Mullett dredged his mind for some innocuous small talk. “Getting on all right?” he said at last.
“Yes, thank you, sir,” replied Webster tonelessly, his eyes fastened on Frost, who was leaning against the car, the handset to his ear, his expression revealing that something was terribly wrong.
Frost walked slowly back to the Commander, his face grim. “Mr.
Mullett,” he said.
Mullett felt the cold of approaching bad news and shivered. “Yes, Frost?”
“PC Shelby, sir. They’ve found him in a ditch about three miles from here, just off the new Lexington Road.”
“Is he all right?” whispered Mullett. A silly question because he already knew the answer. The expression on Frost’s face simply screamed it out.
Frost looked down at the blood on the lane. “No, sir. He’s dead.”
“That must be him,” said Webster as the car headlights picked out the figure of a man flagging him down. The man in a thick overcoat and muddy boots was a farm labourer. He had found the body.
“He’s down here,” said the man, his boots clomping as he took them down a winding lane that snaked back to the farm where he worked. They followed in silence. Tall boundary hedges on each side made the lane very dark. A little way down, and they could hear the gurgle of water. It reminded Frost of the previous night when he’d followed Dave Shelby down those steps to the body of Ben Cornish. The clomping of boots stopped. The man pointed to where the lane started to make a lazy curve and where a drainage ditch, some two feet deep, hugged the side of a hedge-bordered field. From behind the hedge the plaintive lowing of cattle quivered gently in the darkness.
“He’s in there,” said the farm labourer. “In the ditch.” He wasn’t going any farther. He had seen it once. He didn’t want to see it again.
The two detectives moved forward. A narrow verge, overgrown with lank grass, separated the ditch from the lane. Flattened grass lurched over and combed the surface of muddied water which overflowed slightly at that point because of some obstruction. Webster fumbled for his torch and clicked the button.
A waxen hand, bobbing gently up and down, poked through green slime. The body was sprawled facedown in the stagnant murk. The water made the police uniform look jet black.
“I tried to pull him out,” called the labourer from the other side of the lane. “I thought he might still be alive. But when I saw his face …”
Frost knelt on the wet grass and plunged his hand through the slime to grab Shelby’s hair so he could lift the head. As it broke through the surface, Webster stifled a cry and Frost felt his stomach writhe in protest.
The head, dripping water and blood, had only half a face. The left-hand side was bloodied pulp with part of the cheek and lower lip flapping down, showing teeth and bone. There was no left eye, only a spongy red socket, and the forehead was pocked with embedded lead shot. Frost couldn’t look any more. He released his grip, letting the head fall back in the ditch with a hollow plop. He dried his hand by wiping it on his mac.
Webster was the first to speak. “Shall we get him out?”
“No,” said Frost, staring into the distance. “Not until the police surgeon has seen him. You know what a fussy little bastard he is.” What is this, he thought, a rerun? I said all this last night.
After taking a few details, they let the farm labourer get off home. Then a scene-of-crime officer arrived with his expensive Japanese camera and his ultra fast colour film and took flash photographs of the ditch, the grass, and the bobbing white hand. Nothing else to photograph until the arrival of the police surgeon.
“There he is,” called Webster, watching a car gingerly nose its way up the lane, pulling up a few feet away from the two detectives. Slomon climbed out, nodded briefly to Frost, then peered into the ditch. “Have I got to get down there?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Frost, ‘you bloody well have. “Just let Slomon try to skimp this examination.
The doctor returned to the car for his Wellingtons. He pulled them on, removed his coat, and rolled up his shirt sleeves. Then, very carefully, he stepped down into the ditch. “I’d like some light, please.”
Three torch beams homed in on him as he busied himself with his instruments and thermometers. In spite of the difficult working conditions, Slomon took his time, determined not to repeat the fiasco of the previous night. He explored the body very carefully before clambering out.
“At a guess, he’s been dead between four to six hours,” he reported, drying his hands on a towel from his car. “Impossible to be precise in these conditions, but the post-mortem will pin it down.” He rolled down his sleeves and shrugged on his jacket. “Again, the post-mortem will confirm, but I’m pretty certain he was dead before he was dumped in the ditch. He wouldn’t have survived long with those injuries, anyway.”
The poor bastard wouldn’t have wanted to live with his face looking like that, thought Frost. “Can we move him, Doc?”
“I don’t see why not. The pathologist won’t be able to do much with the body as it is.” Slomon went back to his car promising his written report within the hour.
The scene-of-crime officer seemed too busy with his camera to help, so Webster and Frost pulled off their shoes and socks, rolled up their trouser legs, and stepped into the ditch. The water was as cold as death as it lapped around their bare legs, and their feet sunk into squelchy black mud. With Frost taking the shoulders and Webster the legs, they heaved. Shelby was heavy and stubborn. He clung to the bottom. They gritted their teeth and pulled. Suddenly, the body tore free from the grip of the thick mud and emerged through the slime, the head with its hanging flaps of flesh flopping down, streaming dirty stinking water. The proceedings were punctuated by blinding blue flashes ripping into the darkness as the scene-of-crime officer took photograph after photograph.
They laid Dave Shelby on the grass verge, well away from the flattened grass that Forensic would want to crawl over and examine. The scene-of-crime officer brought a plastic sheet from the boot of his car and they draped it over the body.
From the dark distance they heard the plaint of an ambulance siren, then saw its flashing blue light bobbing over the top of the hedges as it picked its way through the winding lane. But before it reached them, other car headlights flared. The Rover and the Ford. Mullett, Allen, and Ingram approached, their faces set.
Frost stepped back from the covered body. Mullett bent over and lifted a corner of the plastic sheet, then, his face screwed up as if in pain, turned his head. “Such a waste. A fine young officer. Such a wicked waste.”
He moved away, his place taken by Allen, who knelt by the body, a torch in hand, peering at the horror of the shattered face as if examining a suspect piece of steak from the butchers. At last he replaced the sheet and straightened up.
Mullett was finding it difficult to control his emotions. “Whoever did this,” he said, “I want him. I don’t care how many men it takes, I want him.” To Frost he said, “I’m putting Mr. Allen in charge. You will take over his cases.”
“Right,” acknowledged Frost, who hadn’t really expected Mullett to allow him to handle an investigation of this importance.
Mullett cleared his throat and shuffled his feet. He spoke to Frost but didn’t look at him. “Someone’s got to tell Shelby’s wife,” he said.
His wife! Young Mrs. Shelby, not much more than a teenager, with two kiddies, one three, the other eighteen months, and a third on the way.
“I thought you’d be doing that, sir,” said Frost.
Mullett stared straight ahead and slapped his palm with his leather driving glove. “I want the news broken gently,” he said. “If she sees the Divisional Commander turning up on her doorstep… I understand she’s pregnant… the shock… It might be better if you
…” He let the rest of the sentence hang.
“You’re ordering me to do it, then?” asked Frost, determined not to volunteer.
“Er, yes,” muttered Mullett, wishing the inspector wouldn’t drive him into a corner like this. “It would be best.”
For you, you bastard, but not for me, thought Frost bitterly. “All right, Super. If you say so.”
Mullett, relieved to have wriggled out of the unpleasantness, put on his sincere expression. “And tell Mrs. Shelby that if there is anything at all I can do to help in her moment of sorrow, she has only to ask. Her husband was one of my finest officers.” As Frost moved off, he called after him, “And tell her we’re going to get the swine who did it.”
