Silence from Frost, who was looking very sorry for himself. He would look even sorrier before Mullett had finished. Mullett produced the copy of the Denton Echo, the editorial ringed in blue felt tip. He pushed it over to Frost. “Have you seen this?”
“Not yet, sir.” Frost gave it the briefest of glances and chucked it back. “Load of balls.”
“On the contrary, Inspector,” snapped Mullett. “What they are saying is painfully correct. A girl was raped last night. Have you interviewed her?”
“Well, no,” said Frost, shifting from one foot to the other, “Detective Constable Harvey took a statement…”
But Mullett wouldn’t allow him to finish. “A rape case. A girl raped and the officer in charge of the investigation doesn’t even bother to interview her personally.”
“We were busy with her boy friend last night,” retorted the inspector.
“She claimed he raped her. We had to clear him first.”
“Clearing the innocent does nothing to reduce our unsolved crime figures. Catching the guilty does,” snapped Mullett. “I further understand you haven’t yet made a search of the rape area.”
“I was on my way to do it when I got your summons, sir,” said Frost, meeting Mullett’s stare of disbelief unwaveringly.
“Make sure you do it, then. And have you interviewed the men on the list of suspects that Mr. Allen has drawn up?”
I’ve not even opened his bloody files yet, thought Frost. “It’s my number-one priority,” he said.
Mullett had plenty more bullets in the chamber. “What progress with that dead tramp?”
“Not much joy up to now, sir,” said Frost.
Mullett stared hard to show his dissatisfaction. Frost shuffled his feet and looked down to the blue Wilton. It sped things up if you looked contrite, and Frost was dying to get back to the office for a cigarette. “If there’s nothing else, Super…” he edged toward the door.
Mullett was opening and shutting drawers. There was quite a lot more, but he had mislaid his notes.
“What about the robbery at The Coconut Grove?” he barked.
“Got a suspect in the interview room right now, Super.”
“Good. Then let me see some action, Frost. Let me see some progress, something that’s been sadly lacking up to now.”
He flipped his hand dismissively, remembering too late about the Sadie Eustace business and the crime statistics.
Frost slouched back to his office, where he gave the waste bin a vicious kick. “Would that that was the reproductive area of our beloved Divisional Commander.”
Then he collapsed in his chair and found the cigarettes he had been seeking. He raised his head to Webster, who was regarding his superior’s show of childishness with superior disdain. “Mullett’s been rambling on about a list of suspects in the rape case, son. Any idea what the old git’s talking about?”
Webster extracted some stapled lists of names and addresses from one of Allen’s files and handed it to the inspector. Frost thumbed through the pages, wincing at the sheer volume of names.
“List of suspects?” he snorted. “It’s more like the Classified Telephone Directory. There must be every sex offender in the county down here.” He stopped at a name he recognized. “Freddy Gleeson! Fred the Flasher? Allen must be off his nut if he thinks Freddy could possibly be the rapist. His dick is for display purposes only, not for use.” He let the list drop to the desk and pushed it away. “Forget it. It’ll take weeks to go through that lot.”
“Couldn’t we at least pull in some of the more likely ones?” Webster asked.
Frost thumbed the pages once more and shuddered. “Waste of bloody time. These are all people with previous form. My gut feeling is that our bloke has never been caught before, so we’re not going to find him in lists of known offenders.” He looked up impatiently as someone knocked at the door. “Yes?”
PC Kenny poked his head in. “Tommy Croll is still in the interview room, sir,” he reminded the inspector.
“I was just on my way in as you knocked,” said Frost.
Tommy Croll was unshaven and unwashed, his clothes even more crumpled than Frost’s. He blinked nervously as the inspector entered with his hairy sidekick.
“Hello, Tommy,” greeted Frost, settling himself down in the familiar hard interview room chair. “Nice of you to come and see us.”
Tommy said nothing. He had long since learned that the best technique to use with the police was to say as little as possible.
Frost folded his arms, smiled at Croll benevolently, then fished out his cigarettes. He lit one very slowly, dribbling the smoke across the table. “You’re the answer to my prayers, Tommy. I’m in serious trouble with my Divisional Commander. To get back in his good books I need a quick confession and no sodding about.”
“I didn’t do it, Mr. Frost,” Croll whined.
“Now that’s a pity,” said Frost, ‘because it means we might have to resort to desperate measures, such as violence.” He jerked his thumb to the door as a signal for the uniformed man to leave.
Croll tried not to show his concern. He was now alone in the interview room with Frost and that thug with the beard, and he’d heard some alarming stories about him. There was even a whisper that he had beaten up Harry Baskin, and you would have to be a real hard case to even contemplate doing anything like that.
“As you probably know,” said the inspector, ‘my hairy colleague was drummed out of Braybridge for smashing up prisoners. I’d never allow him to do anything like that to you, Tommy not in my presence.” He pushed himself up from the chair and stretched. “So I’ll go and take a little stroll around the block.” To Webster he said, “Try not to leave any marks, son.”
Tommy tried to smile to show he knew it was all a bluff, but the smile wouldn’t come. “You’ve got to believe me, Mr. Frost. I didn’t do it.”
“I don’t care if you did it or not,” Frost said. “All I want is a bloody confession.” Then he seemed to have second thoughts and settled down again in the chair. “I’ll listen to one fairy story and one only, Tommy, and then your teeth get knocked out.”
Croll opened his arms in appeal. “It happened just like I told you, Inspector… I heard the right signal. I opened the door and wham, I’m coshed — I’m out cold.”
“Balls!” snapped Frost. “That little tap you got wouldn’t have knocked out a four-year-old.”
Croll chewed his lower lip and his eyes sized up the hairy thug. “All right, Mr. Frost. I’ll tell you the truth.”
“Good,” beamed Frost, motioning for Webster to change roles from heavy to shorthand writer.
“It was like I told you before, Mr. Frost, right up to the time where I got the signal to open the door. I opens it and there’s this geyser wearing a Stan Laurel face mask and holding a cosh of some sort. He clouts me round the nut, but I reckon he hadn’t done it before, because he didn’t hit me very hard. Anyway, I figured that if I didn’t drop down unconscious, he’d welt me a damn sight harder the second time, so I fakes it and down I go. I lies there, dead still, until he’s grabbed the money and gone.”
“So when he’d gone, why didn’t you start banging and yelling?” asked Frost.
“I was going to, honest. Then I suddenly thought what Mr. Baskin might do to me if he found out I’d been faking and hadn’t put up a fight. So I thought I’d better carry on faking. I didn’t even yell when Mr. Baskin booted me in the ribs.”
Frost puffed out the tiniest stream of smoke through compressed lips.
“So tell me about Stan Laurel. Describe him.”
Croll gave a noncommittal shrug. “Medium height, medium build. I hardly saw him.” His nostrils twitched as the smoke from the inspector’s cigarette wafted over. “I couldn’t half do with a fag, Mr. Frost.”
“You’ll have a lighted fag stuck right up your arse if you can’t come up with a better description than that, Tommy boy,” said Frost.
Blinking hard, Croll gulped as he tried to think of something that would satisfy the inspector. “Well, he stunk of scent… after-shave, I suppose… and he had these poncey shoes on.”
Frost caught his breath. “What sort of shoes?”
“Expensive shoes. You could see the quality they must have cost a packet. As I lay on the floor he stood near me, his shoes inches away from my face. I know them off by heart. Sort of brown and cream with a woven pattern.”
