He replaced the handset. “Back to the station, son.” Webster reminded him they hadn’t yet called on Ben Cornish’s family. “Hell,” said Frost wearily, ‘we’ll have to do that first.” As they were on their way to the house, he remembered that he had meant to ask Tom Croll some more questions about the Coconut Grove robbery while they were at the hospital. His finger gave his scar a bashing. There was so much to be done, and he didn’t seem to be getting through any of it.
Then he saw her. “Stop the car!”
Webster slammed on the brakes and the car squealed to a halt
A young girl in school uniform was looking into the window of a dress shop. Frost’s hand was moving toward the door handle when the girl turned and stared directly at him.
She was blonde, wore glasses, and looked nothing like Karen Dawson.
“Drive on, son,” said Frost.
Wednesday day shift (3)
Frost banged the knocker a couple of times. This started a chain reaction of noise from inside the house. A dog barked, setting off a baby’s crying. Footsteps thudded down uncarpeted stairs; a sharp, angry shout followed by a yelp from the dog, then the front door opened.
“Police,” said Frost. He didn’t have to show his warrant card. Danny Cornish knew him of old.
Danny didn’t look at all like his brother. Four years younger, stockily built, he had thick black hair and bright red cheeks which betrayed the family’s gypsy origins. His meaty hand was hooked in the collar of a black-and-brown mongrel dog whose immediate ambition seemed to be to sink his teeth into the throats of the two policemen.
Webster stepped back a couple of paces as the dog’s jaws snapped at air. Frost was looking warily at Danny, whose face reflected the savagery and hatred of the dog and who seemed all too ready to let his hand slip from the collar. The mongrel, almost foaming at the mouth, was getting more and more frantic as its efforts to rip the callers to pieces were frustrated.
One eye on the mongrel, his foot ready to kick, Frost said, “You’d better let us in, Danny. It’s about your brother.”
The man cuffed the dog. It stopped barking but, instead, began making menacing noises at the back of its throat, its lip quivering and curling back to expose yellow, pointed teeth.
“Ben? What’s he done now?”
“Don’t let the bleeders in.” Behind him, advancing out of the dark of the passage, they could see a young woman, not much more than nineteen. She carried a ten-month-old baby, its squalling almost drowning the snarls from the near-apoplectic dog. This was Jenny, Danny Cornish’s common-law wife, once pretty, now hard-faced, her features twisted with hate.
His head snapped around to her. “Shove it, for Christ’s sake. And keep that bloody kid quiet!” His angry tone caused the infant to howl even louder, and this, in turn, spurred the mongrel on to greater efforts. Cornish yanked its collar and dragged the animal down the passage where he slung it out into the back yard. As he slammed the door shut, there was a resounding thud as the dog hurled itself against it, trying to get back in.
“In here.” He took them into more noise a small kitchen where a whistling kettle on a gas ring was spitting steam and screaming for attention in competition with a transistor radio blasting pop music at top volume. Favouring neither, he pulled the kettle from the ring and snapped off the radio.
At the sink a gaunt, straight-backed woman of sixty, hair and eyes jet black, a cigarette dangling from her lips, was methodically dicing vegetables with a lethal-looking knife. She didn’t look up as they entered. “It’s the police, Ma,” said Danny. “About Ben.” She turned, hostile and belligerent, then she seemed to read something in Frost’s face. Carefully, she set the knife down on the draining board, then wiped her hands on her skirt. “Sit down if you want to,” she said.
They sat at the stained kitchen table with its cover of old newspapers. Frost fiddled for his cigarettes. He needed a smoke to bolster his courage.
Webster’s foot was nudging something. A large cardboard box tucked out of sight under the table. He bent and lifted it up. An unpacked VHS video recorder. He looked at the man. “I suppose you’ve got a receipt for this.”
Frost winced. “For Christ’s sake, son, there’s a time and a place …”
But he was too late to stop Danny from snatching an old Oxo tin from the dresser and emptying the contents out on the table in front of the detective constable. “Yes, I have got a receipt.” He scrabbled amongst odd pieces of paper, then, in triumph, stuck a printed form under webster’s nose. “Here it is. You’d better check it in case it’s a forgery.”
Webster took the receipt, read it briefly, then handed it back. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry you haven’t caught us out, you mean?” The receipt was stuffed back in the Oxo tin. “Now say what you’ve got to say and get the hell out of here.”
Stone-faced, Webster stared out through the uncurtained kitchen window into the back yard, which was strewn with parts of a dismantled motorbike. The dog had given up trying to break down the door and was nosing a
It had been days since he’d had any proper sleep.
“The lavatories where Ben was killed,” answered Frost. “We should have gone there first people have been peeing all over the evidence since eight o’clock this morning.”
Webster reminded him that the Divisional Commander was expecting him at the station to see the MP and his son.
Frost gave his forehead a wallop with his palm. “Flaming rectums. Mullett will never forgive me for keeping dear old Sir Charlie-boy waiting. Right, son, this is what we’ll do. I’ll drop you off at the toilets. Turf everyone out whether they’re finished or not, and seal the place off. Then search it from top to bottom for any sign of Ben’s carrier bag, or blood or anything I should have spotted last night. And radio the station for a scene-of-crime officer to help. He can take photographs of the graffiti and dust the toilet seats for fingerprints. I’ll drive on to the station for the hit-and-run interview. Remind me when we meet up that we’ve got that other security guard to interview about the robbery the one Harry Baskin duffed up. Oh, and remind me about seeing Karen Dawson’s mother.”
Webster nodded wearily. He would never get used to Frost’s method of working. Webster liked order and forward planning. Frost seemed to thrive on chaos, lurching from one crisis to the next. He considered reminding the inspector that they still hadn’t started on the overtime returns, let alone finished the crime statistics, but what was the point?
Frost shouldered through the swing doors of the lobby carrying, in a large polythene bag, the filthy, vomit- sodden clothes removed from Ben Cornish.
“Bought yourself a new suit, Jack?” called Johnny
Johnson. “I must say it’s an improvement on the one you’re wearing.”
“It’s cleaner, anyway,” said Frost, holding the bag under Johnny’s nose and watching him recoil. “I might do a swap.” As he swung off to his office to make out the forensic examination request, the sergeant, reaching for the phone, called him back.
“Mr. Mullett’s been screaming for you for the past half-hour. He wanted to know the minute you arrived.”
“I can’t think what’s keeping the inspector, Sir Charles,” said Mullett for the sixth time, his lips aching from the effort of maintaining the false smile. His phone rang. He snatched it up. “What? No, don’t send him in. I’ll be right out.” He expanded the smile. “Mr. Frost has just arrived, Sir Charles. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll pop out and brief him.”
As he passed through his outer office he instructed Miss Smith to make some more coffee. Strong this time. He felt he would need it.
Even before he reached the lobby he could hear Frost’s raucous laughter bellowing down the corridor. And there he was, slouched over the counter, exchanging coarse comments with the station sergeant, completely indifferent to keeping his Divisional Commander, and an important V.I. P, waiting.
