Frost at Christmas

by RD Wingfield

  A burly figure in an anorak butted his way toward them. He ducked into the tent and shook himself like a dog, shedding layers of snow, then pulled back the hood to uncover wire-wool ginger hair flecked with gray and a beaming, florid face mottled with large freckles. Sandy Lane, Chief Reporter of the Denton Echo, had heard the lake was being dragged and wanted to be there when the body popped up. The story would certainly be taken by the London dailies and would merit a byline and a welcome fee that would just about make up for the chilling effort of getting up at the crack of dawn.

  Frost greeted the reporter with a whoop of delight and introduced Clive, who was slumped against the tent-pole trying to keep awake, as his alert young assistant from London.

  "Now I've taken the trouble to come, I hope she's in there," said Sandy.

  "We'll try and oblige," said Frost, moving out of the way as a well-muffled elderly police constable, the boatman, arrived and slithered and bumped the small craft into the lake.

  "We're ready to start, Inspector."

  "All right, but don't fall in. I've signed for you."

  A creak of oars and the boat was hidden in the swirling snow. The other two constables trudged the circumference, methodically poking the bottom of the lake with their poles to encourage a body entangled with weeds to float to the surface. The oarsman was doing the same in the center of the lake. There were false alarms as a rotting log or a plastic bag full of rubbish pretended to be a body and bled up to be hooked out and tossed to one side.

  Frost stared into the flickering white curtain and smoked listening to the creakings and splashings. Then the wind blew a hole in the snow and he saw the small creosoted hut on the far side. He called out to one of the pole carriers who told him the hut was used by the Denton Model Boating Club in the summer but was now empty.

  "It's been searched, I hope?"

  "Yes, sir. It's padlocked, but we got the key from the club secretary."

  Frost thought for a while, then wound his scarf to strangulation tightness and turned up his coat collar. "I'm afraid I've got one of my rotten feelings, son."

  It was no bigger than a small garden shed, the sort used for storing rakes and spades and things, about as big as a sentry box. It had no windows, just a door fastened by an impressive brass padlock on a hasp.

  The hasp didn't look right.

  Frost tugged at it and the screws popped out of the wood, letting the hasp and the padlock fall with a plop to the ground.

  The constable was incredulous. "It wasn't like that before, sir."

  Frost pulled the door open gingerly. There was something on the floor. He swore softly, then stepped back so the others could see. The wind howled and screamed and drove snow onto the face of the crumpled figure huddled on the bare wooden floor.

  Sandy Lane ran over from the marquee. The boatman rowed for the shore and joined them. They crowded around, silently, looking down on the gaping ugly face of death.

  But it wasn't the child.

  It was a man wearing an old army greatcoat several sizes 100 big for him. It was old Sam, the tramp who yesterday had marched into the station demanding the return of his pound. He had frozen to death and the dribble of spittle from the blue lips was a tiny river of ice.

  Frost bent and touched the face. It was iced marble, ' colder even than the snow-driving wind that was howling with rage because they were ignoring it.

  "He must have crawled in here last night to sleep," said the boatman." Poor old sod."

  Frost wiped his hand on his coat again and again. "He's better off out of it." His foot kicked an empty wine bottle. "At least he died happy."

  Sandy Lane left them and trudged back to the marquee. There was.no byline story in the death of an old tramp.

  Frost nudged the army greatcoat with the toe of his boot. It crackled. "Watch out for fleas, boys. I'm told they won't stay on a dead body." He noticed the boatman. "Any luck?"

  "No, sir. We'll try again to make sure but we've bashed the bottom and she'd be floating on top if she was there. There's less muck in the pond than we thought."

  Frost sniffed. "Why should people come all this way with their old mattresses when there's lots of beauty spots far nearer." He took another look at the shriveled husk on the hut floor. "I don't want to be here when you chaps find Sam's body. I'm far enough behind with my paperwork as it is and this would be the last straw. So don't find him officially until I've gone." He paused. "And some brave soul will have to go through his pockets and see if he's got a second name. Let me know who does it and I'll recommend him for the Victoria Cross."

  Sandy was swigging something from a hipflask. He spun round furtively as they entered the marquee.

  "Bit early for that, Sandy, isn't it?"

  "Never too early for me, Jack." He stuck the flask back in his pocket. "You'd think I'd be used to dead bodies after forty-one years, wouldn't you?"

  "Did I ever tell you about my first body?" asked Frost. "He was a tramp, too. Dead for weeks during a heatwave. Council dug up the street twice thinking it was the drains. Then we found him--or what the rats had left . ..." He noticed the boat party were returned. "I'll tell you the rest later."

  The reporter offered his cigarettes around and murmured confidentially to Clive, "Try and avoid hearing the rest at all costs. It put me off my grub for a week when he told it to me."

  A rasping noise from outside as the boat was dragged ashore. Three frozen policemen stumbled in. Tracey wasn't in the lake.

  "Sorry we couldn't oblige you, Sandy," said Frost.

  "That's all right," replied the reporter. He zipped up his anorak. "What about lunch today at The Crown?"

  "Why not? "said Frost.

  The reporter waved and was lost in the snow.

  "If anyone wants us, we'll be at the vicarage," said Frost. "Give us five minutes, then nip over and discover old Sam." He studied the blizzard outside. "You can't beat a white Christmas can you?"

  The vicarage was a sprawling Victorian building, huge and cheerless enough for an army barracks, but the vicar, the Reverend James Bell, moonfaced and beaming, greeted them warmly.

  "Inspector Frost! Come in, come in."

  He ushered them into an uncarpeted hall with dark brown walls and a high ceiling. It was colder inside than out.

  "There's a fire in my study. This way." He led them to a small room with an enormous marble mantelpiece and a fireplace large enough to roast an ox in; in it two pieces of smoldering coal fought for survival.

  "It'll soon get warm," said the vicar optimistically, attacking the fire with a poker until all signs of life were extinct. "Oh dear." He knelt and began puffing and blowing into the grate in a forlorn attempt to raise the dead. At last he stood, admitting defeat. "Never mind. It's not as cold as it was."

  On the marble mantelpiece were several photographs of recent church functions. One showed a group of children. The Sunday school Christmas party. Tracey Uphill was in no

  the center of the group. Frost picked up the photograph and studied it. "It's her we've come about, Padre," he said, pointing. "Young Tracey Uphill."

  The vicar sat behind his paper-strewn desk and shook his head, sadly. "Oh yes. Terrible business. Simply terrible." He blinked in surprise as a spent match dropped into his paperclip tray. Frost had lit a cigarette.

  "Sorry, Padre," boomed Frost, unabashed, "thought it was an ashtray." He retrieved the match and flicked it toward the grate. It missed by miles. "Hello, does old Martha write to you as well?" He pointed to a letter lying on the desk . . . spidery writing in green ink on stiff, deckle-edged notepaper.

  "This?" The vicar held it up. "From our local clairvoyant, you mean?" He gave a tolerant smile. "She wants to hold a public spiritualist meeting in our church hall. We can't pick and choose our lettings, I'm afraid. Our collections are not as generous as one might wish, and things are so expensive. The price of coal!" He swung round for another post-mortem examination of the fire, but stopped as he remembered the reason for their visit. "I'm sor
ry. You're here about that poor child. How can I help you?"

  "You knew her, didn't you, Vicar?"

  The vicar seemed to start. "Only through Sunday school."

  Frost's eyes narrowed. Why that reaction? "I meant through Sunday school, of course, sir. Pretty kid wasn't she?"

  "Was she? I hadn't noticed." An attempt to sound offhand that didn't come off.

  It suddenly occurred to Clive that both Frost and the Reverend James Bell were talking of Tracey in the past tense.

  "Good looks run in her family," continued Frost. "You should see her mother. She's on the game, but I expect you know."

  "Yes," replied the vicar, "I know. I've often seen the men going into her house."

  Ill

  Frost nodded. "She gets thirty quid a time for her Sunday afternoon service. A lot more than you get dropped in your collection plate, I bet." Frost was the only one who laughed and, to make up for the lack of appreciation, laughed loud and long. Clive looked openly disgusted, the vicar, both pained and rueful. Then Frost stopped abruptly, took a last drag on his cigarette, and hurled it in the general direction of the fireplace.

  "We want to search the vicarage, Padre. The kid was supposed to have come here to play in the grounds, but she could well have sneaked into the vicarage without anyone knowing."

  "No!" It was the shocked reaction to an improper suggestion.

  Frost stared hard at the vicar. "Why not, sir?"

  "It's not convenient, I'm afraid. We've got people coming. Later perhaps . . . ?" He refused to meet the inspector's questioning eye.

  Frost smiled. "We won't pinch anything, I promise you. I've got more hymnbooks than I can read back at home. We'll let you know when we've finished." He looked over the vicar's shoulder. "Hello, there's a trace of smoke coming from your fire. I'd encourage it, if I were you." A jerk of his head to Clive and they were out of the study before Bell could think of a reason to stop them.

  Frost wound the scarf tighter round his neck. "Like a flaming igloo in there."

  "He didn't seem too keen on our looking around," remarked Clive.

  "Doesn't trust you, son. It's your suit. Not much better than yesterday's effort, I'm afraid. We'll start at the top and work down."

  They trudged upwards. Staircase succeeded staircase, little sub-landings and corridors shooting off at each turn. The vicarage would be a swine to search properly. And then the stairs stopped and there were only brown cobwebby ceilings above and a gloomy passage lined with dark doors. They creaked the doors open and looked in on pokey attic cells with low sloping ceilings, flapping mildewed wallpaper, and tiny windows thick with years of grime.

  "The servants would have slept up here in the old days," explained Frost, stepping back hurriedly as a floorboard disintegrated under his foot. "What a life the poor sods must have led when you think of it. Working like beavers from crack of dawn until nearly midnight, scrubbing, scouring, emptying the gentry's slop-buckets, then staggering up all those flaming stairs for a few hours' kip before it started all over again the next morning."

  I don't know about the slop-buckets, thought Clive, but their hours sound better than mine.

  The dust and cobwebs in the attic rooms had clearly not been disturbed for years, so they descended to the floor below where the rooms were larger and the sour smell of decay slightly less pungent. On this floor the rooms were apparently used for storage, graveyards for the abandoned junk of past incumbents. They looked in cupboards and battered trunks that smelt faintly of lavender and strongly of mouldering linen and that contained stained ancient clothing and scuttling insects.

  But the end room was different. The door opened easily and the smell inside was of stale tobacco smoke, like the vicar's study. Drawn, heavy curtains made it dark. Frost clunked down the old-fashioned brass lightswitch and an unshaded 60-watt bulb glimmered mournfully. He crossed to the window, dragged back the curtains, and looked down on the back gardens of Vicarage Terrace, now unified in a single plain by the heavy covering of snow. He couldn't tell which was Mrs. Uphill's garden; they all looked the same.

  The room was used by the vicar as a photographic studio. The thick cord of an antiquated electric bowl fire shared a power-point with the thinner cord of a photoflood lamp and reflector on a tall metal stand. Around the walls were enlargements of photos of churches and local landmarks. Inside a corner cupboard they found more photographic equipment, including a tripod and an early model Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera.

  But it was the sheet-draped rectangular object in the center of the floor that claimed the men's interest.

  "That's where the body is," said Frost.

  Clive twitched the sheet away to reveal a battered metal coffin. A cabin trunk, well worn, its sides pasted with labels from long-defunct Edwardian shipping lines. The trunk was old, but the heavy brass padlock securing the lid was brand-new.

  "Let's see if one of these will open it," murmured Frost, producing the bunch of Skeleton keys he always carried with him. The third key he tried did the trick. Clive flung back the lid and they peered inside, almost fearful of what they might see.

  Books. The trunk was tight-packed with books of all shapes and sizes, none of which seemed to warrant the expense of a heavy brass padlock.

  They took them out. Old hymnbooks with the covers hanging by a thread. A copy of Mr. Midshipman Easy presented to Master James Graham Bell, Cooperley Primary School, June 1946, for good work. There were some bound volumes of The Boys' Own Paper dating from the turn of the century that Frost flipped through with interest. "Could be worth a few bob, son. Wonder if he'd miss them."

  The next layer brought forth more ancient treasures including volumes of The Strand Magazine containing the Sherlock Holmes stories with Sidney Paget drawings of spade-bearded men in hansom cabs.

  But in the next layer .... Here the unexpurgated Fanny Hill was the tamest of the collection. Filthy books, obscene books. The sort of books kept under the counter in grubby little back-street Soho bookshops. The general theme of the collection was young girls.

  Frost became engrossed in a paperback whose cover depicted a large, leather-knickered, bare-chested Amazon thrashing the posterior of a buxom, bare-buttocked blonde. The blonde wore a schoolgirl's hat. "What Katy did at school," he muttered, reading with moving lips a choice passage at random.

  They emptied out the trunk. More books of the same type. "All right, son. Bung them back. Who said vicars aren't human? They're as dirty-minded as you or I, or even old Mullett." He reluctantly tossed in the paperback.

  If Clive hadn't noticed the slight bulge under the brown paper lining at the bottom of the trunk, they would have missed the envelope. It contained photographs. Black and white enlargements of Mrs. Uphill in full, unretouched nudity. It also contained photographs of an undressed, nubile twelve-year-old Audrey Harding sprawling provocatively on this self-same sheet-draped cabin trunk. This time the head wasn't torn off.

  Frost was looking through the photographs for the fourth time when Clive asked, "What now, sir?"

  Frost sighed. "Stick them back in the trunk and say nothing, son. Don't look surprised. He hasn't committed a crime, you know."

  Clive squeaked with indignation, "The girl's under age!"

  Frost shrugged. "Look at the photographs. Tell me what part of her is under age. We've got more important things to do, son, than drag this poor sod to court for corrupting the morals of a twelve-year-old slut who was more corrupt than him to start with. Blimey, she could probably corrupt me, and that takes some doing!"

  They carefully replaced everything exactly as they had found it, but as Frost tried to relock the lid, his skeleton key snapped off inside the padlock. He faked it shut, covered the trunk with the sheet, and hoped the vicar wouldn't notice.

  Down to the next floor, but by now the inspector was becoming bored with the search. He hustled Clive along, leaning against the wall and smoking sulkily whenever the younger man tried to be thorough.

  A pair of doors opene
d on to a large hall with a stage, benches, and the components of trestle tables stacked along the walls. This was the vicarage hall, home of the Sunday school, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, amateur dramatic society, and similar local functions. Clive found a trapdoor on the stage and lay flat on his stomach, probing the space beneath with his torch. He was still putting the trapdoor back when Frost was impatiently pounding down the next flight, anxious to get this time-wasting job over so he could get to his over-heated little office, drink tea, and snarl at the paperwork.

  At last they reached the ground floor. The smell of cooking drew them to the kitchen and the vicar's wife, a fluttering woman with a once pretty face and a nervous laugh. She constantly apologized. She apologized for the mess, for the snow, for the lack of heat. A saucepan boiled over and she apologized for that. She offered to show them around the living quarters and invited them to stay for lunch. Frost eyed what was in the saucepan and declined both offers hastily.

  The Bell's living quarters were warm and comfortable, the walls adorned with more framed photographs--Scout groups, cuddly kittens with balls of wool, gnarled trees against a setting sun. "He should stick to nudes," said Frost dismissively.

  All interest in the search now gone, Frost would barely let Clive poke his head round a door before bundling him off to the next room. "I'm a good starter, son, but a poor finisher. At least, that's what my lady friends keep telling me. But we're wasting our time. The kid's not here. I feel it.. .."

  The only room to arouse his curiosity was the Bell's connubial bedroom. He sat on the bed, bouncing up and down on the mattress, wondering to Clive if it made the same creaking during the couple's nocturnal activities.

  On the bedside table stood a silver-framed wedding photograph of a much younger version of the vicar, his beautiful girl-wife clutching his arm proudly. She looked incredibly young, almost a child. She didn't look much older than Audrey Harding.

  TUESDAY--2

  Clive slammed the brakes on hard and spun the wheel to control the skid as a little red Mini shot out of a side-turning smack in the path of the inspector's Morris, then did a sharp right turn to disappear into the swirling curtain of snow ahead.