Authors: R. D. Wingfield
‘I can only express my regrets,’ mumbled Frost, mentally disembowelling Taffy Morgan.
‘
Regrets?
You’re going to have cause to regret this. I’m making an issue of it. Now go and put things right with my wife.’
He stamped up the stairs, followed by Frost, and opened the door to a darkened bedroom in which Frost could dimly make out the figure of Mrs Clark lying on the bed. She shot up as the two men entered the room and screamed at her husband, ‘Get out! I don’t want you near me.’
‘The policeman in charge of the investigation is here.’ He pushed Frost forward.
Her tear-stained face crumpled as she stared at Frost. ‘You’ve come to tell me she’s dead, haven’t you? My lovely daughter . . . my baby . . . she’s dead. That woman told me . . .’
‘I’m not here to tell you that, Mrs Clark,’ said Frost gently. ‘We haven’t found your daughter. We are still looking.’
‘But that reporter said . . .’
‘We have found a body, but it is definitely not Debbie.’
She shook her head. ‘You’re just saying that.’
‘This body has been dead for at least a month, Mrs Clark. There is no way it can be Debbie. I’m afraid the reporter jumped to the wrong conclusion.’
She expelled a breath and started to cry again. ‘Thank God . . . Thank God . . .’
Clark stepped forward. ‘Now you’ve made your pathetic apology, Inspector, I will insist you are never allowed to have any dealings with this or any other serious case again. Now get out!’ He flung the door open.
‘Why are you so keen for him to go, Harold?’ demanded his wife. ‘Are you afraid he will discover the truth about your lies?’
Frost looked at Clark. ‘What is this about, Mr Clark?’
‘Nothing. My wife isn’t well.’
‘Nothing?’ his wife screamed. ‘Nothing? He lusted after his daughter . . . his own daughter . . . did you know that?’
‘Please, Anne,’ said Clark. ‘You’re not well . . .’
‘You’re the one who’s not well. He threatened to kill that boy, Inspector . . . and he lied to you. He said he was indoors the evening Debbie went missing. He wasn’t. He was out. He was out for over an hour. Did you know that, Inspector?’
Clark grabbed Frost’s arm and steered him outside, shutting the bedroom door firmly behind them.
‘I did not go out, Inspector. My wife is not well. She has mental problems and often imagines things that haven’t happened.’
‘Are you sure they haven’t happened?’ asked Frost. ‘Lying to the police is a very serious matter.’
‘How dare you adopt that threatening tone with me?’ snapped Clark. ‘My wife’s GP is Dr Cauldwell. Check with him - he will confirm what I’ve told you. Now get out.’ He propelled Frost to the front door, pushed him outside and slammed the door shut.
‘I will bloody check,’ muttered Frost. Back in the car, his stomach rumbled to remind him that he hadn’t had his dinner yet. He hoped fish and chips would still be on by the time he got back to the station.
‘Mackerel salad!’ echoed Frost in disbelief. ‘What sort of dinner is mackerel salad?’
‘It’s all we’ve got left,’ said the woman. ‘Of course it’s all you’ve got left. No one flaming wants it.’
‘Superintendent Mullett always asks for it.’
‘I’m talking about normal people. Give me a baked-bean-and-bacon toasted sandwich.’
The Tannoy called him, so he took his sandwich down to the lobby.
‘Jordan’s brought in that tom you wanted to see,’ Wells told him.
Frost frowned: ‘What tom?’
‘Maggie Dixon. The tom who was hovering round Market Square last night.’
‘Oh, her!’ He took a bite of his sandwich. ‘That cow in the canteen said they’d only got mackerel salad.’
‘Sounds fishy to me,’ said Wells.
‘Ha bloody ha,’ said Frost, taking his sandwich and mug of tea to the Interview Room.
Maggie looked distinctly unappetising in the harsh light of day: thick lipstick and mascara and a heavily powdered face gave her an almost clown-like appearance. Her straw-blonde, bleached hair added its twopenn’orth to her unattractiveness. She was none too pleased to have been hauled in at this unearthly hour and stood, arms folded, glaring at Jordan. She transferred her glare to Frost as he entered.
‘What’s the bleeding idea, dragging me in here? I’ve got to get ready to go out and earn the rent.’
‘Won’t take long, Maggie,’ soothed Frost. ‘Sit down.’
She plonked herself down in a chair, still scowling.
‘I’m hoping you can do something for me, Maggie.’
‘I don’t give policemen freebies, you know.’
Frost shuddered. ‘Is that a promise?’ He offered her a cigarette, which she snatched from the packet and rammed in her mouth, then she leant over the table to accept a light. Frost lit his too and sucked down smoke. ‘You were near a Fortress Building Society cashpoint last night.’
Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘Who says so?’
‘I bleeding say so. I saw you. Now don’t drag this out, Maggie, there’s a good tart. The quicker we get this over, the quicker you can be off your feet and on your back, keeping the landlord happy. Now, you were in the vicinity of that cashpoint last night while your client was trying to take money out so he could put his dick in.’
‘What if I was? Is it a crime?’
‘All I want to know is, did you see anyone use it?’
‘Yeah.’
Frost fired off a salvo of smoke rings. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere. Describe him.’
‘It wasn’t a him, it was a her.’
Frost’s mouth dropped open. A half-formed smoke ring dissipated.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure. They don’t have to have their dicks hanging out for me to know if it’s a man or a woman.’
‘Can you describe her?’
‘Getting on a bit, dark coat, kept her head down.’
‘Can’t you tell us more than that?’
‘You want a lot for one bleeding fag. I’ve told you all I know. As soon as I saw she was a woman, I switched off. I don’t earn money from women. And talking of earning money, can I go now?’
Frost nodded. ‘Take the lady back to where you found her, Jordan, but try not to succumb to her charms on the way.’
‘I’ll try,’ grinned Jordan, ‘but I’m only human.’ When they had left, Frost pushed the rest of his toasted sandwich in his mouth and flushed it down with a swig of tea. A woman? He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and made his way to the Incident Room.
‘Let’s see the CCTV video of the blackmailer again,’ he said to Collier.
Again the blurred, indistinct image shuddered across the screen.
‘Could be a man, a woman, or even a bleeding giraffe for all the good this flaming thing is,’ he muttered.
As he passed through the lobby on the way back to his office, Bill Wells waylaid him. ‘Graham Fielding wants to make a statement, Jack.’
‘Bloody prisoners. Just because they’ve raped and murdered someone, they think they can make statements any flaming hour of the day or night. He’s Skinner’s prisoner, not mine. Skinner should be back tomorrow.’
‘If a prisoner wants to make a statement, he’s entitled to make one, Jack.’
‘Stall him. I’ve been warned to keep my dirty hands off this one and you know how I always obey orders.’
DC Morgan was engrossed in the
Daily Mirror
when Frost returned to the office. He pushed it away hurriedly. ‘We managed to get the body over to the morgue more or less in one piece, Guv. The undertaker says you owe him one. Oh - and Mr Harding said to tell you there were no traces of clothing under the body, so he reckons she was stripped before she was dumped.’
‘That figures. It makes me more and more certain those clothes we fished out of the lake were hers. As soon as we get some idea from the pathologist as to age, height, how long dead, and so on, we’ll try and find out who the hell she is. We’ve already put out an all-stations request on the clothes, but sod all so far.’
Someone had dumped a wad of papers in his in-tray. He gave the covering memo a cursory glance.
It was from Mullett:
Frost: this is urgent. PL. attend. SCN Divisional Commander.
Without bothering to see what it was about, he chucked it over to Morgan. He had enough on his plate without any of Mullett’s rubbish. ‘Get this done, Taff.’
‘What is it, Guv?’
‘I don’t know, but Mullett says it’s urgent. Read it and chuck it in the waste bin - not necessarily in that order.’
Morgan turned to the front page, then let out a low whistle. ‘It’s from the FBI - the Federal Bureau of Investigation.’
‘The FBI? They’re not investigating my flaming car expenses, are they?’
Morgan grinned. ‘No.’ He read for a while, then looked up. ‘The FBI have cracked a big paedophile ring op on the internet. They’ve got the names of people paying by credit card for pornographic images of kids to be downloaded to their computers.’ He flipped through the next two pages. ‘And some of them live in Denton.’
‘Anyone we know?’ asked Frost.
Morgan carefully studied the pages before replying. ‘No, Guv.’ He turned a page. ‘Lots of small fry but there’s a bloke from Denton here who’s supposed to be a lay preacher - he’s spent a packet on child porn over the last few months - well over a thousand quid.’
‘Right, Taff,’ said Frost. ‘See Sergeant Wells. Get search warrants, get a computer expert and a couple of uniforms to assist and bring the bastards in.’
As Taffy left, Frost’s phone rang. Mullett wanted to see him.
‘What’s happening about that paedophile ring?’ asked Mullett.
‘Being dealt with even as we speak, Super. I gave it top priority as you requested.’
‘Good,’ nodded Mullett. ‘DCI Skinner won’t be back today. Some form of stomach upset.’
‘Yes, I heard you treated him to a meal,’ said Frost. ‘You have to be very careful what you eat in these transport cafés - some of them just have buckets for toilets.’
‘I took him to my club,’ retorted Mullett indignantly, ‘as you know damn well, Frost. Anyway, he wants you to keep an eye on his cases, but take no action without consulting him first.’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ said Frost.
As he passed through the outer office, Ida Smith, Mullett’s secretary; was hammering away at her keyboard at finger-blurring speed.
‘Poor old Skinner,’ said Frost. ‘He swallowed a bad winkle. Have you ever had a bad winkle stuck inside you, Ida?’
She affected not to hear him. The man was foul-mouthed, uncouth and insufferable. She pretended to be concentrating on her work and typed even faster.
Frost’s phone was ringing incessantly as he came back to his desk.
No bleeding peace for the wicked
, he thought as he picked up the handset.
‘Jack,’ said Sergeant Wells, ‘Fielding’s brief is here. He wants bail.’
The solicitor was a young woman in her early twenties, severely dressed, with a big nose, no chest and horn-rimmed glasses.
‘I want police bail for my client,’ she told Frost. ‘He is happily married, runs a courier business which needs his presence and has a full answer to this accusation.’
Frost scraped a chair across the brown lino, dumped the case file on the table and sat down facing them. ‘I’m standing in for my colleague, Detective Chief Inspector Skinner. There’s no way we can grant bail.’
Fielding leapt up. ‘I must have bail. I can’t stay locked up here. I’ve got a business to run.’
His solicitor waved him down. ‘Leave this to me, Mr Fielding.’ She turned to Frost: ‘I understand you have DNA evidence from semen found on the victim’s clothes.’
‘That’s right,’ nodded Frost. ‘On her dress.’
‘My client now admits that he did have sexual intercourse with this girl, but on an earlier occasion. The semen could well have come from that occasion - after thirty years there is no way you can prove otherwise.’
‘A good point,’ agreed Frost. ‘I wish I’d thought of that. Trouble is, she wore that dress for the first time on Christmas Eve - she bought it for a party, so there’s no way the semen could have got on it earlier. And to sod your client up even further, the scrapings of flesh from under her fingernails match your client’s DNA too.’
She stared at Frost, then at her client, who wouldn’t meet her gaze. She shuffled through her papers to give herself time to think. She had never been presented with a situation such as this at law school. With a last glare at her client, she took-a deep breath. ‘I might have misunderstood my client’s instructions, Inspector. Might I have a few words with him in private?’
‘Be my guest,’ said Frost grandly, gathering up the file and leaving them to it.
‘How’s it going?’ asked Wells as he passed Frost, who was leaning on the wall in the passage outside the Interview Room, sucking at a cigarette.
‘Him and Fanny are concocting a new story line to prove he didn’t do t. I think she raped herself, then strangled herself. How’s the paedophile thing going?’
‘We got the search warrant you wanted and they’re on their way now. Do you think you can trust Morgan with this?’
‘By the law of averages he must do something right now and again,’ said Frost. ‘But I’ll poke my nose in as soon as I get Skinner’s ancient murder out of the way. Ah!’ The door opened and the solicitor beckoned him in.
‘We’re ready, Inspector.’
He stubbed out his cigarette and followed her back in. ‘I’m all ears,’ he said, dumping the file on the table and dropping down into his chair.
The woman nodded for her client to begin.
‘All right, Inspector,’ said Fielding. ‘I’ll tell you the truth. I was afraid to say it before as it looked bad for me. Yes, I was with her on Christmas Eve. Yes, we had sex, but she was alive when I left her. I swear by my baby’s life, she was alive when I left her. I didn’t beat her up. I didn’t kill her. When I heard she was dead, I panicked. I didn’t come forward.’
‘Are you saying she willingly submitted to sex?’ asked Frost.
‘Yes.’
‘That doesn’t add up, I’m afraid, son. The poor little cow must have been terrified. She fought off her attacker . . . fought like mad. Like I told you, there was skin under her fingernails where she had scratched him. And it was your skin, son. The DNA test proves that conclusively.’