovered coins. Thirty-three of them.

Tipping them on to his desk, Frost counted them. He only made it thirty-two. Webster counted them for him and made it thirty-three, which, added to the five already sold to Glickman, made a grand total of thirty-eight. Mrs. Carey had reported seventy-nine stolen, so where were the other forty-one? “Turn out your pockets, Arthur,” he said.

Hanlon grinned. “The drug squad tore their place apart, Jack. There were no more sovereigns. Both the brothers say that’s all there was. Mrs. Carey must have been mistaken.” v The inspector shook his head. “She never makes mistakes about money.” He scooped up the coins and returned them to the bag. “Still, I’ve got more important things to worry about. Now take all this junk off my desk, Arthur, and get the paperwork tied up. This is your case now.”

“You’re letting him have it?” asked Webster when Hanlon had left. “He only came in on it at the death.”

“I’ve got more than I can cope with, son,” said Frost. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Something was worrying him. “Those two blokes were only in Denton a couple of weeks. Ma Carey lives in a shitty little house down a back street. How come they picked on that house to rob? How, did they find out she had all that money?”

“They could have overheard someone talking about her,” suggested Webster.

“I suppose so,” said Frost, but he still looked doubtful.

“You’re not suggesting they’ve confessed to a crime they haven’t committed, are you?” asked Webster.

“Of course not, son.”

Webster fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter. “Do you want me to do the report on the rape arrest?” He knew that if he didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done.

“Yes please.” He gathered up the subscription list for Mrs. Shelby and took it out to Johnny Johnson in the lobby, where he received the sergeant’s congratulations on nabbing the “Hooded Terror’.

“You’ll be in all the papers tomorrow, Jack.”

“Unless something bigger breaks,” said Frost, ‘like Allen finding Shelby’s murderer.”

“Shouldn’t be long now,” said Johnson. “Stan Eustace can’t hide much longer.” The phone rang. He answered it. “And who is it speaking, please?” He offered the phone to Frost. “Lady for you, Jack. Won’t give her name.”

Even before he took the phone he knew it was Sadie Eustace, but he hoped against hope he was wrong.

“Jack?” she whispered.

He picked up the complete phone and moved as far away from Johnson as the cord would allow. “I can’t talk to you, Sadie,” he hissed into the mouthpiece. “I got in too much trouble last time.”

“You’ve got to help, Jack. Stan’s been in touch…”

He cut her short before she gave anything away. “Sadie, whatever you tell me, I am going to report it.”

“He’s frightened, Jack. The police have framed him for this killing and he’s terrified at what they might do when they catch him. He’ll give himself up to you if you meet him just you, no-one else.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s…” She broke off as a series of soft clicks cut into the conversation. “What was that?”

“No idea,” lied Frost, realizing that Allen had her line tapped.

But she knew what it was. “The bastards! They’ve bugged the phone!”

The line went dead.

He replaced the receiver and returned the phone to its original position. “Sadie Eustace,” he told Johnson. No point in keeping it a secret now. He thought for a second, then made his way to the murder incident room.

The room was empty except for Detective Sergeant Ingram crouched over a large Revox reel-to-reel tape recorder, looking tired and drawn as he listened through earphones to the replay of the conversation between Sadie and Jack Frost. Seeing Frost, he pulled the earphones off and rubbed his ears. Quickly, he scribbled a note on a pad and dropped it into an in-tray marked “Mr. Allen — Immediate’. “Pity she twigged,” he said. “She was going to tell us where Eustace was hiding.”

“A great pity,” agreed Frost, looking around the room. Empty desks, silent phones, and the wall map marked with red pins indicating the numerous Stan Eustace sightings. “Where is everybody?”

“Tea break. They should be back in a minute.” He shook his head at Frost’s offer of a cigarette. “We could do with a lead,” he went on, knuckling tired eyes. “He seems to have gone to ground.”

“Mr. Allen’s only looking for Stan, then?” asked Frost. “He isn’t keeping his options open?”

“Why should we look for anyone else?” asked Ingram in a puzzled voice.