Authors: R. D. Wingfield
Wells’s eyes widened. “Where did you get these?”
“From the canteen the party.” He still hadn’t finished off-loading, pulling more bottles from his inside jacket pockets. Proudly, he surveyed his haul. “They didn’t invite us to their stinking party, so we won’t invite them to ours.”
In the top drawer of his filing cabinet he found three chipped enamel mugs and slopped in three generous helpings of seven-year-old malt whisky. One mug went to the sergeant, the other to Webster. “Help yourself to tonic and salted peanuts. Sorry we haven’t got any ice.”
Webster glared at his mug and pushed it away. “Are you trying to be funny?”
Frost could only look puzzled. Then the light dawned. “Sorry, I forgot. You’ve signed the pledge, haven’t you, son? The beard that touches liquor will never touch mine.”
This had the effect of sending Wells into a fit of uncontrollable giggling, a fit that Webster’s scowl only seemed to amplify.
Frost shared the contents of Webster’s mug between the sergeant and himself. He pushed the tray toward the constable. “Well, at least have a sandwich or some peanuts.” Webster flicked a hand in curt refusal.
“If you’re not going to join the party, go and look after the lobby,” Wells ordered. When Webster stamped out, the sergeant slipped into his chair and washed down some cheese and onion crisps with a long swig from his mug. He felt warm and happy. It wasn’t such a bad shift after all. He was trying to remember why he had been feeling so miserable before Frost came in.
Frost buzzed Control on the internal phone. “Mr. Ridley? If you wish to attend a booze-up, report immediately to Mr. Frost’s office.” He hung up and lit one of the cigars. “This is great, isn’t it, Bill? All we want now to make it complete are some pickled onions and a naked woman.”
“I wouldn’t object if there were no pickled onions,” giggled Wells, unbuttoning the collar of his tunic. Frost’s office seemed very warm. He felt the radiator, but it was stone cold. As he was trying to puzzle this out he remembered what he had wanted to talk to the inspector about.
“Jack, we’re in a crisis situation. Do you know anything about this hit-and-run?”
“Yes,” said Frost, puffing out smoke rings almost as large as car tires. “We saw the poor sod spewing blood at the hospital.”
“Is he still alive?”
Frost removed the cigar and shot a palmfril of salted peanuts into his mouth. “Just about. I don’t think they’ll be cooking him any breakfast, though.”
“Damn,” said Wells, his worst fears realized. He emptied his mug in a single gulp. “We’ve had the computer feed-back on the licence plate. The car belongs to Roger Miller.”
Frost stopped in mid sip He put the mug down slowly. “Sir Charles Miller’s son?”
“Yes,” agreed Wells dolefully, regarding the interior of his empty mug. “It’s tricky, Jack, flaming tricky. If we don’t play this one right we could end up in the soft and squishy.” It took him several attempts to say “soft and squishy.”
“Roger Miller,” repeated Frost, his eyes gleaming. “Well, if we can chuck that little sod in the nick, the night won’t be entirely wasted.”
Tapping at the door, Ridley looked in. “You said something about a drink, Mr. Frost?”
“More than a drink,” Frost told him, pouring out a quadruple shot of whisky, “a party, a celebration. We’re going to arrest an MP’s son tonight. Help yourself to nosh.”
Ridley thanked him and took his drink and a ham sandwich back to the control room.
“Plenty more when you’ve finished that,” called Frost, biting into a sausage roll and coating both himself and the desk in a snowstorm of flaky pastry crumbs. The phone on his desk rang. “Shut up,” he ordered. “We’re having a party.” It rang on and on until he shook it free of food crumbs and picked it up. “Frost . . . OK, put them through.” He listened. “Thanks for telling me. Good night.” He fumbled the phone back on the rest. “That was the hospital, Bill. The hit-and-run victim just died.”
Wells stood up. “You’d better phone Mullett, Jack. This could be dynamite.”
Frost waved him back into the chair, then refilled the sergeant’s mug. “Sod Mullett, Bill. I want to handle this my way.” He went to the door and yelled for Webster to come in. “Put your coat on, son, we’re going walkies. We’ve got to arrest a piece of puke called Miller.”
“Miller?” said Webster, as he unhooked his coat from the rack. “You don’t mean Roger Miller?”
“What do you know about Roger Miller?” asked Wells.
“I saw the name on a car-theft report on Collier’s desk. When he went off he left a lot of his work unfinished, as I expect you know, Sergeant.”
Wells didn’t know. He hadn’t checked. “I’ve only got one pair of hands. I can’t do every bloody thing.”
Frost put his mug down very carefully and gave Webster his full attention. “Let me get this straight. Are you trying to tell me that there’s an unprocessed car-theft report on Collier’s desk, that Roger bloody Miller phoned us earlier this evening reporting his Jag had been nicked?”
Webster nodded.
“It’s not my fault, Jack,” protested Wells, “I didn’t have time to look on his desk. Mr. Allen had no right to take Collier away.”
“Never mind whose fault it was,” said Frost. “What time did Miller phone in?”
Webster went out, returning with the report in his hand. “Eleven twenty-four,” he said.
Frost sighed with relief. The old boy was run over at 10:58. “He runs someone down, then he reports his car was stolen. Did he really think we’d fall for that?”
“Do you mind telling me what this is all about?” requested Webster.
Frost stood up and shrugged on his mac. “It was Roger Miller’s car that knocked that old boy down.”
“I see,” said Webster.
Slinging the scarf round his neck, Frost yelled for Ridley to contact PC Shelby on the radio.
“Dave Shelby has just come in,” Ridley shouted back. “He’s in the locker room.”
Frost dashed down the corridor and into the locker room. Shelby, busy ramming something into his locker, whirled around with a start. “You frightened the life out of me, Mr. Frost,” he said, quickly slamming his locker door and turning the key.
Hello, thought Frost, what are you up to now, my lad? When he had time, he’d check. “Got a job for you, Shelby. See me in my office—now.”
Back in the office, Wells, fighting hard against the effects of the three brimming mugfuls of Scotch, was insisting that Mullett would have to be told about the MP’s son. “Let me arrest him first, then tell him,” replied Frost.
“Mr. Mullett won’t like that,” said Wells.
“I don’t really believe I was put on this earth just to make Mr. Mullett happy,” replied Frost. Shelby walked in, and his eyes lit up when he saw the drinks and the food.
“Grab a sandwich and get this inside you,” said the inspector, draining his mug and filling it up for the constable. “Don’t sip it, swig it you’re going straight out again. The hit-and-run victim is dead. Do you know if any of the witnesses could identify the driver?”
Shelby bit into a sandwich. “No, sir. All they saw was the car roaring off.”
“We’ve checked the registration,” Frost told him. “The motor belongs to Roger Miller, the MP’s son, and he’s trying to kid us his motor was stolen and he wasn’t driving.” He pushed the car-theft report into Shelby’s hand. “I want all these details checked, double-checked and then checked again, right? We’re dealing with a slippery sod, and I want to be one jump ahead of him.”
“Right, sir,” confirmed Shelby, raising his mug in salute.
“I want this bastard nailed, right?”
“You’re not being objective, Jack,” said Wells, wondering why his headache was starting up again. “He might be innocent.”
“Don’t complicate matters, Bill. I haven’t got time to be objective. Hickman is dead, and Miller is as guilty as hell.” He massaged some life into the scar on his face. “The problem is going to be proving it.”
He twisted the scarf around his neck and was halfway across the lobby before he remembered to nip back into his office and stuff most of the remaining miniature spirit bottles into his mac pockets.
“There are a lot of thieving bastards in this station,” he explained. Then he took one of the miniatures and handed it to the sergeant. “Send this down to Wally Peters with my compliments. Tell him to have a goodbye drink to Ben Cornish.”
Wells exploded. “We don’t give booze to prisoners, Jack. Besides, you know him. One drink and he’ll piddle nonstop all over the cell floor.”
“Your trouble,” said Frost reprovingly, “is that you expect everyone to be too bloody perfect.”
Roger Miller lived in Halley House, a newly built, multi-storeyed block of expensive service flats. Webster parked the Cortina alongside a public call box on the opposite side of the road and looked out at the towering hulk of Halley House, which loomed ever upward to the night sky. At that hour of the morning the only lights showing came from the entrance hall on the ground floor. “What’s your plan of campaign?” he asked the inspector.
Frost grunted and shifted in his seat. He didn’t use plans of campaign. His method of working was to close his eyes, lower his head, and charge. “Haven’t given it a thought, son,” he admitted. “We go in, chat him up, and see what happens.”
“If I were in charge,” said Webster pointedly, indicating that his way was the right way, “I wouldn’t mention the hit-and-run. I’d let him think we were here about his allegedly stolen car.”
“What’s that supposed to achieve?”
“It could lull him into a sense of false security. When he’s off his guard, we wham into him about the hit-and-run.”
“Then he cracks up, breaks down and confesses, like they did in those Perry Mason films?” Frost pursed his lips doubtfully. “I’m afraid not, son. He’ll know what we’ve called for the minute we poke our sticky fingers in his bell push.”
“How will he know?” demanded Webster.
“Because you don’t get two CID men calling for a chat at this hour of the morning just because someone’s taken your motor for a walk.” He drummed a little tune on the dashboard with his fingers. “But I can’t think of anything better, so we’ll try it your way. You conduct the interview, I’ll just chip in with the odd remarks as and when the muse grabs me by the privates.”
“If I’m going to question him, I want to know what sort of person he is,” said Webster, a firm believer in groundwork.
“His father is stinking rich, a Member of Parliament, and a pompous slimy bastard. Master Roger is exactly the sort of son a pompous slimy bastard deserves. He’s arrogant, he’s nasty, and he gets away with murder because of his old man. And if that didn’t make you hate him enough, he also seems to be able to pull the most fantastic birds with throbbing tits and nipples sticking out like sore thumbs.”
“Sounds a right little charmer,” grunted Webster, “but I reckon I can handle him.”
Frost unhitched his seat belt and opened the door. “I’m sure you can, my son. But if you feel like giving him a welt, warn me so I can look the other way and swear blind I never saw anything. Come on, let’s get over there.”
The wind tried to push them back as they raced, head down, across the road. Some sort of down draught caused by the design of the twenty-three-storey block created a whirlwind effect at the base, and they had to fight against it.
Three marble steps led up to bronze-and-glass doors which were security-locked and could only be opened with a key, or if one of the tenants pressed a release button from his apartment. Frost shook them until they rattled, but they refused to open. Through the plate glass they could see the red-carpeted lobby, the reception desk, and the lift. Beside the main doors was a bank of bell pushes marked with the flat numbers. Miller’s number was 43. Frost gave the appropriate button a jab. Nothing happened. He tried again, then stepped back to stare up at the rows of windows. No lights were showing.
“Everyone’s asleep,” muttered Webster.
“Not everyone, son,” said Frost, “When you’ve knocked down and killed some poor old sod, you don’t go to sleep. You stay awake and plan the lies you’re going to tell the fuzz when they call.” He wedged his thumb in the bell push and leaned his weight on it for a good minute. “That should wake the bugger up.”
It didn’t wake the bugger up. No response. “He’s either not in or he’s determined not to answer,” said Frost.
“Well, if he won’t answer the door, there’s not much more we can do,” said Webster.
Frost withdrew his thumb and looked at all the bell pushes. At the bottom was a button marked Caretaker. He thought for a moment, then smiled. “You come with your Uncle Jack and I’ll show you a way of getting inside someone’s place that they never taught you at police college.”
Wondering what the old fool was up to now, Webster followed him back across the road to the phone box. Frost draped his handkerchief over the receiver and dialled the number of Denton Police Station.
“Denton Police,” answered a tired-sounding Sergeant Wells.
“I’m phoning from outside those new flats at Halley House,” said Frost in a low voice. “There’s a man on the balcony of the fourth floor trying to break into one of the apartments.”
“Can I have your name please, sir?” asked Wells as Frost whipped away the handkerchief and hung up.
“Back to the car, son, quick.”
In the car, Frost’s hand hovered expectantly over the handset, snatching it up as Control called through.
“Control to Mr. Frost, come in, please.”
“Frost.”
“Ridley here, sir. We’ve had a report of someone trying to break into the flats at Halley House. You’re near there, aren’t you?”
“Right outside,” answered Frost. “We’ll attend to it right away.”
The caretaker, an obsequious Uriah Heep in a thick grey dressing gown, kept yawning and jingling his bunch of keys like the jailer at the Bastille. “This is most disturbing,” he said. “The tenants won’t like it one bit. But how could anyone climb up to the balconies from the outside?”
“These cat burglars can get up anywhere,” said Frost, wishing the man would just give him the keys and go. “It was the third balcony along the fourth floor.”
“I’ll come up with you,” said the caretaker. “I don’t want any of my tenants to be disturbed. It’ll give the place a bad name.”