R Wingfield - A Killing Frost

He swung his feet on to the floor and dragged on his clothes.

Please let it be a bleeding waste of time.

Even the lamp-post had been vandalised: a jumble of coloured wires dangled forlornly from the switch box. The Council had obviously seen no need to spend money on repairing it in a deserted street, so the road was in total darkness as his car slithered to a halt outside the boarded-up butcher’s shop. His headlights picked up the shape of an abandoned car further up the road. That’s all this place was now – a dumping ground for unwanted junk and, perhaps, unwanted bodies. It was a bitterly cold night, but warm inside the car with the heater going full blast. He leant back in his seat. Couldn’t this wait until the morning?

Frost poked a cigarette in his mouth and smoked to delay making a decision. Sod it, he had no flaming choice. He’d come this far and he wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep not knowing whether or not bite-sized chunks of the missing nurse were rotting away in there.

Chucking his cigarette away, he stepped out into the cold street. He patted his pocket. The key! Sod it, he’d forgotten the flaming key! The perfect excuse to go back home and leave it until the morning. But he’d opened countless doors before when he didn’t have a key.

Clicking on the torch, he studied the lock. It didn’t look too substantial. A couple of well- placed kicks might be the Open Sesame. He gave the handle a tentative turn, just in case, and to his surprise the door swung open, creaking like something from a Hammer horror film. Frost paused, screwing his face in thought, trying to remember if he had locked up when he was here earlier. He could swear he had. He seemed to remember turning the key, then trying the door to make sure it was properly locked. Well, it wasn’t locked now, so he clearly hadn’t. Pushing the door open further, he stepped into the foul-smelling, hostile dark.

Bang on cue, just when he needed it most, his torch gave a death rattle, flickered and died. Sod it! He knew it was on its last legs, so why the hell hadn’t he changed the battery? Another good excuse for leaving the search until later – perhaps even sending Taffy Morgan in. He shook the thought away. One of the penalties of rank was that you didn’t ask your subordinates to do things you wouldn’t do yourself.

Frost gave the torch a couple of slaps against the side of his leg and frightened it into spitting out a feeble, quivering beam, which waited until he was inside the refrigeration room before cutting out completely. All his shakings and bangings failed to give it the kiss of life.

A clunk. The damn door had shut itself behind him, enclosing him in pitch blackness you could cut with a butcher’s cleaver. His shoe slithered on something slimy and nasty and the smell in the enclosed space was making him gag. He fumbled in his pocket for his cigarette lighter and flicked it on, hoping the gas would last out. The flame threw out hardly any light, but at least he could now locate the heap of rotting meat. How the hell was he going to examine it? One thing was sure – he wasn’t going to touch that heap of smouldering putrescent muck with his bare hands.

He gave a rotting carcass a tentative kick and it tottered to the floor with a squelch, exposing something white behind. What the hell was it? He bent and held the cigarette lighter closer, then his heart skipped a beat before hammering away at top speed. Marble-white and stained with blood.

It was a hand. A severed human hand.

Frost stepped back in horror and disgust, then suddenly he felt his feet give way from under him. As he tried to regain his balance, the lighter and the torch dropped from his grasp, landing with a squelch in the heap of putrid filth. There was a thud as his back hit the floor, then a louder thud as his head cracked on a tile. He was momentarily stunned. White dots did a frantic dance in the darkness. His hand, which he had automatically used to try to break his fall, was hurting like hell, firing up bursts of teeth-gritting pain. He must have broken his flaming wrist.

He tried to move his head but a stab of pain made him stop. It hurt. Bloody hell, how it flaming hurt, and his back wasn’t much better. He was smothered in muck which stank to high heaven, and he was in agony. He couldn’t see a bloody thing and he wasn’t going to delve down blindly in the heap to try and find his lighter.

At first, pushing himself up with his good hand didn’t work. His feet slithered from under him and he was once more on his back. The pain almost made him sick. His clothes were a sodden mess and he tried not to think of the fat, bloated maggots he had seen crawling over their food supply earlier that day, the sodding maggots that had made him return for another look. Why the bloody hell had he come back? More importantly, why the bloody hell had he come back on his own?

At last he managed to scramble unsteadily to his feet. His head spun. He had lost all sense of direction. Where the hell was the door? He wanted to get out bloody fast. The back of his head was still stabbing with pain. He touched it gingerly, but didn’t know if the sticky mess he felt was from his own blood or the animal remains. A shake of the head to try and clear it made it ache even more.

Completely disorientated, he stretched an arm out in front of him and carefully moved forward, inch by inch, to avoid stepping on anything that would send him crashing down again, trying to locate the wall. Where the hell was it? It seemed miles away. Then his fingers touched cold tiles. The wall – but which way was the door? Pressing a sweat-soaked hand on the tiles, he followed the wall in a clockwise direction.

He stopped dead.

The hairs on the back of his neck prickled.

There was someone else in the pitch-dark room with him.

He couldn’t see anything. He couldn’t hear anything. But he knew. He just bloody knew…

That flaming car parked up the road. What a stupid prat he was. Of course the sodding thing wasn’t abandoned. It was in too good nick to be abandoned… and the unlocked door…

Lewis! Who else would be lurking around at this time of night? It had to be Lewis, standing there in the dark, probably running a testing thumb along the blade of his butcher’s knife to make sure it was sharp enough to chop up a nosy-parker, flat-footed copper.

Frost cleared his throat. ‘I can see you. I’m a police officer

… Let’s have a bit of light, please.’

The tiled walls flung his words back. All he could hear was the hammering of his heart.

‘Don’t sod me about, Mr Lewis. I know it’s you. Let’s get out into the open and talk about this.’

Nothing… unless… Breathing – he thought he could hear breathing…

He held his breath until his lungs ached and listened, ears straining to detect the slightest sound… Nothing. There was no one there. His bleeding imagination was playing tricks again.

He expelled his breath in a sigh of relief and gulped down a lungful of fetid air. Frost slid his sweaty hand along the tiles, still seeking the elusive door that would let him out of this stinking hell hole and into the fresh air.

Then the blinding beam of a torch hit him in the face.

He couldn’t move. The shock made him freeze. He tried to say something. The words wouldn’t come.

A voice broke the silence. ‘What are you doing here?’

Frost screwed his eyes up against the blinding glare. Through half-closed eyes, with torchlight bouncing off the wall, he could just about make out the figure of Lewis. And his worst fear was realised – the bastard had a knife in his other hand.

‘We had a report someone was trying to break in, Mr Lewis. They sent me to check it out.’ He tried to sound convincing.