Morning Frost

by James, Henry

  ‘Oh Jack, come on, just the one?’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘Saturday?’ he said, surprised. ‘Well, all right. Where?’

  ‘Come by the nick.’

  ‘What time?’

  But Frost had already moved off into the chilly evening.

  Friday (7)

  Simms drummed his fingers impatiently as he waited in the reception area of Gregory Leather Ltd on the Denton Industrial Estate.

  ‘Would you like another cup of tea?’ the pretty receptionist asked.

  ‘No, thanks.’ He forced a smile. He’d already leafed through the collection of handbag catalogues. Pricey items they were too. If I’m made to wait around much longer I’ll get that ponce of a general manager to slip me a bag, he thought – it would do as a Christmas present for Sue, or whoever he happened to be dating next month …

  ‘I’m terribly sorry to keep you.’ The general manager appeared again, playing with the end of the red tie that refused to lie comfortably over his striped paunch. ‘The accounts clerk will be with you very soon.’

  ‘How much longer will he be?’ Simms said impatiently. ‘This is a very serious matter. Never mind the cash, some poor sod – one of your employees – has been shot.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know.’ The man smiled apologetically. ‘But the warehouse staff need to be paid, and Ian has insisted on taking care of it.’

  Simms had heard it all already. After the robbery, in which he’d narrowly avoided getting shot, the plucky young clerk’s first instinct was to rush back to Bennington’s, although this time, taking no chances, the general manager drove him there himself. The lad then withdrew the same amount of cash as before, in the same denominations, down to the last penny. Manual workers, who made up half the workforce, were paid weekly in cash, and their largely hand-to-mouth existence meant that the company risked a riot if they didn’t get their money, not to mention their families going without food. The office staff, such as the pompous nitwit in front of him, were paid through the bank directly.

  ‘Yeah, yeah … I know.’ Honourable as it all was, time was getting on and Simms had plans.

  A pimply lad in a shoestring tie appeared. ‘Ah, Ian, all done?’

  The clerk looked no older than nineteen. His nod betrayed nothing of the ordeal he’d endured at the hands of the armed robber.

  ‘Jolly good, jolly good. Now then, Detective Simms from Denton CID would like a word … Come, use my office.’ He marched off with arms bent like a sergeant major on parade.

  He led them into an office littered with graphs and charts. A visitor’s chair was heaped with handbags.

  ‘Just chuck them anywhere.’ He beamed, settling behind a desk overflowing with paper. Not unlike Frost’s, Simms thought.

  ‘Just the young man, please,’ Simms said sharply. The manager’s face fell. ‘You weren’t present at the robbery, were you? And let me have details of any employees with criminal records before I leave.’

  He huffed but didn’t object, and left quietly.

  Once the door was shut, Simms pulled out his cigarettes. ‘Want one?’

  The boy hesitantly took one. ‘Mr S doesn’t like smoking …’

  ‘So what?’ Simms shrugged. He eyed the lad; he’d been about that age when he joined the police.

  ‘Tell me about your day, from the start. Right from when you decided on that dodgy tie …’

  Simms listened, occasionally nodding, as the accounts clerk talked and smoked. He’d hoped that by getting the lad to retrace the events of the day up until the robbery he might spot something unusual in the ordinary Friday routine. But they had arrived at the point of the shooting and nothing untoward had passed. Simms then mentioned the Victorian method of paying staff; however, the clerk was dismissive – it was still common practice, he reckoned, as a lot of manual workers didn’t have a bank account, even in this day and age.

  ‘So, the armed robber,’ Simms said finally, thinking this would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, ‘she must’ve been expecting you. Is it always the same routine every week?’

  ‘More or less, yeah. We have to fax the bank with the denominations first so they can count it out, then it’s my job to pick it up, and Al – that’s Albert Benson – comes with me as minder. We have to get back in time to pay the wages before the end of play, so there isn’t much time to mess around. Mr S will sometimes go through the accounts if the overtime seems high, but not very often.’

  ‘And the firm has been here, what, since January?’

  ‘About that, yeah.’

  ‘The assailant came on foot from behind. You’re sure there was no car trailing you?’

  He shrugged. ‘Don’t remember seeing one, but then I wasn’t really paying attention … wasn’t expecting to get robbed,’ he said apologetically.

  ‘OK, moving on to the attacker herself. Think carefully.’ Only now did the boy’s composure crack slightly. A tremor of fear passed across his face as he recollected the event. ‘I know getting a gun shoved in your face is a shock, but anything at all might help,’ Simms added.

  ‘Oh, she didn’t point the gun at me. Barely looked at me, in fact.’ He frowned. ‘I wasn’t carrying the money.’

  ‘What age would you put the robber at?’

  ‘Hard to say – she was dressed like someone old … in disguise, I guess.’

  ‘What do you call old?’

  ‘Well, like a granny – headscarf, old person’s coat. But there was stuff about her that made it obvious she wasn’t old. It was the way she moved, I think – smooth and graceful, like a dancer. And her face was plastered in make-up.’

  ‘Get a good look at her then, yeah?’

  ‘Only briefly, it happened so quick.’ He stopped and pondered for a moment. ‘She had this flowery headscarf on like my mum might wear over weird grey hair. She reminded me a bit of a pop star in a video, the way she was all made up and wearing odd clothes, like Annie Lennox, you know?’

  Simms wasn’t at all sure what he was on about. ‘Pop videos? Remind me – Annie who?’

  ‘She was in The Tourists in the late seventies when I was at school. Not so much pretty but striking, like. Oh!’ A thought occurred to him. ‘She was on Top of the Pops last night, as it happens, with her new group. Classy video – did you see it? Maybe that’s why I thought of her …’

  Simms shook his head, scribbling furiously. At twenty-four it seemed he was already losing touch with popular culture. The Tourists he remembered vaguely, but not this singer the boy was on about. Being a detective left so little time for leisure – was he in danger of becoming cut off from everything except the job? He dismissed these thoughts, returning to the matter in hand.

  ‘What about height and build? Short, tall, fat, thin?’

  ‘About my height; tall for a bird. She was wearing this big, beige raincoat, so she could’ve been a cracker underneath but I didn’t get a look.’

  ‘Accent? Local?’

  ‘She hardly said a word, something about calling an ambulance was all.’

  ‘So we’re looking for a pop-star granny,’ Simms said, scratching the back of his head thoughtfully; whoever it was had done a pretty poor job of disguising herself, by the sound of it, although enough to make it difficult to nail important details. The temptation to assume it was the same girl who’d shot Baskin was powerful – gun-toting young women were hardly commonplace in Denton – but that girl had left a couple of thousand lying on Baskin’s floor. It didn’t add up … ‘So, if you had to make a stab at her age, what would you say?’

  The lad pondered for a while. ‘Hmm … thirty, forty maybe?’

  ‘How’d she hold the gun? With two hands, like this?’ Simms clasped his hands together and stretched out his arms.

  ‘No, with one hand.’

  ‘Can you remember which one? Think back – what hand did she grab the cash with?’

  The boy thought for a second, then said, ‘She held the gun with this hand.’
r />   ‘You sure?’

  ‘Positive. When she grabbed the cash and ran, she knocked me on this side.’

  ‘OK, great.’ Attacker left-handed, Simms wrote in his notebook. ‘And after she’d taken the money, which way did she go?’

  ‘I didn’t see. She yelled at me to face the wall, or I’d end up on the ground alongside Al.’

  ‘Did you notice anyone else in the area along your route who might’ve been an accomplice or look-out perhaps?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘See anyone else at all, just before the hit?’

  ‘It’s deserted round there … Might have seen someone coming towards us as I spun round against the wall, but I might have imagined it … All happened so quickly.’

  ‘OK. I’m going to send a police artist round to see you tomorrow, get a face, something to go on. That all right? Will you be at home?’

  ‘In the morning.’ He looked slightly troubled. ‘Town are playing at home tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘The morning it is – best to do it as soon as possible. Your description is crucial, however vague. Given the state she’s in, I don’t think we’ll get much from the mare who had her window shot out – so you’re our key witness, young man.’

  ‘That’s a dead end, then.’

  Waters replaced the phone in the cradle. Stiffly he stood up, and was surprised to see it was pitch black outside; so focused had he been on pursuing leads in this rape case he hadn’t noticed the day slip into darkness. There was no connection he could find between the rape of Jane Wheeler in 1979 and the latest attacks, and since the earlier victim had emigrated to Australia without leaving any forwarding address the trail was now cold.

  ‘Jane Wheeler’s gone AWOL, and anyway, she was never a teacher.’ Receiving no reply he glanced over at Clarke. ‘Sue?’

  ‘Sorry, miles away.’ She pondered for a moment. ‘Well, how do we know the teacher thing is significant? The girl attacked on Monday – Joanne Daniels – we have no idea if the attacker even knew she was a teacher. She was raped in an alley outside a local pub, so perhaps it was a random attack.’

  ‘Except that if the crank calls she’d been getting were connected to the rape it must’ve been premeditated.’

  ‘True,’ agreed Clarke, ‘so if we find out more about those calls we might finally be on to something. Where’s that list you got from British Telecom?’

  ‘I dunno that you’ll learn much from looking at this,’ Waters said wearily, passing her a sheaf of papers.

  Clarke spread the sheets out in front of her and smiled encouragingly. ‘Maybe the times of the calls might tell us something?’

  Waters got up and moved to peer over her shoulder. The print-out listed dates and times of calls received by the victim from several local telephone boxes.

  ‘Most of the calls are before nine a.m. or after nine p.m.,’ Clarke said.

  ‘Don’t I know it, stuck in the motor at the crack of dawn. But that’s just outside regular office hours, doesn’t mean a thing,’ Waters replied, disappointed. ‘And some calls are as late as ten …’ He ran his finger down the print-out, Clarke edging aside to give him space. ‘Here, here and here.’

  ‘Yes … but look what starts happening here.’

  Waters looked closely at the papers. Suddenly he saw there were several consecutive days when calls occurred during the day.

  ‘Strange – I wonder why the pattern changes,’ mused Waters.

  ‘Over these few days he suddenly decided to phone her at a different time. Why would he do that unless he knew she would be in?’ Clarke smiled knowingly.

  ‘But would she be in?’ shrugged Waters. ‘Why?’

  ‘Half-term.’

  A smile spread over Waters’ face. ‘So he must’ve known she was a teacher!’

  ‘Quite possibly. So, if it does turn out that the caller is Daniels’ rapist then we may have a link to the other attack.’

  ‘Hmm, still a lot of ifs and maybes,’ said Waters, returning to his desk and opening his notebook. He sighed; it was well over two hours since schools had finished for the day, while he was yet to even stop for lunch.

  DC Derek Simms entered the Eagle Lane canteen hungry and edgy. His day had been a long and complicated one. He had found himself juggling cases like Frost did – first the dead paperboy, then the Gregory Leather shooting – and not only that, he’d fallen into Frost’s trap of subsisting on cigarettes and coffee. Waters’ cheery cool was beginning to grate a little; it was all right for him, he had his stripes – he wouldn’t be unsettled by something like a raped schoolteacher. Simms was desperate for a break, a lead, anything. He now felt stupid for retrieving the bullet from the car door. Why didn’t he hand it in? What was he to do with it?

  But first he was desperate for some proper food.

  Congealed scrambled egg and a solitary piece of fried bread was all that was on offer at the staff canteen. Jesus.

  ‘Don’t you sneer, young man,’ admonished Grace, Eagle Lane’s faithful catering retainer. ‘If you will come in at six o’clock, then what do you expect? Give it another half hour and you could be first in the dinner queue rather than last for lunch.’

  ‘Lunch? This looks like it’s been out since four thirty this morning!’ Simms disconsolately scraped the corner of the metal serving dish for the last of the orange-hued egg – the canteen’s all-day breakfast clearly meant just that – and shuffled over to the till. Three uniform, Watkins among them, sat amidst a cloud of smoke, sleeves rolled up and ties loosened. It was the end of their shift and probably their week. Well, so what, he was still glad to be where he was, out of uniform and forging a career in CID, despite having not had a break. He sat down at a table and glanced at a tatty copy of the Sun that had been left lying open on page three. He stared at the paper lost in thought, imagining a woman very like the toothy beauty in front of him shooting Harry Baskin.

  ‘Sorry to disturb your deep CID level of thought.’ Simms jolted as a manila package was chucked across the girl’s bare breasts. ‘That’s for you.’

  ‘What’s this?’ he snapped at the lippy WPC.

  ‘Ballistics report for yesterday morning’s shooting.’

  He signed for the package hastily, eager to take a look. It may be Frost’s case now – every case was – but he, Simms, had been first on the scene at the Grove. Besides, he had always been interested in guns. Before deciding to follow Clarke into CID he’d originally hoped to get into the Firearms Unit or the Anti-Terrorist Branch, and he was one of the few at Denton qualified to use a firearm – though a fat lot of good it did him; Frost was so anti-gun.

  Two transparent pouches slipped out of the Jiffy bag. One contained the shell cases – two 9mm shells had been found in Baskin’s office. The Forensics note advised that the shells were probably ejected from an automatic pistol. No fingerprints were found on the cases. Simms recalled that the shell cases found at the roadside of today’s robbery were also 9mm; and indeed the lead was in his back pocket. Coincidence? Simms knew that 9mm handguns were now commonplace in the UK; an influx of smart, powerful pistols had flooded in from Europe since the late seventies. It was only the police who continued to use shoulder-breaking Smith and Wessons dating back to the First World War. So perhaps it wasn’t significant, except for the additional fact that both had been fired by a woman, not that their descriptions sounded too similar.

  He pondered again his dilemma. The longer he left it, the more trouble he was likely to find himself in – but on the other hand there was the lead in the minder, shot on the scene – so perhaps it might not be overlooked …

  In the second pouch was the bullet from Rhodes’s chest (the other one, presumably, was still in Baskin’s shoulder). Striation marks consistent with Continental barrel – Beretta 92 model claimed the accompanying notes.

  Laughter at the uniform table broke Simms’s concentration. He stuffed the packets into his leather jacket inside pocket – they would have to wait until later. He was due to pick Sue Clarke u
p at seven, and she wouldn’t be impressed if he’d not had a shower and shave. He wolfed down his very late lunch; he’d better get a move on.

  Friday (8)

  ‘You all right, then?’

  ‘Will be when we get inside.’

  Sue Clarke was freezing but cheerful; the town-hall doors were still a way off, such was the queue. Unsurprisingly the gig was sold out; big names seldom came to Denton and A Wing of Plovers were riding high in the charts. In front of them, larking around, were a bunch of teenagers, and Clarke was secretly pleased to be one of the oldest ones there.

  Derek had turned up promptly, hair back-combed, giving off a whiff of Denim. They’d even had time for a quick drink. He’d made an effort, and she was now well disposed for a nice evening.

  They were finally through the doors; Simms immediately lunged for the bar, fighting past the lads in front of them as if it was his last ever chance for a beer. He’s still so young, she thought; what would he do if he knew she was pregnant? But for the moment she was putting that aside. The town hall filled up, a Depeche Mode track was pumping through the speakers, and the atmosphere was one of young people in the mood for excitement. Outside it might be a miserable autumn night, but in here the weekend had started.

  Clarke hadn’t seen a band in ages, but she could hardly believe it when A Wing of Plovers announced a date in Denton. She thought Mike was dishy and loved his hair. All around were pale imitations of his futuristic-looking, forward-combed style, much to her amusement.

  Suddenly she caught sight of a woman she recognized. Who was it? Average height, mid-twenties and strawberry-blonde, she was cuddling up to a man who was slight and shorter than her with longish blond hair, and laughing at something he’d said. Could it really be Marie Roberts, the teacher raped that very morning?