A Touch Of Frost (8 page)

Ridley didn’t need to consult his map. With half the strength drinking themselves stupid upstairs, only two cars were available, and one of them, PC Shelby’s patrol car, was failing to respond. This was not untypical of Shelby! “There’s only Charlie Alpha, Sarge, and that’s on the way to a domes tic on the red-brick estate.” A ‘domestic’ meant a family row or disturbance.

“Forget the domestic,” he was told. “I want Charlie Alpha to divert immediately to Denton Woods.” He vented his annoyance by kicking the leg of his desk. “One bloody area car! How am I supposed to cover a division of this size with one lousy area car?”

Shutting his ears to the sergeant’s moans, Ridley thumbed the transmit button and called Charlie Alpha. While he waited for the response, he asked, “Exactly where in Denton Woods, Sarge?”

“How the hell do I know?” snarled Wells. “I’m not a bloody mind reader! You heard what he said—off the main path, behind some bushes.”

A burst of static from the loudspeaker. “Charlie Alpha to Control. On our way to domestic on the red-brick estate in response to your previous message, over.”

“Forget the domestic, Charlie Alpha. Proceed immediately to Denton Woods and initiate search. Anonymous report of young girl’s body behind bushes, off main path. Over.” He waited, his thumb hovering over the transmit button, for Charlie Alpha to request the precise location.

“Would you give us a more precise location, Control? There are main paths running the length and breadth of Denton Woods.”

“That is all the information we have, Charlie Alpha,” replied Ridley in an aggravatingly reasonable voice. “Over and out.” He heard the door open behind him as Wells came into the room.

“But there’s four hundred acres of woods, miles of paths, and thousands of bloody bushes . . .” Charlie Alpha pointed out.

Wells was getting fed up with this. He snatched the hand set from Ridley. “Then you’ll be spoiled for bloody choice, won’t you, Charlie Alpha? Just go and look for her and don’t bloody argue!”

“Over and out,” said Charlie Alpha hurriedly.

Ridley stuck the marker for Charlie Alpha in the green-coloured expanse of Denton Woods on his wall map. “They’ll need some help, Sarge. Should we break up the party?”

Wells pinched his nose and gave it some serious thought. It was tempting, very tempting, and it would serve those noisy sods right to be turfed out into the dark and cold to search the woods. But if the call turned out to be a hoax and he had deployed half the force on a fruitless search, all on overtime, he’d never hear the last of it. Mullett would grind on and on about it for weeks. On the other hand, if it was genuine and he ignored it—He groaned. He was in a no-win situation.

To play it safe, he decided to phone Jack Frost. It might be his missing schoolgirl, and if the inspector wanted more men, it was up to
him
to ask for them. He picked up the phone and dialled the number of the Dawson house. “Denton Police here, sir. Sorry to trouble you, but I wonder if I could have a word with Detective Inspector Frost?”

The traffic lights glowed an angry red in the darkness as Webster ignored them, speeding the car straight across the road junction. “Slow down, son,” Frost murmured. “There’s four hundred acres of forest to search. The odd second isn’t going to make much difference.”

Frost’s request received the same sort of treatment as the traffic lights, and Webster’s foot pressed down on the accelerator. Watching the street lights zip past at seventy-five miles an hour, Frost checked that his seat belt was fastened, then fumbled in his pocket for the photograph of the missing girl and studied it gloomily. I hope this body isn’t Karen Dawson, he told himself I’d hate to be the one who had to break the news to her father. Break the news! He sat up straight and banged his fist on the dashboard. “Knickers! We were supposed to be breaking the news to Ben Cornish’s old lady. “What time is it?”

Webster twisted his hand on the steering wheel so he could see his wristwatch. “Ten past one.”

Frost settled back in the seat, relieved it was too late to do it tonight. “We’ll do it tomorrow, first thing. It’ll be our number-one treat before the postmortem.” He paused for a second. “Are you any good at breaking bad news, son?”

“No,” said Webster hurriedly. The inspector wasn’t dumping that rotten job on him.

“Pity,” sighed Frost. “I’m bloody hopeless. How do you tell someone their son was found dead, choked in his own vomit, floating in a pool of piddle. There’s no way you can tart up that sort of news.”

They were approaching the dense blackness of the woods. Frost scrubbed the windscreen with his cuff and squinted through, trying to locate Charlie Alpha. “There it is, son,” he yelled, pointing to the white-and-black Ford Sierra tucked neatly into a lay-by. Webster coasted the Cortina snugly in behind it.

The wind slashed at them as they left the warmth of the car. Frost wound his scarf tighter and buried his hands deeply into his mac pocket as they trudged along a path in search of Jordan and Simms, the Charlie Alpha crew. Webster was the first to spot the dots of torch beams bobbing in the distance.

The path they followed twisted and turned, so it was nearly five minutes before they heard low voices. A sharp turn, and just ahead of them were the two uniformed men, Jordan and Simms, greatcoat collars turned up, huddled against the trunk of an enormous oak tree, dragging at cigarettes. At the approach of the detectives they spun around guiltily, pinched out their cigarettes, and snapped to attention.

“Hard at work, I see,” said Frost.

They grinned sheepishly. “Have you come to give us a hand, then, sir?” asked Jordan, who sported a drooping, Mexican-bandit moustache.

“You mean to say you haven’t found her yet?”

“Found her, sir? Some nutter phones the station and says there’s a body behind a bush, and me and Simms are supposed to search four hundred acres in the dark. It’s bloody ludicrous.”

Frost showed them Karen Dawson’s photograph. “There’s a chance it might be this kid. She’s fifteen years old, missing from home since one o’clock this afternoon.”

They studied it under the light of Simms’s torch. “Why should it be her?” asked the moon-faced Simms. “As many as twenty teenagers around here go missing every week.”

“A man was reported lurking inside her house as she came home from school. She hasn’t been seen since,” said Webster.

Heads turned toward him. They hadn’t seen the bearded bloke before.

“Are you the ex-inspector?” asked Simms. “The one who got kicked out of Braybridge?”

Another sneering bastard, Webster thought, his hands balling into fists. “What if I am?”

“Rotten luck,” commented Simms mildly.

The oak offered shelter from the wind, and Frost was in no hurry to move on. He offered his cigarettes around. Only Webster, with an impatient jerk of his head, declined to accept one. Jordan’s lighter did the rounds.

Webster looked out on to the dark mass of trees which seemed to stretch on and on for miles. “It’s hopeless with only the four of us. We should ask the station for reinforcements.”

Frost forced out a stream of smoke which the wind snatched and tore into shreds. “A full-scale search would have to be properly organized, so it couldn’t even begin until the morning. Let’s give it a whirl ourselves first—unless anyone else wants to chip in with a suggestion?” He looked hopefully at the two uniformed men, who shook their heads, engrossed in studying the branches of the oak tree. They were paid to do what they were told, not to work out campaign plans.

“Right,” said Frost, pulling himself up straight. “Lacking evidence to the contrary, we’ve got to assume that there is a body—a girl—alive or dead. While we’re assuming, let’s give ourselves a bit of incentive and make her alive . . . not only alive, but a rampant quivering nymphomaniac with enormous knockers, fully prepared to bestow her hot lusty favours on the man who finds her.”

Jordan and Simms grinned. At least Frost was making it interesting.

“Right,” he continued. “Now keep that dirty picture in mind while we transfer our attention to the herbert who tripped over her and phoned the station.”

He dropped his cigarette end to the ground and crushed it under his heel. “It’s late at night. So what was he doing skulking behind bushes? Obvious answer: He wanted to do a pee and, either ashamed of or too modest to flaunt his equipment, decided to commune privately with nature behind a convenient bush, only to find this nympho’s supine body. So he bottled it up and legged it to the nearest blower to call the cops. How does that sound?”

They paused to consider this. It sounded feasible.

“Sergeant Wells said the man was phoning from a public call box,” Frost continued.

“I noticed a phone box near where we parked the car,” offered Webster.

“There are phone boxes all over the bloody place,” said Jordan gloomily.

“We’ve got to start from somewhere,” said Frost, “and that’s as good a place as any. We’ll go up the main paths, searching behind the bushes on either side. If we can’t find anything, we’ll go to another phone box. And if we have no joy in a couple of hours, we’ll call in the heavy mob from the station.”

It was Simms who found her. And by pure chance, because Frost’s reasoning was completely wrong. After getting himself entangled in a flesh-clawing clutch of blackberry thorns, he made a wide detour to take him clear of another thicket and bramble. He squeezed through a tight gap between two bushes.

And there she was, white and still, lying on her back. She was naked, her cold, still flesh gleaming like silver in the harsh moonlight.

“Here!” yelled Simms. “Over here.” He directed his torch beam into the sky like a beacon, then knelt beside her, shining his torch on her face. He shuddered. Her face was a swollen, bloody mess, the eyes puffy and blackened, the nose misshapen and broken. Blood from her nose had clotted, forming a sticky mask all over the lower part of her face and neck.

The body was blood-streaked, scarcely an inch free of livid bruises. Scattered on the grass around her were items of ripped-off clothing. She looked dead. He touched her. Her body was icy. He bent his ear to the wreckage of her mouth, holding his breath as he tried to detect the slightest whisper of life. Nothing at first, only the hammering of his own heart, but then the faint wheezing rasp of tortured lungs. Fumbling with the buttons, he dragged off his greatcoat and draped it over the girl.

There was a crash in the undergrowth as Frost lumbered through, Webster hard on his heels. “She’s still alive,” Simms told him. “Some bastard’s smashed her face in.”

Frost dropped to his knees and made his own check for signs of life, feeling for the pulse in her neck. Satisfied, he called over his shoulder to Webster. “Radio the station. We want an ambulance bloody quick. And you can tell Sergeant Wells, with my compliments, that the party’s over. We’ve got another rape victim.”

As Webster was radioing through, Frost studied the extent of the girl’s injuries. It took some resolve to look at her face, which must have been kicked. He suspected the jaw was broken as well as the nose.

Jordan was the last to arrive. He stared down at the girl, and what he saw made him shudder.

“See what the bugger’s done to her neck,” said Frost, indicating bruises cut deeply into the flesh where the rapist’s fingers had gripped and squeezed her into unconsciousness.

“The same pattern as the other one,” observed Simms dispassionately. “That nurse he raped over at the golf course. But she wasn’t beaten up anything like this.”

Webster switched off the radio and dropped it into his pocket. “Ambulance on its way,” he reported. Frost, still bent over the girl, acknowledged his message with a grunt, then ordered Simms out to the main road to home the ambulance crew in.

“Is it Karen?” Webster asked, only to wince and turn his head away as Frost moved back so Webster could see what the animal had done to the girl.

“If it is, then she’s nothing like her photograph,” muttered the inspector. “The poor cow’s been kicked in the face. Give me just five minutes alone with the bastard.”

He pulled back the greatcoat so he could examine the rest of her. She was naked except for thick black stockings, the tops banded by sexy red garters. The stockings were short, coming not much higher than her knee, then there was an awful lot of white thigh. Somehow, it reminded Frost of dirty French postcards he had seen when he was a kid, all black underwear and white flesh. Her body, like her face, was mapped with huge green-and-yellow bruises. As gently as he could, Frost ran his hands along her sides. He thought he could detect at least two broken ribs. She moaned softly as he touched her.

Could this possibly be young Karen? There was no way he could tell from the face. The body looked too well developed for a kid of fifteen, but girls seemed to be maturing earlier and earlier these days. He frowned and bent forward. The nipples. There was something odd about them. The colour was wrong. He took out his handkerchief and rubbed. The red came off. It was lipstick. Lipstick? He stood up and stared at the red on the handkerchief, unable to believe it. It couldn’t be Karen.

“It’s Karen, all right,” called Webster, and he showed Frost the school blazer he had picked up from the grass. “And there are pieces of school uniform all over the place.” His torch stabbed out at the straw boater, the gym slip, the navy-blue knickers.

“I’ve found this, sir,” called Jordan, pulling a white plastic carrier bag out of a clump of nettles. Frost delved through the contents . . . sweater, jeans, bra . . . a complete change of clothing. Also a purse which held about a pound’s worth of silver, a worn, Yale-type key, and three packets of male contraceptives.

School uniform, red garters, painted nipples, and contraceptives. It wasn’t making sense. And the Yale key, its chromium plating wearing away, looked far too old to be the key to the Dawsons’ elegant front door. He put everything back into the bag. Where was the ambulance? It should be here by now. As if in answer, the piercing warble of a siren came floating over the trees.

Deep in thought, Frost followed the trail of flattened grass back to the bush where the rapist had stood hidden, waiting. He looked along the empty path, from where the girl would have come, trying to put himself into the mind of a man who would do such things to a kid.