R Wingfield - A Killing Frost

Frost moved back to let the photographer and the mortuary attendant perform this task. One of the few perks of being an inspector was that you could get your subordinates to do the jobs you hated doing.

‘Hands tied behind her back by ligatures around the wrists,’ Drysdale intoned to his secretary. The clicking and purring of the camera was accompanied by the blinding glare of flash-guns as these details were recorded.

Frost moved forward so he could see better. Debbie’s back was criss-crossed with angry bruises and red weals. Her wrists were tied with tough twine; blood had seeped where it had bitten deeply, cutting into the flesh and making it red raw. Debbie must have struggled frantically to free herself.

Harding from Forensic cut the twine free from the wrists, leaving the complicated knots intact. He held it up to be photographed before placing it carefully into an evidence bag. He then took scrapings from each of the fingernails while the pathologist tapped his foot and sucked air through his teeth impatiently.

Drysdale then carried out a careful examination of the girl’s body, from the top of her head back down to her feet, stepping back and again waiting impatiently while Harding took swabs from the feet in case they yielded clues as to where she had been undressed and killed. He also took swabs from the weals on her back.

‘Now lay her on her back, please,’ said Drysdale, selecting another scalpel from the row of shining instruments laid out on a green cloth at the head of the autopsy table. He made a long, deep incision down the white flesh of the stomach. Again Frost turned his head away. After God knows how many post-mortems he had attended, he knew the routine off by heart. He knew the various stages without looking: the sounds, the scents, the whining and the burnt-flesh smell of the bone-saw as the whirring blade cut into the bone, the plopping noise, followed by the clang of the scales, as organs were weighed. He could never see the point of weighing the various organs. Drysdale’s secretary leant forward to take the reading from the scales. It was like buying offal from a butcher.

The organs were transferred to a plastic container ready for the mortuary attendant to replace them and stitch up the body after the pathologist had walked away from the carnage of his autopsy. Frost shot a quick glance at Kate Holby to see how she was taking it. She was white-faced and was biting her lip hard, but didn’t flinch when Drysdale’s knife made a delicate cut so he could peel the flesh of the face away from the skull, like removing a Hallowe’en mask.

Drysdale now bent down and parted the girl’s legs. ‘Much bruising. Sexual penetration took place shortly before death. She was not a virgin.’

Frost’s head shot up. Twelve years old and not a virgin? The boyfriend, who was now covered with a sheet on the other autopsy table, awaiting Drysdale’s attention… or the crocodile-tear-dropping bastard of a father?

The pathologist was now gently scraping with a spatula. ‘No trace of semen.’ He permitted himself a wry smile. ‘People know too much about DNA these days. It seems a condom was used.’ Dropping the spatula into a stainless-steel kidney bowl, he examined the rest of the body, which yielded nothing that would help. ‘Death by manual strangulation,’ he told Frost, ‘and she was brutally raped just before death.’ He prised open the girl’s mouth and shone a torch inside, the beam bouncing off perfect teeth. He then turned his attention to the eyes.

‘Any sign that she was gagged, Doc?’ asked Frost.

‘If there was, Inspector, you can be sure I would have mentioned it in the hope you were paying attention,’ sniffed the pathologist, as if explaining to a child.

‘Check again, Doc. It’s important’

Drysdale stared at Frost. ‘And why, pray, is it important?’

‘When she was being raped, she’d have screamed her bleeding head off. If there was no gag, she must have been somewhere where there was no chance of her screams being heard.’

Drysdale’s mouth twitched in annoyance, but he did a more thorough examination. ‘Definitely no sign of a gag. Her killer could have clamped his hand over her mouth.’

‘She’d have bitten the bastard’s fingers off,’ said Frost.

‘It’s for you to advance theories, not me,’ sniffed the pathologist. ‘I deal only with facts. May I now continue with this autopsy, or do you want me to examine everything all over again?’

‘No. You’ve been reasonably thorough, Doc,’ conceded Frost. ‘You carry on.’

Drysdale finished the examination of the girl without finding anything further that would help. They then moved to the boy on the other table.

‘Arms broken, both legs broken. He’s fallen or been dropped from a height of some twenty-four feet or so. His left leg would have been under him when he hit the ground and snapped at the ankle. Back of hands and knuckles badly bruised, two knuckles on right hand broken – they were hit hard with a stone of some sort. Grit embedded in palms. Back of skull caved in. A heavy, deliberate blow from a blunt instrument causing death.’

Drysdale took his fingernail scrapings and swabbed off some of the grit from the boy’s hands.

At last the double autopsy was over and Drysdale was washing his hands at the sink.

Frost ambled over to Kate Holby, who was talking to the photographer. ‘You all right, love?’

She smiled and nodded, but he could see her hands were shaking.

‘I hate it when it’s kids,’ said Frost.

Frost perched himself on the corner of the desk in the Incident Room and surveyed his team, who looked as tired and worn out as he felt. They had been searching, hoping to find the two kids alive, and now fatigue had hit them. And still there was no sign of Jan O’Brien.

Frost swilled down his tea and lit up. ‘As you know, we’ve found the missing girl, Debbie Clark – ’ He turned and jabbed a finger at the photograph on the pinboard. ‘Stripped, beaten, raped and strangled. And Thomas Harris, arms and legs broken and his skull caved in. He’d fallen or been pushed from a height of some twenty feet or more on to gravel. We’ve got to find the site where he fell. We’ve come up with no CCTV footage of the kids cycling through the town, so they presumably went out of town somewhere. I’m guessing the site will be remote because the girl wasn’t gagged and the poor little moo would have screamed her head off. So, somewhere remote, with a twenty-foot drop and surrounded by gravel. Start studying detailed maps and see if you come up with any thing. We’ve got the girl’s bike, we haven’t got the boy’s bike. I want it found. We covered a lot of places when we were searching for the bodies, so we can eliminate them.’ He looked out of the window. ‘It’s peeing with rain and too flaming dark to start looking tonight, so we’ll make an early start tomorrow. It should be light enough by seven, so meet here tomorrow morning at six thirty;’ A groan from his audience. ‘All right, if you don’t think that’s early enough, let’s make it five o’clock.’

PC Collier’s hand shot up. ‘What about the stake-out at the building-society cashpoints?’

‘Shit,’ said Frost. He’d forgotten about it again. Anyway, it was low priority now. ‘Thanks to our beloved commander showing County what a good boy he is by lending them more bodies than anyone else for the drugs bust, we now haven’t got the manpower. Our blackmailer might do the decent thing and give it a miss tonight in view of the weather, but if he doesn’t it’s only five hundred quid and Beazley can easily afford that. If he moans, we’ll have a whip-round for him.’ He looked up as Bill Wells came in.

‘Inspector, those bits of leg you keep finding.’