Harding followed up the stairs. She took them into a small box room which had been converted to an office. It was very similar to the one in Finch's house. A small desk had been jammed up against one wall. On the desk was an IBM 286 PC connected to a printer. Liz pointed. 'A twenty-four pin dot matrix printer, the same type as the one used for the ransom demand.'
Frost grinned with delight. 'Then we've got him.' He turned to Harding. 'Can we prove the ransom note was written on this machine?'
Harding swiftly disillusioned him. 'All we can say is that the note was printed on a machine of the same type. There is no way we can prove this was the actual machine used.'
Yet again Frost was deflated. 'There must be some way.'
'I don't think so.' Harding sat himself down at the desk and peered at the printer. It was a Star 24–10, some five years old. 'There's no typeface, only little pins.'
'The ribbon,' suggested Frost. 'Wouldn't it leave an imprint on the ribbon?'
Harding sniffed his doubts. 'The ribbons are a continuous loop. They go round and round with subsequent letters printed on top of earlier ones. It would be almost impossible to separate them out.'
'Try anyway,' said Frost.
Harding lifted the printer cover. 'If it was a fairly new ribbon I suppose there might be a chance.' He took out the cassette and examined it, before shaking his head and passing it across to Frost. 'Out of luck again, inspector. It's too damn new. It hasn't been used. The old one has been replaced. As I said, your Mr. Finch is determined not to give us anything to go on.'
Frost thudded down the stairs with the cassette and held it aloft. 'We're looking for a used printer ribbon, just like this one. Check waste bins, rubbish bags, dustbin sacks. We've got to find it.' But he knew Finch was too damn clever to replace the ribbon without making sure there was no way they could get at the old one.
In the living-room Finch was sitting, watching the proceedings with a cynical smile, a smile which said, all too clearly, There's no way you dumb policemen are going to find anything that would incriminate me.
'We found chloroform downstairs,' said Frost.
'That's hardly surprising. My friend used to run a chemist shop. Old stock, I imagine.'
'Chloroform was used on the first boy.'
'So you said.' He looked at Frost in mock reproach. 'You are surely not suggesting my friend had anything to do with it? I think you will find he was in Spain at the time.'
'You seem to be finding this all very amusing, Mr. Finch. A boy of seven kidnapped, mutilated, frightened… a boy who might even be dead.'
'I don't find it remotely amusing, inspector. What I do find amusing although I suppose 'pathetic' is the right word is that you should be wasting your time here… all these men… all these resources.' He stared at Frost. 'Can you tell me one thing, one single thing, you've found that proves I had anything to do with it… just one…?' He gave a superior smile that made Frost fight hard to control the urge to smash his face in. 'You can't, because there isn't anything.'
'We'll find it,' said Frost, trying to believe it himself. He jerked his head at Liz and told her to take Finch to the station. 'We'll question him again there.'
Clanging noises echoing from the cellar drew him down the stairs to investigate. Jordan and Collier, both sweating profusely, were levering up flagstones. It was a tiring job. The flagstones were big and heavy, needing all their efforts to lift and move without crushing their fingers. Two stacks of removed flagstones stood in one corner. A large rectangle of earth was exposed. Dry earth, untouched since the floor was laid. Jordan wiped sweat from his brow. 'Nothing yet, inspector.'
Frost went over to the stacks. The flags were nearly three inches thick. He thought for a second. 'Pack it in — forget it. If it's taking two of you to lift one of them, he could never had done it on his own.' The smug look on Finch's face had convinced him they could tear the place apart and not find anything. They would have to look elsewhere. But where… where?
When he went back into the lounge to check progress, one of the Forensic team going over the upholstery with a hand-held vacuum cleaner kept moving him on from wherever he tried to settle. He took the hint he was in the way and yelled that he was going back to the station.
He was standing in the shelter of the porch, turning up his mac collar ready for the plunge through the rain to his car, when he noticed the garage door was slightly ajar. It had already been searched, but on impulse he splashed across and went inside. A chocolate brown Renault took up most of the space. He squeezed through and checked the boot in the remote hope that the original searcher had been as slapdash as he usually was and that he would find Bobby curled up, fast asleep, happy to be rescued. All the boot yielded was a spare tyre, some tools, a metal petrol can and a towing rope. He flashed his torch to the ceiling and the beam caught a shelf high up on the wall. On the shelf were a couple of bulging blue plastic bags which didn't look as if anyone had had them down to check. He reached up and managed to grab the corner of one bag. He tugged, then a bit harder. The entire shelf tipped up and the bags slithered off and thudded to the ground, bouncing off his head on the way. Hitting the cement floor, they burst open, spewing out tins of summing foods which rolled and clattered everywhere, and packs of cotton wool. More junk from the chemist's shop.
He rubbed his head ruefully, then booted one of the tins to relieve his feelings. It rolled underneath the car. He dropped on his hands and knees to retrieve it and it was then he noticed there was mud in the tread of the tyres. Fresh mud, still wet. Finch had been out in the car, very recently, and then must have dried off the body work to disguise the fact. Frost stood up. The kid. Finch ri used the car to move the kid. That was why he was so smug and unconcerned when they were searching the house.
He yelled for Harding, who was annoyed at having to run through the rain and glared at Frost with his hair streaming and his jacket soaking. Frost indicated the mud and asked if there was any way of determining where it came from… 'Some little six-inch square of Denton which had this unique type of mud, found nowhere else in the universe?'
Harding squatted and studied it, then he stood up. 'I can tell you exactly where this came from, inspector.' He pointed. 'From the lane just outside the front gate. Wherever he went, he picked that up on the way back but I don't suppose that is much help.'
'About as good as the sort of help Forensic have been giving me all bloody day,' snarled Frost, plunging out through the heavy curtain of rain back to the house. He went to the bedroom. The smell of chloroform had completely gone. He wondered how long it would have lingered. He was guessing that Finch had chloroformed and removed Bobby not too long before the police turned up. Burton came in to join him. He told the DC of his theory.
'You're saying that wherever he took the kid, it isn't very far away from here?' said Burton.
'That's exactly what I'm saying,' said Frost. 'Otherwise we wouldn't still have been able to smell chloroform.' He went to the window and looked out. The wind was blowing the rain almost horizontal. A few dotted lights of houses could be seen, but beyond them, just visible, was the dark, sprawling mass of Denton Woods. The woods! That had to be it. That's where the boy was. 'He's dumped the kid in the woods, somewhere,' said Frost.
Burton joined him at the window. The woods stretched on and on. 'If you're right, he could be anywhere.'
'I know,' said Frost.
'We'll have to wait until morning,' said Burton. 'We'll never find him in the dark in this weather.'
'By the morning the poor little sod could be dead,' said
Frost. He tugged his radio from his pocket and called Mullett.
Mullett wanted an almost cast-iron guarantee from Frost that they would find the boy before he agreed to authorize a full-scale search party.
Frost gave it to him.
'Two hours,' added Mullett, quickly checking the balance of the overtime account. 'If they haven't found anything in two hours, call it off.'
'Of course, sir said Frost.
In the interview room Finch had been reunited with the dog, which was stretched out on the floor at his feet. 'Where did you go in the Renault?' demanded Frost.
'Out to the lane and back. I wanted to check if it was functioning all right. If so, I would drive back home in it, if not, I would call a cab.'
