Frost at Christmas (33 page)

   "Come on, son," and Frost moved to the door.

   "Where are you going?" asked Mullett, frowning.

   "To arrest Martha Wendle for murder," said Frost, and was clattering down the stairs before Mullett could ask any more stupid questions. 

They were going too fast for safety, but fortunately the roads were empty. Frost refused to waste time walking through the woods. "Take the private road, son," he ordered. Then: "Why are we slowing down?"

   "We're coming to the gate," explained Clive. "It's locked."

   "Drive through it," said Frost.

   "It'll damage the car," exclaimed Clive, horrified.

   "Sod the car, son. Smash through it. It'll make me feel better."

   So Clive gritted his teeth and pressed down hard on the accelerator. The gate grew bigger and bigger until it filled the windscreen, then struck the car with a hammer blow. A splintering sound, something shot up in the air and crashed on the car roof, then there was snow and open road ahead.

   "Saves all the sodding about with a key," murmured Frost, looking back at the wreckage with satisfaction. The dark crouch of the cottage leapt up in front of them and Frost was out of the car while Clive was still applying the brakes.

   No lights anywhere. He hammered at the front door. Silence. He sped round to the back and rattled the handle. Locked, but a tiny sound of movement from within. He charged it and bounced off, bruising his shoulder painfully. Clive joined him and kicked near the lock as he had been taught and the door crashed open and they fell into the kitchen with its smells of boiled fish and leaking cats.

   She was sitting in the dark, waiting for them, green unblinking eyes staring from her lap.

   "We've just come from the vicarage," said Frost.

   "Yes," she said, not needing to ask any questions.

   Clive went into the other room to fetch the oil lamp and the light showed her broken and resigned. "I didn't think anyone went into those rooms," she said.

   "You sodded it up," murmured Frost, gently. "The sort of thing I usually do. You picked the wrong room. It was his photographic studio. Anywhere else and we might never have found her." He cautioned her and asked if she had anything to say.

   Martha stood up and the cat leaped from her lap. "They might as well have their fish." A newspaper parcel of fish heads was tipped into a saucepan and the ritual of boiling began.

   "Children come here and torment me. They throw stones . . . break windows . . . call me a witch." She screwed up the fishy sheet of newspaper and dropped it into a battered enamel bucket. "Last Sunday that child came - Tracey Uphill. She kept banging on my door. When I opened it, she would run off, calling me filthy names. Where do children learn such language?" The water boiled over and she lowered the gas. "I find it best to ignore them so they get fed up and go away, but this one kept on and on. Then she started throwing stones. My kitten was outside. My lovely white kitten."

   "The one we dug up in the garden?" asked Frost.

   Martha nodded. "She hit it with a stone. Broke it's back. It screamed with pain. I had to put it out of its agony. The child turned to run, but fell. I was so angry, I grabbed her throat. I shook her." She clenched the fingers of her strong hands, then thrust them out of sight under her apron. "I shook her and shook her . . . And then she was dead."

   The fish heads rattled in the saucepan. Clive's pen raced across his notebook.

   "When I realized what I had done, I was horrified . . . and frightened. I had to hide the body. At first I was going to bury her with the kitten, but it seemed so obvious. Then I thought of Dead Man's Hollow. No one ever goes there. I took my spade and dug in the dark. It was like some macabre joke. The very spot I had chosen . . . something was already there. Human remains!" She paused and shuddered.

   "You'd uncovered the arm of the skeleton?" asked Frost.

   "Yes. I think I screamed. Then I pulled myself together, covered it up again, and returned to my cottage."

   "So that's how 'the spirits' knew what was buried there?"

   "Yes. When you first called, the child's body was still in the cottage. I had to put you off the scent."

   "You didn't put me off the scent, Miss Wendle, you confused me - which isn't very difficult, I'm afraid. But Tracey wasn't here when we searched your cottage this afternoon."

   "You were too late. I'd already hidden her in the vicarage. I'd just driven back from there."

   "Too late! The story of my life," said Frost. "Why did you choose the vicarage?"

   "I'd been there many times before with my spiritualist meetings. I knew there were lots of old rooms no one ever went into. I'd booked the hall for another meeting and had to go there today to make final arrangements. I took the child's body in my car. No one saw me. I carried her up the stairs into a darkened room. There was an old trunk covered with a sheet. It seemed ideal. There was a padlock, but it just fell off. I opened it. Inside were a lot of old books. I took them out and put the child inside. I didn't think anyone would find her."

   She turned the gas off under the saucepan and emptied the contents onto several plates. The floor was alive with cats, purring in anticipation . . . the cats whose fur had betrayed her.

Frost emerged from Mullett's office smoking an enormous red and gold banded cigar which a delighted Divisional Commander had pressed on him from his special V.I.P. box. It forced Frost's lips apart and weighted his head down. Bloody Mullett had been bubbling over with joy as if they had found the girl alive and well . . . but his elation was really due to the fact that the girl had been proved to be dead before the police were called in and no possible blame could be attached to Denton Division for its handling of the search. He was overjoyed that Frost had obtained a signed statement from the Wendle woman, tidying up all loose ends, but even this might have kept his cigars firmly in their box were it not for the telephoned message of praise received from the Chief Constable.

   And so, with the token of his commander's esteem reeking in his mouth, Frost tramped the stone corridor back to his office. He felt deflated and tired, what with Mullett babbling away like a bloody girl and the kid cold and dead in the trunk. He'd carried the news himself to the mother, who didn't break down. She'd shed all the tears she could cry. Thanking him in a flat, lifeless voice, she had poured herself a large drink and shrunk down very small into a chair. Frost sat with her for ten minutes, but she acted as if he wasn't there, so he took his leave. And Mullett had given him a cigar.

   The door of search control was ajar. He peeked in at a room empty and silent for the first time since Monday morning. A poster of Tracey fluttered on the wall - Have You Seen This Girl? Yes, he'd seen her . . . and tomorrow he'd see her again on the autopsy table as the pathologist cut and tore and probed.

   Young Barnard was waiting for him in the office.

   "You were right about the woman then, sir."

   Frost took the soggy-ended cigar from his mouth and mashed it to brown pulp in his ashtray. "Yes, son, for the wrong bloody reason, but I was right. And if you're going to praise me up, for God's sake forget it. I'm up to here with praise from our illustrious commander. To hear him going on you'd think it was the greatest piece of detection since
The Mousetrap."
He found a cigarette packet in his drawer, chucked one to Clive and lit one for himself. "I did sod all. I suspected the poor cow partly because I hate her mangy cats, but more for the skeleton,
and she had
nothing to do with shooting Fawcus."

   "You spotted the cat hairs on the coat," protested Clive.

   "It just happened I was the first to spot them. If I hadn't, then Forensic would have done so, and they'd have analyzed them and given us the bleeding things' pedigrees." He patted his scar and yawned widely. "Barely ten o'clock and I'm tired. It must be old age."

   Was that the time? Clive checked his watch. "Er . . . will you be wanting me any more tonight, sir?"

   "No - you push off early, son. Mr. Mullett says you're to report direct to Inspector Allen tomorrow, so you'll need all the sleep you can get. You don't mind walking home, do you? I'll be hanging on here for a
while
and I might need the car."

   As Clive left him, the earlier mood of depression seemed to have lifted and he was sitting at his desk, dribbling smoke through his nose and moving mounds of paper to new positions. He was singing himself a parody of a once beautiful Frank Sinatra song.

   "Maybe she's waiting, 

   Just expectorating

   Onto her old shabby dress . . ."

The church clock grated and whirled and hurled a salvo of eleven chimes over a sleeping town.

   Martha Wendle, awake in her bunk in the women's cells, heard it as a vague sound, barely impinging on her racing jumbled thoughts. The kitten ... the lovely white kitten, its skull crushed and blood streaming from its nose. And that child. Why didn't she run away when Martha first shouted at her? Why did she stay and throw stones? If Tracey had run away she would still be alive and life would have gone on as usual. But now the child was dead, her cats would die, and children would throw stones at her empty cottage windows. If only she could turn back the clock, relive it again, force the child to run away.

   The wife of the Reverend James Bell-heard the chimes as she lay rigid in the sagging marriage bed, right on the edge, as far away from him as possible, ready to shudder and recoil at the slightest nauseating contact of bodies. Those books, those disgusting books. And those photographs. And he had taken them himself, actually seen those girls undressed. His eyes dwelling on their naked bodies. 

   Her husband was huddled in the fetal position and he heard nothing but his own internal mumblings, his pleas to God for forgiveness, his promise that if there could be no scandal - if it could be kept from his Bishop - then he'd stop. No more photographs, no more books. A promise, Lord. A solemn promise.

   And in the printing room of the Denton
Echo
nothing could be heard over the chattering and thudding of the presses. They had to completely remake the front page which now carried the familiar schoolgirl photograph and the self-explanatory banner headline TRACEY FOUND - DEAD. It was also necessary to make a slight alteration to the back page where a short paragraph, "Hunt Continues For Missing Girl", was replaced by an equally small paragraph reading "1951 Killer Strikes Again". The public's appetite could only feed on one sensation at a time.

   In Vicarage Terrace, Mrs. Uphill was asleep at last, the drained, empty, heavy sleep of exhaustion. Downstairs the phone was ringing.

   Clive Barnard heard the chimes and counted. Eleven. The earliest he had been to bed since . . . since Sunday, years and years ago. Hazel's body, cool and hot, hard and soft, was stretched out beside him. He pulled her to him and they kissed and buds of hardness flowered against his chest. His hands slipped down to the swell of her buttocks and . . .

   And there was a knock at the bloody door.

   "Are you in there, son?"

   Stupid, silly, sodding Frost.

   She pulled him down, her hands cool, busy, and he was tempted to keep quiet, to let Frost take it out on the door until he gave up and went away.

   "Open up, son . . . please!"

   There was something about that "please". He pulled gently from her and swung his feet to the floor. She was angry and covered herself with the bedclothes. "Don't bring him in here," she hissed, then, with heaving shoulders, presented her back.

   "Hold on, sir - won't be a minute," He dressed quickly. Out of bed, away from Hazel it was sub-zero. Grabbing his thickest coat, he opened the door and slid outside.

   And there was Frost, in his old overcoat and his tatty scarf, his scarred face troubled and apologetic. He noticed the hump under the bedclothes as the door squeezed shut. "Sorry, son. After tonight you won't be bothered. It's just that I need your help."

   Wondering if Hazel would still be there when he got back, Clive tiptoed down the stairs after the inspector. He didn't bother to ask what it was about; whatever it was, he was committed. And, as Frost had said, tomorrow Inspector Allen would be in charge - tidiness, efficiency, regular hours, and undisturbed sex after close of business.

   Snow was falling and the car shivered in the street outside. Frost stepped back to let Clive slide into the driving seat.

   "Where to, sir?" The engine started first time.

   "Didn't I say, son? Mead Cottage."

   Clive blinked. Mead Cottage was where old-man Powell lived. It would be nearly 11:30 by the time they got there. "Do you think they'll be up, sir?"

   "Christ, I hope not," said Frost. "She might offer me some more of her bloody coffee." Then, lighting two cigarettes and poking one in the driver's mouth, "Do you think I'm a nut-case, son?"

   Clive shook his head, his nose delicately savoring the heady Hazel perfume that the heat of the car was driving from the pores of his body.

   "Well, you will in a minute. I'm going to break into his house."

   Clive hammered the horn and a drunken pedestrian leaped back to the safety of the pavement and swore at the car as it swept past.

   "Hard luck, son, you missed him," said Frost.

   Clive swallowed hard. Then, without looking at the inspector, said quietly, "I'm sorry, sir, but I don't want any part of this." 

   Frost sighed. "That's all right, son, I quite understand. We'd better turn back."

   "Why do you want to break in?" asked Clive and they passed the intersection where he should have turned and Mead Cottage was getting closer and closer.

   "After you left tonight, son, I had a word with Sandy Lane. Something had been nagging me. Do you remember, when we were leaving Sandy's office last night, that young reporter poked his head in and said he'd phoned the bank manager about finding the skeleton but he'd refused to give a statement? I thought, at the time, he meant Hudson, the current bank manager, but he didn't - he meant Powell, the old one. So last night old-man Powell was one of the few people in Denton who knew we'd dug up Fawcus. He was also one of the few people in Denton who were actually involved in the 1951 robbery."