Frost 5 - Winter Frost

by R D Wingfield

  'An act of kindness,' smirked the lawyer.

  'You make me feel a swine for ever doubting you,' said Frost. He took the photograph back and swapped it for one of Mary Adams. 'Recognize this one, Mick?'

  Mickey stared at the photograph then shot a quick glance to the lawyer who, with a barely perceptible shake of the head, told him to say no.

  'No.'

  'Her name is Mary Adams, trade name Lolita. She operated from a flat in Clayton Street. Ever been there?'

  'Never.'

  'When business was slack she used to go after the crumpet hunters in Denton Parade and King Street, an area on which Harry Grafton felt he had monopoly trading rights. Harry told you to warn her off, didn't he - to rough her up a bit?'

  'No. And if she says I did, she's lying.'

  'Yes - she's lying . . . in the bleeding morgue, Mickey. You went too far this time. She's dead.'

  'Dead?' Mickey blinked with indignation. 'That's rubbish. I never touched her. I never went near her.' He turned to the lawyer for support but Kirkstone appeared to be busying himself writing copious notes on a sheet of A4 paper. Mickey was on his own with the murder charge.

  'You like to phone them up after you pay them a visit, don't you, Mickey? You thought you'd phoned this girl, but she couldn't answer the phone as she was dead. You actually spoke to one of my women officers. You boasted about beating Mary up.'

  Mickey's head was being violently shaken from side to side. 'No. It's bloody lies.'

  'You phoned her, Mickey. We've got you on tape.' Frost was picking his words carefully in case of future legal arguments. He only had Mickey on tape for the hospital call. 'Couple more photographs you might recognize.' These were of the other two prostitutes, the ones who were tied and tortured. The solicitor leant over to look at them and shuddered, moving his chair slightly, distancing himself even more from his client. Mickey was staring aghast. 'Oh no - you're not pinning all your bloody unsolved crimes on me. All right, I beat up the kid in hospital, but I never laid a finger on Mary Adams.'

  'But you phoned her, Mickey. You told her next time it would be really serious.'

  Mickey stared at Frost, his eyes blinking rapidly, but before he could answer, the solicitor intervened.

  'If my client had killed this woman, Inspector, why would he phone her up with further threats?'

  'He phoned,' said Frost, 'to see if she was still alive.'

  'No!' shouted Mickey. 'I phoned to tell her about her bloody car.'

  'Her car?' echoed Frost, wondering what the hell this was about.

  'I'd phoned a few times warning her to stay off of Harry's patch, but she took no notice. I was going in to give her a going-over but she wasn't in, so I decided to do her car in instead. I slashed the tyres and gave it a few welts with a sledge hammer. It was a warning. If that didn't work, next time it would be her; that's what I was phoning about.'

  'Naturally,' smarmed Kirkstone, 'my client will pay for any damage he inadvertently did to the car.'

  'You smashed her car,' said Frost, 'and then you went up to the flat to tell her what you had done. She went for you with a knife and you killed her.'

  'Like I said, she wasn't in - out tomming on Mr Grafton's patch, I reckoned. I left it a couple of hours, then I phoned her and that's the honest, bloody truth!'

  Kirkstone leant back in his chair and flashed Frost an ingratiating smile. 'Might I ask how this young lady was killed, Inspector? It's probably slipped your mind that you neglected to tell us.'

  Frost groaned inwardly. It hadn't slipped his mind. This was the weaker part of his case against Mickey. 'She was strangled.'

  'Strangled?' exclaimed Kirkstone in mock surprise. 'You're saying she wasn't beaten to death?'

  'No,' grunted Frost.

  'And these other two unfortunate women - did they show any signs of being punched . . . beaten with fists?'

  'No,' admitted Frost grudgingly.

  'So their injuries are not at all consistent with those of the young girl in hospital?'

  'Correct,' muttered Frost.

  'I take it there is nothing to connect my client with the two deaths?'

  Frost nodded gloomily. The bastard had him on the ropes.

  'So we can dismiss that allegation entirely. The only connection he has with the death in Clayton Street is the phone call which he admits to making and for which he has given a satisfactory explanation.'

  'He's given an explanation,' said Frost, clutching at what little bit of straw was left, 'but it may not be the true one. I want the clothes he was wearing that night for forensic examination.'

  'I was wearing the clothes I've got on now,' said Mickey, starting to take off his jacket. 'I take it you're not interested in my underpants and socks?'

  'Definitely bloody not,' shuddered Frost. He was wasting his time with Mickey. He knew it. The man had nothing to do with the killings, but let Forensic have a sniff round the clothes, you never knew your luck. He shoved the photographs back in the folder and stood up. 'Give my colleague a statement, and your clothes, and you'll be released on police bail.'

  Kirkstone patted his papers into shape and dropped them in the leather briefcase. I'll get your other suit sent in,' he told Harris. 'Don't sign the statement until you have read it out to me over the phone.' He followed Frost out. 'You haven't got the shadow of a case, Inspector.'

  'We've definitely got him for the poor cow he put in hospital,' said Frost.

  Kirkstone smiled. 'I wouldn't be at all surprised if the young lady dropped the charge, Inspector.'

  How much is Harry going to pay to buy her off?' asked Frost.

  Another smile from Kirkstone. 'I shall pretend I didn't hear that.' With a curt nod he took his leave, humming happily as he strode down the corridor.

  'Oily bastard!' snarled Frost at the departing figure.

  Police Superintendent Mullett suppressed a yawn and stared down at the waspish memo County had sent him, returning Frost's outstanding crime figures with the carping comment, underlined in red ink, that until this was corrected the All Divisions Quarterly Statistical Summary was delayed and the Chief Constable would want to know why. Mullett's lips tightened. A Division was judged by its paperwork and yet again Frost had let him down. A tap at the door. He sighed. Even the man's knocking had a slovenly air to it. He began to say 'Come in' but was forestalled as Frost slouched in and dropped unbidden into the visitor's chair, a cigarette with a length of ash threatening to fall any minute, drooping from his mouth. 'You wanted to see me, Super?'

  'Yes.' Mullett hastily slid the ashtray across but was just too late to stop the cylinder of ash from dropping on the carpet. He winced as Frost scuffed it into the pile with his shoe. 'I've had this from County.' He pushed the memo and the return across.

  Frost give it a disinterested sniff. 'Those silly sods in County seem to think their bleeding figures are more important than solving crimes.'

  'Head Office judge us on our paperwork. Frost. And in any case, your crime-solving figures are nothing to boast about.'

  Frost shrugged. 'Never thought I boasted about them. What's their beef?'

  'Their beef, Frost, is that your return omits quite a few of your own unsolved cases, but includes cases already shown on Inspector Maud's return.'

  Shit, thought Frost. Morgan must have got the files mixed up. He scooped up the return and stood up. 'I'll do it when I get time.'

  'You'll get it done today,' snapped Mullett, 'and I still haven't finished.' The way Frost kept looking pointedly at his watch and raising his eyebrows to the ceiling was starting to irritate. He tried unsuccessfully to stifle another yawn.

  'Out on the tiles last night, Super?' asked Frost.

  'No, I wasn't. I was woken in the early hours by that wretched Inspector Maud wanting to be put in charge of the prostitute killing and then I couldn't get back to sleep again. And then she had the damn cheek to come in here this morning demanding to be allowed a few days off. She knows how busy and short-staffed we are. Said sh
e had to have an urgent minor operation at a private clinic, but wouldn't tell me what it was about, said it was personal woman's stuff. Do you know what it's about?'

  Frost shook his head. 'Perhaps she's having her breasts enlarged,' he suggested.

  Mullett sat back and frowned. 'Surely they're large enough already?'

  'You'd know more about that than me, Super,' muttered Frost. 'I haven't really studied them like you.'

  Mullett flushed a deep red. 'I haven't studied them. Some things you can't help noticing. Anyway, she's off for a few days, which leaves us even more short-handed.'

  'Get some of our men back from County then.'

  'No. I want County to see that we can manage no matter how short-staffed we are. We'll all have to be that much more efficient. She'll be back next week and Inspector Allen will be returning soon after that. We can hold out until then.'

  Frost stood up and moved to the door. 'As long as you don't mind the overtime bill going up.'

  'No way,' said Mullett firmly, remembering what the Chief Constable had said at the meeting. 'That is the easy way out.'

  But he was talking to a closed door.

  Chapter 7

  Frost added up the column of figures again to check Morgan's addition but made it yet a different total. He admitted defeat and signed the form anyway. 'Are you sure it's right this time?' he asked, tossing the crime return back to Morgan.

  'Positive, guv,' replied Morgan. But he was always positive, completely undeterred by his record of past mistakes. He rubbed his jaw and winced. 'This flaming tooth doesn't half hurt.'

  'It'll hurt a damn sight more when the bastard pulls it out,' said Frost, who hated dentists. The day wasn't going too well. The post-mortem hadn't turned up anything they didn't already know and Morgan's search of the flat in Clayton Street had failed to find the missing car keys.

  Arthur Hanlon came in and flopped wearily into a vacant chair. 'You wanted me to check on the clothes Lewis was wearing at the match, Jack. I've traced a few of the people he travelled with on the coach, but they were so drunk that night half of them don't remember what the score was, let alone what anyone was wearing. I also traced the bloke who gave them lifts back home. He confirms he dropped Lewis off at the flat, but doesn't remember what time.'

  'Great,' said Frost. 'Everyone's so flaming helpful!'

  'And this won't please you either.' Hanlon handed Frost a fax from Forensic. 'The only blood on Mickey Harris's clothes came from the tom he put in hospital - nothing to tie him in with the dead Mary Adams.'

  'Bloody Forensic!' muttered Frost, as if it was all their fault. He relit a dog-end and took a couple of drags. 'But I didn't expect them to find anything on Harris. This isn't his style. It's the boyfriend, Lewis, Arthur, I'm sure of it.'

  'But his story checks out,' protested Hanlon. 'And Forensic found nothing on his clothes.'

  'That's because the sod gave us the wrong clothes,' said Frost. He found the Forensic report and showed it to the DS. 'Look, traces of lubricating oil and automotive grease on jeans.'

  'That's what you'd expect, Jack. He works in a petrol station.'

  'He was going out that night with his mates, Arthur. He'd put clean flaming jeans on, not his working clothes.' The cigarette tasted foul, so he mashed it; out and lit up another. As he flicked through the Forensic report he noticed something he had missed. A note stating that the attached envelope contained; items found in the pocket of the jeans. What envelope? He found it in his in-tray and ripped it open, hoping to find something that would help. A couple of cinema tickets, a service till receipt for £10 withdrawn from Benningtons Bank in the High Street and a supermarket receipt for two hundred cigarettes. Disappointed, he was stuffing them back in the envelope when a thought hit him. 'He smoked a lot, didn't he?'

  'What do you mean?' asked Hanlon.

  'The ashtray in his flat, next to the bed. It was piled up with fag ends - about forty or more, I reckon.'

  'So?'

  'So when did he smoke them?'

  Hanlon blinked. He didn't know what Frost was going on about. 'Does it matter?'

  'Yes, it does flaming matter. When?'

  Hanlon shrugged. 'Before he left for the match?'

  'No. He left first. The girlfriend had a few hours to go before she had to leave, so she tidied up the place - he told us.'

  'So?'

  'She didn't smoke, Arthur,' explained Frost patiently. 'She hated mess. She wouldn't have left an ashtray piled high with fag ends. She'd have emptied it.'

  'When he got back then, in the early hours?'

  'But he told us he was dead beat and flopped straight into bed. It would have taken about two to three hours to have smoked all those fags even if you stuck them up your nose as well.'

  Hanlon looked puzzled. 'I don't see where this is leading us.'

  'Try this out for size, Arthur. He kills his girlfriend. When he gets back to the flat his mind's in a bloody turmoil; what the hell has he done? He can't sleep, so he lies on the bed and smokes himself sick. Some of those dog-ends had hardly been touched, a couple of drags and he stubbed them out.'

  'Just because you lay in bed smoking, it doesn't mean you've killed your girlfriend.'

  'Only if you're trying to be fair and logical, Arthur, which I am not. He did it, I bloody know it.' Frost snapped his fingers. 'Wait a minute!' He pulled the receipt for the cigarettes from the envelope, checked the date on his desk calendar then grinned triumphantly. 'At ten o'clock yesterday morning, Arthur, when he was supposed to be fast asleep in his little bed, he was at the supermarket buying two hundred fags . . . and he told us he didn't wake up until the afternoon.'

  'All right . . . so he couldn't sleep and wanted a smoke.'

  'You're missing the flaming point, Arthur. If he's awake at ten, he knows the bloody girl isn't back from the hospital where she's supposed to be working, and when he went out for the fags, he would have seen his car wasn't there, which means the story he told us was a load of flaming cobblers.'

  'He might have thought she was doing the shopping - you don't have to go to bed the minute you get in from work.'

  'Whose bloody side are you on, Arthur? I want this case out of the way. It's got nothing to do with the serial killings of the other toms and we're wasting too much time on it. Go and bring Lewis in. Don't arrest him, say I want to see him, but don't tell him what about . . . let's get him worried. Uncertainty, Arthur, nothing puts the wind up people more than baked beans and uncertainty . . .' He grinned to himself. It wasn't going to be such a bad day after all.

  But the minute he walked into the interview room the nagging doubts began to fester. He had missed something, something right under his nose, but he didn't know what the hell it was. These bloody warning bells of his gave the warning without specifying the damn danger.

  He sat in the chair and put the folder with the till receipt in front of him while Morgan fiddled with the cassette recorder. His mind was racing. He didn't have the bare bones of a sustainable case against Lewis. All he had was a gut feeling, and one lousy till receipt for cigarettes. If the case came to court without a confession, there was no way of proving that Lewis had gone out that morning and bought the cigarettes -the till receipt could have been issued to anyone.

  What he needed was a confession, without it he was sunk. If Lewis insisted he was wearing his work jeans that night, there was no way of disproving it. And the car keys - why were they missing?

  A tap at the door and Sergeant Hanlon came in with Lewis who was not looking the bundle of twitching nerves that Frost was hoping for.

  'Have you caught the bastard?' asked Lewis, sitting in the chair opposite Frost.

  'Not yet,' said Frost. 'But we know who he is, and with your help we'll nail him.'

  'Anything,' said Lewis. 'Anything at all.' He dug in his pockets for his cigarettes, but Frost got in first, offering his packet and taking one himself. 'Thanks.' Lewis struck a match and held it out to light Frost's cigarette. Frost took his time, noting
with satisfaction that the hand holding the match was trembling slightly. He steadied it with his own. We're getting to you, you bastard, he thought.

  From the file on the table he took the typed copy of Lewis's statement. 'I realize it's upsetting asking you to go over this yet again but I want to make certain we've got our facts straight.' A quick glance at the first page. 'The last time you saw Mary alive was when you left for the match about five?'

  Lewis nodded.

  'When you got back in the early hours, you had no reason to think anything was wrong?'

  'No - everything was as it should be!'

  'You'd had an eventful night so you flopped into bed, went out like a light into a deep, untroubled sleep?'

  'That's right.'

  'You didn't wake up until late afternoon and that was the first time you realized she was missing?'

  'Yes.'

  Frost nodded, as if satisfied. And he was satisfied.

  Things were going to plan. Lewis was digging his own grave with his mouth. 'Good. That checks with everything you've told us.' He smiled. 'People tell us lies, but we always find them out.' Lewis twitched a nervous smile back not certain how to take this. Now's the time to hit the bastard with the till receipt, thought Frost. He slowly opened the folder, keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the man's face to watch his reaction when he confronted him with proof of his lying.

  Frost never reached the till receipt. He suddenly found himself staring goggle-eyed at the calendar on the wall. The date. The bloody date! That was what the little bell in his head had been warning him about. The wall calendar told him it was the 8th. The calendar in his office had said the 7th. Taffy Morgan had forgotten to change the flaming date which meant that the till receipt was for the morning before the murder, not the morning after and had nothing to do with the case. His one lonely trump card had been shot fairly and squarely right up the fundamental orifice. He now had absolutely sod all.

  He kept his face impassive as his mind whirled, trying to think of some way to retrieve the situation. He examined the till receipt and gave an Academy Award-winning satisfied nod as if it was of the greatest importance, then placed it face down on the table. He took some more papers from the file, including the useless Forensic report, and positioned them, also face down, alongside the receipt. Let the sod think I've got a full house, he thought, instead of a busted bloody flush. Lewis's eyes were following every move Frost made. Right, this was going to be one hell of a bluff. He didn't even have one card to play. He took a deep breath.