Webster looked embarrassed. “Some of these modern bathing suits that girls wear… the bottom half is cut very low… they expose parts of the lower stomach… the very low lower stomach.”
Frost looked at him blankly, then his eyebrows rocketed up as the penny dropped. “You don’t mean…? Are you trying to tell me that women actually shave themselves down there before they put their bathing drawers on?” He stared hard at Webster. “You’re having me on.”
“It’s a fact,” Webster insisted “My wife uses one.” His eyes glazed reflectively. “She looked a cracker in a bikini.”
Frost regarded the dainty shaver, shaking his head in awe. “Now I’ve heard everything. I wish the hospital had one of these when I had my appendix out. Before the operation they sent in a short-sighted nurse with a Sweeny Todd cutthroat. That was the first time in my life I really prayed.”
He snapped the lid shut and poked the case back under the bed, wondering what a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl would be doing with a thing like this.
“By your left foot,” called Webster, pointing to the missing lighter.
Frost retrieved it, lit up, and flopped back on the bed. He yawned. “I could stay here all night, son, especially if young Karen, all fresh, sweet, and clean-shaven, would slip under the sheets beside me.” He turned his head and saw the photographs. Two of them on the bedside cabinet, propped up against a tiny Snoopy digital alarm clock.
He sat up to examine them. One showed Karen in the white ballet dress from the wardrobe, standing en pointe, hands outstretched, looking demure and sweet. The other was a beach scene, brilliant sky, silver sand. Two girls — one, young Debbie minus her glasses, flat-chested in a one-piece dark-blue bathing costume, looking as embarrassed as if she were stark naked; next to her, smiling with the sensuous mouth she had inherited from her mother, Karen Dawson, long-legged, well-developed, posing in a white two-piece swimsuit that caressed and stroked every curve of her young body. An entirely different Karen from the scrubbed schoolgirl in the other photograph.
“No sign of five o’clock shadow,” muttered Frost, looking closely before handing the prize over to Webster.
The detective constable winced. Anything prurient and Frost flogged it to death. But the photograph certainly showed the girl in a different light. Unlike the inspector, Webster wasn’t convinced the girl had left home of her own accord. There was one way to check, of course. He asked Frost to get off the bed, then he rummaged under the pillow and pulled back the bedclothes.
“I don’t think you’ll find her in the bed,” said Frost. He had pulled out the drawers of the bedside cabinet and was rummaging through the contents.
“I was checking to see if her pyjamas were there,” sniffed Webster. “If she’d done a bunk I would have expected her to take them with her. They’re not here.”
“But that doesn’t mean she’s taken them with her,” said Frost, pushing the drawers shut. “She might be like Marilyn Monroe and wear nothing in bed but her aftershave.” He lifted the top sheet and brought it to his nose. “Tell you what, though, my hairy son, she wears a pretty sexy perfume in bed… smells like that stuff farmers use to get pigs to mate. Mullett’s wife smothers herself in it.”
Webster took a sample sniff. It certainly was pretty heady stuff for a fifteen-year-old. He was reassessing young Karen by the minute. “Could we check the bathroom to see if her toothbrush and stuff have gone?” he asked. “No girl would run away without her toothbrush.”
“Good idea,” said Frost, “I’m dying for a pee.”
The first door they tried led to the Dawsons’ bedroom, a vast room with a canopied bed, the walls covered in some kind of padded velvet. The next door opened on to the bathroom, fully tiled in red Italian marble. It contained a large circular sunken bath that could have doubled as a swimming pool. The bath had taps made of gold, as did the matching sink basin. A red carpet matched the tiles, and all the towels matched the carpet.
Frost surveyed the bath in awe. “If I had a bath like that, son, I’d definitely have to get out if I wanted a pee.”
The bathroom cabinet was concealed behind a mirror over the sink. Webster opened it and was searching through its contents when the door burst open and Dawson charged in. He reacted angrily when he saw what Webster was doing.
“Who gave you permission to go through our private possessions?”
“We’re checking to see if your daughter’s toothbrush is still here, sir,” said Webster patiently. He had found two toothbrushes in a beaker, one red, the other green. He showed them to Dawson. “Do either of these belong to Karen? It is important, sir.”
“Karen’s brush is orange.” He pushed Webster out of the way and rummaged impatiently through the cabinet. “It should be here somewhere.” He yelled for his wife to come up. “Karen’s toothbrush he snapped as she entered the bathroom, ‘where is it?” He moved so she could get to the cabinet.
Standing on tiptoe, she peered inside, moving things out of the way.
“It should be here,” she said.
“I didn’t ask where it should be,” Dawson told her sarcastically, “I asked where it was. Apparently, it’s important.”
“It isn’t here,” Clare said eventually. “None of Karen’s stuff is here her toilet bag, flannel, toothpaste…”
Webster leaned against the wall and folded his arms. Annoyingly, it looked as if Frost’s theory was correct. The girl had run away.
“If Karen took her toilet things with her,” Frost told the parents, ‘it does rather suggest she went of her own free will.”
Dawson’s face reddened to match the Italian tiles. “Are you suggesting Karen has run away from home? You’re an idiot, man. A bloody idiot. You don’t know my daughter. She loved her home. She wouldn’t do such a thing.”
“Lots of teenagers do it, Mr. Dawson,” said Webster. “Not necessarily because of anything to do with home. There could be trouble at school… or an upset with a boy friend.”
Dawson regarded the detective constable as if he were an imbecile. “A boy friend? My Karen? She’s only fifteen, for God’s sake, a mere child! And what about that man Debbie saw? What is he supposed to be, a mirage… a teenage sex fantasy?”
“I’m not convinced she saw anyone, sir,” Frost said. “She had doubts herself.” He buttoned up his mac to show he was ready to leave.
“So you intend doing nothing?”
“Not a lot we can do,” said Frost. “We’ll issue her description, circulate her photograph, ask everyone to keep an eye open for her. I don’t think she’ll be away for long.”
They heard a phone ringing. Dawson snapped his fingers for his wife to answer, but when Frost suggested the caller might be Karen, he dashed out to answer it himself.
Frost sat down on the toilet seat and lit up his thirty-eighth cigarette of the day. He gave the woman a friendly smile. “Anything you want to tell us while your husband isn’t here, Mrs. Dawson?”
Her face went white, then she pretended to be puzzled. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Frost shrugged. “Then it’s my mistake, Mrs. Dawson.” He stood up as her husband returned. “It’s for you, Inspector Denton Police Station. You can use the phone in Karen’s room.”
The caller was Bill Wells. To Frost’s delight, he could hear the noise of the party in the background. There was still a chance he would make it.
“Hello Jack,” Wells intoned in his usual gloomy voice, “Can you talk freely?”
“Yes,” confirmed Frost.
“What’s the score with Karen Dawson?”
“Zero. Her old man thinks she’s been kidnapped, but my bet is she’s done a bunk.”
“Don’t be too sure she’s all right, Jack. We might have found her.”
Frost caught his breath. Suddenly he felt cold and apprehensive.
“Might?”
“We’ve had an anonymous phone call. A man. He says there’s a girl’s body in Denton Woods. I think you’d better take a look.”
Dawson poked his head round the door. “Anything wrong, Inspector?”
