“Look out!” called Frost and Webster braked abruptly as the headlights swooped down on the bulk of something directly in their path. It was Shelby’s patrol car, the Ford Escort, looking lost and miserable in the darkness.
Cautiously, they approached. The driver’s door gaped open; a stream of police-channel chatter flowed from the radio. Frost’s torch beam pried inside. The keys swung from the ignition, a clipboard with the day’s standing instructions lay on the passenger seat. He picked up the handset and radioed through to Control to report they had arrived at the scene.
“Any sign of Shelby?” Johnson asked anxiously.
“Not yet,” replied the inspector.
“Don’t move!” called Webster urgently. “Just look down, by your feet.”
About an inch or so from where Frost was standing the beam of Webster’s torch glinted on something. The ground was wet. Stained with red. Frost dropped to his knees to examine it closer. He dabbed it with his finger. It was blood. A lot of blood.
“And look there!” called Webster, swinging his torch up to the rear-door window of the patrol car.
The window was a crazy paving of shattered glass, milkily opaque. Embedded in the glass, also held in the paint work of the door, were tiny flattened pieces of metal. Lead pellets, identical to the pellets found in the wall at the pawnbroker’s. Ingram’s theory wasn’t looking so farfetched now.
“Shit!” said Frost. He returned to the handset. “Johnny. It doesn’t look too happy, I’m afraid. There’s blood and shotgun pellets all over the place. You’d better send a full team down here right away.”
Within twenty minutes the area was cordoned off and was droning with mobile generators that fed the many floodlights illuminating the scene. Men from Forensic were crawling, inch by inch, over the car. Scene-of-crime officers were taking photographs with blinding blue flashes, dusting for prints and circling blood splashes and lead pellet pockmarks with white chalk. A group of off-duty men who had spent most of the previous night and this morning combing Denton Woods on their hands and knees now scoured the scrubland on their hands and knees.
Frost, leaning against his Cortina, watched gloomily, the smoke from his cigarette spiralling upward. This was the time for experts and specialists and for attention to detail, so he kept well out of the way. Webster, who had been talking to a couple of the Forensic men, came over to join him.
“Forensic says the ground’s too hard to leave any proper impression, but there are traces of a second car. The other vehicle was ahead of Shelby’s patrol car, probably blocking the road. It looks as if Shelby stopped, got out, and was fired on as he walked toward the other car.”
“Then where is he?” asked Frost.
“Probably been taken away in the other car. There are marks where something was dragged.”
“Why?” said Frost, scratching his head. “Why not leave him?” He looked up. “Hello… what does that toffee-nosed git want?” One of the Forensic team, a man with long grey hair, was waving Frost over to the abandoned car.
“Preliminary report, Inspector,” he announced briskly. “The blood on the ground and the blood splashed on the car is group B, which is Police Constable Shelby’s group. The quantity of blood spilt suggests the wounding must have been extensive. Obviously, without knowing the area of the wounding, we can’t be more specific. From the quantity of pellets we have recovered it seems pretty definite that only one cartridge was fired, and from the flattening of the pellets and the spread, I think we can safely say that the gunman was not much more than nine feet away from the patrol car. In other words, he would have been standing about… here.” He moved to a point some nine feet away and marked it with his heel. “Our reconstruction is that the other car had already stopped. Shelby got out of his vehicle and walked toward the other car. The gunman climbed from his car and shot your policeman, who fell to the ground, bleeding extensively. The gunman then dragged Shelby to his own car and drove off with him.”
Frost looked down at the darkening pool which sluggishly reflected the overhead lights. “Any idea how long the blood has been there?”
“I’m sorry, Inspector, I should have said. About four to five hours.”
Frost nodded gloomily. This would tie in with the time Stan Eustace was speeding away from the pawnbroker’s.
“We’d like to take the car back for detailed examination,” said another of the Forensic team.
“Sure,” agreed the inspector, trying to work out what he should do next. Everyone was looking for the red Vauxhall Cavalier, and until that was sighted all he could do was wait.
Two more cars pulled up. Mullett emerged from his silver grey Rover at the same time as Allen and Ingram climbed out of their black Ford. Like an army detachment, all keeping perfect step, they marched purposefully toward Frost.
“Nasty business,” said Mullett after peering into the abandoned Escort and examining the blood puddle. Allen, not trusting the garbled version he would get from Frost, took the situation report direct from Forensic before bustling back to join the Divisional Commander.
“Anyone who has lost that amount of blood is going to need medical treatment, and damn quickly,” Allen snapped. “I take it you’ve warned all doctors and hospitals, Frost?”
“Yes, I did manage to think that out for myself,” said Frost.
“Hospitals and doctors all advised.”
Missing with his first barrel, Allen fired the second. “And you’ve got a car watching Eustace’s house? He’s bound to try and sneak back.”
Bull’s-eye! thought Frost ruefully. “Actually we were just on our way there.” He began to move toward the car.
“No. You stay here,” said Allen, thinking what a feather in his cap it would be if he were the one who arrested
Eustace. “This requires a police marksman, like Sergeant Ingram.” He swung around to Mullett. “We’ll need to draw a revolver from the armoury, sir. Would you arrange the necessary authorisation?” And with the Divisional Commander’s agreement, he yelled for Ingram to join him and trotted off to his car.
Good bloody riddance, thought Frost, watching them drive away.
“Nasty business,” said Mullett again.
A squawk from a car radio. One of the uniformed men picked up the handset and answered the call, then waved and yelled, “Air Frost. Control wants to speak to you urgently.”
“Right,” said Frost, leaving Mullett with Webster, neither of whom could think of a thing to say to the other. Mullett dredged his mind for some innocuous small talk. “Getting on all right?” he said at last.
“Yes, thank you, sir,” replied Webster tonelessly, his eyes fastened on Frost, who was leaning against the car, the handset to his ear, his expression revealing that something was terribly wrong.
Frost walked slowly back to the Commander, his face grim. “Mr.
Mullett,” he said.
Mullett felt the cold of approaching bad news and shivered. “Yes, Frost?”
“PC Shelby, sir. They’ve found him in a ditch about three miles from here, just off the new Lexington Road.”
“Is he all right?” whispered Mullett. A silly question because he already knew the answer. The expression on Frost’s face simply screamed it out.
Frost looked down at the blood on the lane. “No, sir. He’s dead.”
“That must be him,” said Webster as the car headlights picked out the figure of a man flagging him down. The man in a thick overcoat and muddy boots was a farm labourer. He had found the body.
“He’s down here,” said the man, his boots clomping as he took them down a winding lane that snaked back to the farm where he worked. They followed in silence. Tall boundary hedges on each side made the lane very dark. A little way down, and they could hear the gurgle of water. It reminded Frost of the previous night when he’d followed Dave Shelby down those steps to the body of Ben Cornish. The clomping of boots stopped. The man pointed to where the lane started to make a lazy curve and where a drainage ditch, some two feet deep, hugged the side of a hedge-bordered field. From behind the hedge the plaintive lowing of cattle quivered gently in the darkness.