“Now beat it.”
The tramp’s face fell. “You’ve got to arrest me, Mr. Frost. Put me in a cell for the night. I looked at that nurse… saw all of her body. I lusted after her. I thought carnal thoughts. I deserve to be locked up.”
“You shouldn’t have run away, Wally. She said she fancied you. Now hop it, or I’ll tell my colleague to boot you out.”
‘ Please, Inspector. Look at the weather out there. You’ll be signing my death warrant if you send me out in that!” He pointed dramatically to the windows, and, on cue, the wind lashed and hammered its fists at the glass.
Against his better judgement Frost relented. “All right, Wally. Go to the station and tell Sergeant Wells I want you locked up for the night. Tell him I suspect that you’re an international diamond smuggler.”
The dirt around the tramp’s mouth cracked as he bur bled his gratitude. They watched him shuffle painfully down the corridor, his arms folded around the carrier bag which contained everything he had in the world. Then the dead face of Ben Cornish swum filmily in front of Frost, the eyes insisting, “You bloody fool… you’ve missed something.” As he later realized, Wally had shown him the answer, but he hadn’t seen it.
Webster was saying something.
“What was that again, son?”
Webster’s quartz digital was shoved under his nose. “Four twelve. We’d better get back to the station.”
Frost winced. The station meant the crime statistics and the overtime returns and all the other mountains of paper work that had to be attended to. He thought hard. Surely there was something else they could do instead of going back. Then he remembered Tommy Croll, the security guard from The Coconut Grove. Why not interview him? That should waste a good hour.
“I’m looking for a bloke called Croll,” he told the nurse as she pulled sheets down from the rack. “He came in tonight with concussion.”
“Then you’re in luck, Inspector,” she said. “He’s in my ward.” She frowned at her tiny wristwatch. “But it’s very late.”
“I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important, Nurse,” said
Frost. And what was more important than avoiding the crime statistics?
They followed her into a small ward where a ridiculously young student nurse was crouched over a desk with a shaded lamp, anxiously watching over the twin rows of sleeping, snuffling, and moaning patients, and hoping none of them died on her before the other nurse’s return.
“All quiet,” she reported with relief. No sooner had she said this than one of her patients called out and started bringing up blood.
“Another one for the morgue,” Frost whispered to Webster.
“Mr. CrolPs in the end bed,” called the nurse as she and the student dashed off to attend to the crisis.
Their shoes squeaked as they tiptoed over the highly polished floor to the far bed where a weasel-faced man, his forehead decorated with a strip of sticking plaster, was sleeping noisily. Frost undipped the charts from the end of the bed and studied them. “Hmm. Both ends seem to be in working order. Give him a shake, son.”
Webster’s gentle shake was about ten on the Richter scale. Croll snorted, choked in mid snore then jerked his eyes open, flicking them from side to side as he tried to identify the shapes looming over him in the dark. He groped for the bedside lamp, blinking in surprise as he switched it on.
“Hello, Tommy,” said Frost, his voice generously laced with insincere concern. “How are you?” He scraped a chair across to the bed and sat down.
“Mr. Frost!” Croll fumbled under the pillow for his wristwatch. “It’s quarter past four in the morning!”
“I know,” agreed Frost. “As soon as they told me you were in here, I dropped everything to come and see how you were. You’re a hero, Tommy, a bloody hero.”
“Hero?” echoed Croll uneasily. He never knew how to take the inspector.
“The way you fought like a tiger to try and stop Mr. Baskin’s money being nicked. How’s the poor head?”
Croll touched the sticking plaster and winced. “Terrible, Mr. Frost.
Stabbing pains like red-hot knives.”
Frost nodded sympathetically and stared down the ward. The two nurses had managed to calm the patient and were now straightening and smoothing the bedclothes. “Tell us what happened, Tommy.”
“Not a lot to tell, Mr. Frost. It was all over so quickly.”
“That’s what my girl friends used to say, Tommy.”
Croll forced a grin. Frost always made him feel uneasy. And he wished the inspector would tell him who the bearded bloke hovering in the background was. He had such a miserable face, he looked like an undertaker. “It was like this: Bert went to fetch the car, like always, and I locked myself in. After about five minutes I get the signal. Naturally I think it’s Bert.”
“Naturally,” agreed Frost.
“I unbolts and flings open the door so he can come in when, wham, I’m welted a real right crack round the ear hole.”
“Did you see who hit you?” the bearded bloke asked.
“No, I didn’t but I sodding-well felt him,” replied Croll, his hand again tenderly touching the sticking plaster. “It knocked me out cold. The next thing I know, I’m in here with this roaring great headache. I can stand pain, Mr. Frost, but this is just as though my skull was split open.”
“I saw a bloke with his skull split open once,” said Frost. “A bus had gone right over his head a double-decker, full of passengers even eight standing on the lower deck.
You could hear this scrunching and this squelching and then blood and brains squirted out all over the place. His eyes popped right out of their sockets. We found them in the gutter. I had a job eating my dinner that day.” He switched on a smile as he recalled the nostalgic moment, then abruptly switched it off. “What did you do with the money, Tom?”
Croll, still shuddering from the description of the bus victim, was knocked off balance by Frost’s sudden change of direction. “Money? What money, Mr. Frost?”
“The 5,132 quid you and Bert Harris pinched,” said the bearded one.
“May I drop dead if I’m not telling the truth, Mr. Frost Croll began, his hand on his heart, but Frost cut in before he tempted fate further.
“It had to be an inside job, Tommy. Whoever did it had to know the arrangements and the signal for tonight. Only three people knew: Mr. Baskin, Bert, and you…”
Croll’s head sunk back on the pillow, his eyes showing how hurt he was. “That’s a wicked thing to suggest, Mr. Frost. Look at me wounded in the line of duty. I nearly had my head smashed in.”
“But it wasn’t smashed in enough,” explained Frost patiently. “If your brains had been splattered all over Mr. Baskin’s floor and halfway up his wall, well, I might believe you, but as it is…”
And before Croll realized what he was up to, Frost’s hand had snaked out and ripped the sticking plaster from his forehead. Croll yelled and clapped a hand over his wound, but Frost had already seen it.
“A waste of bloody sticking plaster, Tommy. I’ve seen love bites from toothless women cause deeper wounds than that.”
“I’m injured internally, Mr. Frost,” said Croll, putting a finger to his forehead to see if he was bleeding. “It don’t show on the outside.”
More activity in the ward. The Asian doctor, who seemed to be the only doctor on duty in the entire hospital, flapped in and made for the patient who had called out. Frost now saw that the front of the student nurse’s uniform was one dark, spreading stain of blood. The other nurse was rigging up apparatus for a blood transfusion. She signalled to Frost that she wanted him to leave.
“We’ll chat again tomorrow, Tommy,” said the inspector, moving away from the bed.
Croll pushed himself up. “Mr. Frost, I didn’t do it. I swear.. ”
“I believe you,” beamed Frost. “Just tell me where you’ve hidden the money and I’ll believe you even more.”
When they reached the main corridor they had to press back against the wall so that an orderly, pushing a patient in a stretcher, could pass by. The patient, head swollen by a turban of bandages which were almost as white as his bloodless face, looked a hundred years old.