Frost 2 - A Touch Of Frost

by R D Wingfield

  “Then hadn’t we better make a search of the area?”suggested Webster.

  “A search,” said Frost. “No thanks, son. It’s too bloody cold. We’ll let Forensic have a sniff round if they want to, but I’m for going back to the station and getting warm.”

  “If I were in charge of the case,” said Webster stiffly, “I wouldn’t hesitate to organize a search, just as Mr. Allen did last night.”

  “And a fat lot of good it did him,” Frost pointed out. “But if you feel like organizing one, be my guest, so long as you don’t expect me to take part.”

  Someone’s call and the wave of a torch let them know that the experts from Forensic had arrived. Two of them. A miserable man and a little fat jolly man. Frost took them to the clearing where the jolly little one surveyed the scene with delight.

  “Plenty of footprints here,” he said.

  “Yes,” replied Frost. “Two ambulance men, two policemen, my detective constable, a suspect, me, and the girl. If you find anything else, let me know.”

  Webster’s mood showed itself in his driving. He was furious at Frost’s refusal to arrange a search. Frost was always looking for shortcuts but there were cases that didn’t lend themselves to the inspector’s slipshod methods. This was one of them.

  “So how exactly do you intend to proceed?” he asked, savagely twisting the wheel as they turned into Market Square.

  “We’ll get Terry out of the way first, then we’ll think about it,” answered Frost. He looked up, startled, as the car bumped the kerb after too wide a turn. “Careful, son, you’re driving like I do.”

  The station lobby looked as tired as they did. “Susan Harvey is waiting for you in your office, Jack,” called Wells. Suddenly Webster felt a lot less tired.

  Susan was in Webster’s chair, hugging a mug of instant coffee. She had returned from the hospital, where she had managed to talk to seventeen-year-old Wendy Raynor.

  “Fractured jaw and a few bruises,” she told them. “And she’s in a state of severe shock. She’s been sexually assaulted. Before the assault she was a virgin.”

  Frost sat in his chair and began to swivel from side to side. “And who does she say raped her?”

  Susan put the mug down on the desk. “Terry Duggan. He tried it on in the car. She ran off, but he followed and raped her.”

  Webster’s eyes flashed. “The bastard!”

  “He looks lovely when he’s angry, doesn’t he, Sue?” murmured Frost. He thought for a while, tapping his cigarette on his thumb. “My money wasn’t on the boyfriend.”

  “Then you were wrong, weren’t you?” said Webster with an ill-concealed sneer.

  “I’m always wrong,” admitted Frost. He studied his cigarette, decided he had tapped it enough, and popped it in his mouth. “She’s positive it was Terry?”

  “She’s confused, but she swears it was him. I don’t think she actually saw him. He jumped, threw something over her face, and started to strangle her. When she came to, there was Terry staring down at her.”

  “But that could have been when Terry came back to look for her,” said Frost thoughtfully. “And if it was Terry, then he’s infringed the “Hooded Terror’s” copyright the cloth over the face, the strangling . . .”

  “A copycat crime,” said Webster, determined that Frost should be wrong, “He read about it in the papers and copied it.”

  The phone rang. Webster answered it.The hospital. Swabs taken from Wendy Raynor were on their way to Forensic.

  Frost opened the door and yelled to Bill Wells, “Has the doctor seen Terry Duggan yet?”

  “He’s with him now,” the sergeant yelled back.

  “We’ll soon know,” said Frost, once again swivelling from side to side. “The thing is, she never actually saw him.” Then he grinned. “Did I ever tell you that old wartime joke about the girl munitions worker who was raped in the blackout?”

  Jokes! thought Webster. A seventeen-year-old’s been raped and he makes jokes.

  “The police asked the girl who did it, and she said she couldn’t say because it happened in the blackout. “But I can tell you this,” she said, “the rapist was definitely one of our foremen.” “How can you be so sure?” asked the fuzz. She said, “Because he kept his bowler hat on all the time and I had to do all of the work.” He guffawed with laughter as he reached the punchline. Webster maintained a stony silence, but Susan was convulsed and almost choked over her coffee.

  A tap on the door, and the duty doctor, a plump little Welshman, came in.

  “You’ve just missed a good joke,” said Frost, wiping his eyes. “The girl who was raped in the blackout ‘

  “And the foreman did it,” said the doctor, dumping his bag on Frost’s desk. “You tell me that every time there’s a rape.” He knocked some papers off a chair and sat down. “I’ve examined this young man, Duggan. There are fingernail scratches down his face and wrists, which I’m sure you’ve already noticed. I’ve taken a blood sample, which is on its way to your forensic laboratory, together with his clothes. And he has had sex within the last couple of hours.”

  “Which is more than I’ve had,” said Frost. He pinched his nose. “Well, young Webster, it’s beginning to look as if you might be right. I suppose we’d better see what he’s got to say for himself.”

  Terry Duggan, wearing only a police-issue red-and-grey blanket and a loaned pair of gym shoes some four sizes too big, leaped up angrily as Frost and Webster entered the interview room.

  “What’s the bloody game?” he demanded. “I’ve been stripped, my clothes have been taken away, I haven’t been allowed to leave, and no-one will answer my questions.” He paused for breath. “And another thing, that bleeding doctor did more than examine my scratches. He got bloody intimate.”

  “He gets carried away,” said Frost. He opened a folder and drew out a typed sheet. “Is this the statement you have just made to the police officer?”

  Terry squinted at it. “Yes.”

  “And you’re sticking by it?”

  The youth jutted out his chin defiantly. “Of course I am.”

  “Then I must ask you to sign it.” Frost borrowed a ball-point pen from Webster and passed it to Duggan, who scrawled his name at the foot of the document. Frost and Webster added their signatures as witnesses.

  Frost tucked the statement back in the folder, then shook his head reproachfully. “You’re a silly sod, you know?”

  “Why?” asked the youth, staring him out.

  “You’re in serious trouble, my son, and you make it worse by telling us a pack of lies.”

  Terry clutched the blanket closer to his body. “What do you mean, about me being in serious trouble?”

  Frost motioned for Webster to break the news.

  “Wendy tells us it was you who raped her. Sonny Jim.”

  Duggan looked first at Webster, then at Frost. They both stared back coldly. He tried to laugh, but it wasn’t very convincing. “Rape? Me? Do me a favour. I’ve never had to fight for it in my life. If they don’t give it willingly, then I don’t bloody want it.”

  “You fought for it in the car,” said Frost.

  Duggan shrugged. “They always put on a show of reluctance at first - they don’t want you to know that they’re as eager for it as you are. But as soon as Wendy started marking me with her nails, I packed it in.”

  ". . . and you drove straight back home,” read Frost from the statement.

  “That’s right.”

  “Parked your motor outside your house and, in a highly emotional but unfulfilled state, you crept into your little bed and went straight off to sleep?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So, by 11:30 you were indoors and in bed and your motor was parked in the street outside?”

  A slight hesitation, but again the answer was “Yes.”

  “And yet when Mr. Raynor, Wendy’s father, called at your house at midnight, there was no car outside, and although he kicked and banged on the door, there was no answer.�
�

  “I didn’t know her old man called round my place,” exclaimed Terry.

  “Well, he damn well did,” chipped in Webster. “But you weren’t in, were you? You were down in the woods raping his seventeen-year-old virgin daughter. Don’t try to deny it, Sunshine, the medical examination you just had proves it.”

  Terry sat down heavily in the chair and readjusted the blanket. It was prickly and scratchy and was making him feel itchy all over. “All right, so I didn’t go back home right away. I went back to the disco to see if there was any spare talent knocking about. I didn’t want the night to be a complete washout.”

  “Any witnesses who saw you back in the disco?” asked Webster.

  “No. I never got inside. I met this bird in the car park. She didn’t look very tasty, in fact she looked a bit of bleeding rough, but at least she was available, so we got inside the car and we had it away.”

  “Her name and address?” barked Webster.

  “No idea, squire. I’d never seen her before and I hope I never see her again. If I hadn’t been so desperate, I wouldn’t have touched her with a barge pole.”

  “Didn’t you drive her home afterward?”

  “Home? That’s a joke. She’d been sleeping rough. She asked me to drop her off at the main road so she could thumb a lift up north on a lorry.”

  Webster snapped his notebook shut and walked across to the youth. He grabbed the blanket, screwing it tightly in his fist, and jerked him to his feet. “You must think we’re bloody stupid, Duggan. You tried it on with Wendy. She wouldn’t have it, which was an insult to your virility, so you chased after her, choked her, broke her jaw, and raped her.”

  “I didn’t. If there’s no bleeding co-operation, then I don’t want it,” cried Duggan, trying to pull away, but the detective constable’s grip was vice like

  “Before you leave this room you are going to give us a signed statement admitting everything.”

  “I want a lawyer,” said the youth.

  Webster snatched away the blanket. “When you’ve given us a statement, you bastard.”

  The phone rang. As Webster had taken over the questioning, Frost had to answer it. He listened, thanked the caller, then hung up.

  Webster, his fists clenched, was standing toe to toe with the naked Duggan, his face red and angry. The youth looked terrified.

  Frost stood up and pocketed his cigarettes and matches. “That was Forensic, son,” he said casually, ‘with the results of their tests. The man who raped Wendy has blood group O, and young Terry here is blood group A.” He gave Webster a sweet smile. “I’ll see you back in the office.”

  And he went out, leaving the constable to make his apologies to the suspect.

  When Webster returned to the office he was fuming. He had been made to look a proper fool in front of a suspect, forced to offer grovelling apologies to a sneering young bastard.

  Frost was at his desk shuffling through papers. Webster was all ready to give him a mouthful when Susan Harvey came in.

  “Hello, Sue,” said Frost. “You still here?”

  She looked inquiringly at Webster. “I said I’d drive her home,” he told Frost.

  “Home?” said Frost in surprise. “It’s not time to go home yet, is it?”

  “It’s nearly two o’clock in the morning, Inspector. I’ve been on duty for more than sixteen hours on the trot. I’d fill in an overtime claim if I thought it stood the remotest chance of getting to County accounts.” Immediately he said it he wished he could have bitten his tongue because Frost’s head moved to the Overtime Return file still in the centre of Webster’s desk.

  “Thanks for reminding me, son. I promised Bill Wells they’d go off today.” He scratched his chin. “Tell you what. We won’t bother adding them up. They’ve got dirty great computers at County that can do that for us. We’ll just scribble down the figures and send them off like that.”

  “But it will still take hours,” protested Webster wearily.

  “Not if we split it three ways,” said Frost. “You’ll help, won’t you, Sue?” And he dealt out three heaps of returns from the file as if dealing hands of cards.

  So they pulled up their chairs and filled in page after page of figures copied from the men’s claim forms, allocating them to various categories of crime. Frost did a lot of groaning and smoking and seemed to be tearing up more forms than he filled in. Time hobbled along. Webster was finding that the figures had a tendency to blur into indistinctness. He staggered out and made some instant coffee, which helped a little. Then he realized he had been staring at the same column of figures for five minutes. He reached for another claim form. There were none. He had finished. Within another couple of minutes Susan, too, had finished her stint.

  “Marvellous,” beamed Frost, dealing them out some more from his own pile. But in ten minutes the return, folded in its official envelope marked “Overtime Figures - Urgent,” was all ready for transmission to County for inclusion in the next batch of salary cheques.

  “We all deserve a pat on the back for that,” said Frost, looking at the envelope as if he couldn’t believe his eyes.

  “Yes,” grunted Webster, slipping on his overcoat, all ready for the off before Frost remembered the crime statistics.

  Frost clicked his fingers. “Flaming hell, son . . . we forgot something!”

  “What’s that?” grunted the constable, taking Susan by the arm and steering her to the door.

  “The anonymous telephone caller who phoned about the girl in the woods last night. Dave Shelby said he knew who he was.”

  Freedom only half a turn of the door handle away, Webster said, “But Shelby’s dead.”

  “My memory’s not that flaming bad,” retorted the inspector. “Shelby said he’d seen the bloke. In which case he would have made an entry about it in his notebook.” He moved Webster’s hand, opened the door, and yelled, “Sergeant Wells!”

  Wells approached and gave a mocking bow. “You rang, my lord?”

  “Don’t ponce about when addressed by a senior officer,” rebuked Frost sternly. “Where’s Dave Shelby’s notebook?”

  “I thought you knew,” said Wells. “It’s missing.”

  Thank God for that, thought Webster. Now we can all go home.

  Frost frowned. “Missing?”

  “It wasn’t on the body, Jack, and it wasn’t in the car. Mr. Allen’s made a search, but no trace of it. He reckons it might have fallen from Shelby’s pocket when he was in the getaway car.”

  “So what news on the getaway car? Someone should have spotted the Vauxhall by now.”

  “Stan Eustace was always good at finding places to dump his stolen motors, Jack.”

  “About the only thing he is good at.” He took the brown envelope from his desk and handed it to Wells. “I’m off home. Here’s your lousy overtime returns. Stick them in the post bag.”

  Wells looked at the envelope, his eyebrows arched. “It’s gone three o’clock in the morning, Jack. The County collection was ages ago. If this doesn’t reach them first thing today it’ll miss the salary cheques and we’ll have a bloody mutiny on our hands.”

  Frost waved an airy hand. “Don’t get excited. Webster can drop them in the County letter box.”

  Webster’s beard bristled. “I can do what? It’s an hour’s drive each way.”

  Another airy wave from Frost. “Fifty minutes at the outside - a lot less if you’re not too fussy about obeying traffic lights. Use my car. You can take Sue with you and drop her off on the way back.”

  As he crawled into the car, Webster realized that he wasn't going to be able to do it. He was too tired. He’d fall asleep at the wheel. Susan got out and moved around to the driving seat. “Slide over,” she said. “I’ll drive. You’d better spend what’s left of the night at my place - you’re in no fit state to drive back.”

  Webster did a mental inventory of Susan’s tiny flat - no sofa and only one bed. He felt his tiredness slipping away but didn’t make it obvious. He st
uffed the envelope into the dash compartment. “I didn’t bring my pyjamas,” he said.

  “And I haven’t got a nightdress,” murmured Sue, turning the ignition. Webster leaned back in his seat and purred. The night wasn’t going to be a total disaster after all.

  On the way back from County Headquarters he could fight sleep no longer. When he opened his eyes the sky was dawn-streaked. “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Nearly there,” she told him. “I’m taking a shortcut.”

  The shortcut was a narrow lane joining two side roads. A short, bumpy ride.

  “Look out!” cried Webster. Something loomed up in front of them.

  The headlights had picked out a car. A car parked bang in the middle of the lane, no lights showing. They could have run straight into it.

  Carefully, Sue manoeuvred the Cortina to squeeze past. Webster twisted his head to look back. The lunatic who parked it so dangerously deserved to be booked. Then his heart sank.

  The car was a red Vauxhall Cavalier.

  The registration number was CBZ2303.

  “Oh no!” croaked Webster in disbelief.

  “What’s up?” asked Sue.

  “Every bloody thing is up,” he said despairingly as he reached for the handset. He called Denton Control to report he had found Stan Eustace’s getaway car.

  Thursday day shift

  Webster sat in the car with Sue and waited. Within twenty-five minutes Detective Inspector Allen had arrived on the scene. He must have been asleep in bed when the call came through, but in those twenty-five minutes he had managed to shower, shave, and put on a freshly pressed suit. He looked immaculate. By contrast, Detective Sergeant Ingram, sour and crumpled at his side, looked as if he hadn’t slept properly for a week, which tended to underline the whispered rumours of his marital troubles. He looked even more sour when Allen doled out a few begrudging crumbs of praise to Webster.