clenched.’
‘Show me,’ said Maltby, lowering himself, none too steadily and kneeling on the floor. He took the hand and focused his eyes with difficulty. ‘Looks like a cadaveric spasm… you sometimes get it with violent death. Hello…’ He looked closer. Something white. The corner of a piece of paper was protruding slightly. Frost snatched the hand and tried to force the cold fingers open.
Maltby stood up and distanced himself from the operation. ‘Careful,’ he said. ‘You’ll have her damn head off.’
Frost snapped his fingers at Gilmore. ‘Hold her head, son.’
‘Eh?’ said Gilmore.
‘She won’t bloody bite you.’
Steeling himself, Gilmore took the head in his hands while Frost tugged at the tightly closed fingers. The head felt cold and as fragile as a blown egg. He gritted his teeth and willed the inspector to hurry.
‘The pathologist won’t like you interfering with his corpse,’ warned Maltby gleefully.
‘Sod the pathologist,’ muttered Frost, grunting as the fingers opened and the hand suddenly went limp. Gilmore almost cried out as the body seemed to quiver and he swore he could feel the head patting from the trunk. Carefully and very slowly, like a man building a tottering house of cards, he took his hands away.
The piece of paper fluttered to the ground. It was a carefully folded?5 note. There was something else pressed tightly into the palm, leaving an impression in the flesh. Three pound coins.
Frost placed the coins in his open palm and stared at them. They told him nothing. He retrieved the banknote from the floor, pushed all the money back into the dead hand and tried to close the fist around it so the pathologist wouldn’t know what he had done. But the dead hand remained limp and let the money drop.
‘You’ve done it now,’ called Maltby, moving quickly to the door. ‘If you’d asked me I’d have told you that you couldn’t put it back again.’
‘I’ll throw the bloody head at you if you don’t hop it,’ bellowed Frost as the door clicked shut.
Gathering up the money, he deposited it on the coffee table alongside the knick-knacks, then sank back in the chair. ‘All right, Burton, let’s have some details. I don’t even know the poor cow’s name.’
Burton flipped open his notebook. ‘Mrs Julia Fussell, aged seventy-five, a widow, one son, married, two kids.’
Frost groaned. ‘Don’t tell me I’ve got to break the news to him.’
‘He emigrated to Australia last year.’
Frost brightened up. ‘Good for him. Carry on, son. Who found her?’
‘Her next-door neighbour, Mrs Beatrice Stacey. She knocked to see if the old dear wanted any shopping, didn’t get a reply, so let herself in with a spare key. I haven’t got much sense out of her. She’s having hysterics next door.’
‘I’ll see her in a minute,’ said Frost.
‘The pattern’s the same as Mrs Watson, yesterday,’ Burton went on. ‘No sign of forcible entry, apparently nothing taken — the bedroom’s undisturbed — and money left in her purse.’
A glum nod from Frost. He wandered over to the front door which was fitted with bolts top and bottom, and a security chain. ‘As you say, son, exactly the same as that poor old cow yesterday. He comes late at night, but she lets him in and then she calmly sits down to watch the telly so he can creep up behind her and cut her bloody throat.’ He examined the security chain. Quite a flimsy affair. ‘You said her purse was untouched. ‘Where is it?’
Burton walked over to a small walnut-veneered sideboard and tugged open a drawer. Using his handkerchief, he took out a worn red leather purse and handed it to the inspector. ‘There’s eighty-five quid in there.’
Holding it by the handkerchief, Frost flicked through the banknotes. All new?5 notes, crisp and consecutively numbered. The numbers tallied with the note taken from her hand. He chewed at a loose scrap of skin on his finger as he thought this over. ‘Right. Try this out for size. It’s the same pattern as yesterday. The Ripper’s coming to fit a new security chain for her. She’s waiting for him, the money all ready from her purse. She lets him in, sits down, holding the money tight in her hot little hand, and watches the telly while the nice man fits the chain for her. But the nice man just creeps up behind the poor cow and cuts her throat, then he stabs her in the stomach, wipes his knife on her dress and off he goes, all happy.’
‘Then this puts Gauld in the clear,’ said Gilmore. ‘He was driving his coach until ten and we watched his house until past midnight.’
‘He could have gone out again after we left,’ said Frost, furious with himself for giving up the surveillance so early. ‘If Doc Maltby is right the time of death could have been as late as one o’clock.’
‘You don’t call at one in the morning to fit a chain,’ pointed out Gilmore. ‘And old girls of seventy-five don’t sit up all night watching television.’
Frost gave a rueful sniff. The sergeant was right. This was his star suspect flushed down the sewer. He pushed the money back into the purse, then noticed something else in the centre compartment. Membership cards for the Reef Bingo Club and for the All Saints Senior Citizens’ Club.
‘All Saints?’ exclaimed Gilmore excitedly. Frost’s suspect might be a non-runner, but his own one was fast coming up on the rails. ‘That bloody curate comes from All Saints.’
The pathologist studied the rectal thermometer, gave it a shake, then wiped it clean before replacing it in his bag. His lips moved silently as he did a mental calculation. ‘In my opinion death occurred between midnight and one o’clock this morning.’
Gilmore registered dismay. ‘Not earlier?’ They had seen the curate outside the cemetery just after midnight last night and it was over half an hour later that they left him to go on to the vicarage.
‘If it was earlier,’ sniffed the pathologist, snapping shut his bag, ‘then I would have said so.’ He shouted down the stairs for the mortuary attendants to come up and collect the body then shafted a glare of disapproval at Frost who had come bounding back into the flat, grinning all over his face. ‘I’ve relayed my preliminary findings to your sergeant.’
‘Thanks, doc,’ said Frost, not sounding very interested. He grabbed Gilmore by the arm and pulled him to one side.
‘Autopsy at four,’ called the pathologist, buttoning up his coat.
‘Right,’ said Frost. He wasn’t interested in the autopsy. By four o’clock the killer should be behind bars.
But Gilmore got in with his own bad news first. ‘Death occurred after midnight, so that clears the curate.’ He waved away Frost’s offered cigarette. ‘So now we haven’t got a single flaming suspect.’
‘Yes, we have, son,’ beamed Frost, sending his cigarette packet on a round tour of the room. ‘Our luck had to change some time and now it’s happened. I’ve been chatting up the old dear next door. First, the dead woman had a job getting off to sleep. She was always up watching television until three or four in the morning. Second, she’d told her neighbour she was going to have a stronger chain fitted and guess who was going to do it?’
‘Gauld?’
‘She didn’t know his name but it was that nice young man who drove the mini-coach that took her to bingo.’
‘Did she say when he was coming to do the job?’
‘No, son. But he came last night. Late. After Joe Soap pulled off the bloody surveillance.’
‘How do you know?’
‘She didn’t tell her neighbour when he was coming. But she told her how much he was going to charge her. Eight quid.’
Gilmore whistled. The?5 note and three pound coins in the dead hand. ‘It sounds too good to be true.’
‘You know my motto,’ smirked Frost. ‘Never kick a gift horse up the fundamental orifice.’ He noticed Burton hovering. “What is it, son?’
‘Forensic have turned up a rogue fingerprint, sir. On the sideboard. Looks recent.’
Frost beamed. ‘Luck could be running our way for once. I think the time has come to bring Gauld in.’
Friday afternoon shift
The coach drew up at the old lady’s house. The driver sprang from his seat and opened the door, steadying