Frost 5 - Winter Frost

by R D Wingfield

  She pulled more vegetables towards her. 'I'm old. I forget things. It might have been, or perhaps he was cremated somewhere.'

  'Well, that narrows it down,' snorted Frost. He tried a different tack. 'What was his name?'

  A sad smile. 'Boy. I called him Boy.'

  'What was his proper name?'

  She raised her head. 'Boy. That was his proper name.'

  'Would Boy be buried in a garden in Nelson Road?' Her head dropped. The hand holding the knife shook for an instant before she steadied it and slowly and deliberately gave all her attention to cutting up more vegetables, although already there seemed to be more than enough in the saucepan. 'No.'

  'Only we found a body.' He was watching her closely.

  'Nothing to do with me.' Chop, chop, chop.

  'Do you have any living relatives who might have better memories than you?' Taffy asked.

  'There's no-one.'

  'What about Boy's father?'

  'Dead. Everyone's dead.'

  'What was his name?'

  'Don't remember.'

  'How old was your son when he died?'

  'Don't remember.'

  Frost was getting fed up with this. They were getting nowhere and he wanted to get out of the oppressive atmosphere of this tiny, dirty scullery. 'Just bloody concentrate. We found a skeleton of a man in a garden in Nelson Road. We're trying to establish who he is. Could he be your son?'

  She gave the saucepan a shake. 'No.'

  Frost dug into his mac pocket and pulled out the wrist-watch. He thrust it at her. 'Is this your son's watch?'

  She jerked her head away. 'No.'

  'Look at the damn thing before you say no.'

  'Don't have to. Boy couldn't tell the time. He didn't have a watch.' She rose painfully from her chair and unhooked the other chicken from the nail and started to tear out its feathers. 'I want you to go now. I've got work to do.' The knife crashed down, completely severing the chicken's head and nearly splitting the table top in two. The old girl wasn't as frail as she looked.

  She followed them out to the front door and banged it shut behind them. They could hear bolts slamming home.

  Frost's nose twitched. 'Doesn't fresh air smell funny.' He shivered and tightened his scarf. After the fetid fug of that kitchen, the cold cut like a knife.

  They trudged down the path. Morgan nodded at the potato ridges in the kitchen garden. 'She must be as strong as a horse, guv.'

  'She smells like one,' grunted Frost.

  'I mean, all on her own, digging the garden, tending the chickens and the goat. She must be as old as the Queen Mum.'

  'I was wondering who she reminded me of,' said Frost.

  'What's our next move?'

  'We forget it, Taffy. She probably killed her son, but we're never going to prove it. We let it drop.'

  But Morgan wouldn't let it drop. He kicked a lump of the dug-over earth. 'She could have more bodies buried here, guv.'

  Frost groaned. 'What the hell are you on about now?'

  'Where did she get the money from to buy this place? The council said they'd heard the old boy who used to live here had died, but they had nothing official. Perhaps she killed him, buried him, then pretended he'd sold it to her. I reckon we should dig the place up.'

  Frost's hand flicked this suggestion aside. 'We've got enough flaming dead bodies without digging around to find more, Taffy.'

  'If she killed her son and the old boy, guv, she should be made to pay.'

  'The old cow's pushing ninety. She lives in a shit-house. Prison would be like the Mayfair Hilton in comparison. How is that making her pay?' He sighed. 'Sod it, Taffy. I hate it when you're keen. All right, you can do the ferreting. Get the old boy's name from the town hall and find out if he was still in the land of the living after he was supposed to have sold the place . . .'

  It was chicken casserole for lunch at the canteen, but Frost didn't fancy it. He grabbed himself a sausage sandwich and was half-way into it when he suddenly remembered he was supposed to be attending the post-mortem of Sarah Hicks. Dropping the remains of the sandwich in his pocket, he dashed down to the car and was still wiping crumbs from his mouth as he charged into the autopsy room to be greeted by a scowling Drysdale. 'Just made it, doc,' he panted. 'I thought I was going to be late.'

  'You are late,' snapped Drysdale. 'I said two o'clock.'

  'Oh,' said Frost. 'I could have sworn you said twelve minutes past.' He shuffled on a green gown. 'If you could speed it up, doc, I've got lots to do.' He hoisted himself up on a stool and watched as the pathologist took a scalpel and scratched a preliminary red line down the stomach. Suddenly it hit him. Only a few hours ago he had been talking to the poor cow. Only a few days ago he had sat on this same stool while Drysdale performed the autopsy on little Vicky Smart. Someone was killing toms, someone was killing little girls, and he was supposed to be leading the hunt for the killers, but was getting absolutely nowhere. All his brilliant theories had proved false, all his dead cert leads had fizzled out. He no longer had any faith in his rogue cab driver theory, expecting it to blow up in his face like all the others. The responsibility was too bloody great. He was out of his depth. The pillow case flaming burglar was more his mark and he was getting nowhere with that case either.

  'Are you still with us, Inspector?'

  He snapped out of his mournful reverie. Drysdale was talking to him. 'Sorry, doc. What was that?'

  'I said the condition her arteries were in, she could have suffered a heart attack at any time.'

  Frost nodded gloomily. It didn't make him feel any better.

  Four o'clock in the afternoon, dark as night outside and the pub was already crowded. The autopsy had depressed him and the awareness of his own inadequacy hung heavily over him. He couldn't face going back to the station without a drink inside him.

  As he pushed his way through to the bar a familiar raucous laugh made him stop and turn. Leaning across the bar, chatting up the bespectacled barmaid, was Taffy Morgan clutching a beer glass. His back was to Frost, but some sixth sense told him he was being observed. Morgan turned and started guiltily. 'You looking for me, guv?'

  As good an excuse as any. 'Yes,' lied Frost, 'I've been looking everywhere.'

  'Sorry, guv. I was so busy getting the gen on that old farmer, I didn't have time for any lunch, so I popped in here for a quick sandwich.'

  'Yes,' grunted Frost, 'I saw you drinking it. You can buy me one now, a pint!' He sipped the beer as the DC filled him in.

  'I've tracked down that old boy's family, guv,' he began. 'It looks as if I was wrong about her killing him. The old girl bought the place from him for £3,500 in 1957 - paid cash apparently. The old boy died in his bed three years later. They showed me the death certificate.'

  'Cash?' queried Frost. 'That was big money in those days - something over thirty thousand quid today.' He scratched his chin thoughtfully. 'In arrears with her rent, then suddenly comes up with that sort of money?'

  'Tell you what I was thinking, guv,' offered Morgan. 'Suppose she had her son insured and killed him for the insurance money?'

  'Insurance companies don't pay out without a death certificate and you don't get one if you dump the body in someone else's back garden.' He worried at his scar. 'We haven't time to sod about with ancient history, but we can't leave it like this. A body's planted in the garden next to her and her son goes missing. Then she suddenly comes into three and a half thousand quid. I hate to say it, but sometime or other we'll have to go back to Shangri-la, or whatever she calls the bloody place.' He downed the drink and wiped his mouth. 'But some other time, not now. Let's get back to the station.'

  As they left, Morgan turned to wave to the dark-haired, bespectacled barmaid. 'What do you reckon to her, guv?'

  Frost gave her an approving look. 'I wouldn't kick her out of bed on a cold night.'

  'You know what turns me on, guv?'

  'Every bloody thing turns you on,' said Frost, feeling a lot more cheerful now. Morgan alwa
ys had this effect on him.

  'What turns me on is the thought of making love to a girl who wears glasses. She strips to the buff, but keeps her glasses on.'

  'Then you can breathe on the lens and she can't see how small your dick is,' said Frost.

  He was about to dart through the lobby when he saw the grim, angular figure of Doreen Beatty in earnest conversation with Bill Wells. Frost froze and waited in the corridor until she left, then hurried across.

  'What did old mother Beatty want?'

  'She wanted you,' replied Wells. 'Reckons a man's been stalking her all around the town.' He glanced at the description he had noted down. 'Dirty, shifty-eyed, loose-mouthed and oozing lust.'

  'Sounds like Mullett,' grunted Frost, pushing through the swing doors. 'He always fancied a bit of rough.'

  He went through his usual ritual of riffling through the papers in his in-tray. The only item of interest was a copy crime report from Lexton Division concerning three robberies from private houses where pillows were found in the middle of the beds and the pillow cases missing. The pillow case burglar was working further afield. Frost hoped Lexton would have more luck than he did. If they caught the man it would automatically knock his outstanding crime figures down to a respectable level. There was also a request from Belton Division asking that the case of Big Bertha be added to the Denton Division list of unsolved crimes as the killing undoubtedly took place in Denton District, the body being simply dumped in Belton. A good argument, but it wouldn't help Frost's crime figures, so he buried it deep under all the other papers. He looked up as Detective Sergeant Arthur Hanlon came in.

  'How did the post-mortem go?' asked Hanlon, dragging a chair over to the inspector.

  'Told us nothing we didn't know already, Arthur,' grunted Frost. 'The poor cow died from a heart attack probably brought on from the terror of knowing what the bastard intended to do to her. There was something bloody weird there, though.'

  'What was that?' asked Hanlon.

  'It was when Drysdale scooped out her stomach contents.'

  Hanlon pulled a face. He knew he wasn't going to enjoy hearing this.

  'She'd been dead over twelve hours and yet in her stomach was this undigested sandwich.' He dug in his pocket and pulled out the remains of his sausage sandwich which he held up, parted the bread and looked inside. 'A sausage sandwich.' As Hanlon gaped in horror, Frost popped it in his mouth and gulped it down. 'Doesn't taste bad considering . . ."

  Hanlon went green and shuddered, but Frost couldn't keep a straight face any longer and broke into a broad grin. 'You bastard!' Hanlon shrieked as Frost nearly fell off his chair laughing. 'You're having me on. I won't tell you what we found out from the cab firms now.'

  Wiping tears from his eyes, Frost passed his cigarette packet over. 'If I couldn't find something to laugh at about that damn autopsy room, Arthur, I'd go stark, staring bonkers. The poor bitch lying there like so much meat and Drysdale slicing her open.' He flicked his lighter. 'Tell daddy about the cab firms.'

  'We could be on to something, Jack. We've checked them all and on every night a torn went missing, one of them answered a call, but no-one was waiting for them when they arrived.

  Frost punched his palm with his fist. 'I knew it! He's listing in on a all band radio and if it's a call from a women on her own, he gets there first. We're going to nail the bastard.'

  'How?' asked Hanlon

  'We use decoys, Arthur. Lots of lovely, juicy nubile policewomen as decoys.' Sod all the gloom. He was now feeling on top of the world.

  Chapter 19

  'Decoys?' repeated Mullett, scrubbing away at the lens of his glasses to give himself time to think. 'I don't understand.'

  'We want to lure this bastard into a trap,' explained Frost. 'We dress up policewomen as toms, plant them in the red light district, and get them to phone for cabs. We keep them under surveillance all the time. If the right cab turns up, we simply follow them to the destination, then bring them back to try again. But if it's a rogue taxi, we tail and get ready to pounce.'

  Mullett pinched his nose and thought for a while. He was beginning to have nagging doubts about asking County to send a senior officer down to take over the case. He had been hoping for a chief inspector at most, but Chief Superintendent Bailey out-ranked him and would probably take command of everything, commandeer his office, spend way over Denton's limited budget, leave Mullett to take the blame, then hog all the credit if he was successful. For all his faults, Frost was now looking the much better option. If Frost could pull this off quickly, so County were kept out, there would be no question of the credit being shared. He tugged off the cap of his Parker pen and steeled himself for the worst. 'How many people would be involved?'

  'Not too many. Crowds at that time of night would arouse suspicion. Say two or three girls and four or five, maybe six cars to watch and trail.'

  Mullett jotted some figures down and winced. 'And all on overtime?'

  'Yes,' agreed Frost. 'The sod doesn't like raping and killing in office hours.'

  Mullett added up the sums again, but couldn't make them any less. Perhaps he should let Bailey come after all, and let him take the responsibility for spending all this money. But it would still come out of Denton's budget. 'We've got to keep costs down. When the girls book a taxi, I'm only paying for the minimum distance - and no tipping.' He scribbled some more figures down. 'Eight men - three women per night - maximum. And I want receipts, receipts for everything.'

  'Of course,' Frost assured him, standing up quickly before the superintendent changed his mind. 'It's all agreed then?'

  'No, it's not all agreed,' said Mullett. 'Sit down.' He took off his glasses and pinched his nose. Sanctioning large sums of money made him nervous and when Frost didn't put up objections about it being too little, it made him feel he was giving too much away. 'If I'm to justify this sort of expenditure, I've got to show it's cost effective. I want a result.'

  'You shall have one,' said Frost. The result could well be that the whole operation was a disaster, but it would still be a result even if it wasn't the one Mullett wanted.

  And this isn't open-ended. I'm agreeing three nights only, then I pull out the plug.'

  'Agreed,' said Frost, knowing that if they needed more time, he'd argue about it when it happened. We might even get a result tonight.'

  'That would make a pleasant change,' said Mullett, sourly. 'Results are something sadly lacking from you at the moment. What is the position with the child killings?'

  'We've come to a bit of a dead end there, Super,' admitted Frost. 'All our leads seem to have fizzled out.' Mullett pulled a knowing face, implying this was only to be expected from Frost. 'And the skeleton in the garden? I understand you've tracked down the woman with the missing son?'

  Frost told him about the visit to Nelly Aldridge.

  Mullett's eyes gleamed. 'We're on to something there, Frost.'

  'Ancient bloody history,' said Frost. 'Not worth wasting our time on.'

  Mullett's lips tightened. 'You're so damned negative. No wonder you're making no headway. We've found a skeleton, her son is missing and she has no satisfactory explanation. On top of which, she has acquired, apparently out of nowhere, money to buy a smallholding. Bear down on her. She's your best bet for an early clear-up, and goodness knows, you need one.'

  'All right,' sighed Frost. 'I'll see her first thing in the morning.'

  'You've wasted enough time,' snapped Mullett. 'Do it today. If she doesn't come up with a satisfactory explanation, bring her in.' He picked up his pen and began signing his correspondence to signal that the interview was over.

  Frost slouched out, passing through the outer office where Ida Smith, Mullett's faithful secretary, who had overheard everything, was smiling smugly to herself at the way her superior had put that awful man in his place. Frost gave her a nod as he passed. 'I quite agree with you, Ida - he's a real right bastard.'

  'I don't think this is a very good idea, guv,' moaned Morgan as his fo
ot squelched in a rain-filled pot-hole.

  'It's a bleeding lousy idea,' agreed Frost, 'but we're flaming well stuck with it.' They were slithering and sliding in the pitch dark up the muddied lane leading to the smallholding. 'Not far now - I can smell the privy.'

  They stumbled on and soon could see a feeble orange glow from a flickering oil lamp fighting its way through a dirt-caked window. Frost hammered at the door. 'Open up, Mrs Aldridge. It's the police.' They waited. He tried the door handle, but the bolts and chains inside held firm. 'Let's try our luck round the back.'

  They picked their way round to the rear of the house. No lights showed and the door was again firmly locked.

  'No-one in, guv,' said Morgan.

  'She's in all right, Taffy - probably straining over the slop bucket even as we speak.' He rattled the door handle and yelled again. 'Open up, Mrs Aldridge -police.'

  A bitter wind suddenly roared round the house. Morgan shivered. 'Let's leave it until the morning, guv. This place gives me the willies.'

  'Talking of willies,' said Frost, 'yours is going to have a rest tonight. I've booked you in for overtime.' He banged the door again. 'Sod it,' he grunted. After coming all this way I'm not going back without chatting up the old cow.' He shook the door. 'I don't think it's bolted.' He tugged a key ring from his Pocket and, with a bit of wiggling, the second key he tried did the trick. The door swung open. 'Oh, look,' he exclaimed in a loud voice. 'This door's been left open. We'd better check to see if the occupant is all right.'

  They stepped inside, Morgan's torch beam probing the darkness. 'I'm not happy about this, guv.'

  You didn't join the force to be happy,' Frost told him as he led the way through to the hall. He pushed doors open and steered Morgan's torch inside. Miserable, dank rooms stacked with junk.

  'Guv!' Morgan, at the room nearest the front door, was calling him over. 'I think there's someone in here.'

  The room was pitch dark, but there was the sound of breathing and the smell of a recently extinguished oil lamp. Tentatively, Morgan stepped inside. 'Mrs Aldridge?' called Frost, following him in.