Night Frost (19 page)

   The two detectives returned, Gilmore carrying the envelope which he shook over the table. Five banknotes fluttered out, a £20 note, a £10 note and three £5 notes, all crisp and brand new. Hoskins tried to look puzzled. "Guess what we found hidden behind one of your chair cushions," said Gilmore. He picked up one of the notes and sniffed delicately, then smiled. "Smell it. Lavender!" He looked across to the girl. "Hardly your style, is it, love?" He waggled the note under Hoskins’ nose. "The old girl’s purse reeked of it!"

   Hoskins pushed Gilmore’s hand away. "It’s my giro money," he muttered.

   "Of course it is," said Gilmore, "but just in case you’re telling me a porky, I’ll check the numbers with the post office where Mrs. Haynes drew her pension. If they tally, Sonny Jim, you’re for the high jump." He pushed the money back into the envelope. He felt much happier now. Hoskins was beginning to squirm and the girl looked worried. Frost seemed fidgety, no doubt annoyed that the new boy was scoring all the goals.

   Hoskins took a deep breath. "All right, I’ll tell you the truth. It is her money, but she lent it to me. I needed some spares for my motorbike."

   "Lent it?" scoffed Gilmore. "She wouldn’t have lent you forty-five pence, let alone forty-five quid."

   "She bloody, lent it to me," insisted Hoskins. "And I was very grateful, that’s why I went in later to check she was all right."

   Frost leant forward. "She gave you everything she had in her purse. How was the poor cow going to manage?"

   "I intended paying her back in a couple of days. She said she could wait."

   "When did you borrow it?" asked Frost.

   "When she thought she’d lost her spare key. I saw her purse in her hand so I asked her."

   "Do you mind if I continue, sir?" asked Gilmore with an edge to his voice that would slice through tempered steel. He didn’t want Frost taking over just when victory was within grasp.

   Frost’s hand waved him to silence. "Indulge me, Sergeant." He puffed cigarette smoke down over the seated man. "All right, Hoskins, let’s pretend she lent you the money. And let’s pretend you were so full of gratitude that you were worried about her and decided to see if she was all right at eleven o’clock at night. When you knocked, were the lights on in her house?"

   Hoskins paused for a moment. "No."

   "So when you got no reply, from a house with all the lights out, you thought it was your duty to investigate it—to use her spare key and nose around inside?"

   "That’s right."

   "It never occurred to you that at eleven o’clock at night the most obvious answer was that this seventy-eight-year-old woman might be in bed, asleep?"

   Hoskins’ mouth opened and shut, then he shook his head. "No. It didn’t occur to me at the time."

   Frost gave a weary sigh. "Don’t waste my time, son. Of course it occurred to you. You were banking on it. You wanted her to be in bed and asleep."

   "I don’t know what you’re talking about," Hoskins muttered to the floor.

   "You stupid little git. You’re going to talk yourself into a life sentence." He stood up and started to button his mac. "I don’t think you killed her, but if you’re sticking to that story I’m charging you with murder and your girlfriend as an accessory."

   Hoskins, his face set, stared stubbornly down at the ground.

   "If you don’t tell them the bleeding truth, then I will," said the girl. "They’re not nicking me for something I didn’t do."

   Hoskins took a deep breath. "All right . . . scrub every thing I said. This is now the gospel . . ."

   Frost sat down again and waited. Gilmore was scowling, arms folded, itching to take over the reins of the questioning.

   "Yes, I was going to do the place over—nip in, grab what I could and get out quick. I knew where the spare key was, so I waited until eleven o’clock when I thought the old girl would be asleep. I let myself in. Her bag was on the hall table, so I nicked the money from her purse. Then I crept upstairs. The first door I tried was her bedroom. Christ, when I saw her smothered in blood, it frightened the shit out of me. My feet never touched the flaming stairs as I came down. I took the money, but I never bleeding killed her."

   "I believe him," said Frost when they were back in the office.

   "Well, I don’t," said Gilmore. He was furious. He’d have got a bloody confession to murder if the old fool hadn’t butted in.

   "Mind you," added Frost, "if Forensic find her blood all over his clothes, I’m prepared to change my mind."

Tuesday night shift (2)

"Woman on the phone for you," yelled Wells as they crossed the lobby. "A Mrs. Compton."

   "Old Mother Rigid Nipples!" exclaimed Frost, as Gilmore took the phone.

   "Mr. Mullett wasn’t too pleased you’re only charging Hoskins with petty theft," Wells told him.

   "Mr. Mullett’s happiness is rather low on my list o priorities," grunted Frost, pushing through the swing doors and nearly bumping into an irritable-looking Mullett on his way out.

   "Car expenses," barked Mullett.

   "Be on your desk first thing tomorrow, Super," called Frost, instantly regretting his folly. The expenses, much scribbled on, were still in his pocket and there wasn’t a hope in hell of getting the amended receipts by the morning. Ah well, he philosophized, a lot could happen between now and then. Mullett could get injured in a car crash and break both his legs. But he popped the bubble of this optimistic fantasy. The bastard would hobble in on crutches if it meant catching him out.

   A quick look in at his office. Exactly as he had left it, cold and untidy. Protruding from under an empty, unwashed mug was a memo headed
From The Office Of The Divisional Commander
. It bore the single word
Inventory???
ringed in red and underlined several times in Royal Blue by Mullett’s Parker pen. He ferreted through his in-tray and dug out the inventory return, hoping it wouldn’t look so complicated as at first sight. It looked even worse, so he reburied it even deeper.

   The door slammed to punctuate an angry Gilmore’s return. "That damn Sergeant Wells!" He flung himself into his chair.

   Frost stifled a groan. He had enough troubles of his own. “What’s the matter now, son?"

   "That phone call from Mrs. Compton. Her husband’s away and she’s alone in the house."

   "It sounds a bloody good offer," said Frost. "We’ll flip a coin to see who has the first nibble."

   Gilmore’s scowl cut even deeper. "It’s not funny. She’s had another threatening phone call. The bastard told her tonight will be her last night on earth. She’s frightened out of her wits. I’ve told Sergeant Wells I want a watch kept on the house tonight and he says he can’t spare anyone."

   Frost picked up the internal phone. "I’ll have a word with him."

   At first Wells dug his heels in. He wasn’t going to let any jumped-up, know-nothing, aftershave-smelling detective sergeant tell him how to organize his own men. And did the inspector know how many men he had available to cover the whole of Denton—the
whole
of bloody Denton? Four! Two in cars, two on foot. The others had to be kept in to answer the flaming phones which were ringing non-stop after that stupid Paula Bartlett video on television. Frost put the phone down on the desk and let Wells rant on, while he lit up another cigarette. When the whining from the ear-piece stopped, he picked up the receiver and made a few sympathetic sounds with the result that Wells now grudgingly admitted that perhaps he could spare one man and one car to keep a spasmodic watch on The Old Mill, but he couldn’t guarantee one hundred per cent coverage.

   "You’re a prince, Bill," said Frost. "Your generosity is exceeded only by the size of your dick." He hung up quickly before Wells could change his mind then twisted his chair round to tell his sergeant the good news, but if he expected thanks, he was disappointed.

   "What a bloody way to run a station," snarled Gilmore, stamping out of the room.

   The office was too cold to stay in for long so Frost sauntered along to the Murder Incident Room where the temperature wasn’t much better. Two WPCs and one uniformed man, all well wrapped up against the cold, were beavering through the senior citizen burglary files and answering the spasmodic phone calls that were still coming in following the TV broadcast. Another WPC was slowly working through the vast computer print-out of light vans and estate cars, either blue or of a colour which could be mistaken for blue under street lamps. "Mr. Mullett’s orders," she explained.

   "You don’t need to tell me," sniffed Frost. "Anything stupid and useless, it’s always Mr. Mullett’s orders." Even if a blue van was involved, it could well have been repainted but still be registered under its original colour.

   He dipped into the filing tray and read a couple of the messages. Paula was still being sighted. A woman had spotted her in France, and a man was positive that Paula was the same girl who had delivered his paper that very morning.

   At a corner desk, DC Burton, a sandwich in his hand, was reading the Sun. He stuffed it away hastily as Frost approached and busied himself with the senior citizen files "On my refreshment break, sir," he explained. He accepted a cigarette. "Hoskins and the girl have been charged. We’re holding them in the cells overnight pending the result of the forensic examination."

   Frost nodded and plonked himself down on a chair. "I want to get filled in on the Paula Bartlett case, but I’m too bleeding lazy to read through the file. Start right from the beginning."

   "September 14th," said Burton. "She was on her paper round. Left the shop at 7.05."

   "Hold it," interrupted Frost. "Five past seven? Her parents said she usually started her round at half-past seven."

   "That was when her teacher gave her the lift. She would have had to cycle to school that day, so she gave herself more time."

   Frost blew an enormous smoke ring and watched it wriggle lazily around the room. "I’m still listening."

   "At five o’clock her parents are expecting her home from school. By half-past five they’re phoning around and are told she hadn’t been to school at all that day. At ten past six they phone us."

   "And two months later, we found her," commented Frost, wryly.

   Burton grinned patiently. "Anyway, we sent an area car. They got details of her delivery route from the paper shop and followed it through with the customers. As you know, she never made the last two houses." He heaved himself from his chair and crossed to the large-scale wall map. "Her last delivery was here at around 8.15." His finger jabbed the map. "Her next delivery should have been Brook Cottage . . . here. She never made it,"

   Frost joined him at the map which was studded with yellow thumb tacks marking Paula’s progress. "She was doing her round half an hour earlier than usual?"

   Burton nodded.

   "Then unless the bloke who abducted her knew that, it must have happened by chance—he saw her, acted on impulse and grabbed her."

   Burton destroyed that theory. "She’d been doing it half an hour earlier for the previous four days, sir. Mr. Bell stayed away from school when his wife died, so Paula didn’t get her lift in."

   'Whoever it was, he must have had a car. He either bundled her in and dumped the bike, or it was someone she knew and trusted. Someone, perhaps, with a wispy beard who offered her a lift. The bike went in the boot and he dumped it later."

   A tolerant smile from Burton. Inspector Allen had reasoned all this out months ago. "If she was picked up in a car, sir, it couldn’t have been by Mr. Bell. He never left the house before the funeral. His wife’s parents confirm it."

   "He’s still got a wispy beard," said Frost, "and I don’t trust the sod." He returned to his desk. "Right. She’s reported missing. What happened from there?"

   "Mr. Allen took over the case at 20.15. The area between Grove Road and Brook Cottage was searched. At 23.32 we found her bike and her newspaper bag with the two undelivered papers, dumped in the ditch. The ditch was dragged in case the girl was there as well. It was then too dark to continue so it was resumed at first light with the search area extended to include part of the woods. Mr. Allen had all known sex offenders, child molesters, flashers and the like brought in for questioning." He pulled open a filing cabinet drawer jam-packed with bulging file folders—the results of the questionings.

   Frost regarded them gloomily. Far too many for him to read through.

   "There’s more," said Burton, tugging open a second drawer.

   Frost winced and kneed them both shut. "Say what you like about Mr. Allen, but he’s an industrious bastard. I take it he cleared them all?"

   "Yes."

   "Then that’s good enough for me." He struck a match down the side of the filing cabinet and lit up another cigarette. “Where’s the bike?"

   Burton led him to the freezing cold evidence shed in the car-park and unlocked the door.

   The bike, swathed in dimpled polythene, was leaning against the wall. Burton pulled off the covering and stood back. A neat little foldable bike in light grey stove-enamel with dark grey handle-grips and pedals. Frost stared at it, but it told him nothing. He waited while Burton replaced the dimpled polythene, then followed him back to the Incident Room.

   "Let’s see the physical evidence."

   Unlocking a metal cupboard Burton took out a large cardboard box that had once held a gross of toilet rolls and dumped it on the desk. Then he pulled a bulging box-file down from the shelf and handed it to the inspector. "The main file."

   Frost opened it. From the top of a heap of papers a serious-looking Paula Bartlett regarded him solemnly through dark-rimmed glasses. The school photograph provided by the parents when she first went missing, which was used for the 'Have You Seen This Girl?’ poster. There were many more photographs, including those taken at the crypt and at the post-mortem. Frost shuddered and dug deeper, pausing to examine the flashlight enlargements showing the handlebar of the bike poking through the green scum of the ditch. "Any prints on the bike?"