Even if we could prove the girl’s last meal was an identical product, the supermarkets sell tens of thousands of these every week.’
‘Damn!’ growled Frost.
‘You ready to go yet?’ asked Gilmore pointing yet again to his watch.
‘A quick sniff around the bedroom and then you can get off to your conjugals,’ Frost promised.
The bedroom reflected the state of the rest of the house with the bed and the floor strewn with dirty clothing and unwashed, food-congealed crockery. Was this where Greenway dragged her and raped her? Was this pigsty of a room the last thing that fifteen-year-old kid saw before he choked the life out of her?
One of the Forensic team pushed past him and began stripping the clothing from the bed. ‘We’re taking the bed clothes for further examination, Inspector, but I get the feeling they’ve been washed during the past four weeks or so.’
‘I only wash mine once a year,’ said Frost gloomily, ‘whether they need it or not.’
Another long, deep, irritating sigh from Gilmore.
‘All right, son,’ said Frost. ‘We’re going now.’
In the hall, Harding looked even gloomier than Frost. ‘We haven’t come up with a thing, Inspector. There’s no evidence at all that the girl was ever in the house.’ He plucked a Dobermann hair from his jacket. ‘There’s dog’s hairs all over the place. Would have been helpful if we’d found some on the girl, but we didn’t.’
‘Find me something, for Pete’s sake,’ pleaded Frost, ‘otherwise I’m in the brown and squishy up to my ear- holes.’
Gilmore put his foot down hard on the drive back in case the inspector thought of some other outlandish spot to visit. Frost slumped miserably down in the passenger seat, stared at the rain-blurred windscreen, smoked and said nothing. Gilmore could almost feel sorry for him.
Then Frost sat up straight, pulled the cigarette from his mouth and rammed it into the ashtray. ‘I’m a number one, Grade A twat!!’ he announced.
Tell me something I don’t know thought Gilmore, slowing down at the traffic lights in the Market Square.
‘Turn the car around,’ ordered Frost. We’re going back to the cottage.’
‘You’re kidding!’ gasped Gilmore, looking at Frost whose face was bathed red by the traffic signal.
‘Under my bloody nose and I missed it… All that junk in the shed. You’d expect it to be dry, but it was wet, dirty, muddy and rusty. It must have been out rotting in the open for months… so why gather it up and bung it in the shed?’
‘Perhaps he just wanted to tidy up his garden,’ said Gilmore.
‘Do me a favour. His place is a rubbish tip, just like mine. I’d never tidy up my garden and neither would he. That junk was dumped in his shed to hide something… so let’s go and find out what.’ Frost’s face was now bathed in green. Wearily, Gilmore spun the wheel round and headed back to the cottage.
The Forensic team had almost completed their work and Harding shook his head at them as they passed through. ‘Nothing. We’re now going to try the shed.’
‘Then you can give us a hand,’ Frost told him. ‘Bring a torch.’ Harding slipped on a plastic mac and followed them down to the bottom of the yard.
‘This would be easier in the morning,’ moaned Gilmore as rain trickled down his collar.
‘Shouldn’t take us long,’ said Frost dragging out the deck-chair frame and flinging it into the dark of the garden.
It took nearly half an hour. As one item of useless junk was removed more and more was revealed.
‘I can’t think why he bothered to keep this,’ grunted Harding, struggling with a muddy iron-framed bedspring, heavily corroded with rust.
It was not until the shed was nearly empty that they found what Greenway had been hiding. Stacked high against the far end of the shed, white cardboard boxes, piled almost to the roof. Frost moved back to let Gilmore reach up and drag one down. He tore open the stapled lid. Inside, tightly packed, were cartons of Benson and Hedges Silk Cut cigarettes. Gilmore took out a carton and tossed it over to Frost who ripped off the wrapping. No ‘Government Health Warning’ on the side of the packets. These cigarettes were made for export.
Frost stared at the packets, feeling even more depressed. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting to find, but certainly not this. This would effectively shoot his case against Green way right up the anal passage. He went to the shed door and swore bitterly into the rain and the wind and the dark.
The Interview Room now reeked strongly of stale shag tobacco smoke and cheese and onion crisps. There was a spit-soaked, thin hand-rolled cigarette end in the ashtray. Some one else had been interviewed since Frost’s questioning of Greenway.
‘All right, all right. Stop shoving.’ Greenway, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with a neatly bandaged hand, stumbled into the room, urged roughly from behind by a foul-tempered Gilmore. Frost waited until the man was sitting down, then he pulled a packet of Benson and Hedges from his pocket and pushed it across. Greenway stared at it for a while, turned the packet gingerly with a finger so he could confirm the absence of the health warning. ‘You took your bloody time finding them,’ he grunted.
Frost retrieved the packet and shook out a cigarette. He lit up and sucked in smoke. ‘Feel like talking?’
Greenway helped himself to a cigarette and accepted a light from the inspector. ‘I take it I’m no longer being charged with killing the school kid?’
‘No. The bloke you coshed has identified your photograph.’
Greenway thought for a moment. ‘All right. I’ll give you a statement.’
But as Gilmore turned the pages of his notebook, Frost waved a hand for him to stop. ‘This isn’t our case. Detective Inspector Skinner from Shelwood Division is on his way over. You can give a statement to him.’
Gilmore snorted in exasperation. ‘Would someone mind telling me what this is about?’
‘Sorry, son,’ apologized Frost. ‘On the day Paula Bartlett went missing a van-load of Benson and Hedges king-size cigarettes for export was hijacked on its way to the docks. The driver was flagged down, coshed, and his load nicked. This happened on the motorway at Shelwood, miles outside Denton Division.’
‘But Greenway told Inspector Allen he never went out that day,’ protested Gilmore.
‘I think he was lying,’ said Frost. ‘People don’t always tell us the truth.’
‘Of course I was lying,’ said Greenway. ‘The bloody van, full of nicked fags, was standing outside my house when the other inspector called that evening. I thought he was on to me, so when he asked me, I said I hadn’t been out all day. But it was about the missing kid.. ’
‘Can you help us at all about the girl?’ asked Frost.
Greenway shook his head. ‘I left home at six in the morning.. didn’t get back until nine o’clock at night. The paper hadn’t arrived when I left and it wasn’t there when I got back.’
A tap at the door. ‘Detective Inspector Skinner is here,’ announced Sergeant Wells.
Skinner, a burly man in a trench coat, looked exactly how a detective inspector should look, a contrast to the rag-bag Gilmore had to work with. His sergeant, lean and mean, looked like a detective sergeant who would always be in his boss’s shadow, not how Gilmore intended to end up. ‘Understand you’ve got a little present for us, Jack?’ said Skinner, his eyes on the prisoner.
‘He’s all yours,’ said Frost. ‘I can’t solve any of my own cases, but I solve other people’s.’ He offered his cigarettes around and Skinner nearly choked when he was told he was smoking some of the stolen property.
Wells returned with papers to be signed for the transfer of the prisoner and whispered to Frost that Mr Mullett would like to see him in his office.
‘Shit,’ muttered Frost. ‘It’s been a rotten enough day already.’
In fact Mullett was hovering outside in the corridor and was full of charm and smiles for the two detectives from Shelwood. ‘Delighted to have been able to help,’ he smarmed. But as soon as they had gone, his smile froze to death. ‘My office!’ he hissed and spun on his heel away.
Frost was dead tired, but he kept his eyes open to pretend he was listening as Mullett droned angrily on. ‘You’ve made me look a complete and utter fool in the eyes of the Chief Constable…’
He let his gaze drift around the old log cabin and noticed to his horror that there was a foil take-away food container, yellowed with cold curry sauce, poking from under Mullett’s desk. He moved forward, looking very contrite, and nudged it out of sight with his toe.
‘… and it wasn’t even our case. We’ve improved Shelwood’s crime figures, which made ours look sick anyway,
