disobeyed standing instructions and went ahead regardless, and if that wasn’t bad enough, you gave Sergeant Johnson the impression that I had agreed to it.”
“He must have misunderstood me,” said Frost brazenly. “Still, no harm done.”
Mullett leaned back in chair, wide-eyed with incredulity. “No harm done? A police woman was injured.”
Frost shrugged. “A few bruises and a black eye. I’ve seen brides come back from their honeymoons with worse than that.”
“She could have been killed, Inspector.”
“She could have won fifty thousand pounds on the pools, sir, but she didn’t.”
Burying his face in his hands, Mullett felt like crying. How could you reason with a man like this? He picked up a newly sharpened pencil from his pen tray and twiddled it between his fingers. “I’m taking you off the case, Inspector.”
Frost’s jaw dropped. He looked disbelievingly at Mullett as if the man had taken leave of his senses. “You’re bloody what?”
The pencil snapped in two between Mullett’s fingers as he stiffened with fury. “Don’t you ever speak to me like that again, Frost,” he croaked, anger making his voice barely audible.
“Sorry, Super,” said Frost in the tone of a man pulled up on some minor and obscure breach of etiquette, ‘but I want to stay with this one. I think I’m close to cracking it’
“Yes… the plastic mac and the door key,” said Mullett, referring to his notes. “Pass them all over to Mr. Allen. It’s his case from now on. By the way, how are you getting on with your murder inquiry that drug addict?”
“Not too well,” said Frost, mentally adding ‘as well you know, you four-eyed git.”
“Then you’ll have more time to concentrate on it now you’re off the rape case, won’t you?” smiled Mullett, showing the interview was at an end by pulling his in-tray toward him and taking out the letters for signature. “One last thing. The Chief Constable is very concerned at our mounting number of housebreakings Let that be your number-one priority. That will be all, Frost.” He unscrewed the cap of his fountain pen and began signing his letters only to see his pen jump and splutter ink all over Miss Smith’s pristine typing as Frost left, slamming the door behind him with unnecessary force.
He put the letter to one side for retyping, then buzzed Miss Smith for some aspirins. There had to be some way he could get rid of the man.
The door slamming was repeated as Frost fumed back into his own pigsty of an office, where he further vented his rage by giving his in-tray a right-hander, sending the contents flying all over the floor. He spun around on Webster, who was regarding his tantrum with amused tolerance. “Don’t just sit there plaiting your beard, Constable. Help me pick this lot up.”
Without a word, Webster began gathering up the papers, smirking with inward satisfaction at Frost’s rage. Obviously he had been given a roasting by the Divisional Commander for last night’s debacle. And it served the stupid fool right.
Frost was down on his knees after a couple of burglary reports that had found their way under his desk just out of reach. He poked at them with a ruler and managed to fish one out. “By the way, son. As of today I’m off the rape case.”
Webster grunted noncommittally.
“How’s your girl friend this morning?” said Frost, reading through the form.
“She’s come to work,” the constable told him, ‘wearing dark glasses to hide the black eye, but otherwise OK.” And no thanks to you, he added under his breath.
Frost flung himself into his chair and read the burglary report again. “Do you know anything about this attempted break-in at Beech Crescent?”
“Just the bare details,” said Webster. “PC Kenny was called to it last night as he was dropping Sue and me off at her flat.”
According to the report, a Mrs. Shadbolt at number 32 saw a man climbing over the fence into her back garden, so she dialled 999. Kenny did a search of the area and found that the back door of a house a couple of gardens away had been forced open. Kenny woke up the householder and they went over the premises from top to bottom, but nothing had been taken.
“Hmm,” muttered Frost, scratching his chin thoughtfully. He swivelled around to the wall map to locate Beech Crescent. Most of the streets adjoining the woods were named after trees, and he found Beech Crescent not too far from the spot where Sue was attacked. He had a feeling that this might be worth following up. “Get the car, son. We’re going out.”
They had just started out when Control radioed. Sammy Glickman, the pawnbroker, had phoned. The man with the sovereigns for sale was back in his shop with another batch.
“We can be there in five minutes,” said Webster, looking out for a turnoff.
“No,” said Frost firmly. “We’re following up the burglary.” He told Control to send an area car to the pawnbroker’s immediately to pick the man up. He would interview him on their return. Webster couldn’t see why this attempted break-in was so important all of a sudden, but Frost was the boss.
Mrs. Shadbolt, her grey hair dyed lavender, wore bright orange beads over a fluffy mauve cardigan. Under her arm she carried a tiny overweight Pekinese, which she called “Mummy’s darling.” It was a sour-faced animal with a protruding tongue, continually snuffling and panting as if its oxygen supply was running out. The woman had another dog, a French poodle, its hysterical bark hitting the eardrums at a frequency bordering on the threshold of pain. To its Gallic fury, it hadn’t been allowed to bite the two detectives, but had been dragged by the collar to the kitchen and shut in. Its incessant high-pitched yap threatened to shatter all the glasses in Mrs. Shadbolt’s display cabinet.
“The poor dear gets so excited when we have company,” explained Mrs.
Shadbolt.
“Tell us about last night,” shouted Frost over the noise.
“Well, I was upstairs in bed…”
Frost heaved himself out of the chintz-covered sofa. “Let’s re-enact the crime,” he suggested. Anything to get away from that bloody ca strato barking.
Up the stairs, past pictures of kittens romping with balls of wool on the walls, and into the little bedroom overlooking the garden. A nightdress holder in the shape of a fox terrier sprawled across the twin pillows of the double bed.
“My bed,” Mrs. Shadbolt explained.
“Make a note of that, Constable,” Frost muttered to Webster.
“I retire every night at ten on the dot, Inspector. I’m a creature of habit, regular as clockwork. Bed at ten, up at six forty-five.”
“Is there a Mr. Shadbolt?” asked Frost, eying the twin pillows.
She dabbed an eye with a tiny handkerchief. The Pekinese snuffled in sympathy. “He passed over six years ago.”
“Sorry to hear that, madam. So you were in bed…?”
“Fast asleep. I go off the instant my head touches the pillow. Then Fifi started to bark. I woke up instantly.”
“Yes, I imagine you would,” said Frost. “Where was Fifi?”
“Up here with me. Fifi sleeps on the floor; Mummy’s darling sleeps on the bed with Diddums.”
“Diddums?” queried Frost.
She simpered and patted the fox terrier nightdress case. “We call him Diddums. Fifi was leaping up at the window, barking incessantly. I got out of bed and opened the window.”
They all moved over to the window in question. Frost opened it and looked out on to the garden below. A tiny garden, a wooden fence on each side, a brick wall at the rear. Beyond the brick wall were the back gardens of the houses in the street running parallel to Beech Crescent. Mrs. Shadbolt’s lawn was infested with green and red plaster gnomes, some peeking through bushes, some sitting cross-legged on plaster toadstools, others fishing down a plastic magic wishing well.
“Very tasteful,” murmured Frost, thinking he had never seen anything so ghastly in his life.
“I looked out,” continued the woman, ‘and there he was climbing over the fence into my garden, right down at the end, near the gnome on the toadstool. I just screamed and screamed and he immediately leapt over the
