Frost at Christmas

by RD Wingfield

  Switching off the engine, he staggered to his front door. He didn't remember getting undressed, but was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. He could have dreamed of death and decay, but he dreamed of Shirley.

  When he went out the next morning he found he'd left the car unlocked, with the window down, and the keys swinging in the ignition. Anyone could have pinched it, but his luck had held out just a little while longer.

  WEDNESDAY

  WEDNESDAY--1

  Wednesday morning at 8:05, Station Sergeant Bill Wells leaned across the inquiry desk and studied the morning paper, a look of intense pity on his face.

  "What's up?" asked Frost, pausing on the way to his office with Clive.

  Sadly shaking his head, Wells jabbed a thumb at the front page. "I've seen some terrible things in my time, Jack, but this is awful. The poor devil--you'd think they could do something with plastic surgery."

  Frost snatched the paper and looked at a photograph of himself taken at the time he'd received his medal at the palace.

  "God, what a handsome brute," he exclaimed. "Who is it--Errol Flynn?"

  The banner headline bellowed SKELETON OF SHOT BANK ROBBER FOUND IN 32-YEAR-OLD GRAVE. Tucked away at the bottom was a tiny, blurred photo of Tracey, captioned "Hopes fading for missing girl". Frost shuddered. The snow had stopped and the search parties would be out in force and he wondered if it would be today that he'd have the rotten job of taking the mother to the mortuary.

  "Hear about the arrests Arthur Hanlon made last night?" asked Wells.

  "Yes," snapped Frost, already on his way to the office, "he's a good chap. He doesn't waste his time reading bloody papers."

  They made an early start and were well stuck into the Bennington's Bank robbery file when Frost let out a sharp groan and reminded Clive they should have been at the briefing meeting ten minutes ago. Mullett stared pointedly as they clattered their shamefaced way to their seats, mumbling apologies.

  "I suppose I'll have to start again for the benefit of the latecomers. I was suggesting we should extend the area of the search."

  "It's no use extending it until we get some more men," said Frost. "We haven't even got enough to cover the more likely places as thoroughly as we should."

  "Agreed," purred Mullett, "but if you had been here when the meeting started, Inspector, you would have known that I intend to ask the Chief Constable for more help."

  Game, set, and match to Hornrim Harry, thought Frost, and didn't say another word until the divisional commander left when he blew a soft raspberry at the closed door. That courtesy out of the way, he heaved himself to his feet and sidled over to Detective Sergeant Martin. "You don't need me, do you, George? I'll be over at the bank solving the case of the three-eyed skull. If anything exciting happens, give us a buzz on the radio." He stopped at the door. "Oh--one other thing. Mrs. Uphill will be waking up in a strange bed without the mirror in the ceiling this morning. Better get one of the policewomen to take her home. What's the name of that one with the mole on her stomach?"

  "Hazel!" said George Martin and Clive in unison.

  Hudson, the manager of Bennington's Bank, was plump, dark-haired, and blue-chinned. He shook hands with a warm pudgy palm, ushered them to moquette-covered chairs, and announced his secretary would rustle up some coffee.

  "It's about the skeleton, isn't it? I read about it in the papers this morning."

  "Yes, sir. Looks as if it might be a long-lost cashier of yours. Reckon you can let us have details of everyone who worked here in 1951?"

  Hudson scotched a note on his memo pad with a chunky, gold-banded pen. "Our staff department at head office holds all personal files. I'll have to get the details from there." He smiled and offered a suggestion. "This was before my time, of course, but why don't you have a word with our assistant manager, Rupert Garwood? He was here then--in fact he drove the car and got coshed for his troubles, I understand."

  "Good idea, sir," said Frost. "May we see him?"

  A light gray phone was lifted with a flourish. "Brenda? Mr. Hudson here. Ask Mr. Garwood to come to my office, please. What?" His eyes traveled up to the wall clock. "Unusual for him, isn't it? And he hasn't phoned? Oh dear, I hope he's not sick. Ask Mr. Fox to take over his post." The brow was deeply furrowed as he replaced the phone and turned apologetically to Frost.

  "Bit of a snag, I'm afraid. Mr. Garwood doesn't seem to be in today. Brenda's phoned his home, but there's no reply. Most odd--and so unlike him." He made another note on his pad.

  The two detectives exchanged glances. "Let us have his address," said Frost, "and we'll call at his house on our way back. If we miss him, and he turns up here, you might ask him to give me a ring at the station. I've got a card somewhere."

  Eventually a grubby dog-eared card was located from the depths of a crumb-lined pocket and passed across. Hudson took it doubtfully and was about to tuck it in the corner of his clean blotter when he decided it would look less offensive under his paperclip tray, in which, he noticed with annoyance, the inspector had stubbed out his cigarette.

  No. 38 Priestly Court, where Garwood lived, was a pebble-dashed residence of 1938 vintage. They followed the milkman's footprints up the snow-covered path to the porch where the morning's pint of milk shivered on the step. All the curtains were drawn. Frost pressed the bell. They could hear it ringing inside. The ringing died. Silence. Frost rang again, then rattled the letter box causing the morning paper to drop down on the doormat.

  "Sounds ominously empty, son," said Frost. "The woman next door's peeking at us through her curtains. She looks a right nosey cow. Let's see if she can tell us anything."

  She was a homely body in curlers and a quilted mauve dressing gown, and she talked non-stop. If they wanted Mr. Garwood, he'd be at the bank. No, he wasn't married--lived on his own with Roy. ... Of course not! He wasn't that sort of a man. Roy was his golden retriever. I'm surprised you didn't hear it barking its head off when you rang the bell. It usually does.

  Nodding his thanks, Frost backed away, leaving her still talking, then he sped back to the car with Clive. "I don't like it son. Radio through to Control and get them to contact the bank. If Garwood still hasn't arrived, they'd better do a quick audit. He might have run off with the tea money." He watched Clive fumble among the litter on the ledge under the dashboard. "What's up, son?"

  "I can't find your personal radio," Clive explained.

  Christ! thought Frost. He remembered where he'd left it. On Shirley's studio couch the previous night.

  "On second thoughts, son, scrub it. Let's go round to the back of the house. There might be a door open."

  On the way they took a look at Garwood's garage. The doors were padlocked, but they forced them open enough to poke a torch inside and it lit up the radiator of a gray Hillman Avenger. Wherever Garwood had gone, he hadn't taken his car.

  But the back door was securely locked and bolted and the closed Venetian blinds stopped them from seeing into the kitchen. A small patio extended from the rear of the house for about ten feet or so before the lawn took over. Thick, crusty snow made it one unbroken blanketed expanse, except for an oddly shaped little mound, longish, slightly curved. Frost prodded it tentatively with his toe. A crackling sound of thin ice breaking. Curiosity aroused, he bent and scraped away the snow with a gloved hand, calling for Clive to help. A little way down the snow was tinted pink, and then there was thick, bright, ruby red ice, and something stiff, golden and spikey. Frozen animal fur. They'd found Roy, Garwood's golden retriever, the head darkened with dried blood running into frozen rivulets, soft brown eyes staring dully and reproachfully at the inspector's unpolished shoes.

  Frost turned his head away. Tracey's body would be like that, stiff, cold, and reproachful.

  They were crouched at the back door, Frost trying one of his skeleton keys, when the two men jumped on them. Frost's arm was seized and jerked brutally upward in an agonizing hammerlock, while Clive's head was slammed into the woodwork of the door. Fros
t kicked back, savagely, and there was a scream of pain. Then he turned his head and saw the police uniforms.

  "You silly sods!" The policeman holding him, gritting his teeth against the pain of the kick, abruptly froze, then slowly released his grip.

  "Inspector Frost!"

  "Who was you hoping for, you great tart--Jack-the-bloody-Ripper?" The constable rubbed his leg and Frost worked the shoulder muscles of his right arm to ease the pain. Clive was soaking up blood from his nose with a handkerchief. "Are you all right, son?" Clive nodded and dyed the handkerchief red.

  "Sorry, sir," apologized the second policeman, "but we had this 999 call about two suspicious characters...."

  "Lucky for you we're not burglars, otherwise I'd sue you for police brutality--look at what you've done to his nose, it's all bent." Clive's eyes glared at the inspector over his sodden handkerchief.

  "We're trying to break into this house," said Frost.

  I

  "What's the easiest way?"

  "Through the coal-chute," said the first constable and limped around the front to show them.

  During the summer, while the householders were away on holiday, there had been several break-ins in the locality, the thieves gaining admittance through the coal-chutes which were alongside the front doors. Most of the burgled houses had their doors fitted with strong, sophisticated thief-proof locks, but the coal-chute doors were secured by very simple locks--after all, who would want to steal a few pieces of coal? But with the coal-chute door forced open, all the intruder had to do was slither down into the coal cellar and out through the inner door, straight into the house.

  They got the door open without any trouble. An enormous pile of anthracite hid the inner door.

  The constable cleared his throat. "Be a mucky job clambering over that lot, sir."

  Frost flashed a benevolent beam at Clive. "Fortunately we have in our midst the Chief Constable's nephew. A new boy's perks, I'm afraid, son. Try not to drip blood on his nice clean coal."

  Impassively, Clive heaved himself up and slid down the gritty chute to land ankle deep in the anthracite, which kept shifting underfoot and sending up clouds of dry, penetrating coal dust to creep down the collar and into the eyes, and to stick to the blood from his nose. With pumping legs he tried to climb to the top of the heap, but the coal ran away from him and it was like trying to turn up the down escalator, but at last, sweat trickling channels of white into his grimed face, he was there. The inner cellar door had no inside handle and a push proclaimed it to be bolted from the other side. Garwood must have heard about those burglaries.

  "Give it a kick, son," called Frost.

  The first kick sent him sprawling on his face, but the second crashed back the door, and there was the hall with its off-white carpeting daring him to spoil it with dirty shoes.

  .

  He tiptoed to the front door, which wasn't bolted, and opened it to Frost who tipped his hat and handed him the bottle of milk.

  Frost suggested the two constables wait outside-- "This gentleman doesn't want you mucking up his nice clean floor with your beetle-crushers"--then he ventured inside. The first door he tried led to the lounge. He whistled softly. It was in some disarray, with drawers open and the contents trailing to the floor as if someone had been frantically searching for something. But they gave it just a cursory glance and moved on. The next door led to the kitchen, which was in darkness, with the Venetian blinds closed. Frost felt round the door frame and switched on the light. A compact kitchen in stainless steel and Formica. On the floor, spread across the blue and yellow checkered tiles, was a man.

  The man wore a blue paisley dressing gown over gray nylon pyjamas. He lay on his back, his mouth open as if surprised, his left eye staring in perplexity at the ceiling. Where the right eye should have been was a cavity overflowing with congealed blood. The blood had welled over down the side of the face and on to the blue and yellow tiles.

  The smashed eye held dive in a repulsive but hypnotic grip. He didn't want to look, but couldn't turn his head away. Then his stomach revolted and he staggered from the room. Frost heard his retching outside and hoped he'd managed to avoid the off-white carpet.

  Sensing trouble the two uniformed men bounded in, recoiling at the sight of the mess on the floor. Frost waved them out. The kitchen was too small with the corpse taking up so much room "You'd better radio the station, lads," he said. "Get a full forensic team. Tell them someone has shot and killed Rupert Gar wood."

  WEDNESDAY--2

  And then it was organized chaos with experts stamping all over the house, measuring, examining, photographing, dusting for fingerprints. The pathologist and his secretary were closeted with the corpse in the kitchen after being assured by the inspector that it had a bit more meat on it than the last one.

  Frost didn't like experts. They spoke a language he didn't understand, a language where things were exact and precise and where hunches, intuition, and blind luck didn't enter into it. So he sat on the stairs, smoking, keeping out of everyone's way, flicking ash on the thick sheet of polythene that had been laid to protect the deceased's off-white Wilton.

  Clive staggered in from the garden, his face chalk white under the coal grime. He flopped down on the bottom stair, ready to charge outside again should the need arise.

  "Feeling better now, son?"

  Clive nodded. "Sorry about that, sir--it was seeing his eye--"

  "Don't apologize, son. It's to your credit that you've still got some decent revulsion left in you. I bet, in a couple of weeks, you'll be flicking your butts in it like the rest of us."

  Clive sat quietly, willing his stomach to settle down. Frost kept the conversation going to cheer the lad up.

  "The pathologist and his girlfriend are in there now, admiring the spilled brains. I remember a choice corpse we had once when I was on the beat. It seemed this bus had gone right over his head--"

  Clive was thankful that two ambulance men bearing a stretcher caused a diversion as Frost directed them, with a jerk of his cigarette, to the kitchen, but they were immediately rejected. The pathologist was not yet ready to yield up the body.

  A fingerprint man emerged with his case of equipment, humming happily to himself.

  "If you've done the kitchen, do the lounge," called Frost. "Someone's turned it over."

  "Right," beamed the fingerprint man. "Let's hope he had the manners to take off his gloves. He kept them on in the kitchen."

  "How I hate cheerful little sods," said Frost, and then the kitchen door opened again and the photographer squeezed out with his equipment. Frost asked for three enlargements of the eye, in color, to send as Christmas cards, then went in with Clive to see the pathologist.

  He was dictating notes to his secretary as Frost's head poked round the door. The corpse, respectably draped with a sheet, was now just something to be stepped over. Frost stepped over it.

  "His dog's outside, Doc, as dead as he is. Do you think you could take a look when you've finished in here?" He nudged the sheeted body with his foot. "What's the verdict on one-eyed Riley?"

  The pathologist winced, delicately. "Well, he was shot from a distance of a few feet. The bullet has ripped through the eye and is now lodged in the skull somewhere. I'll fish it out for you when I do the autopsy. He would have fallen back with the impact and cracked his head on the tiles, but he wouldn't have felt it. He was dead before he hit the floor."

  "Some people have all the luck. What time did he cop it?"

  The pathologist scratched his chin. "We're now going into the realms of speculation. Pinpointing the time of death is very much a hit-and-miss affair, but from my preliminary calculations I'd say that death occurred between ten o'clock and midnight last night. I'll be more precise after the post mortem."

  The ambulance men were allowed to remove the body and Frost led the pathologist out to the stiffened little mound on the patio. Squatting on his haunches the medical man gently explored the sodden fur on the animal's head. "Beautiful c
reatures, aren't they?" he murmured impassively, then straightened up and rubbed his hands briskly together. "A blow from our old friend, the blunt instrument. A nasty knock, but I don't think the intention was to kill. The dog was stunned and this crippling weather did the rest. It just froze to death."

  Frost evened up the ends of his scarf. "Thank God we're not dealing with the sort of swine who'd kill a dog in cold blood. Parliament would bring back hanging for that. What time did Fido expire?"

  The pathologist gave a hollow laugh. "You do ask the most impossible questions, Inspector. The dog's frozen solid. It's like giving me a piece of meat from the deepfreeze and wanting to know when it was slaughtered. My guess is that it died some time last night."

  "That's bloody obvious, Doc," snorted Frost. "Gar-wood was a fastidious man. He would never have left a dead dog out on his patio all day. He'd have shoved it in the dustbin. They both must have been killed around the same time, but who went for walkies in the sky first--the bow-wow or his master?"

  "If it's all that important," sniffed the pathologist, "I'll do a quick P.M. on the dog as well." He called out to one of the ambulance men to ask if there was a polythene bag to put the dog in.

  The ambulance man looked at the golden retriever, his eyes clouding with compassion. "Poor old thing. What bastard would do that to a dog?"

  "If I ever get myself murdered," announced Frost, "I'll make certain my dog is scabby, mangy, and smelly, so if any sympathy's going, I get the lot."

  The black Daimler carrying the pathologist purred away, followed, after a frenzy of door-slamming, by the ambulance bearing the mortal remains of Garwood and Roy. And then the house was peaceful again.

  Frost closed the front door, lit his thirtieth cigarette of the day, and ambled back to the kitchen with its traces of fingerprint powder on polished surfaces and the distorted chalked outline, like a child's drawing, on the floor. He wandered over to the Ideal Standard boiler in the corner, opened the fire door, and peered inside. It was full of light gray fluffy ash and lumps of cold unburned coal.