to come back this way. There's nowhere else for him to go.' He scratched his chin. 'The two women say he never arrived and Duggie says he never came back, so who is lying?' He signalled for her to drive on. 'I think we had better talk to Duggie again.'
Duggie was adamant. 'I'm telling you, Mr. Frost, he pedalled up to the cottage on the bike and he never came back while I was there. Why should I lie?' Before Frost could come up with his reasons, there was an urgent tap at the door of the interview room. An excited DC Burton beckoned him over.
'Some of that funny money's turned up.'
'Already?' asked Frost. This was bloody marvelous. He thought they might have to wait days.
'The bank phoned. They've just had over 6000 paid in, over a thousand of it in forged notes.'
'Who paid it in?'
'Someone called Philip Mayhew, 47 Haig Avenue, Denton. I've checked with records. Nothing known about him.'
'Then let's make the sod's acquaintance,' said Frost, twisting his head back into the room and yelling, 'Interview suspended.'
It was a semi-detached house, newly pebble-dashed. Two cars, a Jaguar and a Ford Sierra, were parked in the road outside and there was a Range Rover in a driveway leading to closed garage doors.
'A lot of motors for one house,' commented Frost as they cruised slowly past, surveying the situation. The curtains to one of the upstairs rooms were drawn. He wondered if the boy was up there. They drove round the block. There seemed to be no rear exit from the property, except by clambering over about six garden fences to reach the side road. In one of the gardens a large, rippling-muscled rottweiler paced up and down, looking ready to tear any intruders to shreds. Little chance anyone would risk that, but to be on the safe side Frost posted a couple of men in the side road. His mind raced over all the things that might go wrong, but there were too many of them to worry about. They stopped outside the front of the house. 'AH right. Let's go, go, go.'
Followed by Liz, Burton and two uniformed officers, he trotted up the path and hammered on the knocker. The door was no sooner opened when he slammed it back and the others raced inside.
'Police!' yelled Frost as the man, a brawny individual in his mid-forties, sporting a beard, and brandishing a baseball bat, tried to push the door shut, shouting for someone inside the house to call the police.
He swung the bat at Frost, but Liz, leaping on him from the back, managed to grab his arm and twist it. 'Drop it!' The bat clattered to the floor.
'Police,' repeated Frost, showing the man his warrant card. 'And we've got a warrant to search these premises.'
'You've got the wrong house,' bawled the man.
'Are you Philip Kenneth Mayhew? Then we've got the right house. Let's go inside.'
He pushed Mayhew through the first door leading off the hall which took them into a spacious lounge with an enormous five-speaker, cinema-sound television set that made the one Duggie had bought on Lemmy's card look like a portable. Suddenly, a woman in a tight-fitting black dress charged in, swinging an iron bar. Her long fingernails were painted silver. She looked as if she would happily use them to scratch Frost's eyes out. 'I've called the police, you bastards,' she screamed.
'We are the police,' said Frost.
She lowered the iron bar, but kept it swinging in her hand, warily. This scruff looked nothing like a policeman. She was only half convinced when she studied his warrant card. 'What's this all about?'
'That's what I want to know,' said the man. 'They claim to have a warrant.'
'We have got a warrant,' said Frost.
He gave it to Mayhew who skimmed through it and passed it over to the woman. 'Call our solicitor,' he said.
'You paid a large sum of money into the bank today,' said Frost.
'No, I didn't. I haven't left the bloody house all day.' He jammed a cigarette into his mouth and lit it with a table lighter in the shape of a vintage Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost.
'I'm telling you that you paid 6495 into Bennington's Bank in the High Street at 10.54 a.m. today,' insisted Frost.
'And I'm telling you I did not,' spat the man.
'If you must know, I paid it in,' shouted the woman. 'Why don't you get your bloody facts straight? No wonder innocent people get sent to prison.' The sound of thuds and bangs from upstairs suddenly intensified and sent her head jerking up. 'What are those buggers doing?' She went to charge out, only to be stopped by Liz. 'Let me go, you cow.'
Frost borrowed the Silver Ghost lighter for his own cigarette. He smiled sweetly at the woman, whose eyes were spitting bullets. 'I don't give a sod who actually paid it in,' he said. 'All I'm concerned with is that over 1000 of it was counterfeit.'
This stopped the woman in her tracks. She stared wide-eyed at her husband, whose jaw had sagged, showing his gold fillings. 'Counterfeit?'
Frost nodded.
The man smashed his cigarette out in a round glass ashtray which. was enclosed in a miniature rubber car tyre. 'The bastard. The lousy rotten bastard. I'll break every bone in his body.'
'What particular bastard are we talking about?' asked Frost.
'The bastard I sold the car to.'
Frost frowned. 'What car?'
'The Honda Accord. He paid six and a half grand in cash and drove it away this morning.'
'You sold him a car?'
'Hoo-bloody-ray,' said the man, giving a mock clap. 'A brilliant deduction. Yes, I sold him a car. That's what I do. I sell used cars didn't you damn well know?'
Frost didn't damn well know. Mayhew pushed a copy of the local free paper over to him. There was a block of cars for sale ringed round in the classified section. One of them was a Honda Accord priced at 6750.
The clatter of footsteps down the stairs and Burton looked in. His face told Frost they had found nothing, neither the ransom money nor any trace of the boy. 'You'd better do this room,' he told Burton. 'The other two can do the garden and the shed.'
He ushered May hew and his wife into the kitchen, a beautifully fitted room with expensive units, but empty bottles and unwashed crockery sprawled all over the place.
'It might speed things up if you told us what you were looking for,' said Mayhew. 'We might even be able to tell you where it is.'
'We're looking for the rest of the money.'
'What money? That's all he gave me. I paid it all into the bank.'
Frost leant against the dishwasher. 'Let's get this straight. You sell second-hand cars. So why did you try and attack us with a baseball bat?'
'Some people are dissatisfied with their purchase. Some come back very stroppy. We have to defend ourselves.'
'So this has happened before?'
He shrugged. 'Now and again. Some niggling little thing goes wrong and they want their money back.'
'Niggling little things? Like the wheels falling off or sawdust leaking from the gearbox?'
'The condition of the cars we sell is reflected in the price. You can't expect an ex-showroom Mercedes for three hundred quid.'
'Tell me about the Honda Accord,' said Frost.
'This bloke phoned me.'
'When?'
'This morning. Said he'd seen my ad in the local rag for the Honda. If it wasn't sold, he wanted to come round and have a look at it. I told him it hadn't been sold, but it was such a snip, he'd better get round quick before someone else snapped it up. He said he'd be round in half an hour.'
'And was he?'
'Half an hour forty-five minutes… not long, anyway.'
'And how did he come on foot?'
