“The father of the missing schoolgirl. He wanted to know if there was any news. I told him we’d circulated her description.”
Frost nodded. “Ah yes. Young, clean-cut, clean-shaven Karen. If she doesn’t turn up soon, I’ll have to try and sneak a chat with the mother without the father being present. There are one or two things about Karen that don’t quite add up.” His attention was caught by a note in his own writing which he had circled in red as important.
He studied it with a puzzled frown. “PM 10.00? We’re not expecting Mrs. Thatcher are we?”
“The post-mortem,” explained Webster wearily.
Frost tipped the remainder of his tea into the waste bin and reached for his mac. “Life is one round of constant pleasure. Come on, son, we mustn’t be late.”
There was a brisk knock at the door. “Not today, thank you,” called Frost.
The door opened and Mullett walked in. His expression didn’t indicate that his life was one round of constant pleasure. Frost quickly pulled the crime statistics from his in-tray and put them in the centre of his desk as if he were working on them. “Sorry, Super. Didn’t know it was you.”
Mullett gazed stiffly around the room. What a shambles the place was. Piles of paper everywhere, even on the window ledge, where the piles were held down by unwashed teacups. There were even salted peanuts and bits of potato crisp dotted around the floor. “This office is a mess, Inspector. An utter and disgusting mess!”
“We were just about to tidy it up as you knocked, sir,” lied Frost cheerfully. “Shift the muck off that chair, son, so the Super can sit down.”
Webster removed the dog-eared stack of files, looked for somewhere to put them, then decided his own desk top was the only free space. He offered the chair to the Superintendent who declined it with a disdainful sniff. He wasn’t going to risk his brand-new uniform on that. His eye caught sight of the overtime returns in Frost’s in-tray. “Some talk of the men not getting their overtime payments for last month, Frost.”
“Yes,” agreed Frost. “It’s that bloody computer. It’s always going wrong.” He stared Mullett out, then remembered the busy morning he had planned. “Have you just come in to give me a bollocking, sir, or is it something important? I’ve got a hell of a lot to do. They’re filleting Ben Cornish down at the morgue in half an hour.”
“I’ve something more important for you than that,” snapped Mullett. “Roger Miller… the hit-and-run. I’m putting you in charge of the investigation.”
“Right, Super,” said Frost. “I’ll have the little bastard put away for you, don’t you worry.”
Mullett gritted his teeth and wished he hadn’t let Allen talk him into this. “You don’t understand, Frost,” he said, and told him just what was expected of him.
Sergeant Johnson, the duty station sergeant for the day shift, had been down to the cells to check on the occupants. He was irritated to find that Frost had let Wally Peters stay the night, with the inevitable result. The cell was being hosed down now.
“Mr. Frost!” he yelled sternly as Webster and the inspector cut across the lobby on their way to the car park.
“Yes, Johnny?” called Frost from the door.
“We’ve got a friend of yours downstairs. He’s piddling all over the floor and stinking the place out.”
Frost’s face creased in mock perplexity. “What is Mr. Mullett doing down there?” he asked.
Wednesday day shift (2)
He hovered in the hall, by the letter box, waiting, and as soon as the boy pushed the newspaper through he grabbed it, opening it up to the headlines. The big story was COACH CRASH HORROR FIVE KILLED! Nothing about the attack. He turned from page to page, his eyes racing over the various headlines. Nothing. Back to the front page. And there he found it. Four blurred lines of stop-press squeezed as an afterthought down in the bottom right-hand corner. Woman attacked in Denton Woods. A woman was assaulted and raped late last night in Denton Woods. Police are looking for a man believed to have carried out similar assaults in the area over the past few months.
Four lines! He felt like crying. It was so unfair. Part of his pleasure was reading about it afterward. Sometimes the papers included an interview with the girl in which she described her terror at what had happened. He loved reading about it. It made him feel excited all over again.
Four lines. Four miserable little lines. And the paper was lying this time. It said he had raped her. He hadn’t. He couldn’t. He had picked her because he thought she was a young, untouched schoolgirl. But she was a tart. A dirty bitch with painted breasts who sold herself to men and was probably crawling with disease. She’d even tried to pick him up two nights before. The cow, the slag. Wearing those clothes to lure him on.
He screwed up the paper and hurled it to the floor, then went into the bedroom and took the well-thumbed book from its hiding place. Time was running out. He would try again tonight. For a young one. He opened the book and started to read.
They had arranged the unpleasant jobs in this order: first, the call on Mrs. Cornish to break the news about her son, Ben; second, the post-mortem. But for Frost, arrangements were made be broken. There was another call he now wanted to make first. “A quick diversion, son,” he said, pulling the burglary report from his pocket and filling Webster in on Lil Carey and her sovereigns. “Could be the break we’re looking for with these petty robberies. Shouldn’t take us more than a couple of minutes.”
Webster looked at his wristwatch. There was no way they were going to make the post-mortem in time. They were late already, and here was Frost making yet another detour.
“Pull up there, son. By the lamppost.”
Sunford Street was a row of dreary-looking terraced houses. Out of the car, across the pavement, and they were in the porch of number 26, a house even drearier-looking than its neighbours. Frost hammered away at the knocker. They heard low, shuffling footsteps from within, then a harsh female voice demanding to know who they were.
“Jack the Ripper and Dr. Crippen,” called Frost through the letter box. “Come on, open up. You know bloody well who we are. You’ve been giving us the eyeball through the curtains ever since we pulled up.”
The clanking of chains being unhooked, keys turned and bolts drawn, then the door creaked open. Facing them was a small, wiry old dear wearing a moth-eaten fur coat over a too-long nightdress, the bottom of which was black with dirt where it constantly dragged over the floor. Her ensemble was topped by an ill-fitting, ill-suited brown nylon wig in a Shirley Temple bubble style; it wobbled and threatened to fall off each time she moved her head. Her face was knee-deep in make-up, the cheeks rouged like a clown’s. She was at least seventy years old and possibly much nearer eighty.
“Tell your mummy the cops are here,” said Frost.
“Never mind the jokes,” she retorted. “Where was you while I was being robbed?”
“Paddling in pee down a toilet,” answered Frost. “Can we come in, Lil?”
She took them into the front downstairs room, a cold, damp little box packed tight with heavily carved, gloomy furniture treacled with dark-oak varnish. In the centre of the room a knock-kneed table sagged under the weight of bundles of ancient newspapers tied with string. A piano, complete with candle holders, cringed sulkily in a corner; it, too, carried more than its fair share of bundled newspapers. The one window was hidden by thick, dusty, velvet curtains, tightly drawn so that passers-by couldn’t get a glimpse of the treasures within.
Frost thumbed through one of the yellowing newspapers. “Looks as if Mr. Atlee’s going to win the election,” he said. He pushed it away. “Right, Lil, so what happened?”
“You know what happened, Inspector,” she said, the wig wobbling furiously. “I put it all down in that form. It’s all rotten forms these days. Soon you’ll have to fill up a form to go to the lavatory.”
“I fill up a bucket myself,” murmured Frost. “My hairy colleague can’t read, Lil, so tell him what happened.”
She gave Webster a searching look and decided he just might be worthy of her confidence. “You listen, young man, because I’m only saying this once.”
The day before, she had travelled to Felby, a town some fifteen miles away, to visit her sick sister. She left the house at three, catching the 3.32 train from Denton Station. A few minutes before leaving she had checked that
