Night Frost Read online

  The bedroom door opened, releasing a murmur of angry voices. DC Burton came out. He seemed relieved to see the inspector and carefully closed the door behind him.

  ‘What have we got?’ asked Frost, shaking rain from his mac.

  ‘Suicide, but our new super-sergeant is treating it as a mass murder.’

  ‘He’s new and he’s keen,’ said Frost. ‘It’ll soon wear off.’

  The bedroom was small, neat and unfussy, with white melamine furniture and pink emulsioned walls. A glowering Gilmore was watching Dr Maltby, red-faced and smelling strongly of alcohol, who was pulling the sheet back over the body on the single bed. Gilmore scowled at Frost’s entrance. He’d asked for a senior officer. He didn’t expect this oaf. ‘I thought you were off duty,’ he muttered.

  ‘They dragged me out of bed. So what’s the problem?’

  Gilmore opened his mouth to speak but the doctor got in first. ‘There’s no problem, Inspector. It’s a clear case of suicide.’ He jerked his head towards a small brown glass container on the bedside cabinet. ‘Overdose of barbiturates. She swallowed the lot.’ He glared at Gilmore as if daring him to contradict.

  ‘You don’t look very happy, Sergeant,’ observed Frost, wondering why the man had requested a senior officer to attend a routine suicide.

  ‘There was no suicide note,’ Gilmore said.

  ‘It’s not obligatory,’ snapped the doctor. ‘You can commit suicide without leaving a note.’ He was tired and wanted another drink. What he didn’t want was complications. ‘It’s suicide, plain and simple.’ He moved out of the way so the inspector could get to the body.

  ‘I’m glad it’s simple,’ said Frost, pulling back the sheet, ‘I’m not very good when things are complicated.’ Then his expression changed. ‘Oh no!’ he said softly, his face crumpling. ‘I never realized it was a kid.’

  ‘Fifteen years old,’ said Gilmore. ‘Everything to live for.’

  She lay on top of the bed. A young girl wearing a white cotton nightdress decorated with the beaming face of Mickey Mouse. Over the nightdress was a black and gold Japanese-style kimono. Her feet were bare, the soles slightly dirty as if she had been padding about the house without socks or shoes. A Snoopy watch on her left wrist ticked softly away. It seemed wrong. Almost obscene. Mickey Mouse and Snoopy had no place with death.

  Frost gazed down at her face, trying to read some answers. A pretty kid with light brown hair gleaming as if newly brushed, spread loosely over the pillow. Gently, as if afraid to wake her, Frost touched her cheek, flinching at the hard, icy cold feel of death. ‘You silly bloody cow,’ he said. ‘Why did you do this?’

  He switched his attention to the bedside cabinet. Standing on top of it was a bright red, twin-belled alarm clock, its alarm set at 6.45, a pair of ear-rings, a Bic pen, an empty, brown pill bottle and, over to one side away from the bed and almost on the edge of the cabinet, a tumbler with an inch of water remaining. Frost crouched to read the label on the pill container. Sleeping Tablets prescribed for Mrs Janet Bicknell.

  ‘They were prescribed for the mother,’ Gilmore explained. ‘There were about fifteen or so left. The kid got them from the bathroom cabinet.’

  Frost sank down on the corner of the bed and lit up a cigarette. ‘Any doubts it’s a suicide, doc?’

  ‘If the post-mortem shows a lethal dose of barbiturates in her stomach, no doubts whatsoever. If you could speed things up, Jack, I’d like to get off home. I’ve had one hell of a day.’

  ‘Right,’ said Frost. ‘How long has she been dead?’

  ‘Rigor mortis hasn’t reached the lower part of the body yet. That and the temperature readings suggest she’s been dead some nine to ten hours.’

  Frost checked his watch. It was now a few minutes past five. ‘So she died between seven and eight o’clock this morning?’

  ‘She was still alive at half-past seven, this morning,’ interjected Gilmore.

  ‘Then she was dead pretty soon after,’ snapped the doctor. His head was throbbing and Gilmore was getting on his damn nerves.

  ‘Slow down,’ pleaded Frost. ‘Let’s take it step by step, starting with her name.’

  Gilmore opened up his notebook and read out the details. ‘Susan Bicknell, fifteen years old. In the fifth form at Denton Comprehensive.’

  ‘And who found the body?’

  ‘Her stepfather, Kenneth Duffy.’

  ‘Stepfather?’

  ‘Yes. Her father died two years ago. Her mother married again in March.’ Gilmore paused, then added significantly, ‘He’s a lot younger than the mother.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Frost. ‘I’m getting the scenario . . . teenage girl, randy young stepfather. But let’s get the doc out of the way first. I don’t want to shock him with our rude talk.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing more to tell you,’ said Maltby, dropping a thermometer in his bag and snapping it shut. ‘You’ll have my written report today. Any joy with our poison pen writer?’

  ‘No,’ Frost told him. ‘I’ll go and see Wardley in hospital when I get a chance.’ The doctor lurched towards the open door. A curse as he appeared to miss his footing on the stairs.

  ‘He’s drunk!’ hissed Gilmore.

  ‘He’s tired,’ said Frost. ‘The poor bastard is overworked. He never refuses a call day or night and people take advantage of him.’ He whispered something to Burton who chased after Maltby and called, ‘Give us your keys, doc. I’ll drive you home.’ Maltby handed them over without a murmur.

  ‘Follow on in the Panda and take Burton back to the station,’ Collier was told. Frost lit up another cigarette. ‘So what’s on your mind, son?’

  ‘The suicide note’s missing,’ said Gilmore.

  ‘What makes you think there was one?’

  Gilmore steered the inspector across to the bedside cabinet. ‘One ballpoint pen.’ He pointed. On the floor, by the bed, was a pad of Basildon Bond writing paper. ‘One notepad.’

  ‘So she had the means to write a suicide note,’ said Frost. ‘But it doesn’t follow she wrote one. I don’t have to do a pee just because I pass a gents’ urinal.’

  ‘Look at the glass with the water in,’ continued Gilmore. ‘Right on the edge of the cabinet. If she was lying in bed when she took the pills, she’d have replaced the glass on the side nearest to her. If she took them before she lay on the bed, she’d have put the glass somewhere in the middle.’

  ‘I’m sure this is all significant stuff,’ Frost said, ‘but I’m such a dim sod I can’t see it.’ He wandered over to the window and opened it to let out the smell of tobacco smoke. In the darkened street below, the street lights were just coming on.

  Gilmore sighed inwardly. He knew the man was thick, but surely he didn’t have to explain every detail. ‘I’m saying the glass was moved by someone else. I’m saying she left a suicide note and weighed it down with the glass. The stepfather found the body, saw the note and because it implicated him, he destroyed it. There’s two sets of prints on the glass. I’m laying odds they’re the girl’s and the stepfather’s.’

  Frost squinted at the glass. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gilmore. ‘I’ve got a feeling about the stepfather. He’s hiding something. I just know he is.’

  Frost nodded. Feelings and hunches were things he knew all about. His eyes slowly traversed the room. Yes, there was something wrong. He could sense it too. ‘All right, son, let’s go and have a chat with the stepfather.’ He pitched his cigarette out of the window and closed it, then took one last look at the still figure on the bed before covering her with the sheet.

  They were in the lounge, a large, comfortable room with heavy brown velvet curtains drawn across a bay window. From the other room the heart-breaking sound of sobbing went on and on. Frost stared gloomily at the blank screen of a 26-inch television set and wished they could get this next part over. He looked up as the stepfather, Kenneth Duffy, a dark-haired, boyish-looking man in his late thirties, came in.

  Duffy’s eyes w
ere red-rimmed and his cheeks glistening wet. He had been crying. Drying his face with his hands, he dropped heavily into an armchair opposite the two detectives. ‘My wife’s too upset to talk to you.’

  ‘I quite understand, sir,’ murmured Frost, sympathetically. ‘I know you’ve already explained everything to my colleague, but I wonder if you’d mind telling me. I understand you’re a van driver with Mallard Deliveries?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And it was you who found Susan?’

  ‘Yes.’ His voice was so low they had to lean forward to catch what he was saying. ‘I found her.’

  ‘What time would this be?’

  ‘Time? This afternoon . . . just after four. She was on the bed. I touched her. She was cold.’ He broke down and couldn’t continue.

  Frost lit a cigarette and waited until Duffy was ready to go on. ‘Tell me what happened this morning. Right from the beginning.’

  ‘Susan always got herself up . . . made her own breakfast. She had a half-term holiday job in the new Sainsbury’s supermarket . . . shelf-filling and sometimes helping out on the check-out. She had to clock in at eight and left the house at half-past seven. I’d wait until I heard the front door slam, then I’d get up.’

  ‘You wouldn’t come down until after she had gone?’

  ‘I don’t start work until 8.30. We’d only get in each other’s way.’

  ‘I see,’ said Frost, wondering if there was more to it than that, if Susan was deliberately avoiding being alone with her stepfather.

  ‘I heard her going up and down the stairs this morning, but now I think of it, I never heard the slam of the front door. She always slammed it when she went out. Today she must have gone back upstairs to her bedroom. I came down a little after 7.30, washed, dressed and went to work.’

  ‘And you didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary?’

  ‘No. There was nothing to suggest she hadn’t gone to work.’

  ‘You didn’t look in her bedroom before you left?’ asked Frost, looking for somewhere to flick his ash.

  ‘I had no reason . . . but in any case, she hated people going into her room when she was out. So I went to work and my wife went to work and Susan was upstairs dying.’ Again he broke down.

  ‘So what made you go into her bedroom at four o’clock this afternoon?’ asked Frost.

  ‘I’d finished early and was home just before four. I phoned Susan at Sainsbury’s to remind her about the groceries we needed and they told me she hadn’t been in to work all that day. I suddenly remembered I hadn’t heard that front door slam. I went upstairs and looked in her bedroom.’ He knuckled the tears from his eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ He was apologizing for crying. Frost gave a sympathetic nod and made a mental note to check with Duffy’s firm about him finishing early.

  ‘Have you any idea why Susan should want to take her own life?’

  ‘There was no reason – no reason at all.’

  ‘Was she worried about anything?’

  ‘She seemed a bit edgy over the last couple of days. We thought something had gone wrong at school . . . a row with a friend or something . . . nothing serious.’

  ‘Did she have a boyfriend?’

  ‘Stacks of them – no-one steady.’

  ‘She must have had some reason for killing herself,’ Frost insisted. ‘Family trouble, perhaps? Girls don’t always get on with their stepfathers.’

  ‘We got on fine,’ insisted Duffy. ‘She was happy at home . . . doing well at school . . . everything was right for her.’

  ‘If everything was right,’ said Frost, ‘she’d still be alive.’ He stared at Duffy until the man had to turn his head away. ‘We couldn’t find her suicide note.’

  The knuckles of Duffy’s hands whitened as he gripped hard the arms of the chair to try to stop his body from shaking. ‘There wasn’t one.’

  ‘My colleague here is pretty certain there was.’

  ‘If there had been a note, I’d have found it.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Frost, treating Duffy to an enigmatic smile. ‘Of course you would.’ He studied the glowing end of his cigarette, then casually asked, ‘Was she pregnant?’

  ‘Pregnant? Girls don’t kill themselves these days just because they’re pregnant.’

  ‘It depends who the father is,’ snapped Gilmore.

  Duffy’s head came up slowly, angry patches burning his cheeks. He sprang to his feet, fists balled. ‘What are you suggesting? What filth are you bloody suggesting?’

  Frost stepped between them and pushed Duffy back into the chair. ‘We’re suggesting nothing, Mr Duffy. The post-mortem will tell us if she was pregnant, in which case we might want to talk to you again.’

  ‘I’d like to talk to Susan’s mother,’ said Gilmore.

  ‘No!’ Duffy leapt from the chair and stood by the door to bar their way.

  ‘It’s all right, sir,’ said Frost. ‘It won’t be necessary.’ He jerked a thumb at Gilmore. ‘Let’s go, Sergeant.’

  Gilmore glared at Frost. Right, you sod. Mullett wants the dirt on you, I’ll find it for him. With a curt nod at Duffy, he followed the inspector out. The sobbing from the kitchen was much softer, weaker. The mother had cried herself to exhaustion.

  Outside in the car they watched as a hearse pulled up to collect the body for the post-mortem. Two undertakers in shiny black raincoats slid out the coffin.

  ‘Well?’ asked Gilmore, impatiently. ‘What do we do about it?’

  ‘We do nothing,’ said Frost. Before Gilmore could protest, he explained. ‘Look, son, just on a hunch and without any evidence, you expect me to believe that Duffy’s been having it away with his unwilling, fifteen-year-old, schoolgirl stepdaughter.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Gilmore, biting off each word, ‘that’s exactly what I expect you to believe.’

  Frost took a long drag at his cigarette. ‘If it’s any consolation, son, I agree with you all the way. I reckon he put Suzy up the spout and that’s why she killed herself and that’s why stepdaddy destroyed the suicide note. But we could never prove it. She never made a complaint and now she’s dead.’ He wound down the car window and jettisoned his cigarette end into the gutter. ‘There’s sod all we can do about it.’

  ‘You want proof?’ said Gilmore, his hand on the car door handle. ‘I’ll get you proof. Let me go and talk to the mother. She must have noticed something.’

  ‘No!’ Frost grabbed Gilmore’s hand and pulled it away from the handle. ‘You do not breathe a word of this to the mother. Don’t you think the poor cow’s suffered enough? Let it drop, son. That’s the end of it.’

  Gilmore stared at the rain. ‘So the bastard gets away with it?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Frost. ‘The bastard gets away with it.’ He started the engine.

  The undertakers were sliding the coffin into the back of the hearse.

  The light in the upstairs bedroom window went out.

  The rain bucketed down.

  Monday evening shift

  The internal phone grunted and gave its peevish ring. Automatically Wells picked it up and said, ‘No, sir, Inspector Frost hasn’t come in yet . . . Yes, sir, the minute I see him.’ He banged the phone down and stamped his feet to try and restore his circulation. It was freezing cold in the lobby. The central heating had broken down and wouldn’t be repaired until the following day at the earliest. How he envied all those lucky devils who were down with the flu and were tucked up in their nice warm beds and didn’t have to put up with Mullett bleating every five minutes. He consulted the wall clock. Twenty to ten. Only ten lousy minutes of the shift gone. Still, it was only half a shift. Sergeant Johnnie Johnson was to relieve him at two. So only another four freezing hours of this.

  A roar of poncey aftershave as the new chap, Detective-newly-promoted-to-bloody-Sergeant Gilmore marched up to the desk. ‘Where’s Inspector Frost?’

  ‘No idea,’ beamed Wells, delighted to be so unhelpful.

  Gilmore scowled at the clock.
Frost was ten minutes late already. ‘How do I get a cup of tea?’

  ‘You make it yourself. The canteen’s closed. The night staff are all down with flu.’

  Gilmore scowled again. Detective sergeants didn’t make the tea. He would find DC Burton and get him to do it. As he turned to go he bumped into a woman wearing a red raincoat with the hood up over her head. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, stepping out of her way.

  ‘Yes, madam?’ asked Wells. Then he recognized her and his voice softened. ‘What can we do for you, Mrs Bartlett?’

  ‘I’ve got to see Inspector Allen. It’s very urgent. I’ve news about Paula . . .’

  Gilmore stopped dead. Paula? Paula Bartlett? Of course, the girl on the poster, the missing school kid. ‘Perhaps I can help, madam. I’m Detective Sergeant Gilmore. I’m handling the case in Mr Allen’s absence.’

  She looked up at him, eyes blinking behind heavy glasses, a dumpy woman in her early forties. Her usually pale face was flushed with excitement. ‘Wonderful news. Paula’s alive. I know where she is.’

  ‘Mrs Bartlett . . .’ began Wells guardedly, but Gilmore took her by the arm and drew her away to one of the benches. ‘Where is she, Mrs Bartlett?’

  ‘In a big house, overlooking the woods.’

  His hand shaking with excitement, Gilmore scribbled this down.

  ‘Where did you get this information from?’ called Wells from the desk.

  Gilmore scowled. He was handling this. He didn’t want any interference from the sergeant.

  She turned towards Wells. ‘From Mr Rowley. He’s a clairvoyant.’

  Gilmore’s heart sank. ‘A clairvoyant?’

  She nodded earnestly. ‘He phoned us. He told us things about Paula that no-one would know. He said he suddenly had this mental picture of Paula in a tiny room . . . a tiny attic room. She was being held prisoner. He described the room, the house, everything.’

  ‘I see,’ said Gilmore. He stood up. ‘If you’ll excuse me for a moment.’ He crossed over to Wells and lowered his voice. ‘Do we know a clairvoyant named Rowley?’