First Frost

by Henry James

‘William?’ said Clarke, as the redhead walked away.

  ‘Jack’s real name,’ said Hanlon. ‘William Edward Frost.’

  Detective Inspector Jim Allen had to park on Eagle Lane, back by the Territorial Army headquarters, as the station yard was filled with cars and vans he didn’t recognize. He presumed the press conference, which he’d been watching at home on television, would have ended by now.

  Then it occurred to him that the cars could well belong to officers from other divisions, and lawyers, independent advisers, people from the Police Complaints Board and government officials, you name it. A shoot-out in the woods. A notorious gang smashed. Everybody and his dog would want to be involved, himself included.

  He hurried up the steps, feeling surprisingly fit and refreshed, despite the fact that his wife had just left him, and pushed open the doors to the lobby.

  Coming the other way was Denton Echo reporter Sandy Lane, a fag in his mouth, a pork-pie hat askew on his mop of hair. ‘Ah, Mr Allen,’ he said. ‘Where have you been all week? Tucked up in bed? On your own too, nowadays, if a little bird told me right. Marital difficulties? You wouldn’t be the first.’

  ‘Piss off,’ said Allen, barging the sleazy hack out of the way and striding straight up to Bill Wells at the counter. ‘Hello, Sergeant.’

  Wells raised an eyebrow. ‘Bit late, aren’t you, Inspector?’

  ‘Still some clearing up to do, isn’t there? At least that’s what Superintendent Mullett implied on the TV – what with this stripper on the loose. Got here as soon as I could.’

  ‘You and everyone else,’ said Wells.

  ‘Been a hell of a journey trying to get back,’ said Allen, ‘train strikes, roadworks, demonstrations, riots, you name it. The country’s in a right mess.’

  ‘Where were you? The Peak District, wasn’t it?’ said Wells dismissively.

  ‘Somewhere like that. Any idea where Mr Mullett is?’

  ‘About to hold a briefing, so I understand, in the canteen.’

  ‘In the canteen?’

  ‘Renovations,’ said Wells, wearily. ‘Final phase.’

  ‘Right,’ said Allen, confused. Just what the hell had been going on? It was like he’d landed on Mars.

  The moment he caught a flash of red coming down the corridor, Frost shut his eyes, feigning sleep. There was the unmistakable clip-clop of her heels, like a Welsh pony he’d often thought, and she could certainly kick like one.

  Presently he heard the curtain being pulled shut around them and his wife sitting down in the chair beside his bed, and the creak of that bloody expensive coat. He could smell her, her perfume, the faint whiff of her make-up and of new leather.

  ‘Haven’t seen you in bed for a while, William,’ she said.

  Frost opened his eyes slowly, but made little effort to sit up. ‘Oh, hello, love,’ he said, yawning. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘The station were good enough to let me know that following an armed exchange in Denton Woods my husband had been hospitalized. It wasn’t until I got here that I was informed that you hadn’t actually been shot but were suffering from appendicitis.’

  ‘They’ve whipped it out already,’ Frost said gamely.

  ‘Is that all they’ve whipped out? Must be plenty of other rotten stuff inside you they could have cut out while they were at it.’

  ‘You’re in a good mood, Mary. Makes a change.’

  ‘William’ – she leant closer, put her hand on the edge of his bed – ‘I’ve been sick with worry – all week for that matter. Which has not been so different from the week before and the week before that. You have no idea what it’s like being married to you.’

  ‘I’ve only been doing my job,’ he replied.

  ‘You only ever do your job. That’s the problem.’

  ‘Please keep you voice down, Mary, people are trying to die in here.’

  ‘Why can’t you get a normal job? It’s not as if they even appreciate what you do. You’ve been there for years, slaving away, and you’re still only a sergeant.’

  ‘Detective sergeant,’ Frost said with a sigh.

  ‘When are you going to be made an inspector? A superintendent? Someone with a bit of status, like your boss – what’s his name? The one who is always on the telly.’

  ‘It’s not all about a few gold stripes and fancy medals. You’d be surprised – not all superintendents are quite what they’re cracked up to be.’

  ‘That’s as maybe, we’re all human.’

  ‘Mullett’s not,’ insisted Frost.

  ‘He did a good impersonation of being one – one who cared. He made it sound like the police smashed this gang with real guts. No mention of you, mind.’

  ‘If I’d wanted my name in lights, on telly, I’d have joined The Sweeney, not Denton Police Station.’

  ‘You’re impossible,’ Mary sniffed. ‘Why can’t you go into business then, the private sector? You could get a job as one of those security guards, couldn’t you? Earn some proper money, too.’

  ‘Nick it more like. Which reminds me, love,’ Frost said, making more of an effort to sit up, ‘there’s someone I need to see.’

  He pulled back the sheet and tried to get out of the bed, remembering he was wearing not pyjamas but a hospital-issue nightshirt. The injection had made him feel so much better, but there was still a terrible pain in his stomach. ‘Be a love and pass me my mac, will you,’ he wheezed. ‘I think you’re sitting on it.’

  His raincoat, he could just see, had been draped over the back of the visitor’s chair. ‘I need a smoke,’ he added.

  ‘Get back into bed. You’re in no fit state to go anywhere.’ Mary looked over her shoulder and, realizing she’d been sitting on his mac, quickly stood up. She lifted the garment up at arm’s length, as if it were infected with something fatal. ‘William, what the hell has happened to your mac? Dirt, rips … are those bloodstains? I only bought this for you the other week. Your birthday present, ruined already.’

  ‘Nonsense, now give it here.’

  ‘You just don’t care, do you? Not about me. Everything I ever do for you gets thrown back in my face.’ She brushed at the mac with a neatly manicured hand. ‘I suppose you’ve forgotten what day it is today, as well.’ There was a quiver in her voice. Tears were imminent.

  Frost sat on the edge of the bed, thinking hard, frantically looking about him. ‘Friday?’

  She threw the mac at him, stamped a foot, and turned to go. ‘Only our bloody wedding anniversary.’

  His eyes settled on the flowers on top of the locker. ‘I know that, love.’ He reached over, managed to grab them by the stems. ‘Here,’ he said, holding them up, ‘these are for you.’

  Mary turned back. ‘Oh, William.’ She was surprised, all right. ‘Didn’t think you’d remember.’ There really were tears in her eyes now.

  Friday (3)

  With the briefing over, officers were starting to come through the lobby, while others could be heard milling about the newly painted corridors, laughing and joking, an air of jollity sweeping through the station. Webster and Pooley were already standing just outside the entrance doors, chatting on the steps in the late-autumn sun. Mullett was no doubt back in his gleaming office, contemplating the successes of the past twenty-four hours.

  And DI Allen, who’d now be in his cramped inspector’s office, beating himself about the head for not having been around when it really mattered. Wells had an idea what that felt like.

  The phone rang, disturbing Wells from his reverie. Similar accent, but different code word. Bill Wells looked at his watch, then at the clock behind him. They had been given twenty minutes, and something told him that this time it wasn’t a hoax. He readied himself to make the Tannoy announcement, but before he could speak into the contraption, Sergeant Webster was at the front desk. ‘What now?’ he said.

  ‘Bomb alert: TA headquarters,’ said Wells.

  ‘Shit!’ exclaimed Webster. ‘That’s just across the road.’

  Frost swore under
his breath when he saw it was Simms outside the door to Blake Richards’s private room. Just his luck. He shuffled up, clasping his mac about him, his head clearing by the minute. ‘This what you have to do to get top-class treatment round here – rob a bank?’

  Simms gave Frost a disdainful look. ‘Forget to put your trousers on this morning?’

  Frost peered down at his bare legs – he was still wobbly on his feet. He’d be for it if the sister caught him out and about. ‘A young nurse helped me out of them last night. Don’t know what she’s done with them.’ He edged up to the door, peered through the small porthole. ‘Conscious, is he?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Simms. ‘Can’t move an inch, but he can talk, all right.’

  Frost turned the handle, pushed open the door.

  ‘You can’t go in there. That’s the super’s direct orders.’

  ‘Look, Simms,’ said Frost, turning back and squaring up to the PC, ‘why don’t you shove off. You’ve been getting on my nerves all week.’ Frost walked into the room, shutting the door in Simms’s face. He knew the constable wouldn’t rush in after him. The boy had no real bottle when it came to it, making do with easy targets. Frost knew his type, all right.

  The private room was awash with wires and drips, cylinders and canisters of this and that, an array of monitors flashing and quietly beeping away, all centred around the bed where Blake Richards lay, one tube stuck up his nose.

  Frost paused as he noticed the second-floor room had a spectacular view of Denton: there was the clock tower of the town hall, the spire of St Margaret’s, the copper cupola on the roof of Aster’s, the rows and rows of quiet semis, the tall Victorian warehouses lining the canal, the floodlights of Denton FC, the grim sprawl of the Southern Housing Estate and, on the horizon, the brown, autumnal belt of Denton Woods.

  He turned back to the bed and leant over Blake Richards. Seeing Frost, his eyes widened, his brow furrowed. Panic slowly crept across his bearded face.

  ‘Remember me?’ threatened Frost, anger welling up. He was on the verge of pulling out every tube he could find, and then burying Richards under all the equipment he could dump on top of him.

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ Richards whispered, frightened and hoarse.

  ‘Didn’t do what?’

  ‘I didn’t kill Bert Williams.’

  ‘What was that snooker cue doing in the back of your car, then? Covered in Bert’s blood.’ Frost found he was pinching one of the tubes, the tube that ran into Richards’s nose, knowing he was gambling with the facts, but knowing too that Betty Williams needed the truth.

  ‘Someone borrowed my car that day. It’s my cue, sure, it’s always in the boot – I play snooker. But I don’t know anything about any blood on it. Haven’t used it all week.’

  ‘What day are you talking about? What day did they borrow your car?’

  ‘The Saturday, wasn’t it.’

  Frost felt a wave of dizziness – perhaps he should have waited until tomorrow before making bedside visits. He let go of the pipe and clutched the railings at the side of the bed, sweating and breathless. With relief he found a half-crushed packet of cigarettes in the pocket of his mac.

  ‘I was at work all day, Frost. Easy enough to check,’ Richards added, his voice bone-dry and growing fainter.

  ‘Who are you trying to pin it on now, Richards? I need to know what happened to Bert. I hardly need to remind you that convicts don’t like bent coppers any more than coppers do.’

  ‘You think I care about that? Look at me! I can’t bleeding move. Paralysed from the waist down.’

  ‘But you arranged to meet Bert on Saturday, right? Why?’

  ‘Look, he’d had a tip-off about the Wallop job and he was on to me. Truth be known, we’d met a few times. We had this procedure, knowing we had to be careful. He didn’t trust me much – don’t blame him, I suppose. But he really wanted this one, I could tell. Wanted to hand it all wrapped up straight on to his new super’s desk. Made out that no one at the station took him seriously any more.’

  I did, Frost wanted to say. ‘If I’ve understood this right, why were you snitching on this gang anyway? You were right in there, part of it.’

  ‘I was stupid. Thought it wasn’t too late. Thought I could get out. Look, George Foster had been blackmailing me one way or another for years, whether he happened to be inside or not. OK, I made a few mistakes when I was in London, but that was ages ago.’ Richards struggled for air, to clear his throat. ‘But when Foster hooked up with Kelly, after they’d both been released from Dartmoor, he got a whole lot nastier, a lot more ambitious. Started leaning on me because I was working for Security Guard.’

  ‘Likely story. You just wanted the money, like the rest of them.’

  ‘I couldn’t have refused to help them. They’d have killed me. I suddenly knew too much and that’s how they worked. But I wanted to come clean, honest. I wanted a clean break. That’s why I came to Denton. That’s why I started spilling the beans to your colleague. I did used to be a copper.’

  Frost exhaled heavily, not thinking as he tapped the ash straight on to the floor. ‘What happened to Bert, then? Who killed him?’

  ‘OK, I set up the final meeting, down that lane – that was where we always met. I had no option, you see. They were suddenly on to me, Foster and Kelly. Nothing escaped Kelly – I should have realized that from the beginning. You see, they’d found out I’d been meeting Williams. Thought I could bluff my way out of it, told them, yeah, that was where I was getting a lot of my information from, about the police response procedures, that sort of thing. I said Bert was as bent as me. A washed-up drunk, too.’

  Frost glanced towards the door. It was still firmly shut, no sign of Simms peering in.

  ‘So come last Saturday they decide they want to check him out for themselves, see if he was as bent as I was making out. They took my Range Rover – knowing Bert would have been expecting me. The thing is,’ Richards continued, ‘Bert knew those roads, he’d picked that spot. If he’d thought anything unusual was happening, he would have known how to get away. I thought he’d be all right.’

  ‘You could have warned him.’

  ‘I tried, I promise. I rang, two, three times.’

  Frost dropped the cigarette end on the floor and stood on it, before realizing he wasn’t wearing shoes. ‘Arseholes!’ he yelled, hopping on one foot. He quickly caught his breath. ‘There’s still a number of things I don’t get. If they were so suspicious, why didn’t they snuff you out too? Why take a risk?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe Bert convinced them he was bent but they decided to get him out of the way anyway. He was tough, wasn’t he. Maybe they had plans for me later, after the Fortress job. Who knows. They left that snooker cue in my car, didn’t they – could have been trying to frame me. Kelly was smart, well trained.’

  ‘He wasn’t that smart. He’s flaming dead.’ Looking up, Frost glanced once again at the Denton skyline. ‘Who did he take with him when he went for Bert? Just Foster?’

  ‘What’s it matter?’ said Richards.

  ‘Heard of closure?’ snarled Frost. ‘Think of Bert’s widow. You can’t have been a tosser all your life.’

  ‘Yeah, it was Foster, Kelly and Foster, and the tart. She would have driven them.’

  ‘Louise Daley’s the only one we don’t have,’ said Frost. ‘Are you going to help us find her?’

  ‘What’s it worth?’

  ‘Your life.’ Frost was running his hand through a mass of tubes, deciding which one to yank out first.

  ‘I’m not going to have much of a life, whatever happens.’

  ‘My heart bleeds,’ said Frost. ‘Well, why not do something good for once? Can’t believe you ever signed up to be a copper. What a fucking disgrace.’

  Richards took a breath. ‘You could try the Hope and Anchor, a strip pub in Bermondsey, south-east London. That’s where she came from.’

  ‘I thought she was George Foster’s niece,’ said Frost.

  ‘Do
n’t think they were related by blood, if you know what I mean.’

  Frost had heard enough – enough depravity for one morning.

  He had a sudden urge to ring Betty Williams. He wanted her to know that her husband hadn’t died in vain, that he had stuck his neck out, had shown the temerity to go after someone like Blake Richards, and the others, single-handed. That he was courageous. A hero. The best bloody copper Denton had ever seen.

  Bert would never be forgotten, Frost would make sure of that – he would carry on where Bert left off.

  Making for the door, Frost was stopped in his tracks by a massive boom, and then felt a shockwave wallop him in the back.

  He immediately spun round, saw the window flexing and, beyond, a dark cloud of smoke mushroom into the sky.

  If his geography was right, it was rising over Eagle Lane, home to the Territorial Army HQ and Superintendent Mullett’s spruced-up Denton Division.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Bill Scott-Kerr, Doug Young, Katie Gurbutt, Nick Reeves, Nicholas Shakespeare, Peter Straus, David Miller, Philip Patterson, Rob Nichols, Sam Evans, Sarah Neal, Sarah Adams, Selina Walker, Rachel Potter, Tony Stewart, Phil Wingfield.

  James Henry is the pen name of James Gurbutt and Henry Sutton.

  James Gurbutt is a publisher at Constable & Robinson, R. D. Wingfield’s original publisher in the 1980s.

  Henry Sutton is the author of seven novels under his own name. His latest, Get Me Out of Here, was published by Harvill Secker in January 2010. He is the Books Editor of the Daily Mirror, and teaches creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

  After a successful career writing for radio, R. D. Wingfield turned his attention to fiction, creating the character Jack Frost. He published six novels featuring Frost. The series has been adapted for television as the perennially popular A Touch of Frost, starring David Jason. R. D. Wingfield died in 2007.

  ‘James and Henry have captured my father’s style superbly. Fans and newcomers alike will not be disappointed.’

  Philip Wingfield, son of the late R. D. Wingfield.