by Danny Miller
‘I know you didn’t, Terry. But why don’t you tell me what happened that day, so I can clear this mess up for you.’
Langdon stared straight ahead of him, his eyes squinting in the low spring sun, like he was deep in concentration and trying to make sense of what had happened, to recall the events precisely.
‘I wanted to kill him,’ said Langdon. ‘I had the gun all ready. Had it planned … sort of.’
Frost let out a wry little laugh. ‘Yeah, it’s the “sort of” part that always goes wrong. Go on.’
‘I saw George leave the races early. I thought he was going home. I planned on going to his house … have it out with him and tell him the truth.’
‘And what was that?’
‘That Melody loved me, and not him. I knew he wouldn’t listen, though. He’d laugh at me. He’s looked on me like a piece of dirt ever since I could remember, always thought of me as a kid. But with a gun in my hand, he wouldn’t laugh, I’d make sure of that, I’d stick the gun in his big fat mouth!’ His voice quaked and he visibly shook. ‘He killed my dad. You know that, don’t you?’
Not wanting to get sidetracked by the debatable veracity of that statement or to get him any more worked up, Frost agreed with a few noncommittal platitudes that seemed to set Terry at ease.
‘He’s a bully. He’s the type of man who only respects one thing – violence. And I knew that’s how he treated Melody. She only stayed with him because she was scared. What else would she be doing with a horrible old bastard like that?’
Frost could think of a few reasons, the most prominent being money. But not wanting to upset Terry, again he agreed.
‘I loved her, Mr Frost … I really loved her.’
There was something heartbreaking in that statement, even for Frost. It seemed so misguided and out of step with reality, just like Terry Langdon himself.
They reached Denton General and found a parking space near the entrance. Frost was now determined to get as much information as he could before the doctors put Langdon under the chemical cosh, or he just lost his appetite to talk.
He took a pack of Senior Service cigarettes off the dashboard; they must have belonged to Mullett. Frost was in the habit of purloining other people’s fags if they left them on their desk, one of the few illicit acts he was good at. He pulled out two cigarettes and gave one to Terry, and the two men sat smoking for a bit, watching an ambulance unload some poor sod who looked like he’d fallen under a bus. Frost pondered the fragility of existence.
‘George Price isn’t dead, Terry. In fact, he’s in that hospital. He’s going to be operated on next week, and it looks like he’ll pull through. Now, I reckon you’re glad to hear that, because you’re not like George Price, you’re not a cold-hearted bastard.’
Langdon nodded, and Frost saw his eyes moisten as he spoke.
‘I couldn’t have done it. I probably would have just waved the gun about in his face a bit. Maybe shot up the tyres of his car, and driven off.’ He turned towards the detective. ‘Pathetic, aren’t I?’
‘No, you’re not. You’re like most of the population. Most people want to shoot someone at sometime or another, but most people can’t shoot people. If they could, my job would be impossible, because everyone would be shooting everyone – all the bloody time, probably.’ Frost got Terry back on track. ‘So, you followed him out of the races …’
‘Yeah, he was heading toward his home, but I lost him. So I drove along the road I knew he usually took to his house and I spotted his car in a lay-by not far from that pub, the Feathers. The lay-by’s only got a narrow entrance where it’s all overgrown with bushes, but I just managed to catch sight of his Merc as I drove past. So I stopped, started to reverse, and then I was almost hit by a car coming out – but this car was really motoring, it screeched out of there like it was in a hurry.
‘Then I reversed into the lay-by and there he was, George Price, sitting in the Merc with the roof down. I got out of the car. I had the gun in my hand. I called out his name, but of course he didn’t answer. His head was tilted to one side, his eyes were closed. I could see he was still breathing. But there was a black mark on the side of his head. When I got closer I saw it was a small circle of blood, with a line of red leading down to his collar. I touched his shoulder, gave him a little nudge, to wake him up, and then he tipped right over to the side. There was blood on my hands … Then it all went quiet, no wind in the trees, no bird sounds or traffic rushing past … Everything just sort of stopped. Then I looked down at my hands and saw I was holding the gun … and with the blood on my hands I thought that I’d done it. I’d never shot anyone before, not even an animal, so I didn’t know what it was like to shoot anyone. My head … my head got all messed up. I thought I’d had a blackout and it had just happened … Does that make any sense?’
‘You were confused, Terry, running on adrenalin, fear, you’re holding a gun. Who knows what goes through a man’s head in those circumstances.’
Langdon nodded, finding succour in Frost’s words.
‘What happened next?’
‘Then all the noises came back, the wind in the trees, the birds, the traffic passing by and a plane overhead, and everything was just incredibly loud. It was like waking up from a bad dream, being back in reality. And the reality was: George Price was dead, and I’d killed him. So I got in my car and got out of there as fast as I could.’
Frost didn’t want to put words in his mouth, but he also didn’t want him to lose his narrative thread, so he pushed on. ‘But it wasn’t that easy, was it? Someone was blocking your path, remember?’
‘Yeah … that’s right … I remember. As I was pulling out, another car was pulling in. It wasn’t their fault. I had to slam on the brakes – would have gone into them otherwise. It was a young couple. They must have got a good look at me. I could see the bloke staring at me, calling me a wanker. He had to reverse to let me out, and I drove off.’
‘You drove off fast, like the other car you saw. When you were first reversing, a car sped out of the lay-by. Isn’t that what you just said?’
‘That’s right. I had to brake pretty sharpish that time as well.’
‘Whoever was in that first car probably shot George Price. They got to him before you could. Tell me, did you get a look at them at all?’
Langdon dipped his head and looked down at his hands.
‘Did you see what make the car was? You must have seen it, in the mirror, perhaps? Think, Terry … think …’
Langdon raised his hands in front of his face, like he’d never seen them before. Then he started rubbing the blue make-up off his fingers and wrists. ‘Why … why am I covered in blue?’
‘Relax, Terry. I’m covered in parrot shit.’ He cringed. ‘All down the back of my neck. Supposed to be lucky, but I have my doubts.’
Langdon then looked in the rear-view mirror and saw his face, as if for the first time, lucidly. With his hair and his moustache gone, and streaked with blue eyeshadow, he was clearly a stranger to himself. Terry looked appalled at what he was seeing: the madman in the mirror.
Frost was no shrink, but it was clear to him that Terry’s psychotic episode had been gradually abating. But the shock of what he’d done, or thought he’d done, and had now become was driving him nuts all over again. He began to weep uncontrollably. Frost muttered some frustrated four-lettered words. He knew he wasn’t going to get any more out of Terry today.
He prised Langdon out of the car, and with the help of two passing nurses got him into the hospital. The on-call psychiatrist promptly stopped Langdon’s hysterical crying with a chemical cosh that, judging by the happily zonked-out expression that took over from the one of terror, Frost wouldn’t have minded a shot of himself.
He then put a call through to Eagle Lane and got a WPC posted at the ward with strict instructions for her to contact him the minute Terry Langdon became compos mentis; Frost wanted a description of who was in that car as quickly as possible.
Heavy on
the pedal of the trusty yellow Metro, Frost raced across town to get to the town hall meeting. In the High Street, stuck on a red light, the sight of the office of Denton Premier Estate Agents provoked a thought. His watch told him he had time, not a lot of it, but he would make time for this little bugger.
He found Jason Kingly at his desk, on the blower, talking big about some crummy flat in some crummy area of town. Frost knew it was a crummy area of town when Jason had to reiterate three or four times that it was up-and-coming. Kingly had his feet up on the desk and the phone jammed between his ear and his bony shoulder, leaving his hands free to twist away at a Rubik’s Cube. But seeing Frost enter, he turned as red as a post box, dropped both the phone and the Rubik’s Cube, and swung his feet off the desk, knocking over a stack of papers, a coffee cup and an anglepoise lamp in the process.
‘Smoothly done,’ complimented Frost.
Five minutes later they were in the Metro, both smoking furiously.
‘You did the right thing, Jason, calling us. Even if it was only to report the parrot. Why didn’t you say Terry was there?’
‘I was going to, but when I heard the copper’s voice down the phone, I just couldn’t do it. It just felt wrong … grassing Terry up. So I thought if you found the parrot, you’d find him …’
‘What’s your connection with Terry?’
‘He’s my cousin.’
Frost expelled a salvo of smoke rings as he gave this some thought. ‘He’s your cousin, who just happens to have a gun on him, and isn’t in the best of mental health. It was lucky it was me who showed up. I could have sent a WPC along there to see what was happening – he could have shot her!’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Frost. What’s going to happen now?’
‘The good news – for you and Terry – is he didn’t shoot George Price. He just thought he did.’
‘He told me he didn’t at first. Then he said he might have … Then he was sure he did.’
‘Fact is, he didn’t have a bloody clue if he did or not. He had what they term a psychotic episode. Went off his trolley over a piece of skirt, that’s another term for it.’
‘Melody Price?’
Frost nodded.
Jason smirked. ‘Spends a lot of her time out of a skirt from what I’ve—’
‘All right, son, we’ve all seen the pictures.’
There was a long pause and the seriousness of the situation settled over them again.
‘I knew he was losing it,’ said Jason. ‘He was scared, only natural, he thought he’d shot someone. But when that parrot turned up, he seemed to go completely off his rocker. Asked me to get him some hair clippers so he could shave his head … plumage, as he called it. Then he asked me to get some blue make-up so he could paint himself.’ Jason shook his head in disgust. ‘He wanted to be the parrot.’
‘Don’t be too hard on him. As you get older, son, you’ll find everyone feels like Terry at one time or another – he just wanted to fly away from all his problems.’ Frost conceded, ‘But usually they go buy a ticket and get on a plane.’
‘Is he all right?’
‘Looked happy enough to me. But I need you to tell me – did he talk about the shooting at all? Did he say what he saw?’
‘No.’
‘You said that too quickly, Jason. I need you to think, and think good and hard, take as long as you like. We’re not out of the woods yet.’
Kingly made a concerted effort to look like he was thinking, with everything from rubbing his chin to scratching the top of his head. ‘He said he was in big trouble … “because this goes right to the top”, he said.’
‘This goes right to the top?’
Jason gave an assured nod. ‘That’s what he said. I asked him what he meant, but he said he couldn’t tell me. He made out that I could be in danger if I knew too much.’
Frost examined the pointed orange tip of his cigarette; it had burnt down to the print. He took one last pull, puffed out another perfect smoke ring and then blew a shard of smoke right through the middle of it. Jason looked impressed and attempted a similar manoeuvre with his cigarette; but he just ended up with a heavy fug in front of his face that left him coughing and spluttering as he stubbed out the butt in the ashtray.
Frost wound the window down further. ‘Do you trust me, Jason?’
‘Yes, Mr Frost!’
‘Good lad. Forget everything that’s happened with you and Terry, you won’t get nicked, I’ll make sure of that.’
Jason let out a noisy sigh of palpable relief. ‘Thanks, Mr Frost.’
‘But I need to know – when he was talking about this going right to the top, did Terry mention anything about coppers, the police being involved?’
Kingly gave it some serious and again visibly animated thought. ‘I remember I said if he’s innocent he could go and see you. I said you were a good man. I said you’d give him a fair hearing. He just laughed, said I didn’t understand. But he didn’t mention any names …’
Jack Frost sat looking straight ahead of him, his eyes narrowing, deep in speculation as all his hunches fell into place.
‘Can I go now, please?’
Frost turned his attention to Kingly, who had one hand on the door.
‘Not so fast, we still have some serious matters to discuss.’
‘Eh? That’s all I know, Inspector. You said … I’m not in any trouble, am I?’
‘Depends.’
‘On what?’
‘The deal you can get me on the flat.’
Frost winked, and Jason breathed easy.
Thursday (6)
It was standing room only, except at the front, where they had reserved some seats. Frost had never seen the town hall so packed. The red-brick Victorian civic building had hosted a few concerts over the years, of course: A Flock of Seagulls had played to a packed house a couple of years ago; and The Rolling Stones had allegedly played an early gig here in the sixties, but there was no proof of it, because no one had bothered to cover the event as no one had thought they would make it. Still, at least they had lots of photos of the Flock of Seagulls gig.
But this was different: never had a civic meeting attracted so many Denton citizens. There was a queue to get into the main hall. Frost wasn’t one for queuing, and he wasn’t in the mood to flash his badge and shoulder his way through the crowd, a crowd that was mostly made up of women and children, from what he could discern. They were supporting the Mothers’ Alliance Against Drugs and wearing white T-shirts with big bold Frankie Goes to Hollywood-style slogans on them: MAAD SAYS NO TO DRUGS and MAAD WON’T RELAX – DRUGS OFF OUR STREETS.
He made his way across the black and white tiled floor of the lobby to the noticeboard, lit up a cigarette and waited for the queue to dissolve. It was the local elections next month, so the noticeboard was full of information about the candidates. All the main parties were represented, as well as some local-interest groups, plus the usual array of eccentrics and raving loonies who thought politics was a natural home for them. Frost seldom bothered himself with local politics, he could barely be arsed with national elections, and quietly despised politicians with their self-serving regard for the system. They all made big promises about improving policing and never delivered, and he was pretty clueless as to who was running here in Denton.
But one candidate did catch his eye. The poster showed the incumbent Conservative councillor for the North Denton ward, and a favourite to be re-elected, one Edward Havilland. He was a fat fellow in his late forties, bald-headed with a hem of curly blond running around the sides, and he was sporting a bow tie and a broad smile. But what Frost really noticed was that he had his fingers raised in the victory salute, just like … Winston Churchill.
Frost took a surreptitious shufti around him, saw no one was looking, pulled out the thumbtacks from the board and pinched the poster, folding it up roughly and jamming it into his jacket pocket. He then dropped his barely smoked cigarette into the fire bucket with a satisfied expression on his face. He oft
en told himself, and anyone who would listen, that detective work was all about luck; and the harder you worked, the further you pushed and the deeper you dug, the luckier you got. He felt like taking some sand out of the fire bucket, scattering it on the floor, and tap-dancing his way into the main hall. He made do with a jaunty tuneless whistle instead.
‘There’s some room right at the front, Inspector Frost,’ whispered a DC from Rimmington whose name he’d forgotten. All the county was present. Frost thanked him and made his way down the aisle. As he did so, he picked out faces in the crowd. Eve Hayward was sitting with Sue Clarke, deep in conversation, probably about him and what a red-hot lover he was – he winced at the thought, still clueless about what had happened the previous night. There were some more Rimmington coppers amongst the serried rows, making conversation with the Denton contingent. They’d probably all end up in the Spread Eagle tonight, drink too much lager and get into a fight. Frost knew how competitive coppers could get. Sandy Lane, Denton’s very own and very cut-price Walter Winchell, was with the rest of the press pack near the front. Sandy clocked Frost, and the newspaperman formed his hand around an invisible pint glass which he shook slightly, gesturing for them to have a drink later.
Up on the stage, behind a long trestle table covered in blue cloth, were Mullett and the three other regional superintendents, as well as the Assistant Chief Constable from County HQ. Frost made sure that Mullett saw him by giving him a thumbs-up, which was ignored with disdain. Still, job done, thought Frost. He’d give it ten minutes then leave in a hurry, looking down urgently at his bleeper. Cathy Bartlett and Ella Ross from MAAD had pride of place; the mayor looked resplendent in his chain, and was flanked by local councillors, including Edward Havilland in his bow tie, who had forgone the jovial look on his poster and was adhering to the solemnity of the occasion. And next to him, looking a little nervous in his Sunday best, was DS John Waters.
Frost edged along the front row and took his seat. It was probably the worst seat in the house. Too close to the elevated stage, he had to crane his neck upwards to see their faces. And because he knew he couldn’t spend the next ten minutes doing that, he looked straight ahead, and all he could really see was their footwear, where they’d run out of blue cloth to cover all of the trestle tables. Frost’s limited view forced him to examine the feet before him, and he saw some were nervously tapping away whilst others were languidly crossed, seemingly at ease with the situation. All the superintendents’ shoes were highly polished, with Mullett’s the most effulgent, of course. Their black uniform trousers were spotless, with sharp creases down them that you could cut cheese with. And all had black socks that—
