Frost 2 - A Touch Of Frost

by R D Wingfield

Webster looked at his wristwatch. There was no way they were going to make the post-mortem in time. They were late already, and here was Frost making yet another detour.

  “Pull up there, son. By the lamppost.”

  Sunford Street was a row of dreary-looking terraced houses. Out of the car, across the pavement, and they were in the porch of number 26, a house even drearier-looking than its neighbours. Frost hammered away at the knocker. They heard low, shuffling footsteps from within, then a harsh female voice demanding to know who they were.

  “Jack the Ripper and Dr. Crippen,” called Frost through the letter box. “Come on, open up. You know bloody well who we are. You’ve been giving us the eyeball through the curtains ever since we pulled up.”

  The clanking of chains being unhooked, keys turned and bolts drawn, then the door creaked open. Facing them was a small, wiry old dear wearing a moth-eaten fur coat over a too-long nightdress, the bottom of which was black with dirt where it constantly dragged over the floor. Her ensemble was topped by an ill-fitting, ill-suited brown nylon wig in a Shirley Temple bubble style; it wobbled and threatened to fall off each time she moved her head. Her face was knee-deep in make-up, the cheeks rouged like a clown’s. She was at least seventy years old and possibly much nearer eighty.

  “Tell your mummy the cops are here,” said Frost.

  “Never mind the jokes,” she retorted. “Where was you while I was being robbed?”

  “Paddling in pee down a toilet,” answered Frost. “Can we come in, Lil?”

  She took them into the front downstairs room, a cold, damp little box packed tight with heavily carved, gloomy furniture treacled with dark-oak varnish. In the centre of the room a knock-kneed table sagged under the weight of bundles of ancient newspapers tied with string. A piano, complete with candle holders, cringed sulkily in a corner; it, too, carried more than its fair share of bundled newspapers. The one window was hidden by thick, dusty, velvet curtains, tightly drawn so that passers-by couldn’t get a glimpse of the treasures within.

  Frost thumbed through one of the yellowing newspapers. “Looks as if Mr. Atlee’s going to win the election,” he said. He pushed it away. “Right, Lil, so what happened?”

  “You know what happened, Inspector,” she said, the wig wobbling furiously. “I put it all down in that form. It’s all rotten forms these days. Soon you’ll have to fill up a form to go to the lavatory.”

  “I fill up a bucket myself,” murmured Frost. “My hairy colleague can’t read, Lil, so tell him what happened.”

  She gave Webster a searching look and decided he just might be worthy of her confidence. “You listen, young man, because I’m only saying this once.”

  The day before, she had travelled to Felby, a town some fifteen miles away, to visit her sick sister. She left the house at three, catching the 3.32 train from Denton Station. A few minutes before leaving she had checked that the sovereigns were safe. She was indoors again by ten o’clock that night but, tired out after the journey, went straight to bed.

  “If I’d known my life’s savings had been stolen, I wouldn’t have slept a wink,” she said. “First thing after breakfast I went to the hiding place and I nearly had a seizure on the spot. The tin was empty - all the money I had scraped and saved for, my little nest egg, my burial money - all gone. They should bring back hanging.”

  Poor old girl, thought Webster. “Where did you keep the tin?”

  “In the piano.” She waddled to the corner, removed two piles of newspapers and opened the piano top, then, standing on tiptoe, plunged her hand into the depths. With a twanging of strings, she pulled out a biscuit tin decorated with pictures of King George V and Queen Mary. This she opened, holding it out by the lid to demonstrate its complete emptiness.

  “It’s empty, all right,” agreed Frost. “I’ve never seen a tin more empty. Who else knew where you kept it hidden?”

  “No-one!” she said.

  “The thief knew,” said Frost.

  “Was anything else taken?” asked Webster.

  She wobbled the wig from side to side. “No, thank God. I’ve checked everywhere. Just my seventy-nine golden sovereigns.”

  “What sort of sovereigns, Lil?” asked Frost.

  “They were all Queen Victoria,” she answered. “My old mother, God rest her soul, left them to me on her deathbed.”

  “Would you know them if you saw them again?”

  “I know every mark, every scratch on them. I’d know them as if they were my own children - and I miss them as much as if they were.” She dabbed her eyes and trumpeted loudly into a large handkerchief which looked as if it, too, dated from Queen Victoria’s time - and hadn’t been washed since. The wig slipped down over one eye.

  “And the tin was put back again in the piano?”

  She nodded.

  Frost prodded his scar. The same old pattern, a quick in-and-out job, but this time the thief knew exactly what he was after and where to find it. So how did he get in? The window, perhaps?

  He squeezed past the table and pulled back the curtain, then tried to open the sash window. It wouldn’t budge. Early in its life it had been thickly painted with cream paint which had seeped over the catch to seal it tight. So the thief didn’t get in that way. More than likely he came in through the front door.

  The front door almost wilted under the weight of the hardware attached to it - bolts, bars, and various heavy-linked security chains. But none of these could be applied from the outside, and when Lil went to visit her sister, all that had secured the door was the door lock. It looked solid enough, but, as in many of these old houses, the pattern was such that the lock could easily be snapped back with a flexible piece of plastic.

  “Odds are he got in through this door,” he told Webster, ‘but you’d better take a look around the rest of the house in case there’s any sign of forced entry.” He gave the old dear a grin. “You’d better go with him, Lil, in case he pinches anything. You know what sticky fingers we cops have.”

  Webster didn’t think it at all funny, especially as Lil took the remark seriously and followed him suspiciously through every room of the house.

  Left on his own, Frost quickly began opening drawers and peering inside. Then he lifted the bundles of newspaper off the piano lid so he could get to the keyboard. Lying on the yellowed keys were various bank-deposit books, post-office savings accounts, and building-society savings books. He quickly thumbed through them to see how much money the poor old dear had. That done, he shuffled through a wad of family-allowance books kept together by a thick rubber band. These were at the other end of the keyboard. He was prevented from studying these in detail as he heard footsteps descending the stairs. Quickly, he replaced everything where he found it, moved to the window, and put on his most innocent expression.

  Webster had found no signs of forced entry, but he was shocked at the poverty-stricken conditions in which the old lady lived. The bedroom was a horror with no heating, bare boards on the floor, and old coats on the bed instead of blankets.

  They knocked on a few doors, but none of the neighbours would admit to seeing anyone suspicious lurking about the house the previous day. There was little else they could do, apart from Lil’s suggestion that they should inform Interpol.

  The biscuit tin was dropped into a plastic bag to be tested back at the station for alien prints, and then it was time to go. She saw them out, plucking at Frost’s arm as he was about to leave. “Please get my money back for me, Mr. Frost.”

  Frost shrugged. “If we can, Lil, but we’ve got a lousy track record.

  We haven’t recovered a penny of anyone’s money up to now.”

  With her lower lip quivering she looked pathetically at Frost, as if he had told her that her entire family had been wiped out in an air crash.

  “It was my burial money,” she said, blinking hard to hold back the mascara-streaking tears.

  Webster felt choked-up as he slid into the driving seat. “Poor cow,” he said. “I feel so sorry for
her . . . and you should see the rest of the house. She probably hasn’t got two half-pennies to rub together.”

  “You should see her bank book,” said Frost. “She’s got at least twenty thousand quid in the building society, fifteen thousand in the bank, and God knows how much more in her other accounts.”

  “You’re joking!” exclaimed Webster.

  “I’m not, son. I had a little nose around while you and she were up to no good in her bedroom. Years ago she used to carry out back-street abortions fifty bob a time, including a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit afterward. She was known as the “Fifty Shilling Tailor.” If it weren’t for Lil and her crochet hook we’d be suffering from a population explosion. But as soon as the government made abortions legal she went over to money lending . . . short-period loans at exorbitant rates of interest to people desperate for ready cash - housewives who’ve spent the housekeeping on Bingo and don’t want their old man to know, loan club organizers with sticky fingers. She also makes loans to young people behind on their HP payments, usually taking their family-allowance books as security. There was a wad of them in her piano. You needn’t get your beard wet with tears over her, my little hairy son.”

  Time was hurtling on. The visit to Mrs. Cornish would have to wait until after they had attended the post-mortem on her son. Webster broke all speed records driving to the mortuary, pulling up with a screech behind a Rolls-Royce hearse, all agleam with black and silver like Mullett’s new uniform.

  Out of the Cortina, up a slope and through double doors into a small lobby where the notice on the wall read All undertakers to report to porter before removing bodies. At the inquiry counter two undertaker’s assistants in funereal black were arguing with a little bald-headed mortuary attendant who was firmly shaking his head as he thumbed through the papers they had presented to him.

  “But I keep telling you,” the exasperated undertaker was saying, ‘the bloody funeral is in an hour. We’re burying him at twelve.”

  “Don’t you swear at me,” said the attendant, drawing himself up to his full height. “Without the death certificate you’re burying bugger all!”

  “Excuse me,” said Frost, elbowing his way through like a referee parting two boxers. He showed his warrant card. “I’m here for the Cornish post-mortem.”

  The attendant craned his neck up at the clock. “You’re a bit late, Inspector.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s started?” asked Frost.

  “Nearly finished, I think. You know how punctual Dr. Bond is. He don’t sod about.”

  They pushed through another set of double doors into the white chill of the green-tiled autopsy room where a sharp antiseptic smell held a cloying aftertaste of something nasty.

  A sheeted trolley stood against the wall to the left of the entrance doors. Frost twitched back the sheet and looked down on the blue, shrivelled, waxen face of an old lady. “Sorry, love,” he murmured gently, covering her. “I thought you were someone I knew.”

  At the far end of the room a rubber-aproned mortuary attendant in abattoir-style Wellington boots was hosing down the guttered and perforated top of a post-mortem operating table. Water suddenly overflowed as something blocked one of the drains, but the assistant cleared the blockage with his finger and carried on with his work. Webster shuddered to think what the blockage was caused by. Frost tapped the attendant on the shoulder. “The Ben Cornish post-mortem?”

  “All over,” said the attendant, too engrossed in his work to stop. “The pathologist has gone, but Dr. Slomon’s in the office waiting to see you.”

  In the office Slomon was pacing up and down, very agitated and worried. As soon as Frost entered, he dashed over and grabbed him by the arm. “Thank goodness you are here, Inspector.” His worry increased when he saw Webster. “Who is this?”

  Frost introduced his assistant. Slomon hesitated. “It’s a bit delicate,” he said, making it clear he wanted Webster to leave.

  “If it’s police business,” answered Frost, ‘then he’s in on it.”

  Slomon compressed his lips, checked the hall to make sure no eavesdroppers were hovering, then closed the door firmly. He lowered his voice. “We’re in trouble, Inspector.”

  “I’m always in trouble,” said Frost, finding himself a chair. He didn’t like the way the doctor had said “We’re in trouble.” His tone seemed to imply that Slomon was in trouble but wanted Frost to share a large part of the blame. He listened warily to what the man had to say.

  “No-one could examine a body properly in the conditions we had to cope with last night, Inspector. They were intolerable and if we missed anything it was through no fault of our own. It’s important that we each stress that fact in our reports. People are always too ready to point the accusing finger.”

  Now Frost was really worried. What the hell had they missed last night? “What did the post-mortem show, Doc?”

  “Come with me.” Slomon took Frost’s arm and steered him into the adjoining storage area with its neatly tagged refrigerated units set into the wall like filing-cabinet drawers. “Where are the frozen peas?” asked Frost. Slomon was in no mood for jokes. He tugged at one of the drawers, and a body, smoking with curling wisps of frozen carbon dioxide, slid silently forward on rollers.

  The haggard, strangely clean face of Ben Cornish stared up, horrified as if in protest at the indignities the postmortem had subjected him to. “Look at this!” Slomon indicated a nasty-looking green-tinged bruise in the area below the corpse’s left eye.

  Puzzled, Frost crouched over the body. “How come we didn’t spot this last night, Doc? It looks so bloody obvious now.”

  “Last night,” explained Slomon. "he was covered with filth and vomit. This only came to light when the body was stripped and washed clean. There was no way I could have spotted it.”

  He pulled the sheet down to expose the torso and upper legs. The dead man’s right arm was one angry mass of suppurating sores where he had been injecting himself. The chest and abdomen were vividly slashed with extensive autopsy wounds, which had been crudely restitched after flaps of flesh had been torn back to facilitate the removal of internal organs from the stomach cavity. The flesh of the stomach was one massive, sprawling, yellowy-green bruise.

  Slomon traced the bruised area with his finger. “As you can see he was beaten up pretty badly just before he died.”

  Frost’s heart dropped down to his own stomach cavity. He was beginning to realize what was coming. Did a fist do this?”

  “Not a fist,” replied Slomon. “A boot. He was punched, knocked down, then, when he was helpless on the floor, his assailant brought up his foot and stamped with all his weight on the abdomen.”

  Frost gritted his teeth and winced. He could feel the pain shooting across his own stomach. But Slomon hadn’t finished. From a stainless-steel cabinet in the corner he brought over two sealed specimen jars containing a mass of mangled human offal half immersed in a bloodied liquid. The sight of it made Webster flinch, and his stomach gave one or two protesting churns, but Slomon lectured dispassionately as if to students. “As you can see, his liver has virtually exploded. In the whole of my professional career I have never seen such terrible internal injuries. Further, the blows actually split the pancreas, and the main blood vessel to the heart is torn. Really shocking injuries.”

  “And that’s what killed him, Doc?” Frost asked, fearful that the sheet might be pulled down to reveal further horrors.

  “They would have killed him,” answered Slomon. “In fact there is no way he could have recovered from such injuries. However, the initial blows to the abdomen caused the expulsion of the stomach contents. He choked on his own vomit, so, to my credit, in spite of the appalling conditions, my diagnosis was perfectly correct.”

  To your credit? thought Frost. No-one comes out of this with any credit, Slomon. He stuck his hands deeply into his mac pockets and swore softly to himself. Why the hell wasn’t any of this spotted last night? Damn bloody Slomon for not wanting to get his
feet wet, and damn my own bloody incompetence. I was so keen to get away to that lousy party, I bungled the investigation. I should have insisted Slomon do a proper job.

  “I don’t want the body touched further,” he said. “It’ll have to be photographed. I’ll send one of our blokes down . . . and I’ll need his clothes for forensic examination.” He looked again at the dead face and then recalled the scene in the toilet the previous night. The cubicle with the splintered door. He could picture the scene. Ben cowering inside in terror while his assailant kicked the door down, then dragged him out and stamped him to death. He draped the sheet over the dead face and pushed the drawer firmly shut. “Come on, son,” he said.“Work to do.”

  “Don’t forget to emphasize in your report that we did everything possible last night,” called Slomon as they were leaving. Frost waved a vague hand. He would report exactly what happened, nothing more, nothing less. He had no doubt that Slomon’s report would dump all the blame on the police, but he hadn’t time to play such games.

  They pushed through the swing doors and out into the mortuary lobby, where a side door had been opened to allow the two undertakers to carry a coffined body straight through to the waiting Rolls Royce hearse. Behind his desk the mortuary attendant was booking out the corpse and adjusting his stock records. He was whistling happily as if someone had tipped him a fiver. There was no sign of the death certificate on his clipboard.

  Outside the air smelled marvellously fresh and untainted. As they waited for the hearse to move away, Frost said, “Why would anyone want to do that to a poor old sod like Ben?”

  “Robbery,” suggested Webster.

  “He had bugger all to pinch,” said Frost.

  “Drugs?” was Webster’s next suggestion. “Another drug addict wanted Ben’s heroin so he killed him for it?”

  For a few seconds Frost stared into space. Webster wondered if he had been listening, but then Frost turned and said, “I’ve been bloody stupid, son. I knew I’d missed something.”