Authors: R. D. Wingfield
Frost had taken Clark back to his cell and had been sitting outside the house for nearly half an hour, smoking cigarette after cigarette, trying to pluck up the courage to walk up that drive and knock on the door.
‘I’m terribly sorry, Mrs Clark . . . I’m terribly sorry, Mrs Clark . .
.’ He kept muttering the words to himself as if repetition would make them come out any easier. He had brought WPC Kate Holby with him, but was not setting her a good example. She sensed his anxiety and sat in the seat next to him, saying nothing. ‘You never bloody get used to it,’ said Frost. ‘Sod it. It has to be done, so let’s sodding well do it.’ He snatched the cigarette from his mouth, crushed it and stepped out of the car. ‘Here we go then. Over the bleeding top.’
It was even worse than he had feared. She screamed, she cried, she became hysterical, pounding him with her fists. Then she insisted on being taken to the mortuary to see the body, and when she saw it, her grief was uncontrollable and her body-racking sobs and screams echoed round the empty building.
Enough to wake the bleeding dead
, thought Frost. He could see that Kate Holby was even more shattered than he was and wished he hadn’t asked her to accompany him, but the poor cow had to get used to the joys of policing in case she thought it was all bleeding fun and games. He tried to catch her eye, then decided a reassuring smile would be out of place. He felt so shattered, he wanted to get outside, away from the piercing screams that were drilling holes through his skull.
Mrs Clark’s tears were now splashing down on the cold, white face of her daughter. Frost decided enough was enough. He put his arm around her and drew her back, motioning for the mortuary attendant to cover the face and close the drawer. ‘Come on, love,’ he soothed. ‘Let’s get you home.’
Angrily she shook his arm away. ‘He killed her. That perverted bastard of a husband of mine killed her . . . his own daughter . . .’
‘If he did, we’ll get him,’ said Frost.
‘
If?
’ she screamed. ‘What do you mean, if? Of course he did it. He lusted after her. He took photographs . . .’
They managed to get her back to the car, where she resisted all the efforts of the WPC to comfort her. ‘I’ll kill him,’ she kept muttering. ‘If he comes near me, I’ll kill him, so help me . . .’
They dropped her back home. She didn’t want anyone with her. Her hands were shaking so much she couldn’t get the key in the door. Frost took it from her and turned it in the lock. She barged past him, slamming the door shut on them without a word. He could still hear her screams and sobs as he walked back to the car. He slid into the passenger seat and told Kate to drive to the boy’s parents’ home. God, this was a sod of a day.
Drained and washed out, Frost staggered back to his office with a ham roll and a mug of tea from the canteen. Sandy Lane was in the visitors’ chair, waiting for him; he pointed to two bottles of whisky on the desk. ‘Merry last Christmas,’ he said.
‘If I had any strength of character, I’d refuse them,’ said Frost, picking one up and surveying the label. ‘I’ll hide them away before anyone sees how cheaply I can be bought.’ He pulled open a drawer and dropped them in. ‘So what do you want to know?’
‘Was it the missing girl - Debbie Clark?’
Frost nodded.
‘Cause of death?’
‘Some bastard raped her, flogged her and strangled her, but that’s off the record until the post-mortem. You can say we’re treating this as a murder inquiry
‘And the boy?’
‘Skull caved in, but that’s not official until after the PM.’
‘I’m told you’ve arrested Debbie’s father.’
‘On an entirely different matter, Sandy. Keep him out of it.’
‘Are you going to charge him with possession of obscene photographs?’
‘You’ve had all that two bottles of cheap whisky can buy. Be satisfied.’
‘When will you be making the official press statement?’
‘Skinner’s doing that. It’s laid on for six o’clock tonight, I think. Now clear off.’
Sandy rose from the chair. ‘For those few meagre crumbs, my half-hearted thanks. Enjoy the whisky.’
‘Whisky? What whisky?’ asked Frost innocently, kneeing the drawer shut. As he took a bite of his ham roll, the phone rang. It was Mullett.
‘I understand we’ve found two bodies, Frost - the boy and the girl.’
‘That’s right, Super.’
‘Still no trace of the other girl?’
‘Not a trace.’
‘Right. I understand you’ve arranged a press conference for six o’clock tonight. I don’t want you there. I’ll be dealing with that.’ There was no way he was going to let slummocky Frost appear on the nation’s TV screens, with his scruffy mac and cigarette drooping from his lips, as a representative of Denton division.
Mullett clearly didn’t know that Skinner intended doing the conference. Frost decided not to tell him. ‘Right you are, Super.’
‘Put all the details on my desk and ask my secretary to get my best uniform from the dry-cleaner’s.’
No sooner had Frost banged the phone down than it rang again. This time it was Bill Wells.
‘Drysdale’s screaming blue murder down at the morgue, Jack. He seems to think you ought to be there.’
Frost looked at his watch and groaned. Ten past flaming three. Shit. ‘Tell him I’m on my way.’
There was a tap at the door and an agitated WPC Holby looked in. ‘We’re going to be late for the autopsies, Inspector.’
Frost grimaced. He had forgotten that Skinner had ordered her to attend. ‘Look, love, I know what Skinner said, but - ’
She cut him short. ‘I don’t want to be molly coddled. If it’s part of the job, then I’ve got to do it.’
‘All right, then,’ sighed Frost. ‘But if at any time you feel you want to walk out, do it - you won’t be the first, or the last.’
‘I won’t walk out,’ she said. ‘I won’t give him the satisfaction.’
‘What’s he got against you?’ asked Frost.
She hesitated. ‘My father was in the same division as DCI Skinner when they were both inspectors. He wanted my father to lie in court about some evidence supposed to have been found in a suspect’s house. My father refused and the suspect got off. Skinner never forgets a grudge. Getting at me is his way of getting his own back on my father.’
‘The man’s a bastard,’ said Frost. ‘The trouble is, he’s a bastard who’s a chief inspector and you’re only a probationer constable. He’s got the edge. He could tell lies about you and he’d be believed; you could tell the truth about him and you wouldn’t be.’ God, he wished he wasn’t going to be kicked out of Denton. He’d like to be able to stay and keep an eye on the girl, if only to spite Skinner. He had to find some way to foil the bastard. ‘Look - why not apply for a transfer? Come with me to Lexton.’
She shook her head defiantly. ‘There’s no way I’m going to run away from him. He would consider that a victory.’
‘It sometimes pays to run away, and come back and fight when the odds are better.’ But he was wasting his breath. She was as stubborn as he was. He would never run away, even if it was the most sensible thing to do - sensible things to do weren’t his style.
‘I’m staying,’ she said.
‘Good for you, girl,’ said Frost. Bloody hell, if a flaming nineteen-year-old kid could do it . . . ‘If I can find a way to do the bastard down, I’m staying as well.’
Drysdale’s frigid glare lowered the chill factor of the autopsy room by several degrees as Frost and WPC Holby entered. ‘It would be an agreeable surprise if you were on time for once, Inspector.’
‘I hate giving people surprises, Doc,’ said Frost, pulling on the obligatory green gown. He rubbed his forehead. The cold of the room was making his scar ache.
Debbie, lying open-eyed and naked on the autopsy table, looked so small and vulnerable. Frost turned his head away as Drysdale selected a scalpel and made the first incision in the bluish-white flesh of the neck, muttering his standard running commentary to his green-gowned secretary, whose pen skimmed over her notebook, recording the words almost before Drysdale spoke them. This was just routine to them. It should have been routine for Frost, but he could never get used to it, especially when young kids were involved. His ears were still ringing from the mother’s heart-wrenching screams of despair.
He let his eyes travel round the room: harsh neon lights burning down on the autopsy tables; green-tiled walls; the blue flicker of the electric insect-killers, of more use in hot weather than now. Somewhere a tap was dripping. There always seemed to be a dripping tap, plop-plop- plopping into a stainless-steel sink. Two autopsy tables. Two bodies. Two for the price of one. That tasteless thought reminded him of the supermarket and the blackmailer, now stuck on the back-burner. What the hell was he going to do about that? The thought was chopped short as he realised all eyes were on him. Drysdale, looking annoyed, had asked him something and was waiting for an answer.
‘Sorry, Doc. I was miles away.’
Drysdale raised his eyes to the heavens and expelled a theatrical sigh. ‘Sorry I’m not holding your attention, Inspector, but I ventured to ask if the bodies had been formally identified.’
‘Yes, Doc. Both of them.’
‘I asked because that specific section of the “Autopsy Request” form had been left blank and my mind-reading ability is not at its best today.’
‘That’s all right, Doc,’ said Frost grandly. ‘We all have our off-days’ He quickly filled in the form and handed it to Drysdale, who waved it towards his secretary, who took it and slipped it in a folder.
‘Could the body be turned face-down, please,’ requested Drysdale.
Frost moved back to let the photographer and the mortuary attendant perform this task. One of the few perks of being an inspector was that you could get your subordinates to do the jobs you hated doing.
‘Hands tied behind her back by ligatures around the wrists,’ Drysdale intoned to his secretary. The clicking and purring of the camera was accompanied by the blinding glare of flash-guns as these details were recorded.
Frost moved forward so he could see better. Debbie’s back was criss-crossed with angry bruises and red weals. Her wrists were tied with tough twine; blood had seeped where it had bitten deeply, cutting into the flesh and making it red raw. Debbie must have struggled frantically to free herself.
Harding from Forensic cut the twine free from the wrists, leaving the complicated knots intact. He held it up to be photographed before placing it carefully into an evidence bag. He then took scrapings from each of the fingernails while the pathologist tapped his foot and sucked air through his teeth impatiently.
Drysdale then carried out a careful examination of the girl’s body, from the top of her head back down to her feet, stepping back and again waiting impatiently while Harding took swabs from the feet in case they yielded clues as to where she had been undressed and killed. He also took swabs from the weals on her back.
‘Now lay her on her back, please,’ said Drysdale, selecting another scalpel from the row of shining instruments laid out on a green cloth at the head of the autopsy table. He made a long, deep incision down the white flesh of the stomach. Again Frost turned his head away. After God knows how many post-mortems he had attended, he knew the routine off by heart. He knew the various stages without looking: the sounds, the scents, the whining and the burnt-flesh smell of the bone-saw as the whirring blade cut into the bone, the plopping noise, followed by the clang of the scales, as organs were weighed. He could never see the point of weighing the various organs. Drysdale’s secretary leant forward to take the reading from the scales. It was like buying offal from a butcher.
The organs were transferred to a plastic container ready for the mortuary attendant to replace them and stitch up the body after the pathologist had walked away from the carnage of his autopsy. Frost shot a quick glance at Kate Holby to see how she was taking it. She was white-faced and was biting her lip hard, but didn’t flinch when Drysdale’s knife made a delicate cut so he could peel the flesh of the face away from the skull, like removing a Hallowe’en mask.
Drysdale now bent down and parted the girl’s legs. ‘Much bruising. Sexual penetration took place shortly before death. She was not a virgin.’
Frost’s head shot up. Twelve years old and not a virgin? The boyfriend, who was now covered with a sheet on the other autopsy table, awaiting Drysdale’s attention . . . or the crocodile-tear-dropping bastard of a father?
The pathologist was now gently scraping with a spatula. ‘No trace of semen.’ He permitted himself a wry smile. ‘People know too much about DNA these days. It seems a condom was used.’ Dropping the spatula into a stainless-steel kidney bowl, he examined the rest of the body, which yielded nothing that would help. ‘Death by manual strangulation,’ he told Frost, ‘and she was brutally raped just before death.’ He prised open the girl’s mouth and shone a torch inside, the beam bouncing off perfect teeth. He then turned his attention to the eyes.
‘Any sign that she was gagged, Doc?’ asked Frost.
‘If there was, Inspector, you can be sure I would have mentioned it in the hope you were paying attention,’ sniffed the pathologist, as if explaining to a child.
‘Check again, Doc. It’s important’
Drysdale stared at Frost. ‘And why, pray, is it important?’
‘When she was being raped, she’d have screamed her bleeding head off. If there was no gag, she must have been somewhere where there was no chance of her screams being heard.’
Drysdale’s mouth twitched in annoyance, but he did a more thorough examination. ‘Definitely no sign of a gag. Her killer could have clamped his hand over her mouth.’
‘She’d have bitten the bastard’s fingers off,’ said Frost.
‘It’s for you to advance theories, not me,’ sniffed the pathologist. ‘I deal only with facts. May I now continue with this autopsy, or do you want me to examine everything all over again?’
‘No. You’ve been reasonably thorough, Doc,’ conceded Frost. ‘You carry on.’