A Killing Frost (32 page)

   ‘There’s specks of blood. I’ll get Forensic to match it.’

   ‘If you want,’ said Frost. ‘We know whose blood it will be.’

   Jordan reported back. ‘The caretaker said the blinds are never shut, Inspector.’

   ‘Then the killer shut these,’ said Frost. ‘That clinches it. The boy would have seen the lights come on and then the blinds close - that’s why he shinned up here.’

   The searchers, now at the far end of the floor, had found nothing, except for a few bits of ancient rubbish.

   Frost dug his hands in his pockets. ‘She was here. The poor little cow was stripped, beaten and raped. She screamed her bleeding head off and no one heard. All right, let’s retrace our footsteps. Let’s assume she came in by the main entrance . . .’

   ‘She couldn’t do that, Inspector,’ Collier pointed out. ‘The time lock. She wouldn’t be able to get in after four and she left home at half seven.’

   ‘Good point,’ said Frost. ‘Bloody good point. You’ve shot my theory right up the fundamental orifice, but . . .’ He stopped. ‘There must be some way of overriding the time switch. Supposing some silly sod got themselves locked inside the building and wanted to get out? Phone the caretaker and ask him. The rest of you, downstairs.’

   As they clattered down the stairs, Frost yelled after them, ‘Keep your grubby paws off the hand rail. If he had a spark of bleeding decency, our killer would have left prints.’

   The lobby by the main entrance where Frost had been the previous night was the only part of the building that was fitted out. Its floor was covered with heavy-duty green carpeting and it was equipped with visitors’ chairs. Frost nodded at the two ivory phones on the reception desk. ‘Check them.’

   ‘Wiped clean,’ reported Norton. ‘But the phones are dead, so they could have been cleaned months or more ago.’

   ‘Right, now check the lift-summoning button and the button inside for the fourth floor.’

   Norton checked and shook his head. ‘Blurred prints all on top of each other. I reckon the caretaker uses it every day.’

   ‘You’re bleeding useless,’ said Frost. ‘Check the handrail to the fourth floor.’

   Collier hurried down the stairs. ‘The caretaker says you can set and un-set the time switch from the lobby. The switch box is under the reception desk.’

   Frost bent and looked. There it was. A white switch box with buttons setting ‘on’ and ‘off’ times and days of the week. A green button was marked ‘Emergency Override’.

   Frost called Norton over. ‘See if you can get any prints off that. The rest of you, search this place from top to bottom. See if you can find some trace - anything - that the girl was here or that something dodgy was going on, or can find the weapon that knocked the boy’s brains out. I know she was bloody well here, but I can’t bloody prove it . . . Apart from that, I’ve got this case tied up.’ He shook his head. ‘Whoever killed her knew this place. He knew how to get in - how to work the time lock. He knew he could do what he liked with her and she wouldn’t be heard. But why did she come? It must have been someone she trusted . . . or thought she could trust. Her father? That bastard - he’s involved in this somehow. We know he had it in for the boyfriend.’

   ‘Perhaps Debbie saw her dad kill Thomas Harris and had to be silenced, Guv?’ offered Morgan.

   Frost rubbed his scar. The cold in the unheated building was making it ache., ‘She wasn’t just killed, Taff, she was beaten and raped.’ Would a father kill his own daughter? The sort of bastard who could hand photographs of his young daughter in the nude to a gang of paedophiles would certainly be capable of it, and if he lusted after her, he might be capable of rape, but the beating? He hadn’t faced Clark with the photograph yet. Something else on the long list of vital things he wasn’t doing.

   His mobile phone rang.

   It was Bill Wells from the station.

   ‘Jack, you’ve got to get this sod Beazley off my back. He’s doing his nut. He wants you and he’s blaming me for not getting you to contact him. He’s taken my name, address and number and is going to report me to the Home Secretary; the Queen, the Prime Minister, Carol Vorderman, the bloody lot. He’s not going to wait much longer.’

   Frost groaned. Yet another addition to the long list of vital jobs he just didn’t have time for.

   ‘As soon as I can, Bill, I promise you. As soon as I can.’ That was a bleeding lie for a start. He’d put it off as long as he could. He switched the phone off and dropped it back in his mac pocket, then yelled for PC Collier.

   ‘Leave what you are doing, son, and come with me. We’re going back to the nick. There was another withdrawal from the cashpoint last night. Pick up the CCTV footage from Fortress and get more CCTV videos of cars in the vicinity at the time. A common factor must show itself up.’

Frost waltzed through the doors of the station. ‘Honey, I’m home,’ he called to Bill Wells, who had now taken over from Johnny Johnson.

   ‘Your dinner’s in the oven and there’s a gentleman here to see you,’ said Wells, nodding to a man sitting on the bench opposite his desk.

   Frost groaned. It was Lewis. ‘I’m rather busy, Mr Lewis,’ he began as the man rose to meet him.

   ‘I want to be arrested,’ said Lewis. ‘I’ve killed my wife.’

   ‘We’ve been through all this, Mr Lewis,’ began Frost, edging for the door.

   ‘You think I’m mad, don’t you?’

   ‘Of course not,’ said Frost. ‘Just absent minded. As soon as you remember where you put the pieces, come and see me.’ He put his hand on Lewis’s arm and gently led him to the doors. ‘You go home now, Mr Lewis.’

   ‘She’s dead,’ said Lewis softly. ‘I killed her.’

   ‘I know,’ nodded Frost. ‘And you can’t prove it. It’s a sod, isn’t it?’ He propelled the man through the doors and firmly pushed them shut behind him. ‘He’s getting to be a bleeding nuisance,’ he told Bill Wells.

   ‘He might be telling the truth, Jack.’

   ‘She’s in London, drawing money out of the bank on her cash card. Bit difficult to do that when you’re cut up in little pieces.’

   ‘Someone’s been drawing cash. It could be Lewis.’

   ‘It could be Elvis bleeding Presley, but it isn’t,’ snapped Frost. ‘It’s her.’ He said it as if he was convinced. Why were bleeding doubts still gnawing away?

   'Have you seen Beazley yet?’ asked Wells. ‘I get palpitations each time the phone rings.’

   The phone rang. Wells stepped back and looked at it apprehensively.

   ‘You’d better answer it,’ said Frost. ‘It might be Tom Champagne.’

   It was Beazley.

   ‘He’s on his way to you now, Mr Beazley,’ croaked Wells. He moved the phone away from his ear as a stream of invective poured out. The tirade stopped. ‘On his way now, Mr Beazley, I promise you.’ He hung up quickly and looked appealingly at Frost. ‘Please, Jack.’

   ‘I want to have a word with Clark,’ said Frost. All right - it was a delaying tactic. But he did have to talk to him.

‘Why can’t I have bail?’ demanded Clark.

   ‘Where would you go?’ asked Frost. ‘Your wife won’t have you back with her.’

   ‘The house is in my name,’ said Clark. ‘She’ll do what she is damn well told.’

   ‘You don’t like people going against your wishes, do you?’ said Frost.

   ‘And what is that supposed to mean?’

   ‘You told your daughter she wasn’t to go out with Thomas Harris. She went against your wishes. Now she is dead and the boy is dead.’

   Clark stared at Frost, eyes wide, mouth open. ‘Are you suggesting I killed . . . killed my own daughter? I’m not saying another word unless my solicitor is present.’

   Staring back at Clark, Frost took the childhood photograph of Debbie from his pocket and thrust it in Clark’s face. ‘Is this your daughter, Mr Clark?’

   ‘You know damn well it is. Where the hell did you get it from?’

   ‘It was on the computer of your paedophile chums. Did you share it around so they could all dribble over it?’

   The colour drained from Clark’s face. He took the photograph and gaped at it in disbelief. ‘Inspector, you’ve got to believe me . . . I never . . . I . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Wait . . . I did send it to one of our group. This was long before I knew of their . . . our special tastes. I was proud of her. I was just showing her off. This was years ago . . . I never dreamt . . .’

  
I don’t believe you, you sod
, thought Frost.
I don’t flaming well believe you
. He took the photograph back. ‘On the evening Debbie went missing, you told me you stayed in. Your wife tells me this is not true. You left the house shortly after Debbie did and didn’t return until almost midnight.’

   ‘I’m sorry,’ said Clark. ‘I lied. I was with some of our group.’

   ‘You mean the paedophiles?’

   Clark nodded. ‘Some new photographs had been downloaded. We were to collect them. I couldn’t tell you. They will vouch for me. I promise you, they will vouch for me.’

   Yes, thought Frost.
All those lying bastards would stick together
. He yelled for Bill Wells to let him out. ‘I’ll speak to them, Mr Clark. Let’s see if they can lie as well as you can.’

‘Get them to confirm it later, Jack,’ pleaded Wells. ‘Beazley’s going to be back on that phone any second.’ The phone rang. ‘I’ll bring them in now, sir,’ said Wells, hanging up and scooping up some papers. ‘Mullett wants the overtime returns,’ he said before dashing off.

   While Frost waited, he glanced at the pages Wells had been working on. It was a list of keyholders for various properties to be updated. He was about to push it away when a name caught his eye. He snatched up the page and studied it closer. ‘Bloody hell!’ He waved the page at Wells when the sergeant came back.

   ‘This keyholder. It’s our flaming butcher. The one who reckons he turned his wife into mincemeat.’

   Wells looked at the page and nodded. ‘That’s right. Why?’

   ‘What is he the keyholder of?’

   ‘His butcher’s shop.’

   But he was kicked out of there nearly a year ago.’

   ‘He’s still the keyholder. The landlord couldn’t get anyone else and he just stayed on by default. Why?’

   ‘Why didn’t you bloody tell me this before? If I wanted to cut up my wife and dump her remains, what better place than an empty butcher’s shop?’

   Wells twitched his shoulders. ‘Never gave it a thought, Jack. But you yourself said he was fantasising.’

   ‘Because more bits of body than the odd foot or ankle would have turned up otherwise. He’s dumped her in that bloody shop, Bill, I just know it. Do you have a spare set of keys here?’ 

   Wells unlocked a drawer and pulled out a box full of labelled keys. ‘Here you are.’ Frost snatched the keys and made for the door.

   ‘Where are you going, Jack?’

   ‘To take a bloody look.’

   ‘But Mr Beazley . . .’

   ‘He can bloody wait.’

   As the door slammed behind him, the phone rang and rang . . .

As he drove to Lewis’s old butcher’s shop, his mind began whirring yet again as he went through all the things he had to do. Jan O’Brien, the other missing teenager: she was a pupil at the same school as Debbie Clark. Was it just a coincidence? Probably. It was the obvious school for Denton girls of her age to attend.

   Had Jan run away from home, as she had done so many times before? Was she shacked up somewhere with a new boyfriend? Possibly, but that didn’t explain her mobile phone found near where the drunk heard a girl screaming. No. She was in trouble somewhere, serious trouble, but they had no idea where the hell she was. She could be still in Denton, or miles away, or - and he shuddered at the thought - she could be dead. Could it be the same killer who murdered Debbie and Thomas? Another body to be slashed and sliced open on the autopsy slab?

   But this was all speculation. He’d have to look in on her parents to see if there had been any contact. It was a forlorn hope, but people didn’t always bother to tell the police when a missing person suddenly returned.

   And God, he still had to tell Thomas Harris’s parents that their son’s bike had been found, before they read about it in the press. It was definitely the boy’s, but he’d need a formal identification. But more importantly, he had to see Debbie’s mother to find out if she knew of any reason why her daughter would go to that deserted office block. And then there was the dreaded visit to bloody Beazley.

   A policeman’s lot was not a flaming happy one. Why the bloody hell wasn’t Skinner down here to help?

   The butcher’s! In chewing over all the other things he had to do, he had almost forgotten the flaming butcher’s, his main reason for coming out in the first place. Where the hell was he? He had been driving on autopilot. An angry tooting of a horn snatched him away from his self-pitying thoughts and back to his driving. Shit! He had nearly driven straight through a red light and had narrowly missed crashing into a petrol tanker whose driver was mouthing obscenities at him. He pretended not to notice.

   He jerked his head from left to right, trying to find a landmark, and realised he was near Thomas’s parents’ house - so that would be his first port of call.

The boy’s parents were still numb from grief and shock. They sat side by side on a settee in the lounge, holding hands, staring into space. They seemed barely aware of Frost’s presence and he had to repeat each question several times before he got an answer. No, they knew of no reason why their son would have gone to the office block. Yes, Mr Harris would come down to the station to identify the bike. There were long moments of silence. Eventually, Frost mumbled his goodbyes and let himself out.

Then he headed to Jan O’Brien’s house. He didn’t have to ask if they had heard from the girl. As soon as his car pulled up outside, the mother came running out to ask if there was any news. ‘Not yet,’ said Frost, ‘but we’re pulling out all the stops trying to find her.’ That was a bloody lie. They’d looked everywhere while searching for the other two kids and that was it. Details had been circulated to all divisions with no results. The trail had gone cold and congealed. There was little more that could be done, especially with Denton’s limited resources.