Authors: R. D. Wingfield
“Good,” beamed Frost, motioning for Webster to change roles from heavy to shorthand writer.
“It was like I told you before, Mr. Frost, right up to the time where I got the signal to open the door. I opens it and there’s this geyser wearing a Stan Laurel face mask and holding a cosh of some sort. He clouts me round the nut, but I reckon he hadn’t done it before, because he didn’t hit me very hard. Anyway, I figured that if I didn’t drop down unconscious, he’d welt me a damn sight harder the second time, so I fakes it and down I go. I lies there, dead still, until he’s grabbed the money and gone.”
“So when he’d gone, why didn’t you start banging and yelling?” asked Frost.
“I was going to, honest. Then I suddenly thought what Mr. Baskin might do to me if he found out I’d been faking and hadn’t put up a fight. So I thought I’d better carry on faking. I didn’t even yell when Mr. Baskin booted me in the ribs.”
Frost puffed out the tiniest stream of smoke through compressed lips. “So tell me about Stan Laurel. Describe him.”
Croll gave a noncommittal shrug. “Medium height, medium build. I hardly saw him.” His nostrils twitched as the smoke from the inspector’s cigarette wafted over. “I couldn’t half do with a fag, Mr. Frost.”
“You’ll have a lighted fag stuck right up your arse if you can’t come up with a better description than that, Tommy boy,” said Frost.
Blinking hard, Croll gulped as he tried to think of something that would satisfy the inspector. “Well, he stunk of scent . . . after-shave, I suppose . . . and he had these poncey shoes on.”
Frost caught his breath. “What sort of shoes?”
“Expensive shoes. You could see the quality—they must have cost a packet. As I lay on the floor he stood near me, his shoes inches away from my face. I know them off by heart. Sort of brown and cream with a woven pattern.”
The inspector stretched his arms out above his head, then massaged the back of his neck. “You might have helped us there, Tommy.” He heaved himself up from the chair. “You might have helped us a lot. Now, we can either lock you up or set you free and let Mr. Baskin know where you are. What do you prefer?”
“Locked up, Mr. Frost.”
“Well,” smiled Frost as if bestowing a great kindness, “as a favour to you.” He shook some cigarettes from his packet and pushed them over, then he called in the uniformed man and asked him to lock up the prisoner. That done, he flopped back into the chair, clasped the back of his neck with his interlocked fingers, and purred contentedly at the ceiling.
“Have I missed something?” asked Webster.
A beam from Frost. “I’ve got a feeling in my water, son. One of my hunches.”
“Amaze me with it,” Webster said without enthusiasm.
“Fancy shoes, son. Brown-and-cream fancy shoes. Roger Miller has got a wardrobe full of them; we saw them when we had that little nose around his flat.”
“Thousands of people have got brown-and-cream shoes,” said Webster as he sneaked a look at his watch. He wanted to be in the canteen for lunch at the same time as Susan Harvey and was hoping that this bumbling half-wit of an inspector wouldn’t detain him much longer.
But Frost had no intention of being hurried. “Try this out for a scenario, son. Roger is in Baskin’s ribs for a lot of money. He knows Baskin will get very nasty if he isn’t paid.”
“We’ve been through all this,” sighed Webster.
“That was when I thought Baskin had nicked Roger’s motor. Just hear me out,” insisted Frost. “Roger hasn’t got the money to settle his gambling debt, so he gets the bright idea of stealing it from Harry Baskin. He gets his girl friend with the mole on her bum to help—she’s got all the inside gen and she’s the one who phones pretending to be the nurse, while Roger, in his Stan Laurel mask, does the dirty deed.”
“It’s a possible theory,” sniffed Webster, patently unimpressed and more concerned with getting this stupid conversation over and done with.
“I haven’t finished, son.” Frost stood up and began to pace about the room. “I’ve always worried about the way that licence plate came off the Jag. But what if it was meant to come off?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“They knew what Baskin would do to them if he ever suspected, so they badly wanted an alibi. An alibi that would put Roger miles away. Everyone knows his flash motor. So the girl friend puts on one of Roger’s caps, drives the Jag round and round the old people’s flats, bashing into dustbins, trumpeting away at the horn, making sure no-one could avoid seeing the car. And just in case no-one got the registration number, she chucks the licence plate out of the window for the cops to find. When the police followed it up, Roger would say, “Yes, officer, it was I who caused the public nuisance,” pay his fine and for fifty quid he’s bought himself a cast-iron alibi for the time of the robbery. What went wrong, of course, was the girl knocking down that old man. That sodded everything up. There was no way Roger was going to say he was driving after that.” He sneaked a glance across to Webster to see how this was being received.
It wasn’t being received too well. Webster immediately saw the flaw in the reasoning. “Very ingenious . . . except for the fact that Miller didn’t owe Baskin any money. He’d settled his debts two days before the robbery.”
Frost stopped dead in his tracks. “Damn and bloody blast!” he shouted. “I’d forgotten all about that.”
The door opened and the sergeant from the motor pool walked in. “Been looking for you everywhere, Mr. Frost,” he said. “You borrowed a car from the pool this morning.”
“Did I?” said Frost, a nasty feeling of more trouble starting to creep up his back.
“Yes, sir. When that stolen Vauxhall was found you wanted to get over there in a hurry. You told us your assistant was using your own car so you took one from the pool and promised you’d bring it straight back.”
“We came back in your Cortina,” said Webster.
Damn! thought Frost. I must have left the flaming pool car down that lane. He patted his pockets for the keys. He didn’t have them. “I must have left them in the ignition,” he admitted sheepishly. “Still, no problem. I’ll nip over and bring it back. I know where it is.”
“You don’t know where it is, Mr. Frost,” the sergeant told him grimly. “At this moment it’s being hauled up from the bottom of a canal in Lexington. Lexington police have arrested two joyriders.”
“Bum holes!” said Frost, now feeling very depressed. “I don’t think it’s going to be my day.”
It wasn’t going to be Webster’s day either. Before he had the chance to explain about his lunch date with Susan, he was dragged by the inspector out through the back way to the car park. Frost was anxious to make himself scarce before Mullett learned about the pool car fiasco.
First they went to Denton Hospital to interview the seventeen-year-old rape victim, but she could add nothing to the statement she had already given to Susan Harvey. Indeed, she remained convinced it was her boyfriend who had assaulted her, despite the medical evidence to the contrary.
That chore out of the way, Frost directed Webster to some appalling little back-seat transport cafe where they dined on burnt sausages, greasy chips, and tinned peas. To add insult to injury, Webster had to pay the bill for both of them when Frost realized he hadn’t drawn any cash from the bank. The deepening scowl on Webster’s face was threatening to become a permanent feature.
Sulkily slinging himself back in the car, the acidic stewed tea and the stale chip fat fermenting in his stomach, Webster asked the inspector where he wanted to go. He just didn’t care anymore, life was one long round of chauffeuring Frost, teetering from one crisis to the next while having to endure his unfunny jokes about beards and whiskers.
“Denton Woods,” said Frost. “Mr. Mullett is very cross with us because we didn’t search the area for clues last night.”
“It’ll take more than two of us,” grunted Webster, slamming the car door too hard and wincing as acid indigestion made its first tentative stab.
“Only if we do it properly,” said Frost cheerfully, leaning back and puffing contentedly at a cigarette. “Not a bad meal, was it?”
The thin, yellow afternoon sun did little to warm up the woods, and they hunched up inside their coats as they trudged along the path. “You know, son,” said Frost when they squeezed through the bushes and found themselves in the clearing with its wet, flattened grass, “I’ve got a hunch. I reckon he’s going to try it on again tonight.”
“Oh yes?” grunted Webster. He just couldn’t care less. He had had his fill of Frost and was counting the hours until he would be off duty and round to Susan Harvey’s little flat with the door bolted and the phone off the hook.
“The weather’s getting colder,” Frost went on. “He’s going to have to grab his opportunities. If he does his stripping-off act much longer he’ll end up with a frostbitten dick.” He scuffed the grass with his foot, already anxious to be away, but Webster suddenly bent down and tugged at something, a scrap of cloth caught on the lower branch of a bush. He held it out to Frost, who backed away. “It’s not a clue, is it, son? I’m not in the mood for clues.”
By the look of it, the scrap of cloth had been hanging around the woods for years, but Webster slipped it into a small plastic envelope. “I’d like to send this to Forensic . . . unless you’ve any objection?” His tone dared Frost to demur.
“If it makes you happy, son. Now let’s get the hell out of here before you pick up any more rubbish.” He squeezed back through the gap to the path, while Webster protested that they hadn’t even begun to search the area. “We haven’t got time,” said Frost, hurrying back to the car. “We’re never going to nab this sod by sniffing around for clues. The only way we’ll do it is by catching him in the act—in flagrante dick-o, as the lawyers say.”
“And how are we going to do that?” asked Webster.
“I’ve got a plan,” said Frost, grateful to be back in the car after the cold dankness of the forest. “I’ll tell you when we get back to the office. Next port of call, the bank. I’ve got to get some money.”
Webster was turning the key in the ignition when another car roared up and skidded across to block their path. A plump little man in a blue mac and a porkpie hat jumped out and hurried over to them.
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere, Inspector,” puffed Detective Sergeant Arthur Hanlon, out of breath. “Mr. Mullett’s screaming blue murder—something about a wrecked car—and Johnny Johnson says they can’t get in touch with you by radio.”
“It’s on the blink,” said Frost.
“It’s been turned off,” accused Hanlon, clicking the switch.
“I don’t understand these technical terms,” said Frost, firmly switching it off again. “Now speak your piece, Arthur. I’ve got to go to the bank.”
“I’ve found someone who was with Ben Cornish on Tuesday evening,” reported Hanlon. “They call him Dustbin Joe, so you can imagine what he smells like. He was just about coherent, and his breath stank of meths but if we can believe him, he reckons he saw Ben about eight o’clock Tuesday evening and Ben told him he was on his way round to his mother’s to try and tap her for some money.”
“Now that’s very interesting,” said Frost, scratching his chin thoughtfully, “because his family said they hadn’t seen him for weeks.”
“The statement’s on your desk,” said Hanlon. “Just sniff, you’ll find it.”
“You’re a little gem, Arthur,” beamed Frost. “Now, if anyone asks, you haven’t seen me. I’m the man who never was.” He closed the car door. “Change of plan, son. Let’s go straight to Mrs. Cornish.”
Mrs. Cornish, who had affected indifference to her son’s death, was wearing the black woollen dress she had worn at her husband’s funeral. Frost didn’t comment on this fact. He sat with Webster in the tiny kitchen which reeked of fried onions, a smell that threatened to rouse Webster’s stomach to further rebellion. The yapping, snarling mongrel in the yard kept leaping up and banging its nose on the window in its frenzied efforts to rip them to pieces.
She folded her arms belligerently. “Like I told you, we hadn’t seen him for God knows how long. Hadn’t seen him and never wanted to see him.”
“Ben met someone Tuesday evening, just after eight, and said he was on his way round here,” said Frost.
“Well, he didn’t come,” said the woman flatly, “and I would have slammed the door in his face if he did.”
A banging as the front door closed, then footsteps along the passage. Danny pushed into the kitchen, stopping dead when he saw the two detectives. “What the hell?” he exclaimed. For a moment he looked as if he was going to turn tail and run.
“They’re asking about Ben,” said his mother quickly. “They seem to think he was here on Tuesday. I’ve told them we hadn’t seen him for months.”
“Quite right,” said Danny, still hovering by the open door.
“And that’s all we’ve got to tell you,” said Mrs. Cornish to Frost. “I want you to leave now.” To hurry them on their way, she asked her son to let the dog in.
Webster reversed out of the back street and pointed the car toward the town. “So what did that achieve?”
Frost, plunged in deep thought, surfaced with difficulty. “I reckon they’re lying, son. I’ll lay odds that Ben did go home on Tuesday.” His watch told him it was a quarter past three. “Foot down, son. I must get to the bank before they close.”
The nameplate above the cashier’s window in Bennington’s Bank said the young teller’s name was Gerald Kershaw. He took Frost’s cheque and clouted it with a rubber stamp. He didn’t look very happy.
“Fives, please,” said Frost, watching carefully as the youth counted out the crisp, brand-new notes.
“I’ve got to call in at the police station tonight, Mr. Frost,” said the youth gloomily.
“Been fiddling the books?” asked Frost, taking the money and rechecking it. “I’d flee the country if I were you.”
The cashier grinned. “No, not quite as bad as that. I’ve got to produce my driving licence and insurance details. A traffic cop caught me driving through a ‘buses only’ lane.”
Frost tut-tutted and shook his head at the gravity of the offence. “That’s a thirty pound fine at least, plus fifteen quid costs. It’s cheaper to rob a bank—you’d only get probation for that.”