'You didn't mean to kill her, you just meant to keep her quiet… to stop her screaming, screaming, screaming…' His voice rose with each repetition of the word. 'It got on your nerves. You couldn't take it, so you put your hands round her throat and you squeezed and squeezed.'
'No… No!!' Green was standing and shouting. He suddenly stopped and sank down again in the chair. 'If they object, I stop. I don't want to know. It isn't fun if they object. I wouldn't have raped her. I don't do that sort of thing.'
'You're too good for this world,' murmured Frost. He showed him the photograph of Vicky Stuart. 'And when did you give her a lift, Bernie?'
Green shook his head. 'I've already told you, I know nothing about any other girl, Mr Frost. There's nothing else to tell. I've told you everything.'
Frost tapped a pencil on his teeth, then slipped the photograph and the statement back in the file. 'All right, Bernie. Give my colleague here a fresh statement, and you can go.'
Morgan followed him out. 'What do you reckon guv?'
Frost shrugged. 'If he's telling the truth and the girl was 'in there for over half an hour, then what the hell was going on inside that house? Little innocent Charlie-boy said she nipped in, changed her dress, then legged it. That would take minutes. One of them is lying.'
'She could have nipped out the front way, while Green was waiting round the back.'
'Weaver said she went out the back way, why should he lie if she was only there a few minutes?' He yawned. 'I'm too tired to think. Let's leave it for now. Take his statement and get off home. See you tomorrow.'
He slept an untroubled sleep until two in the morning when the insistent ringing of the phone and the hammering at the front door woke him up.
The hot dog and pie and chip van, which catered in the main for the night trade — drunks rolling home from the local pubs, long distance lorry drivers, delivery men and cabbies — was parked in a cul-de-sac alongside the local comprehensive school. At half-past one in the morning it should have been a blaze of light, wafting out the greasy reek of fried onions, but it was now in darkness, and most of the onion smell had been blown away by the cutting wind. A little after midnight a crowd of noisy drunks from a nearby pub had amused themselves by distracting the owner's attention while two of them let down the tyres on one side. The van now drooped alarmingly.
The headlights of a minicab lit up the van and nosed in behind it as the owner, Ted Turner, a mournful- looking horse-faced man humping a foot-pump, clambered out and paid off the driver who had been chewing his ear-hole throughout the journey with good advice about always keeping a foot-pump handy in case anything like this happened.
As Turner went down on his knees to screw in the connection, he saw something underneath the van. A dosser, lying under some sacking, using the parked van as a temporary shelter. Just what he bloody needed!
'Oi you — out!' He hammered on the side of the van to wake the swine up, but was ignored. 'I haven't got all bleeding day. Out!' Still no response. He got down on his knees again and stretched out a hand to give the man a shake. He froze in horror. His outstretched hand was touching icy cold, hard, dead flesh.
'Bloody hell!' He snatched his hand back and wiped it down the front of his coat as he clambered to his feet. He kicked the foot pump under the van in case some bugger nicked it, then hared off to find the nearest phone box to call the police.
The area had already been cordoned off by the time Frost arrived. Arthur Hanlon scuttled across to meet him. 'Another dead tom, Jack. She's under the van.'
Frost rubbed his hands briskly. The biting wind was cutting right through him. 'Do we know her?'
'We can't get to her face until we can move the van.'
'Let's take a peep,' grunted Frost. 'I might recognize the rude bits.'
Watched by Hanlon and Collier he knelt and flashed his torch which picked out a naked arm, part of the torso, the rest covered by a piece of sacking. He straightened up. 'I don't recognize any of the bits I can see. Are we sure she's a tom?'
'I managed to squeeze part the way under,' Collier told him. 'She's naked, and she's been beaten and burnt, just like the others.'
Frost passed his cigarettes around 'This bastard is letting too bloody cocky. He's really taking the piss out of us and he's doing it too bloody often.' He accepted a light from Hanlon. 'This is what — number four or five, I'm losing count — and we're no nearer to catching him than we were with the first. Who found her?'
'The bloke who runs the stall,' said Hanlon. 'Some jokers let his tyres down and he had to go back home to fetch a foot-pump.'
'What time?'
'Just after half-past twelve. He checked the tyres then and she wasn't there.'
'And he got back when?'
'Half-past oneish. She was dumped between those times.'
'We've never been so close to the sod,' said Frost. 'He was here… less than an hour ago, he was right here.'
'I reckon he was a regular at the stall,' said Hanlon. 'Came for some grub, saw the place was deserted so decided to use it to dump the body.'
Frost chewed this over and shook his head. 'No, Arthur. If you've got a body on board, you want to get rid of it quickly, you don't stop on the way for a hot dog and chips. Besides, he had to be sure the owner was well away. He didn't want him coming back when the body was still being shoved underneath. I reckon he just happened to be driving past and saw the owner leaving in a minicab, so he grabbed his chance. If I'm right, we can pin him down to a time within minutes. This might be the break we're looking for.' He squinted down the street. Still a couple of houses with lights showing. 'Start knocking on doors. Not much chance there's anyone still up, but find out if anyone spotted a van, a car, a horse and cart, anything, coming down this road just after half-past midnight.' A long shot and he knew it. Cars and vans would be driving up here all the time to visit the stall and people tended to ignore the familiar.
He switched his attention back to the body. 'How do we get to her without dragging her out?'
'If we pumped up the tyres, we could move the van,' suggested Hanlon.
'Do it,' nodded Frost, looking up as headlights flooded the scene. He thought, at first, it was the doctor, but it was a minicab driver hoping for some fast food. PC Collier, guarding the cul-de-sac, was turning the driver away. 'Hold it!' yelled Frost, running across. The driver might have called earlier when the van was closed. 'Ask everyone if they were here earlier and if they saw anything suspicious.'
'Like what, Inspector?'
'Anything, son — I don't care how trivial. Even if they only saw someone stuffing a dead body under the van and happened to take down the registration number, it's little things like that that could help.' He turned away, spinning back as something else occurred to him. 'And take names, addresses and registration numbers of everyone you stop. We might want to talk to them again.'
Another car approached, but this time Collier waved it through. Frost grinned as Dr McKenzie, the police surgeon, climbed out. 'Over here, doc. We can do you a hot meat pie or a cold dead body.'
McKenzie waved his bag happily. He was always pleased to see Frost, even at three o'clock on a bitterly cold morning. 'Where is she?'
Frost pointed to the van where a perspiring Arthur Hanlon was working away at the foot-pump. 'Under there, doc. I keep calling, but she won't come out.'
McKenzie bent and squinted underneath the vehicle, aided by the beam of Frost's torch. 'How am I supposed to get under there?'
'Wait in your car, doc. We'll have the van moved soon.' Leaving the doctor, Frost went over to the van and climbed inside where Turner, a picture of misery, was drawing on a hand-rolled cigarette, its acrid smoke mixing with a strong smell of rancid fat and cold, fried onions. Turner's arm was resting on a fryer in which a dirty, oily brown substance had congealed. 'A dead body,' he moaned, kicking away a piece of broken cup on the floor. 'Just what I wanted, a bleeding dead body.' He shuddered. 'First some joker lets my tyres down, then a dead bleeding body…'
'Not your night, is it?' sympathized Frost, flicking ash on the floor. 'Tell me what happened.'
'I opened up just before ten as usual. All going fine until the pubs turn out, then a crowd of flaming drunks,
