‘What particular sod did you have in mind?’ asked Frost.
‘The burglar. The sod who pinched my stuff.’ Frost blinked at him. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Don’t you know what is going on in your own flaming station? I was burgled, wasn’t I? Sod broke in while we were away in the caravan on holiday. When I came back, the place had been done over. I’d been burgled.’
‘Who’d burgle this bleeding place?’ said Frost.
‘You’d spend more on petrol driving here than you could nick. You’re saying you had a burglary and you didn’t report it?’
‘Of course I flaming well reported it. A little fat bloke came round.’
‘Detective Sergeant Hanlon?’
‘That’s him. And he was bloody useless. Nosed around, got some bloke to chuck fingerprint powder all over the place, then pissed off. That was the last I heard. I thought you were here to tell me you’d caught him.’
‘You used to do a bit of burglary yourself, Bill. This sounds like an insurance fiddle to me.’
‘Insurance fiddle? Don’t talk to me about insurance companies. They’re quick to take your flaming premium, but when you’re unlucky enough to be robbed, they won’t pay out. They want receipts. Who the hell keeps receipts?’
‘Especially when you nicked the stuff in the first place,’ said Frost, stuffing the search warrant back in his mac pocket. ‘What was taken?’
‘He turned the place over – made a right bleeding mess of it. Flaming amateur, if you ask me. All he took was an old wallet with a couple of quid in it.’
‘And the wallet was all you claimed for on your insurance policy?’
Billy spread his hands and shrugged. ‘All right, Inspector Frost, I’ll come clean as it’s you. I might have exaggerated about the brand-new telly and DVD player and the wife’s designer clothes, but all he took was the wallet with a couple of quid in it.’
‘Was there anything else in the wallet apart from money?’
‘Condoms, you mean? No, the wife has her own method of birth control. She bolts the bedroom door.’ He wheezed heartily at his own joke.
‘What about a cashpoint card for the Fortress Building Society?’
King screwed up his face in thought. ‘Might have been. I haven’t dealt with them for ages. I’m with the Woolwich now.’ He frowned. ‘Are you telling me the bastard took that as well?’ He reached for the phone. ‘I’m closing my account. There wasn’t much left in it, but that bastard isn’t going to have it.’
Frost knocked Billy’s hand away from the phone. ‘No, don’t do anything. If he tries to use it, Billy, we can get him.’ He pushed himself up from the chair. He’d check with Hanlon, but King’s story had the ring of truth about it, and for all his faults, Billy wasn’t the kind of bloke who would go around poisoning baby food. He paused as a thought struck him. The pin number. The blackmailer would be unable to withdraw money without the pin number. ‘Was your pin number in the wallet?’
‘Of course it was. Safest place for it. I wrote it on the back of the card.’
Frost smiled. ‘What would crooks do without prats like you, Billy?’ He waved away the offer of a cup of tea and remembered his long-delayed wee. ‘Do you think I could use your toilet?’
‘But I haven’t got a report of a flaming burglary;’ said Frost, riffling once more through his over flowing in-tray. ‘I felt a bigger prat than usual, going in there with a search warrant to find a card that had already been nicked.’
‘I definitely sent you a copy, Jack,’ insisted Hanlon. ‘I gave it to that Welsh bloke.’
‘Gave it to the Welsh bloke?’ exploded Frost, pushing his in-tray away. ‘You might just as well have flushed it down the flaming karzy.’ He opened his office door and bellowed down the corridor. ‘Lloyd flaming George. Come here!’
DC Morgan came trotting in, not knowing his offence, but wearing his hang-dog look of contrition, just in case. ‘You wanted me, Guv?’
‘No,’ snapped Frost. ‘I don’t flaming want you, but I’m stuck with you. The crime report Hanlon gave you?’
Morgan looked blank for a moment, then brightened. ‘All filed away, Guv.’ He pulled open the drawer of the filing cabinet.
‘You didn’t think I should see it first – just in case I wanted to know what was going on?’ He held his hand out for the report and skimmed through it. ‘Smashed a back window to get in and cut his hand doing so. That rings a bell. Did we take a sample for DNA?’
‘Not worth the expense, Jack,’ Hanlon told him. ‘All he’d taken was a wallet with a few quid in it. SOCO found the odd print, but couldn’t match them with anyone on record.’
‘No, they wouldn’t,’ said Frost. ‘This bloke is a rank amateur, like flaming Taffy here. Plenty of stuff he could have pinched, but he didn’t touch it because he wouldn’t know where to sell it. All he could handle was money and he was flaming lucky to find the wallet.’
‘And you reckon this is the same bloke who’s blackmailing the supermarket?’
‘Yes. Now he’s got the account details, he can have the hush money paid in.’
‘But for all he knew, when Billy King realised it was pinched he’d have stopped it with the building society.’
‘I doubt he thought that far ahead, Arthur. He probably tried the card out, found it worked and reckoned he was on to a winner. A flaming amateur trying for the big time. Shouldn’t be hard to nab the sod. We’ll pay Beazley’s cheque in, then we’ll watch all the cashpoints and when our blackmailer tries to make a withdrawal, we’ve got him.’
Frost stared again at the cheque with Beazley’s signature scrawled along the bottom. He blew off the ash that had fallen from his cigarette and looked across the desk at DC Morgan. ‘You know, Taff, with my forgery skills I reckon I could overwrite this with my name, cash it and do a bunk to somewhere exotic like Bangladesh or Basildon.’
Morgan grinned. ‘But it wouldn’t be honest, Guv.’
Frost nodded. ‘Agreed, but that wouldn’t stop me. It would be the fact that I would be letting that nice Mr Beazley down. I’d hate to think of his little, fat, greasy lower lip quivering with disappointment.’ He held out the cheque and passbook. ‘Nip across to the building society and give it to. Mr Selby, the manager. He’s expecting you. Tell him you’re the dopey cop I told him about.’ He pushed himself up from his chair. ‘Right. Let’s break the news to Hornrim Harry that his overtime bill is going to hit the roof tonight when we are out covering all the cashpoints’ He made a mental list of all the things that could possibly go wrong with the operation and shuddered. ‘This is going to be a complete balls-up, Taffy. I just know it.’
Morgan grinned. ‘I have every faith in you, Guv.’
‘That’s because you’re a prat, and a Welsh one at that,’ said Frost, making his way to the old log cabin.
Mullett wasn’t in his office. In fact the entire station seemed strangely deserted. Frost checked his watch, then he remembered. Bleeding hell! Fatty Arbuckle’s meeting. The one he had promised not to be late for.
Frost hastened to the main Incident Room, pausing at the door to listen. Skinner’s voice was booming out. He turned the door handle very carefully, hoping to slip in unobserved, but as he entered he received the full force of Skinner’s blistering glare. All heads turned to look at him, including Hornrim Harry, who was seated alongside Skinner and was doing his ‘frowning and tutting’ disapproval act.
‘Ah, Inspector Frost. Nice of you to join us,’ sneered Skinner.
‘No problem,’ beamed Frost, completely unfazed. ‘I didn’t have anything else to do.’ Sarcasm just bounced off him. He was relieved to see that his usual seat – back row, near the door – was vacant, so perhaps he could sneak out when things got boring.
Skinner exchanged glances with Mullett, as if to say, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll soon get rid of this useless bastard for you.’ Mullett nodded and smirked a tight smile of acknowledgement.
Frost was sitting next to the young WPC who h
ad been with the rape victim in the hospital. He didn’t know her name. His warm smile met with a blank stare.
‘Right,’ resumed Skinner. ‘For the benefit of our late arrival I’ll quickly repeat what I said before, as I am sure many of you haven’t taken it in properly. I’ve only been in Denton division a few hours and already I’ve noticed slackness, slovenliness and laziness almost without exception. I hear moans about shortage of man power. If you all put in a full day’s work, there would be no shortage.’ He picked up a sheet of paper and fluttered it at arm’s length. ‘This, in case you haven’t looked at it for some time, is your contract of employment. If you read it, you will be aware of the following points. Point number one: you are allowed one – repeat one – meal break of forty-five minutes per shift. It does not allow you half an hour of extra breaks, morning and afternoon, for tea, coffee, sandwiches and bleeding fairy cakes. I don’t want to see anyone in the canteen outside the official forty-five minutes, unless they are off duty.’
Frost had mentally switched Skinner’s voice off and it was just droning away in the background as he started to work out how many men he would need to stake out the various Fortress Building Society cashpoints. He looked up. Skinner didn’t appear to be looking his way, so he decided this might be a good time to out. He was just opening the door very carefully when Skinner spotted him.
‘Going somewhere, Frost?’
‘Just checking that the door was closed properly. Flaming draught,’ said Frost, slamming it tight and giving the handle a few wiggles. He, turned up his coat collar and faked a shiver, then slunk back in his seat. The fat bastard must have eyes in the back of his head.
‘Now that Inspector Frost has checked the door for us,’ continued Skinner, ‘there are other time-wasting practices that I want rectified. Shift starting times are constantly delayed because officers are wasting time changing from civvies to police uniform and having a bloody good chat about last night’s bleeding football while they do so. The man hours wasted by this would be enough to provide Denton division with three more officers.’ He let his glance roam the faces in front of him as he repeated this to emphasise his point. ‘Three new officers. And probably better flaming officers than we have got now. So in future, ladies and gentlemen, you will change into your police uniform before you leave home and will start your shift the minute you walk through the station doors.’
There was a rumble of discontent. Skinner looked up in mock surprise. ‘Does that present a problem?’
Bill Wells raised a hand.
Skinner jabbed a finger at him. ‘And you are…?’
‘Wells – Sergeant Wells.’
Wells! thought Skinner. Ah yes. The thicky who kept me hanging on the phone this morning. The thicky who thinks he deserves promotion. The thicky who had better watch his bloody step or he’ll be following Frost out of Denton, if not leading the flaming way…
‘Yes, Sergeant Wells?’ he cooed, knowing what was coming and primed to shoot the stupid git down.
‘If I walk to the station in the morning wearing my uniform, people think I’m already on duty and they yell at me to solve their problems – domestic disputes, vandals, missing flaming cats – and all in my own time.’
‘If you saw someone kicking his wife’s teeth in, would you say, “Sorry I’m not on duty yet”? A good policeman is always on duty.’ He dismissed Wells with a derisive twitch of his hand. ‘And, of course,’ he continued, ‘we will also gain man hours if, as I require, you finish your shift dead on time, not half an hour early so you can get changed. You will now leave your uniform on until you get back home.’ He paused. That thicky sergeant had his hand up again. He sighed loudly and raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Yes, Sergeant Wells?’
‘Same point as before,’ replied Wells. ‘I’ve finished my shift, I’m walking home and, because I’m still in uniform, I’m going to get dragged into all sorts of things.’
‘The same point, the same answer,’ snapped Skinner. ‘Nearly everyone in this station is not pulling their weight. I exclude Superintendent Mullett, of course.’ Mullett beamed back his acknowledgement. ‘Too many people are slacking, skiving, duty dodging, doing sloppy paperwork, not completing required returns.’ Here he glowered meaningfully at Frost, but the man appeared to have fallen asleep with a lighted cigarette in his mouth. Skinner tightened his lips grimly. The inspector didn’t know what was coming to him! ‘None of this,’ he went on, ‘will be tolerated in future. Any deviation and I’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks.’ He turned to Mullett. ‘Anything you’d like to add, sir?’
Mullett shook his head. ‘No, Chief Inspector. I think you have covered all points admirably.’
Everyone except Frost stood as Mullett and Skinner gathered their papers and left the room, closing the door on a bubbling simmer of indignation and discontent.
A fuming Bill Wells made his way across to Frost. ‘What do you think of that, Jack?’ he spluttered.
Frost beamed up at him. ‘Skinner’s all sweet talk now, but wait until he’s been here a few weeks – he’ll be a real right bastard.’
Skinner was with Mullett when Frost entered. He was seated alongside Mullett behind the desk and seemed to be pushing the superintendent out of position. Every now and then Mullett made a half-hearted attempt to move his chair back to centre, but Skinner didn’t yield an inch. Mullett’s expression indicated that he was starting to wonder whether he had made the right decision in accepting Skinner into Denton division. But the man had promised he would get rid of Frost quickly and painlessly, and that weighed heavily in Skinner’s favour.
Mullett opened his mouth to ask Frost what he wanted, but Skinner beat him to it. ‘What is it, Frost?’
Frost grabbed one of the two visitors’ chairs and dragged it across the blue Wilton, leaving twin tracks of scuff marks. He plonked himself down and lit up. ‘I’m going to need a hell of a lot of men on overtime for the next two nights,’ he said.
Mullett was already shaking his head – the division was under attack from County for the size of its overtime bill – when Skinner asked, ‘Why?’
Frost filled them in about the supermarket blackmailer. ‘So we need to stake out the cashpoints and nab the sod when he tries to draw out his money.’
Skinner’s eyes glinted. ‘And you reckon you can catch him?’
How the bleeding hell do I know? thought Frost. Aloud he said, ‘One hundred per cent sure.’
Skinner rubbed his chin in thought, then jabbed a finger at Frost. ‘OK; I’m taking charge of this case. You carry out the stake-out – and you’d better give me a result. When you catch him, arrest him, then hand him over to me.’
‘Right,’ nodded Frost enthusiastically. If it meant getting the extra bodies on overtime, he didn’t give a damn who was supposed to be in charge of the case. It meant someone else could take the flak for a change if the whole damn thing went pear-shaped, as most of Frost’s fool proof enterprises tended to.
‘How many men will you need?’
‘There are five Fortress cashpoints, two men on each – ’
‘Hold on,’ interrupted Skinner. ‘How do you know he’ll use a Fortress cashpoint? He can use the card anywhere.’
‘That’s where our luck’s in,’ Frost told him. ‘You can only use Fortress cards at their own cashpoints. They haven’t joined Link yet. So all we’ll need is two men on each of the five cashpoints, with another man as back-up and an area car lurking in the background in case we have to chase the sod. I’m hoping he’ll leave it until it’s dark when there are fewer people about, so the main group will be covering from eight until, say, six the next morning – unless we catch him earlier, of course. And we’ll need a skeleton surveillance team, with no back-up but able to call in reinforcements if necessary, during the day. They won’t be on overtime, of course.’
Frost knew there was no way Mullett would authorise this in full, so he had upped the ante by asking for more men than he needed. He had asked Fortress Buildin
g Society to put two of their cashpoints out of action overnight, so they would only be watching three instead of five, but he didn’t tell Mullett that.
‘For how many days?’ croaked Mullett, his brain whirling as he tried to calculate how much all this would cost.
‘One or two at the most,’ lied Frost. ‘The minute he draws money out on the card, the building society will phone me. If our luck’s in, we’ll nab him tonight.’ He oozed optimism, but Frost’s luck was rarely in.
Mullett’s head was already shaking when Skinner forestalled him again.
‘I don’t know about during the day. I want every man I can get my hands on to search the woods and other likely places for those missing kids. But you can have a maximum of five bodies for tonight – and let one of them be that dopey Welsh bloke. But if you sod this up
…!’ He let the threat hover like Damocles’ sword over the inspector’s head.
Frost put on his hurt look, as if sodding things up was inconceivable to him. He shot out of his chair and made for the door before they could change their minds.
‘Hold it,’ snapped Skinner. ‘Don’t forget. When you get him, you hand him over to me. I’ll take it from there.’
Frost nodded. Always agree: that was his motto. You could always say you didn’t understand afterwards.
‘But remember, if you foul this up -, began Skinner, his mouth shutting with a snap when he realised he was talking to a slammed door. Frost had made his exit.
‘When are you going to tell him he’s being transferred out of Denton?’ asked Mullett.
‘Not yet,’ replied Skinner, smiling maliciously. ‘I don’t want to dampen his enthusiasm for tonight’s stake-out.’
Chapter 4
A petulant wind rattled the windows of the Incident Room. It was a lousy night for a stakeout, but you couldn’t pick your moment. Frost surveyed his team and was pleased to note that Bill Wells had included two WPCs, one the girl who had sat with the rape victim at Denton General, looking even younger out of uniform. This was good. A man and a woman in a shop doorway late at night would look far less conspicuous than a man on his own, and the blackmailer was sure to be edgy and ready to abort. Frost swilled down the dregs of his tea, lit up another cigarette from the stub of the old one, which he dumped in the mug, then clapped his hands for silence.
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