A Lethal Frost

by Danny Miller

  She briefed him thoroughly on Eamon Hogan and his operation. The Dublin-born gangster was nothing if not diverse, believing you needed a broad ‘criminal portfolio’ to succeed, and that included everything from armed robberies, domestic burglaries, fraud, protection rackets, smuggling, counterfeit goods, and just about every other type of criminal activity you’d care to mention. And amongst these activities there also featured gambling and race fixing.

  Hogan loved horse racing, but along with the Irish’s natural affinity for the sport, he loved what the betting ring could offer him. All that untraceable cash sloshing about in the bookmakers’ satchels: it was the perfect place to launder his money. Whether or not the Dublin gangster had anything to do with the attacks on George Price and Jimmy Drake, Eve Hayward couldn’t say, as there was as yet no proof, but like Frost, there had never been a coincidence that she’d been willing to accept when it came to a murder case.

  When Eamon Hogan had first got started in the smuggling business, it was to bring untaxed shipments of booze and cigarettes into the Republic of Ireland, and this had led to him dealing in counterfeit goods; it was a profitable sideline that he’d kept in his ‘crime portfolio’ ever since. But, of course, it was the insidious nature of the drugs trade that had proved the biggest money-spinner for Eamon Hogan. And his adroitness at drug smuggling and distribution had made him one of the top gangsters in the Republic.

  There was still the ten-million-dollar question, which Frost dutifully asked: ‘Why Denton?’

  ‘A lot of major Irish crime figures have felt the pinch at home with some big arrests. The Garda and the government have been piling on the pressure – seizing their assets, homes and other property, freezing bank accounts – and a lot are moving out of Dublin. Some have gone to Europe, over to Spain, even Marseille and the South of France, running their businesses from afar. But Eamon Hogan seems to be doing it differently: he wants to take over a whole town.’

  ‘For all Denton’s charms, we’re hardly the Costa del Sol or the Riviera. Which again begs the question, why sunny Denton?’

  ‘It’s up and coming. It has a growing population with a youngish demographic. The property developers have moved in and are expanding with lots of land being made available, and it’s just about commutable to London. There’s a big council estate in town and others in neighbouring areas that can be infiltrated. But probably the biggest reason is that it’s not Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham, or London. There’s no competition here, no major crime families or gangs to contend with. Plus, and this could be the biggest factor involved, they may well have already corrupted people in positions of power here.’

  ‘Coppers?’

  She didn’t answer, left it hanging.

  Not good enough. Frost wanted answers. ‘Sue Clarke told me you were asking questions about me, so you obviously thought I was in the frame?’

  ‘I walk into a station and I think everyone is – potentially.’

  ‘But not now, or you wouldn’t be telling me all this. What made you change your mind?’

  ‘Because corrupt coppers on the take are usually the best coppers and really good at their jobs.’

  Frost, with all the sarcasm he could muster, said, ‘Thanks.’

  ‘What I mean by that is, they blend in and get on with the job, they exploit the system by working seamlessly within it. The last thing a corrupt copper does is challenge the status quo, stick his head above the parapet and kick up merry hell when he thinks it’s not working. He doesn’t shoot his big mouth off and fight everyone and everything, or come across as a stubborn little arsehole to get the right result.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  They laughed. But bent coppers aside, Eamon Hogan’s pervasive power made sense of what had been happening. That’s why he’s been able to recruit Bomber Harris and Tommy Wilkins, two Herberts who hate each other, mused Frost. They had no choice. Plus the fact they’re now probably earning more money than they’ve ever earned in their lives. But just how dark could it get? The DI shuddered and thought back to when Eagle Lane had been badly damaged in an IRA bombing. ‘Is there any political angle? IRA?’

  ‘You’re asking the right questions, Jack. There’s always a certain amount of coexistence between the ODCs and Provos.’

  ‘ODCs?’

  ‘Ordinary Decent Criminals: it’s a term used for criminals who have no political allegiances as such, and commit crimes for profit, not to fill the coffers or war chests of any paramilitary outfit. Ordinary Decent Criminals is a term they coined, not the Garda, I can assure you.’

  Frost gave a heavy sigh as he considered the implications. ‘And this has just landed on our doorstep?’

  ‘He plays his cards right, he could end up owning the place.’

  ‘Over my dead body.’

  ‘That can be arranged. Like I said, he’s ruthless.’

  Frost lifted his glass to his lips, took a slow sip of lager and pondered what Eve Hayward had just said – it was the kind of statement that demanded a snappy and ballsy retort. And there were several sharp one-liners that he was sure he could have thrown out that might even have impressed her. But somehow he wasn’t in the mood for that.

  ‘Do you have any pictures of Eamon Hogan?’

  ‘Back at my hotel.’

  Frost, now impatient, downed most of his drink; he broke his usual rule and actually left some in the glass.

  ‘Can I see them?’

  ‘The pictures?’

  ‘What else?’

  Wednesday (6)

  ‘Was everything OK, sir?’

  ‘It was great, just great,’ said John Waters distractedly as he collected his Access card off the waiter, a waiter whose French accent seemed to be slipping the more he had to deal with the emotional couple on table number seven. There had been raised voices and Kim had stormed out in floods of tears. So when Waters stuffed a fiver in the waiter’s breast pocket just before leaving the restaurant with his head down, he could have sworn he heard ‘good luck, mate’ in a broad Brummie accent.

  Waters found Kim by the Nissan, waiting to be let in. They didn’t look at each other as they got into the car. Waters turned the key in the ignition and slipped the car into gear. He took a deep breath and then killed the engine.

  ‘I’m not taking this back home.’

  She sat perfectly still, her face not reacting to a single word or sound he was uttering. To Waters it seemed like she was now locked in her own world of anger.

  ‘Of course I want kids. I wouldn’t have married you if I didn’t. And I am happy. But I’m scared, Kim, I’m scared, too.’

  She let out a heavy sigh, and slowly turned towards him. It felt like she was re-evaluating him, seeing him anew. Big, strong, tough John Waters could look after himself, scared of nothing and of no one. If that’s the image he’d projected, he felt himself coming undone – it was false and he felt like a fraud. In this job you were confronted with your worst atavistic fears for your family and loved ones, in crime after crime, day after day. But some hit home harder than others, resonating in your past, threatening your future.

  Kim intuited the problem. ‘It’s the two boys, Dean and Gavin, isn’t it?’

  ‘You know I was at that community outreach meeting on the estate, just before it all happened. The mothers asked me what they could do about the problem. And without meaning to, and I certainly didn’t plan it, or even want to … I ended up telling them about my brother. They now know more about him than you. Because I’ve never really spoken to you about him, have I?’

  ‘I know his name, Carl, and I know that he was older than you. And I know you miss him, even though you’ve never said it. But that’s about it, because you always shut down when I try to ask you about him.’

  ‘He was three years older than me, but when you’re a kid that feels like a lifetime. So I always really looked up to him, he was good at football, funny, smart, always dressed the business and everyone liked him. He start
ed hanging around with the wrong crowd, got into crime, petty stuff at first. But it led to borstal, some prison. Then he got into drugs. Fast forward a few years, and he ended up dead around the back of King’s Cross. My mum had done everything she could to help him, she and her friends tried to stop drugs coming into the neighbourhood. But she couldn’t stop him. And when he died, that was it, she never spoke about him again from that day on. As I got older I understood, it was like part of her had died too. After a while it was like he never existed. But he did, of course. He got me here. I don’t know why I wanted to be a copper, it wasn’t a natural thing for me to do, but I think it had something to do with him. Maybe try and stop what my mum couldn’t.’

  ‘Then at least something good did come out of it, John. I see the way your mum looks at you, she’s proud.’

  ‘Moving here … to Denton, I didn’t think I was moving to the Lake District or the Cotswolds, but I thought I could outrun it … but here it is, on my doorstep.’

  ‘I’m not moving to the Lake District!’ she said jokingly. Then, very seriously: ‘This is my home and yours too now, for better or worse. And you can’t run away from life. You didn’t before, you joined the force, and you faced it full on. So don’t be scared. You’ll be a great father. I wouldn’t have chosen you for the job if I didn’t think so. There’s no manual for this stuff, no rules or guidebook, not like becoming a copper. It just happens. It’s my first time, too. I’m scared. But I know it will all be OK – no, it will be better than that, it will be perfect. Trust me.’

  ‘I trust you,’ said John Waters with a gratified bobbing of his head, like the world had just been set back on its axis. Whilst he groped around for the right words, she had an unerring knack of coming out with just the right thing at just the right time. She had an innate wisdom that just happened to be wrapped up in a ra-ra skirt and a little black boob tube. I’m a lucky man, he told himself.

  ‘Have you got any pictures of your brother?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Let’s get home, I’d like to see them.’

  He smiled, then reached over, rested his hand on her tummy and kissed her.

  ‘It’s a bit early,’ said Kim. ‘You won’t feel any little kicks. Just some rumbling, because I’m bloody starving, can we get a kebab on the way back?’

  The strong Bavarian beer had been replaced by French cognac, and the choice of drink complemented their surroundings perfectly. Frost and Eve Hayward were now in the lounge bar of the Prince Albert Hotel, with its country-house grandeur. It was one of the few places in the town where you could drink after hours that hadn’t been renovated, modernized and ruined with gaudy neon-blue and -pink tube lighting in the shape of a cocktail glass, desperately trying to convince you that you were in Miami.

  With the workload Frost had, he didn’t dare look at his watch, and, luckily, he couldn’t read the dial of the grandfather clock that chimed away in the gloom of the corner, but he knew it was late, too late for a school night. The lounge bar was nice and empty, allowing Frost the illusion that the button-back Chesterfield chairs they were sitting in and the grand marble surround of the flickering fireplace were all theirs. Delusional, maybe, but when you lived above a Chinese takeaway on the High Street, these momentary lapses were allowed. When Frost was starting off on the force, an old copper had once advised him to keep an allotment and go there once a week, and to regularly think about nothing other than complete nonsense. ‘You need to empty your mind of the realities of your life and the work you do. It will keep you sane,’ he’d said. Frost didn’t have an allotment (yet), but he did like to slip into fantasy every now and again. Which seemed to lead seamlessly to his next thought.

  ‘I could tell you that other rumour about you, if you like.’

  Eve Hayward was warming her cognac in her hands, staring down at the big balloon glass as if it held the magic and answers of a clairvoyant’s crystal ball. As the burnt-orange liquid played perfectly in the light of the fire crackling away in the grate, she smiled a knowing smile, then glanced up at Frost and said, ‘I can see you’re dying to tell me.’

  ‘Well, you’ve been so informative, Eve, it’d be rude not to extend you the same courtesy.’

  ‘Did anyone ever tell you you’ve got a very wicked grin?’

  ‘Only our great leader, Superintendent Mullett, and he’s a big fan of my dress sense, too.’

  She rolled her eyes at the mention of the super’s name. ‘Why do I feel that with Mullett, there’s a scandal involving two dominatrices and him dressed as a schoolboy just waiting to happen?’

  Frost laughed and winced at the image and the painful probability of it all.

  ‘Go on then, let’s hear it.’

  ‘That you and Sue Clarke spent the night here … together.’

  Eve Hayward’s head slowly rolled back as she let out a peal of laughter. Like the rest of her, Frost enjoyed her laugh. It was husky, raucous, very sexy, and infectious enough for him to join her in it.

  Eventually she answered, ‘We did spend the night together.’

  ‘I know. Sue said so herself. Quite open about it, she was. I think some of the younger, more imaginative PCs, who mainly still live with their mums, have been indulging in some wish fulfilment.’

  Hayward kept smiling, but said nothing more.

  Frost kept on digging: ‘Maybe they got the wrong end of the stick. They wanted to read more into it than there was, or perhaps not …’

  ‘Well, they couldn’t have got the wrong end of the stick, because there were no sticks involved that night. But they might have got it right on the button.’

  ‘The button.’

  ‘The button.’

  Frost wasn’t one to mix his metaphors, but you didn’t have to be a poet to work that one out. Eve Hayward laughed some more and dismissed it all with a good-humoured shake of her head.

  ‘Let’s keep that rumour going, shall we, Jack? But, seriously, she’s a great girl and a really good copper. I think if Sue Clarke is given the right opportunities, she’ll go places.’ Frost agreed. Hayward added, ‘But she’s definitely not my type.’

  ‘Then who is? I don’t see a wedding ring.’

  ‘You neither.’

  ‘No. My wife passed away eighteen months ago now.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Frost paused for thought, a thought he wasn’t sure he wanted to have, not here, not now, but it came over him anyway. ‘Sounds callous, but we lived very separate lives, seemed like that for most of the time.’

  ‘The work?’

  ‘It always is, but in the end that just becomes the excuse. It’s the great default position we have as coppers: we can say we let our work get in the way. It’s special pleading, the job ruined my marriage, nothing to do with me, guv, not guilty, it was the job.’

  Eve Hayward gave a humourless laugh of recognition, a fellow traveller.

  Frost continued, ‘But that said, we didn’t grow apart either, we were different people right from the off, Mary and me. Funny, I think we had an idea that what made us so different was what made us right for each other. She was from a very well-to-do local family, big house in North Denton. I was from … well, the wrong side of the tracks, as they say. Her parents didn’t much care for me. Being a copper may have helped for a while, but it’s not the same as being a barrister, doctor, banker. I think even they could see I was too mouthy to join the top brass, be like the Mulletts of this world. Still, it held for a while, opposites attract, and all that. That may be true – I suppose if enough people say it for long enough it passes for truth. But it wasn’t true for us. We just got more settled in our ways, and never really … I don’t know.’ Frost looked down at his glass and swirled the cognac around the bowl a few times. It made for a good prop, too good to drink. ‘How about you, ever been spliced?’

  ‘I got married when I was seventeen. Lasted three years. We met at work, before I became a copper. It was the most boring job in the world, and he was the only reasonably attrac
tive and interesting thing in the place. He was all right, he was just young and stupid, like me. I thought I was destined to work on the factory floor all my life. Luckily the factory shut down, he pissed off, and I was left on my own. It was this or the army.’

  ‘You like uniforms, do you?’

  ‘Believe it or not, I like doing something where I don’t know whether I’m going to make it home at night. Does that sound weird?’

  Frost shook his head. It didn’t sound weird at all. His mind quickly scrolled back to the time he was shot in an attempted bank robbery: he remembered the feeling, not of fear but of exhilaration. He could almost see the hammer hit the bullet in the chamber and pass down the barrel of the revolver, the smell of cordite, the smoke, the searing pain as the bullet tore into his flesh, and at that moment he swore he’d never felt more alive. It was a flesh wound, ugly, but not fatal.

  But for all that, there was young DC Derek Simms, PC David Simms’ older brother, who hadn’t made it home, killed in the line of duty shortly after Mary’s funeral. And Frost’s old friend and mentor, DI Bert Williams, had suffered a similar fate. His eyes drifted down past his glass to the table and the black file that Eve Hayward had brought down from her room. In there were the pictures he wanted to see. The opposition. The quarry. Eamon ‘The Hook’ Hogan. And the very reason why you might not make it home alive.

  Thursday (1)

  Frost was finally pulled from his dream not with a gentle nudge to his shoulder, but with a stiff prod and the words, ‘Sleeping Beauty, time to shift!’