Frost nodded sympathetically. ‘You’ve had it rough, love.’
She dropped her sodden handkerchief into her handbag and snapped it shut. ‘Can I go now?’
Frost nodded. ‘Yes. Thanks for coming.’ He held the door open for her.
‘So how do I get back to London?’ she asked.
‘See the nice sergeant in the lobby,’ Frost told her. ‘He’ll either arrange a car or give you the money for your train fare.’
At the doorway she paused. ‘I used to love him once. But he changed…’
Frost nodded. Hadn’t this happened with his own wife? God, how they had loved each other at the beginning and how they had hated each other at the end. He shook his head and wiped his hand over his face. It was all my fault, he told himself. If only… He mentally compared the beautiful young cracker he had married with the drawn figure, her lovely dark hair now streaked with grey, dying in the hospital side ward, where she could be wheeled out on a trolley and taken down in the lift to the mortuary without alarming the other patients. All my sodding fault.
As he pushed his way through the swing doors, he could hear Bill Wells explaining to Mrs Lewis that he just didn’t have the transport or the cash allocation to get her back to London, while she was explaining to Wells that that scruffy inspector had told her he would do it, so he had bloody well better do it, and bloody soon. Frost backed out and decided to use the rear exit.
Mullett’s gleaming blue Porsche was parked by the exit, reminding Frost that he should have reported to Hornrim Harry ages ago. There was a gleaming pearl-grey Mercedes sprawled across two parking places next to the Jaguar, with the registration number BEA 001. Bloody hell. He must be here, chewing the privates off Mullett. Frost quickened his step. He nearly made it. He was climbing into his battered Ford when Mullett’s voice roared out from an open window: ‘Frost! My office – now!’
Sod it!
Beazley, his face brick-red with anger, was chomping on one of his outsize cigars, and the corpses of two other cigars lay in Mullett’s ash tray. The office reeked of cigar smoke.
Mullett was equally angry ‘I sent for you ages ago, Frost!’
‘I was just about to come in when you called,’ lied Frost, drawing himself up a chair as far from Beazley as possible. He lit up and flipped the spent match in the general direction of the ashtray.
‘Coming to see me?’ shrilled Mullett. ‘You were getting into your car.’
‘Just checking the mileage for my car expenses,’ said Frost. ‘You know I like them to be dead accurate.’
‘Never mind your bleeding car expenses,’ snarled Beazley. ‘What happened to that brilliant suggestion of yours to catch the sod who’s pinching my money? You said it was bleeding foolproof. Another five hundred quid up the Swanee last night. I might as well leave the bleeding money in the street for him to pick up.’
‘I’m sorry Mr Beazley,’ said Frost. ‘We now have other priorities. I’ve got three kids’ bodies in the morgue and another teenager gone missing.’
‘Sod your other bloody priorities,’ roared Beazley. ‘I’m your number-one priority. I want the blackmailer caught, I want all my money returned and I want it done now.’ He poked a finger at Mullett. ‘I’m holding you responsible as well, Superintendent. Your Chief Constable is in the same lodge as me and he’ll be interested to learn how incompetent Denton Police Force is.’
Everyone seems to be chummy with our flaming Chief Constable, thought Frost, flicking ash on the carpet.
Mullett, white as a sheet, tried to calm the man down. ‘No need for that, Mr Beazley. Inspector Frost will have a full surveillance team round those cashpoints tonight.’
‘OK,’ said Frost, pushing himself up from his chair. ‘But I’ll nip round and see the dead kids’ parents first and tell them Mr Beazley wants priority over the search for their killer, and I’ll try and talk them out of going to the press, because it would be bad publicity for Mr Beazley and his supermarket…’
Beazley leapt up, sending his chair flying. He mashed his cigar to death. ‘If you dare – ’
‘I wouldn’t dare,’ cut in Frost, ‘but I can’t speak for the murdered teenagers’ parents.’
The muscle at the side of Beazley’s mouth kept twitching. He was breathing deeply, trying to contain himself. ‘All right. I’ll give you until the end of the week. If you haven’t caught the sod by then I’ll see both of you are kicked out of the force.’ He stormed out of the office, slamming the door shut after him.
Mullett looked at Frost. ‘I want the blackmailer caught, Frost.’
‘Give me more men, more overtime.’ Mullett fluttered a hand. ‘Anything… anything… only get him caught.’ He flopped back in his chair and mopped his brow. ‘This is all your fault, and he’s blaming me as well.’
Frost beamed back at him. ‘There ain’t no justice, Super. I’ll go and see about the extra men and overtime…’
Never any peace. There was always someone waiting in his office. This time it was PC Collier, clutching a computer printout.
‘Whatever it is, bin it,’ said Frost as he sat down. ‘We’re all on overtime tonight watching the cashpoints again.’
‘It’s that child-modelling agency you asked me to try and trace, Inspector. I think I’ve found it.’
Frost took the computer printout. ‘Delmar Model Agency, 39 High Street, Melbridge.’ He looked up at Collier and nodded. ‘Well done, son. This could well be the one.’
‘Turn the page, Inspector,’ said Collier. Frost flipped the sheet over and whistled softly. They used to have a studio in the office block on Denton Road. ‘Bloody hell!’ He unhooked his scarf and wound it round his neck. ‘Come on, son, let’s pay them a visit.’
‘They went out of business a couple of years ago, Inspector. The owner died. No list of employees, no records anywhere.’
‘Shit!’ said Frost. He drummed his fingers on his desk. ‘Whoever worked there must have paid tax. Go to the tax office. Tell them it’s a murder inquiry. They should have a list of employees somewhere.’
‘They could be filed under name, Inspector, not workplace.’
‘You’re probably right, son, but ask them any way.’
Leaving Collier, he nipped up to the canteen for a quick cup of coffee and a bacon roll and spotted DS Hanlon nursing a cup of tea at a table with other members of the search party that had been scouring Denton Woods for Jan O’Brien. They all looked tired and fed up. Frost dumped his tray on the table beside the sergeant. ‘I take it you haven’t found anything, Arthur? Any body – especially Skinner’s – would be a bonus.’
Hanlon gave a weary grin. ‘We’ve searched those flaming woods so many times, Jack. I know every blade of grass off by heart.’
Frost found it hard to swallow the bacon in his roll. It reminded him of the maggoty carcasses in the butcher’s. He pushed the plate away, took a swig of tea and lit a cigarette. He filled his lungs with smoke, then slowly exhaled. ‘She’s not there, Arthur. We’re wasting our time. Send most of the team home and let them have a kip. I’ll be wanting volunteers to stake out the cashpoints again tonight.’
‘You’ve got the overtime agreed, I hope?’ asked Hanlon. ‘Only last time…’
‘Mullett’s agreed,’ nodded Frost. ‘He’s terrified Beazley’s going to report him to his Masonic buddies, so the sky’s the limit.’ Then he remembered the modelling agency. ‘Go and see Jan’s parents, Arthur. Ask them if their daughter ever wanted to be a model, or was ever contacted by the Delmar Model Agency. She went to the same school as Debbie Clark. Talk to the teachers, the kids… did she ever say any thing about modelling or about a modelling agency?’ He filled Hanlon in on the details. ‘Not much of a lead, Arthur, but it’s all I’ve got.’
Frost staggered up the stairs to bed just after three in the morning. The stake-out had been a complete waste of time. They had waited, shivering in the wind and rain until a couple of minutes before midnight, when the Fortress computer people phoned to say that fi
ve hundred pounds had just been withdrawn from a cashpoint at Frimley, a small town some three miles from Denton. Frost had phoned the Frimley police who sent a car round, but far too late. They had staked out the cashpoint in case the blackmailer returned after midnight to make a second withdrawal, while Frost and his team covered the Denton cashpoints. At two o’clock, cold and dispirited, he had decided to call it a night.
In his dream Frost was running for dear life. The figure chasing him had a knife. A long knife. He crashed through a door, heart pounding, and found himself inside the refrigerator room at the butcher’s. The light was on, the white-tiled walls were smeared with fresh blood and crawling with maggots. On the floor were newly slaughtered lambs, their throats bleeding on to the white tiles. His pursuer was at the door. There was no way to lock it. He leant against it. The man out side started pounding at the door, which shook with the blows. The door crashed open…
He awoke, dripping with sweat and panting, his heart hammering. Bloody hell, you can stick these sort of dreams, he thought. What about the ones with the naked nymphos, which have been missing from the agenda for far too long? He clicked on the bedside lamp to check the time. Half past four in the morning. He had been asleep barely an hour.
Suddenly the pounding started again. He sat up in bed. It was coming from his front door.
He staggered from the bed to swish back the curtains and look out into the darkened street below. The blue light of an area police car was flashing. Shit! What the hell had happened now?
He padded down the stairs and opened the front door. He vaguely recognised the officer standing there – it was someone from Traffic, but he couldn’t think of his name.
‘Sorry to knock you up, Inspector, but your phone’s off the hook.’ He pointed to the hall table.
‘So it is,’ grunted Frost, replacing the phone on its base. ‘So kind of you to wake me up at half past flaming four in the morning just to tell me that.’
The officer grinned. ‘PC Lambert from Control is anxious to talk to you, Inspector. He says it’s urgent.’
‘At half past four it had better flaming well be,’ snarled Frost.
It was cold in the hall. Frost slipped his mac over his pyjamas before phoning the station. ‘This had better be good, Lambert,’ he yawned into the mouthpiece. ‘Who’s dead, Mullett or Skinner? Please say it’s both.’
‘The charge nurse from Denton General Hospital has phoned, Inspector, worried about one of their nurses. She hasn’t reported for duty
‘Then tell them to sack her,’ grunted Frost.
‘She’s always been conscientious, loves her job, this is the first time she hasn’t turned up for night duty and she’s not answering her phone. They sent someone round to her house – it was in darkness.’
‘There’s a surprise. At four o’clock in the morning I’d expect every bleeding light to be on.’
A token chuckle from Lambert, who pressed on. ‘Three pints of milk on the doorstep and papers stuck in the letter box. They fear some thing might have happened to her.’
‘Like she’s gone off drinking milk and reading papers? Why the flaming hell did you wake me up to tell me this? It would be just as bleeding pointless at nine o’clock.’
‘She lives next door to Lewis, the butcher,’ said Lambert.
Frost’s knuckles whitened as he gripped the phone tighter. ‘A nurse?’
‘Yes, Inspector.’
‘A paediatric nurse?’
‘Yes, Inspector.’
‘Get back to the hospital and check if she was one of the nurses who looked after Lewis’s kid.’
He sat on the stairs and smoked. Lambert was back in five minutes.
‘Yes, Inspector, she was.’
A warning bell started tinkling softly in Frost’s brain. ‘It might be a coincidence, but I’d better check it out. Get on to Taffy Morgan. Drag him out of bed if necessary. Tell him to pick me up in ten flaming minutes or they’ll be finding parts of his legs and dick all over Denton Woods.’
Apart from the odd porch-light, the street was in darkness. Morgan parked the car outside the nurse’s house, then gave Frost a nudge to wake him. ‘We’re here, Guv.’
Frost shook himself awake, yawned, then climbed out of the car. ‘Right. Let’s take a look.’ He gave a passing glance to the butcher’s house next door, half expecting, even at that late hour, that the curtains would twitch.
There were three pints of milk on the doorstep and three morning papers protruding from the letter box, which Frost tugged out so he could poke his torch through. Its beam picked up a few letters strewn across the mat. He straightened up. ‘Just so we don’t make proper prats of ourselves…’ He hammered the door knocker. They waited. Nothing.
‘I don’t think she’s in, Guv,’ offered Morgan.
‘I wish I had your perceptive intuition,’ grunted Frost. He walked across the front garden to the window and slashed his torchbeam through the gap in the curtains. An empty room. So what did he expect to see – a pile of body parts on top of a nurse’s bloodstained uniform?
‘I suppose there’s no rear entrance to this place?’
‘Back-to-back houses, Guv.’
Frost returned to the front door and knocked again. ‘Never know your luck, she might have gone to the lavvy.’ After a couple of seconds of silence, he stepped back and nodded at the glass door panel. ‘Break the glass, Taff. We’re going in this way.’
‘What do I use, Guv?’ Morgan asked.
Frost pointed to the step. ‘One of the milk bottles.’
Morgan grabbed a milk bottle and used it as a club, smashing both the door panel and the bottle, which shattered, sending milk flying everywhere.
‘… first pouring the milk out, of course,’ said Frost mildly.
‘Sorry, Guv,’ said Morgan.
The door swung open as Frost stuck his hand through and turned the catch. He shone his torch on an expensive, milk-sodden carpet topped with milk-sodden letters. ‘If we don’t find a body, Taff, you’re in deep trouble.’ They skirted the mess and looked through all the rooms. Everything was as it should be.
‘What do you think, Guv?’ asked Morgan.
‘I think I’m a prat for letting Lambert talk me into this. We’re either going to have to pay for the smashed door, the ruined carpet and the bottle of milk you poured all over the bloody place, or lie our bloody heads off and say it was like this when we came.’
‘That last bit sounds good to me, Guv,’ said Morgan.
‘The first bit never stood a chance,’ said Frost.
It was gone five when Morgan dropped him off. The damn phone started ringing the minute he opened the front door. ‘Dr Shipman’s surgery,’ he grunted. ‘Do you want a house call?’
‘Too early in the morning for flaming jokes,’ said Station Sergeant Johnny Johnson. ‘The hospital have phoned again, Jack. They’re still worried about that nurse.’
‘Then book her in as a missing person. She’s only been gone a couple of days.’
‘It’s longer than that, Jack.’
‘There were only three bottles of milk on the step and there was nothing suspicious in the house.’
‘She was supposed to have gone off on holiday for two weeks, sharing an apartment with a nurse from another hospital. They’ve managed to get hold of the other nurse. Our one never turned up. She’d paid for the holiday and she never turned up. She was mad keen to go. All she’d been talking about was this flaming holiday and she never turned up.’
Frost tipped back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. ‘I agree with you, Johnny, it don’t sound too good. Bloody hell. We’ve got enough to flaming well do without this. Well, we can’t do any more tonight. I’ll send Taffy over to the hospital first thing tomorrow to get details.’ He hung up and trudged upstairs to bed.
He couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned, smoked innumerable cigarettes, then gave the pillow a couple of punches and tried to concentrate on drifting off. It didn’t work. He kept thinkin
g about the missing nurse. Supposing she didn’t know Lewis’s wife had left him? Supposing she drifted over one evening for a cup of coffee and a chat and Lewis and his bleeding butcher’s knife were waiting for her? He shook the thought out of his head. It was all conjecture.
He tried to focus on something more pleasant – that fat pathologist, for a start. He cursed him self for missing his flaming chance there – he bet she was hot stuff under the sheets. His attempt to conjure up a picture of the naked pathologist failed… all he kept getting was a bloodstained, maggot-ridden corpse.
He sat up straight in bed. Something was nagging away. Something important. Something he had missed.
Maggots! Why were there bloody maggots? The Maggot Man had said flies wouldn’t touch a long-dead body. The meat in the refrigeration room had been rotting for months, so why were there maggots?
He squirmed back on to the pillow and pulled the bedclothes over him. Whatever the reason it could wait until morning. He sat up again. Sod it. It couldn’t wait, not if he wanted to get any sleep. Another look at the alarm clock. Twenty- two minutes past five, pitch black and cold outside. If he got up and nosed around the butcher’s shop now, it would be too late to go back to bed after he’d found it was all a bleeding waste of time.
He swung his feet on to the floor and dragged on his clothes.
Please let it be a bleeding waste of time.
Chapter 14
Even the lamp-post had been vandalised: a jumble of coloured wires dangled forlornly from the switch box. The Council had obviously seen no need to spend money on repairing it in a deserted street, so the road was in total darkness as his car slithered to a halt outside the boarded-up butcher’s shop. His headlights picked up the shape of an abandoned car further up the road. That’s all this place was now – a dumping ground for unwanted junk and, perhaps, unwanted bodies. It was a bitterly cold night, but warm inside the car with the heater going full blast. He leant back in his seat. Couldn’t this wait until the morning?
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