Too terrified to speak, she looked from Webster to Frost, her mouth working, then, still trembling she pointed back to the open door of a storeroom. At last she was able to speak. “A man in there. I went to get some clean sheets. He was horrible…”
“Let’s take a look,” said Webster, moving cautiously into the dark of the storeroom and groping for the light switch. The fluorescent tubes seemed to resent being woken up at such an unearthly hour, but finally, with a half-hearted crackle, they flashed and flooded out cold, blue light.
Inside the large room were racks of wooden shelving, all neatly stacked with folded blankets, bed linen, rubber sheets, and pillows. No sign of a lecherous intruder. Webster walked around inside. “Can’t see anyone,” he said to the nurse, who was hovering anxiously by the door.
Braver now that she had company, she joined him, her head turning from side to side, looking, wanting to prove that she hadn’t imagined it. “There was someone here,” she insisted.
Frost wandered in after them, his nose twitching. “There’s a hell of a stink in here…” He sniffed again, his eyes slowly scanning the racks, missing nothing. “I spy with my little eye… someone on the top rack… there!”
Webster followed his finger but couldn’t see anything. He grasped the wooden supports and shook the racks as if he were shaking apples from a tree. “Come on, you bugger. Down you get or I’ll drag you down.”
A heap of blankets on the top shelf heaved, then slithered to the floor. A dirty brown overcoat struggled out, then two red-rimmed eyes peered down at them. Webster turned his head away in disgust as the smell wafted down to hit him in the face.
“I wasn’t doing no harm,” whined the man.
“No harm?” cried Frost, “You’re stinking the place out.”
“What are you after drugs?” demanded Webster as the old man, a tramp in his mid-sixties, climbed stiffly down.
Short and stooped, he had tiny, red-rimmed, deepset eyes; his face was greasy and black and grey with stubble. His nose, large and route-mapped with tiny red veins, cried out for the urgent attention of a handkerchief. Matted hair flopped over the dirt-stiffened collar of the brown overcoat, which had been made many years ago for someone much bigger. His hands, the nails chipped and black, reached up to the top shelf for a bulging brown carrier bag which he clutched protectively to his chest.
Frost identified him from the very first sniff. “Blimey, Wally, hasn’t the hospital got enough germs of its own without you bringing yours in as well?”
“I’m an old man, Mr. Frost. Just looking for a place to rest my poor head for the night.” A dewdrop shimmered at the end of his nose. He gave a juicy sniff, which temporarily delayed its further descent.
“So you rested your poor head against the window of the nurses’ bedroom?”
“I didn’t know there was anyone in there… honest. I just happened to look in as she happened to look out our eyes sort of met.”
“Sounds like something out of True Romance,” said Frost. “So if you weren’t after an eyeful of naked nurse, what were you after? And what have you got in that bag?”
He reached out for it, but Wally shrank back, clutching the bag as tightly as he could. With difficulty, Frost managed to prise it from the tramp’s greasy grasp and looked inside. Scraps of clothes, bits of food and a three-quarters-full wine bottle. “I hope you haven’t stolen someone’s specimen,” said Frost, pulling out the cork and cautiously sniffing the contents. “It’s either me ths or the stuff they pickle human organs in. Is this what you’ve sneaked in to pinch?”
“On my dead mother’s grave, Mr. Frost,” the tramp whined, “I haven’t come here to pinch anything.” A mighty sniff reprieved another dewdrop that was in danger of obeying Newton’s law of gravity. “I’m just a poor old man looking for shelter.”
“Well, you’re not going to find it here,” said Frost, ‘so push off before I kick you out.”
“I’m an old man, Inspector. Send me out in the cold and I’ll die.”
“Promises, promises,” said Frost. “Why don’t you go and kip where you usually doss down?”
“I couldn’t go to my usual place. There was a policeman standing outside.”
“A policeman?” queried Frost. “Here… what usual place are you talking about?”
“The public convenience behind the Market Square. Me and Ben Cornish usually kip in one of the cubicles.”
“You won’t kip with him anymore,” Frost said, and, as gently as he could, he broke the news.
The tramp, genuinely upset, clutched the wooden rack for support. “We was good mates, me and him, Inspector. Ben wasn’t eating properly. He was on drugs used to inject himself with a needle. I told him it would kill him in the end, but he wouldn’t listen.” He reflected sadly for a while, then said, “Did he have any money on him? He said he was going to give me some for food. He promised me.”
“Sorry, Wally. He had no money. In fact he had sod all,” said Frost.
“Now beat it.”
The tramp’s face fell. “You’ve got to arrest me, Mr. Frost. Put me in a cell for the night. I looked at that nurse… saw all of her body. I lusted after her. I thought carnal thoughts. I deserve to be locked up.”
“You shouldn’t have run away, Wally. She said she fancied you. Now hop it, or I’ll tell my colleague to boot you out.”
‘ Please, Inspector. Look at the weather out there. You’ll be signing my death warrant if you send me out in that!” He pointed dramatically to the windows, and, on cue, the wind lashed and hammered its fists at the glass.
Against his better judgement Frost relented. “All right, Wally. Go to the station and tell Sergeant Wells I want you locked up for the night. Tell him I suspect that you’re an international diamond smuggler.”
The dirt around the tramp’s mouth cracked as he bur bled his gratitude. They watched him shuffle painfully down the corridor, his arms folded around the carrier bag which contained everything he had in the world. Then the dead face of Ben Cornish swum filmily in front of Frost, the eyes insisting, “You bloody fool… you’ve missed something.” As he later realized, Wally had shown him the answer, but he hadn’t seen it.
Webster was saying something.
“What was that again, son?”
Webster’s quartz digital was shoved under his nose. “Four twelve. We’d better get back to the station.”
Frost winced. The station meant the crime statistics and the overtime returns and all the other mountains of paper work that had to be attended to. He thought hard. Surely there was something else they could do instead of going back. Then he remembered Tommy Croll, the security guard from The Coconut Grove. Why not interview him? That should waste a good hour.
“I’m looking for a bloke called Croll,” he told the nurse as she pulled sheets down from the rack. “He came in tonight with concussion.”
“Then you’re in luck, Inspector,” she said. “He’s in my ward.” She frowned at her tiny wristwatch. “But it’s very late.”
“I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important, Nurse,” said
Frost. And what was more important than avoiding the crime statistics?
They followed her into a small ward where a ridiculously young student nurse was crouched over a desk with a shaded lamp, anxiously watching over the twin rows of sleeping, snuffling, and moaning patients, and hoping none of them died on her before the other nurse’s return.
“All quiet,” she reported with relief. No sooner had she said this than one of her patients called out and started bringing up blood.
“Another one for the morgue,” Frost whispered to Webster.
“Mr. CrolPs in the end bed,” called the nurse as she and the student dashed off to attend to the crisis.
Their shoes squeaked as they tiptoed over the highly polished floor to the far bed where a weasel-faced man, his forehead decorated with a strip of sticking plaster, was sleeping noisily. Frost undipped the charts from the end of the bed and studied th
em. “Hmm. Both ends seem to be in working order. Give him a shake, son.”
Webster’s gentle shake was about ten on the Richter scale. Croll snorted, choked in mid snore then jerked his eyes open, flicking them from side to side as he tried to identify the shapes looming over him in the dark. He groped for the bedside lamp, blinking in surprise as he switched it on.
“Hello, Tommy,” said Frost, his voice generously laced with insincere concern. “How are you?” He scraped a chair across to the bed and sat down.
“Mr. Frost!” Croll fumbled under the pillow for his wristwatch. “It’s quarter past four in the morning!”
“I know,” agreed Frost. “As soon as they told me you were in here, I dropped everything to come and see how you were. You’re a hero, Tommy, a bloody hero.”
“Hero?” echoed Croll uneasily. He never knew how to take the inspector.
“The way you fought like a tiger to try and stop Mr. Baskin’s money being nicked. How’s the poor head?”
Croll touched the sticking plaster and winced. “Terrible, Mr. Frost.
Stabbing pains like red-hot knives.”
Frost nodded sympathetically and stared down the ward. The two nurses had managed to calm the patient and were now straightening and smoothing the bedclothes. “Tell us what happened, Tommy.”
“Not a lot to tell, Mr. Frost. It was all over so quickly.”
“That’s what my girl friends used to say, Tommy.”
Croll forced a grin. Frost always made him feel uneasy. And he wished the inspector would tell him who the bearded bloke hovering in the background was. He had such a miserable face, he looked like an undertaker. “It was like this: Bert went to fetch the car, like always, and I locked myself in. After about five minutes I get the signal. Naturally I think it’s Bert.”
“Naturally,” agreed Frost.
“I unbolts and flings open the door so he can come in when, wham, I’m welted a real right crack round the ear hole.”
“Did you see who hit you?” the bearded bloke asked.
“No, I didn’t but I sodding-well felt him,” replied Croll, his hand again tenderly touching the sticking plaster. “It knocked me out cold. The next thing I know, I’m in here with this roaring great headache. I can stand pain, Mr. Frost, but this is just as though my skull was split open.”
“I saw a bloke with his skull split open once,” said Frost. “A bus had gone right over his head a double-decker, full of passengers even eight standing on the lower deck.
You could hear this scrunching and this squelching and then blood and brains squirted out all over the place. His eyes popped right out of their sockets. We found them in the gutter. I had a job eating my dinner that day.” He switched on a smile as he recalled the nostalgic moment, then abruptly switched it off. “What did you do with the money, Tom?”
Croll, still shuddering from the description of the bus victim, was knocked off balance by Frost’s sudden change of direction. “Money? What money, Mr. Frost?”
“The 5,132 quid you and Bert Harris pinched,” said the bearded one.
“May I drop dead if I’m not telling the truth, Mr. Frost Croll began, his hand on his heart, but Frost cut in before he tempted fate further.
“It had to be an inside job, Tommy. Whoever did it had to know the arrangements and the signal for tonight. Only three people knew: Mr. Baskin, Bert, and you…”
Croll’s head sunk back on the pillow, his eyes showing how hurt he was. “That’s a wicked thing to suggest, Mr. Frost. Look at me wounded in the line of duty. I nearly had my head smashed in.”
“But it wasn’t smashed in enough,” explained Frost patiently. “If your brains had been splattered all over Mr. Baskin’s floor and halfway up his wall, well, I might believe you, but as it is…”
And before Croll realized what he was up to, Frost’s hand had snaked out and ripped the sticking plaster from his forehead. Croll yelled and clapped a hand over his wound, but Frost had already seen it.
“A waste of bloody sticking plaster, Tommy. I’ve seen love bites from toothless women cause deeper wounds than that.”
“I’m injured internally, Mr. Frost,” said Croll, putting a finger to his forehead to see if he was bleeding. “It don’t show on the outside.”
More activity in the ward. The Asian doctor, who seemed to be the only doctor on duty in the entire hospital, flapped in and made for the patient who had called out. Frost now saw that the front of the student nurse’s uniform was one dark, spreading stain of blood. The other nurse was rigging up apparatus for a blood transfusion. She signalled to Frost that she wanted him to leave.
“We’ll chat again tomorrow, Tommy,” said the inspector, moving away from the bed.
Croll pushed himself up. “Mr. Frost, I didn’t do it. I swear.. ”
“I believe you,” beamed Frost. “Just tell me where you’ve hidden the money and I’ll believe you even more.”
When they reached the main corridor they had to press back against the wall so that an orderly, pushing a patient in a stretcher, could pass by. The patient, head swollen by a turban of bandages which were almost as white as his bloodless face, looked a hundred years old.
It was the hit-and-run victim.
At four forty-five in the morning Denton Police Station was a dreary mausoleum, and the flowers Mullett suggested would have made it look more funereal than ever. It echoed with cold emptiness. Only two men were on duty, Police Sergeant Wells and Police Constable Ridley, the controller. Wells, slumped at the front desk, stared at the ticking time bomb the computer had presented him with. The licence plate found at the scene of the hit-and-run had been trotted through the massive memory banks of the master computer system at Swansea. The print-out read:
Registration Mark: ULU 63A
Taxation Class: Private! Light Goods
Make/ Model Jaguar 3.4
Colour: Blue
Registered Keeper: Roger Charles Miller Address: 43 Halley House, Demon.
What the computer didn’t say was that Roger Miller was trouble. Big trouble. He was the son of Sir Charles Miller, member of Parliament for the Denton constituency. And Sir Charles was even bigger trouble. He had money and he had influence, owning businesses as diverse as security organisations, newspapers, and commercial radio stations. He constantly criticised the police in his newspapers, and he was a permanent thorn in the side of the Chief Constable. And it was his son, Roger, a twenty-year old spoiled brat, who had brought seventy-eight-year-old Albert Hickman to the brink of death.
Wells twisted his neck to see what luck Ridley was having in contacting Detective Inspector Frost. “Control to Mr. Frost, come in please.” Over and over, Ridley repeated the message, flicking the receive switch and getting only a mush of static in response. “Still no answer, Sarge.”
“Damn!” said Wells, reaching for the phone. He dialled the first two digits of Mullett’s home number, then changed his mind and banged the receiver down. “Do you think I should phone Mullett?”
“That’s for you to decide, Sarge,” was Ridley’s unhelpful reply.
“You’re in charge.”
“I’m not bloody in charge. Frost is in charge… or he should be.
He’s the senior officer.” Again his hand reached out for the phone. Again he hesitated. Thanks to Frost, Wells was back in his familiar no-win situation. If he phoned Mullett he’d be castigated for disturbing him and for not using his initiative. And if he didn’t phone, Mullett would say, “Where’s your common sense, Sergeant? If someone as important as Sir Charles Miller is involved surely it doesn’t need a modicum of common sense to realize that I would want to know about it.” In either event, it would give the Superintendent a tailor-made excuse for turning down the sergeant’s latest promotion application.
Wells felt like breaking down and weeping at the injustice of it all when suddenly he was dragged away from his self-pity by a most unpleasant smell, which elbowed its way across the lobby. The sergeant’s head swivelled slowly
until he located the source.
“Clear off,” he said, happy to have someone to snarl at. “Get out of here before I turn the hose pipe on you.”
A brown over coated figure clutching a carrier bag tottered toward him.
“I’ve come to be arrested,” said Wally Peters. “Mr. Frost sent me.”
As Wells searched for a suitable expletive, Ridley called out excitedly from Control. “There’s Mr. Frost, Sarge.” Wells spun around in time to see Frost and Webster pushing through the main doors.
“I’m here, Mr. Frost,” the tramp announced proudly.
“Yes,” agreed Frost, ‘we smelled you from the top of Bath Hill. But I must dash,” and he went charging through the other door and up the corridor.
“Hold it a minute, Inspector,” yelled Wells, chasing after him.
The light was on in Frost’s office. Relieved, Wells hurried forward and opened the door, but inside he saw only Webster, frowning at the car licence plate lying across Frost’s desk.
“What’s this, Sergeant?” he asked, picking it up.
Wells waved it aside. “None of your business. Where’s the inspector?
We’ve got a bloody crisis on our hands.”
Webster put down the licence plate and sat at his own desk. “He said something about going scavenging.”
“Scavenging?” Wells sank down in Frost’s chair. “What’s he playing at? The man’s supposed to be an inspector; why doesn’t he start acting like one?”
“You sound just like our beloved Divisional Commander,” said Frost, staggering back into the office bearing a tray piled high with goodies: sausage rolls, sandwiches, crisps, pork scratchings, and salted peanuts. A clinking noise came from his bulging mac pockets. “It’s party time, folks,” he announced, pushing papers and the licence plate to one side to clear a space on his desk for the tray.
From pockets that seemed far too small to contain them came can after can of lager, a seemingly endless supply of miniature spirit bottles, and even a box of expensive cigars. “You shall go to the ball, Sergeant,” he said.
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