“Don’t forget to emphasize in your report that we did everything possible last night,” called Slomon as they were leaving. Frost waved a vague hand. He would report exactly what happened, nothing more, nothing less. He had no doubt that Slomon’s report would dump all the blame on the police, but he hadn’t time to play such games.
They pushed through the swing doors and out into the mortuary lobby, where a side door had been opened to allow the two undertakers to carry a coffined body straight through to the waiting Rolls Royce hearse. Behind his desk the mortuary attendant was booking out the corpse and adjusting his stock records. He was whistling happily as if someone had tipped him a fiver. There was no sign of the death certificate on his clipboard.
Outside the air smelled marvellously fresh and untainted. As they waited for the hearse to move away, Frost said, “Why would anyone want to do that to a poor old sod like Ben?”
“Robbery,” suggested Webster.
“He had bugger all to pinch,” said Frost.
“Drugs?” was Webster’s next suggestion. “Another drug addict wanted Ben’s heroin so he killed him for it?”
For a few seconds Frost stared into space. Webster wondered if he had been listening, but then Frost turned and said, “I’ve been bloody stupid, son. I knew I’d missed something.”
“What?” Webster asked.
“His carrier bag. That’s where he kept all his worldly possessions food, odds and ends, his hypodermic. He was never without it. But it wasn’t with his body last night. Whoever killed him took it.”
He drummed his fingers on the dashboard, then leaned over for the handset and called Johnny Johnson at the station. He wanted to know if Wally Peters was still in the cells.
“No, thank God,” was the reply. “We kicked him out half an hour ago. Now we’ve got all the windows open, and we’re burning sulphur candles and scratching like mad.”
“I want him brought in,” ordered Frost. “Get the word out to all units.”
“Brought in, Jack? Why?”
“We’ve just come from the post-mortem. Ben Cornish was murdered.”
“Murdered?” gasped Johnson. “Why would anyone want to murder him?”
“Probably for the few bits and pieces in his carrier bag,” replied Frost. “It’s missing… and Wally was seen lurking about outside those toilets last night. So I want him.”
“Right,” said Johnny. “Consider it done. By the way, Jack, you won’t be long, will you? Mr. Mullett’s got Sir Charles Miller, his son, and his solicitor sitting in his office, all craving an audience with you about the hit-and-run.”
“Flaming hell!” cried Frost, “I forgot about them. We’re on our way shouldn’t be more than ten minutes.”
He replaced the handset. “Back to the station, son.” Webster reminded him they hadn’t yet called on Ben Cornish’s family. “Hell,” said Frost wearily, ‘we’ll have to do that first.” As they were on their way to the house, he remembered that he had meant to ask Tom Croll some more questions about the Coconut Grove robbery while they were at the hospital. His finger gave his scar a bashing. There was so much to be done, and he didn’t seem to be getting through any of it.
Then he saw her. “Stop the car!”
Webster slammed on the brakes and the car squealed to a halt
A young girl in school uniform was looking into the window of a dress shop. Frost’s hand was moving toward the door handle when the girl turned and stared directly at him.
She was blonde, wore glasses, and looked nothing like Karen Dawson.
“Drive on, son,” said Frost.
Wednesday day shift (3)
Frost banged the knocker a couple of times. This started a chain reaction of noise from inside the house. A dog barked, setting off a baby’s crying. Footsteps thudded down uncarpeted stairs; a sharp, angry shout followed by a yelp from the dog, then the front door opened.
“Police,” said Frost. He didn’t have to show his warrant card. Danny Cornish knew him of old.
Danny didn’t look at all like his brother. Four years younger, stockily built, he had thick black hair and bright red cheeks which betrayed the family’s gypsy origins. His meaty hand was hooked in the collar of a black-and-brown mongrel dog whose immediate ambition seemed to be to sink his teeth into the throats of the two policemen.
Webster stepped back a couple of paces as the dog’s jaws snapped at air. Frost was looking warily at Danny, whose face reflected the savagery and hatred of the dog and who seemed all too ready to let his hand slip from the collar. The mongrel, almost foaming at the mouth, was getting more and more frantic as its efforts to rip the callers to pieces were frustrated.
One eye on the mongrel, his foot ready to kick, Frost said, “You’d better let us in, Danny. It’s about your brother.”
The man cuffed the dog. It stopped barking but, instead, began making menacing noises at the back of its throat, its lip quivering and curling back to expose yellow, pointed teeth.
“Ben? What’s he done now?”
“Don’t let the bleeders in.” Behind him, advancing out of the dark of the passage, they could see a young woman, not much more than nineteen. She carried a ten-month-old baby, its squalling almost drowning the snarls from the near-apoplectic dog. This was Jenny, Danny Cornish’s common-law wife, once pretty, now hard-faced, her features twisted with hate.
His head snapped around to her. “Shove it, for Christ’s sake. And keep that bloody kid quiet!” His angry tone caused the infant to howl even louder, and this, in turn, spurred the mongrel on to greater efforts. Cornish yanked its collar and dragged the animal down the passage where he slung it out into the back yard. As he slammed the door shut, there was a resounding thud as the dog hurled itself against it, trying to get back in.
“In here.” He took them into more noise a small kitchen where a whistling kettle on a gas ring was spitting steam and screaming for attention in competition with a transistor radio blasting pop music at top volume. Favouring neither, he pulled the kettle from the ring and snapped off the radio.
At the sink a gaunt, straight-backed woman of sixty, hair and eyes jet black, a cigarette dangling from her lips, was methodically dicing vegetables with a lethal-looking knife. She didn’t look up as they entered. “It’s the police, Ma,” said Danny. “About Ben.” She turned, hostile and belligerent, then she seemed to read something in Frost’s face. Carefully, she set the knife down on the draining board, then wiped her hands on her skirt. “Sit down if you want to,” she said.
They sat at the stained kitchen table with its cover of old newspapers. Frost fiddled for his cigarettes. He needed a smoke to bolster his courage.
Webster’s foot was nudging something. A large cardboard box tucked out of sight under the table. He bent and lifted it up. An unpacked VHS video recorder. He looked at the man. “I suppose you’ve got a receipt for this.”
Frost winced. “For Christ’s sake, son, there’s a time and a place …”
But he was too late to stop Danny from snatching an old Oxo tin from the dresser and emptying the contents out on the table in front of the detective constable. “Yes, I have got a receipt.” He scrabbled amongst odd pieces of paper, then, in triumph, stuck a printed form under webster’s nose. “Here it is. You’d better check it in case it’s a forgery.”
Webster took the receipt, read it briefly, then handed it back. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry you haven’t caught us out, you mean?” The receipt was stuffed back in the Oxo tin. “Now say what you’ve got to say and get the hell out of here.”
Stone-faced, Webster stared out through the uncurtained kitchen window into the back yard, which was strewn with parts of a dismantled motorbike. The dog had given up trying to break down the door and was nosing a