Fatal Frost (DI Jack Frost)

by James, Henry

  ‘Where was he heading?’

  ‘Other side of town. He wanted a number 4, which runs up the Bath Road out west, past Denton Woods.’

  Waters’ heart started beating fast. ‘Can you recall what he was wearing?’

  The shopkeeper squinted with the effort of remembering. ‘A tracksuit, I think.’

  ‘Time?’

  ‘I’d guess around 7.30.’

  ‘Thank you, you’ve been a big help.’

  Waters made to leave but the man was still pondering. ‘Yes, I remember it now – a white top – a complete contrast to the girl all in black.’

  ‘The girl?’

  ‘Yes. The girl – I think it must have been his sister.’

  Shortly after 10 p.m. Simms knocked on Frost’s office door. As he entered, he thought the DS looked pained in the glow from the desk lamp. His fingers were working his temples in a motion suggesting either deep thought or worry, Simms couldn’t tell which. In front of him was a large-scale map of Denton with highlighter marks across the middle.

  ‘Hello, son, come in. What’s up?’

  ‘The smash and grabs and the mugging. I’ve drawn a blank, I’m afraid. The victims didn’t recognize their attackers.’

  ‘What, between the three of them they couldn’t come up with even one possible?’ Frost said in amazement, picking his cigarette up from the ashtray.

  ‘The estate agent and the jeweller, nothing. The newsagent, well, every single photo was a candidate from his position; literally every white kid that came up.’

  ‘Hold on – surely he’s the one least likely to make a match? They were all wearing balaclavas in his shop, am I right?’

  ‘Yep.’ Simms pulled up a chair.

  Frost reached into the lower drawer. ‘Time for a nightcap?’ he said, waving the bottle of Black Label.

  Simms nodded, remarking, ‘I reckon the newsagent has convinced himself it’s race-related. Some weird persecution complex …’

  ‘Nothing weird about it. He’s probably right to be concerned; that estate is going downhill fast.’

  Frost endeavoured to find some cleanish mugs, opening the office window and slinging out coffee dregs, while Simms wondered, not for the first time, what Frost’s thoughts were on Waters’ beating. The DS clearly wasn’t going to discuss it, not with him at least.

  Simms’s thoughts turned back to the robberies. ‘Well, maybe we’re wrong to think it’s the same gang that’s done all three,’ he said. ‘After all, in the newsagent’s job they were armed, and they all had balaclavas.’

  ‘We don’t know they were armed. Nobody actually saw a gun. And the kid who did the bike trick outside the jeweller’s was in a balaclava. The other attack was more opportunist, so they hadn’t had time to get their masks on, and it was in broad daylight too – and yet the estate agent can’t offer us anything to help us ID them?’ Frost rolled his eyes.

  ‘Nothing. I picked him up off the street, remember. He was pretty dazed, and visibility was quite poor; the sky was very overcast.’

  The Scotch burned Simms’s throat. He looked over at Frost; he had to hand it to him, he may look a tired wreck of a man, but you couldn’t fault his sharpness. According to station gossip his marriage was in trouble, perhaps seriously, and yet here he was, still giving his all to the job.

  ‘I take it DC Clarke has been through these too?’

  Simms nodded. ‘She can’t point to anyone either, despite her tussle with one of the assailants, same as the estate agent.’

  Frost grunted. ‘Never mind. We’ll catch them. I’ve enlisted some outside help …’

  Simms was about to ask what but decided he was too weary.

  ‘And talking of Ms Clarke’ – Frost looked at his watch – ‘she should be back from the tip soon … which leads us to Tom Hardy and the jolly campers in Denton Woods. They’re our biggest chance of a breakthrough. We have the candle wax to suggest he was in the woods, so chances are the Scouts saw something. Any progress?’

  ‘Yes and no.’ Simms sighed. ‘The Scouts did camp this weekend. But not at Denton. They were on Rimmington Meadows.’

  ‘Arse.’ Frost sighed and looked nonplussed. ‘But hang on … Witnesses at Wood Vale saw groups of teenagers traipsing into the woods on Friday. What were they doing, going flower-picking?’ He snorted in derision.

  ‘Well, yeah, actually – more looking at them than picking. I don’t know exactly, but the Scout and Guide leaders mentioned something to do with a nature badge.’

  ‘What about the huts made of twigs and what-have-you?’ Frost puffed.

  ‘Bivouacs? They’d been there weeks, left over from their Easter camp.’

  ‘So let me get this straight – there was nobody camping out in Denton Woods last weekend?’

  ‘Not that we can verify. But I asked the leaders for names and addresses of everyone in their troops.’

  ‘Get that list,’ Frost said urgently, then looked back at the map before him, prompting Simms to ask, ‘What have you got there?’

  ‘Well, it’s not all bad news. Myles and Waters have had a breakthrough on Tom Hardy’s movements.’ Frost reached for another cigarette. ‘Well, I say it’s a breakthrough – we’ve at least found out when he left the house on Friday evening and where he was going. He stopped in at a shop around seven to make enquiries about bus times …’

  ‘Which bus?’

  ‘The number 4, which runs up the Bath Road.’

  ‘And past Denton Woods.’

  ‘Exactly. Waters has gone to question the bus driver, to try and find out where the poor kid got off the bus. And Clarke has been to the dump where the kid’s clothes were found, and they match the description from the shopkeeper, so we know he wore a white tracksuit top on Friday evening, the same as when he was murdered.’

  ‘So, Friday looks to have been D-Day then,’ mused Simms.

  ‘Yes, so some progress. Clarke also found … Well, no need to get into that now …’

  When Simms finally closed the door behind him at ten thirty, Frost pulled out the Samantha Ellis file and leafed through the pages until he found what he was looking for, the detailed pathologist report made by Drysdale’s sidekick. There it was under ‘distinguishing marks’: inside left thigh, a small brown mole/ birth mark (?); sickle-shape / inverted ‘5’.

  He thought back to the girl’s bedroom which he’d briefly seen on Monday, filled with astrological mumbo jumbo. He had no daughters or sisters of his own, so couldn’t presume to offer any expert understanding of how adolescent girls’ minds worked, but if he had to hazard a guess, then turmoil, melodrama and a burning quest for self-expression would all figure highly. It was the question mark the pathologist had added that had caught his eye. Suppose the mark were not a birthmark but instead a makeshift tattoo in brown ink? A sickle could mean a couple of things – a rural peasant’s farm tool; the emblem of the Soviet Union – but it was the final description that interested Frost: an inverted ‘5’. Inverted 5? Where had he read that before? He reached over for A Brief History of the Pagan Calendar and flicked to the glossary at the back. There it was, pentagram. ‘The five-pointed star drawn with straight strokes. The word originates from the Greek …’ Yeah, yeah. He read on, ‘Symbol of the Wicca faith. An inverted pentagram, with two points upwards, is often regarded as the sign of the witch.’

  Frost’s mind was racing. He snatched up the autopsy report from twenty years ago on Nancy Edwards, the girl who had hanged herself. A few pages in, there it was in faded ink, a description of the tattoo the girl had been caught, compasses in hand, disfiguring herself with: The number five; the bottom resembling a blade or scythe. Five. The School of the Five Bells. The members of which, according to Mary, had numbered five, all similarly marked with a tattoo. But could the connection between past and present take him any further? The original members certainly committed no serious crimes – the only injury was to one of their own, and by her own hand. Something wasn’t right.

  He stubbed out his cig
arette, got up from his desk and made his way down the corridor. The Incident Room was in darkness. He switched on the lights and waited briefly for the fluorescent tubes to flicker into life. Scanning the dozens of photos on the two boards, he found what he was looking for – the landscape shot of Tom Hardy’s body. It had been positioned on a slight rise a few yards from the ninth hole, with the head on the downward slope, at an angle of 45 degrees to the neck. As previously established, the victim had been laid out that way on purpose, but now it struck Frost. It was another inverted 5. He unpinned the photo and made his way back to his office, just as the phone began ringing, reverberating eerily through the empty corridor. Mary? He increased his pace to almost a jog or the best approximation he could manage.

  ‘Hello?’

  It was Desk Sergeant Johnny Johnson – he had Sue Clarke on the line.

  ‘Sue, love, everything all right?’ Where were his cigarettes, or was he out of them again?

  ‘I just wanted to apologize.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said, without the slightest idea of what she meant.

  ‘And tear up that letter. I know you’ve not read it … It was stupid. You’ve enough on your plate, what with … Shit. Wait a sec. The bath’s about to overflow.’

  He poured another measure of Black Label into his coffee mug. His mind, stirred by the thought of Sue and her bath, began to wander.

  ‘Sorry, where were we?’ she said.

  ‘Sue, I’ve been trying all week to catch up with you …’ It was a lie. Since Tuesday’s awkward showdown he’d barely given his personal feelings for Clarke a second thought, until the image of her curvaceous naked body about to slip beneath the suds floated by.

  ‘I’m glad. I know you’re in a difficult position. Come round for a chat maybe?’

  ‘Yes, of course, good idea,’ he said. A ‘chat’ was the last thing on his mind, but one thing could lead to another. Mary was most likely still at her mother’s; she’d expressed no intention of returning home any time soon. Could he? How big a stinker would that make him? ‘It’s getting late, though, and I’ve one more call to make. It’s important,’ he said reluctantly, having just noticed the underlined ‘Ellis’ on his blotter from the previous day.

  ‘OK. Yes, maybe it is a bit late. I need an early night too.’

  He hung up and rifled through the Ellis file to find her mother’s telephone number. He unearthed his cigarettes and lit a Rothmans.

  ‘Mrs Ellis? Good evening. It’s Detective Sergeant Frost here. I do apologize for the lateness of the hour.’

  ‘Mr Frost, I’ve been trying to reach you …’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry about that article in the Echo. It’s the press, they’ll do anything for a story – totally unscrupulous …’

  ‘I quite understand. It wasn’t me who complained. My late husband’s brother, Michael Hartley-Jones, was furious, and he thinks because he knows your station chief … Anyway …’ the woman stuttered, ‘I completely understand that it’s not your fault. No, I called about something else …’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Frost was relieved and intrigued. ‘What might that be?’

  ‘I saw a police statement on the television – a lad was found dead on the golf course yesterday.’

  ‘Yes. Tom Hardy.’

  ‘Yes, poor Tom. I’m not sure whether it’s relevant, but I thought you should know that Sam was going out with Tom.’

  ‘I’m sorry … “going out with”?’

  ‘You know, dating.’

  ‘They were boyfriend and girlfriend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Well, well, thought Frost, that’s an unexpected piece of information.

  Friday (1)

  ‘THE HEART IS missing,’ the pathologist said, tapping the metal tray conclusively with a scalpel.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Frost said, as Clarke shuffled uncomfortably next to him. ‘Couldn’t the rats have eaten it?’

  ‘Sergeant, the heart is one of the larger of the organs – I wouldn’t miss it if it was here. The liver and kidneys are here in part, here and here’ – Drysdale poked the half-eaten organs again – ‘and are widely considered more edible, whether by rodents or others.’

  Drysdale was right of course, Frost realized. The heart had probably never been among the organs in the plastic bag in the first place.

  The clothes and body parts discovered at Denton Municipal Tip had been confirmed as belonging to Tom Hardy.

  ‘Everything is pointing towards a ritual killing, as you yourself wisely suspected, Doc.’ Frost was flattering Drysdale, biding his time before bringing up what really interested him. ‘Anything useful on the clothes?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes.’ Drysdale pulled two further trays from beneath the counter. Inside each were bagged items of clothing.

  ‘Though they were blood-soaked, I am certain the victim was not wearing the clothes when he was killed. The markings would indicate the clothing was used to “mop up”.’

  Frost sensed Clarke wincing; she had his sympathy there. There was a chilling absence of emotion in the jaded pathologist’s delivery which Frost had long ago got used to.

  ‘I’ll trust your opinion on that, Doc. Now, if I may—’

  ‘Not so fast, Sergeant. I’ve not finished.’ Drysdale reached over for a microscope. ‘These are the socks.’

  ‘Socks?’ Clarke asked. ‘Were there socks? Forensics didn’t mention that.’

  ‘The socks were there, along with the underpants. If Harding and his Forensics chums took the trouble to look—’

  ‘We were intent on getting the garments back here to confirm the blood type,’ Clarke said defensively.

  Drysdale barely acknowledged her. ‘I took the liberty of examining the socks. I thought they might be significant, given there was no footwear found initially on the corpse, although the shoes have since been found. I thought perhaps a closer look at the socks might give some indication of where the victim last walked.’

  Frost was getting impatient – who gave a monkey’s about socks? – he wanted to examine Samantha Ellis’s body for evidence of a tattoo. ‘Very good, Doc – you should consider branching out into Forensics. God knows, they need the help. Been bugger-all use so far with this poor sod.’

  Drysdale was hunched over the work surface, fiddling with the microscope. ‘Come here, take a look at this.’ He waved them over.

  Frost bent before the instrument. Drysdale began to explain the mechanism but didn’t get far.

  ‘I know, I know how these things work,’ Frost insisted. He screwed up his face and twiddled the knob back and forth wildly until he had the slide in focus. He squinted for several seconds at the object on the glass. ‘A pubic hair?’ he said.

  ‘A wool tuft,’ Drysdale replied airily.

  ‘Call it what you like, Doc, a pube’s a pube where I come from – although not usually in this colour …’ Frost adjusted the focus further. ‘Blue?’

  ‘Indeed. Ice-blue. I would say an Axminster.’

  Frost looked up.

  ‘A carpet, recently laid,’ Drysdale added, lest there be any doubt.

  ‘Very good!’ Frost clapped the grey-skinned pathologist on the back. ‘Maybe the boy was killed indoors after all. This could turn out to be a key piece of evidence. Well done! Now then, Samantha Ellis – is she still here?’

  ‘Er, yes,’ Drysdale said, clearly surprised by the sudden jump. ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s something I’d like to check up on.’

  Drysdale led them down the corridor and into the lab morgue itself.

  ‘You’re in luck – this one goes today,’ he said, releasing the cold-storage lock and sliding out the drawer containing the corpse. He turned back the sheet to reveal the unearthly bluish face.

  ‘That’s her,’ Frost said, ‘but I want the other end.’ Unceremoniously he flung the sheet off the lower half of the body and peered at the inner thighs. ‘The trouble with stiffs,’ he said, parting the legs, ‘is that they tend to be stiff.’
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  ‘Jack, what are you doing?’ Clarke cried in alarm.

  ‘It’s the cold storage that makes the body stiffen,’ Drysdale said. ‘May I ask what you hope to achieve by manhandling the body like this?’

  ‘According to your assistant’s report, there was a distinguishing mark on the inner thigh, possibly a birthmark, or possibly something else.’ Frost looked across to Drysdale for help.

  Drysdale raised an eyebrow. ‘I never thought you read them, to be totally honest.’

  ‘Of course I … Wait a minute – there we go. Doc, magnifying glass?’

  Drysdale passed him a glass from his overall pocket.

  Halfway down the left thigh was a brown mark the size and colour of a well-used two-penny piece. To the naked eye it looked like a large, crescent-shaped birthmark, but under close scrutiny it did appear to be a crude tattoo – a sickle with a line perpendicular to the handle: the number 5.

  ‘Here, have a look.’ Frost passed the glass over to Clarke. ‘I’d hate you to think I was some sort of pervert.’

  She rolled her eyes towards the ceiling before scrutinizing the mark. ‘I agree, it’s some form of tattoo. But what does it mean?’

  Frost stepped back from the corpse. The half-light of the morgue gave his tired features a somewhat sinister appearance. ‘I think it means she belonged to a secret society, one which first existed here in Denton twenty years ago, and was formed by disaffected schoolgirls.’ He fiddled nervously with his cigarette packet; the nicotine jitters always got to him in here. ‘Back then, St Mary’s School for Girls had a reputation for strict discipline verging on brutality. This was in the sixties when most girls boarded. One end of term, five of them, all aged about fifteen or sixteen, arranged a tryst with some boys from Denton Comprehensive, in the sports pavilion in St Mary’s grounds. The boys arrived late one night, after “lights out”, loaded with booze and cigarettes.’

  Clarke was watching him carefully, hanging on every word.

  ‘This was all well and good to begin with but, while rebellious, these were well-brought-up girls at heart, so when they didn’t put out, the lads became fractious and disgruntled, as well they might …’ Frost paused in thought, as though imagining himself on the scene.