Susan put the mug down on the desk. “Terry Duggan. He tried it on in the car. She ran off, but he followed and raped her.”
Webster’s eyes flashed. “The bastard!”
“He looks lovely when he’s angry, doesn’t he, Sue?” murmured Frost. He thought for a while, tapping his cigarette on his thumb. “My money wasn’t on the boy friend.”
“Then you were wrong, weren’t you?” said Webster with an ill-concealed sneer.
“I’m always wrong,” admitted Frost. He studied his cigarette, decided he had tapped it enough, and popped it in his mouth. “She’s positive it was Terry?”
“She’s confused, but she swears it was him. I don’t think she actually saw him. He jumped, threw something over her face, and started to strangle her. When she came to, there was Terry staring down at her.”
“But that could have been when Terry came back to look for her,” said Frost thoughtfully. “And if it was Terry, then he’s infringed the “Hooded Terror’s” copyright the cloth over the face, the strangling.. ”
“A copycat crime,” said Webster, determined that Frost should be wrong, “He read about it in the papers and copied it.”
The phone rang. Webster answered it. The hospital. Swabs taken from Wendy Raynor were on their way to Forensic.
Frost opened the door and yelled to Bill Wells, “Has the doctor seen Terry Duggan yet?”
“He’s with him now,” the sergeant yelled back.
“We’ll soon know,” said Frost, once again swivelling from side to side. “The thing is, she never actually saw him.” Then he grinned. “Did I ever tell you that old wartime joke about the girl munitions worker who was raped in the blackout?”
Jokes! thought Webster. A seventeen-year-old’s been raped and he makes jokes.
“The police asked the girl who did it, and she said she couldn’t say because it happened in the blackout. “But I can tell you this,” she said, “the rapist was definitely one of our foremen.” “How can you be so sure?” asked the fuzz. She said, “Because he kept his bowler hat on all the time and I had to do all of the work.” He guffawed with laughter as he reached the punchline. Webster maintained a stony silence, but Susan was convulsed and almost choked over her coffee.
A tap on the door, and the duty doctor, a plump little Welshman, came in.
“You’ve just missed a good joke,” said Frost, wiping his eyes. “The girl who was raped in the blackout ‘
“And the foreman did it,” said the doctor, dumping his bag on Frost’s desk. “You tell me that every time there’s a rape.” He knocked some papers off a chair and sat down. “I’ve examined this young man, Duggan. There are fingernail scratches down his face and wrists, which I’m sure you’ve already noticed. I’ve taken a blood sample, which is on its way to your forensic laboratory, together with his clothes. And he has had sex within the last couple of hours.”
“Which is more than I’ve had,” said Frost. He pinched his nose. “Well, young Webster, it’s beginning to look as if you might be right. I suppose we’d better see what he’s got to say for himself.”
Terry Duggan, wearing only a police-issue red-and-grey blanket and a loaned pair of gym shoes some four sizes too big, leaped up angrily as Frost and Webster entered the interview room.
“What’s the bloody game?” he demanded. “I’ve been stripped, my clothes have been taken away, I haven’t been allowed to leave, and no-one will answer my questions.” He paused for breath. “And another thing, that bleeding doctor did more than examine my scratches. He got bloody intimate.”
“He gets carried away,” said Frost. He opened a folder and drew out a typed sheet. “Is this the statement you have just made to the police officer?”
Terry squinted at it. “Yes.”
“And you’re sticking by it?”
The youth jutted out his chin defiantly. “Of course I am.”
“Then I must ask you to sign it.” Frost borrowed a ball-point pen from Webster and passed it to Duggan, who scrawled his name at the foot of the document. Frost and Webster added their signatures as witnesses.
Frost tucked the statement back in the folder, then shook his head reproachfully. “You’re a silly sod, you know?”
“Why?” asked the youth, staring him out.
“You’re in serious trouble, my son, and you make it worse by telling us a pack of lies.”
Terry clutched the blanket closer to his body. “What do you mean, about me being in serious trouble?”
Frost motioned for Webster to break the news.
“Wendy tells us it was you who raped her. Sonny Jim.”
Duggan looked first at Webster, then at Frost. They both stared back coldly. He tried to laugh, but it wasn’t very convincing. “Rape? Me? Do me a favour. I’ve never had to fight for it in my life. If they don’t give it willingly, then I don’t bloody want it.”
“You fought for it in the car,” said Frost.
Duggan shrugged. “They always put on a show of reluctance at first they don’t want you to know that they’re as eager for it as you are. But as soon as Wendy started marking me with her nails, I packed it in.”
‘… and you drove straight back home,” read Frost from the statement.
“That’s right.”
“Parked your motor outside your house and, in a highly emotional but unfulfilled state, you crept into your little bed and went straight off to sleep?”
“That’s right.”
“So, by 11:30 you were indoors and in bed and your motor was parked in the street outside?”
A slight hesitation, but again the answer was “Yes.”
“And yet when Mr. Raynor, Wendy’s father, called at your house at midnight, there was no car outside, and although he kicked and banged on the door, there was no answer.”
“I didn’t know her old man called round my place,” exclaimed Terry.
“Well, he damn well did,” chipped in Webster. “But you weren’t in, were you? You were down in the woods raping his seventeen-year-old virgin daughter. Don’t try to deny it, Sunshine, the medical examination you just had proves — it.”
Terry sat down heavily in the chair and readjusted the blanket. It was prickly and scratchy and was making him feel itchy all over. “All right, so I didn’t go back home right away. I went back to the disco to see if there was any spare talent knocking about. I didn’t want the night to be a complete washout.”
“Any witnesses who saw you back in the disco?” asked Webster.
“No. I never got inside. I met this bird in the car park. She didn’t look very tasty, in fact she looked a bit of bleeding rough, but at least she was available, so we got inside the car and we had it away.”
“Her name and address?” barked Webster.
“No idea, squire. I’d never seen her before and I hope I never see her again. If I hadn’t been so desperate, I wouldn’t have touched her with a barge pole.”
“Didn’t you drive her home afterward?”
“Home? That’s a joke. She’d been sleeping rough. She asked me to drop her off at the main road so she could thumb a lift up north on a lorry.”
Webster snapped his notebook shut and walked across to the youth. He grabbed the blanket, screwing it tightly in his fist, and jerked him to his feet. “You must think we’re bloody stupid, Duggan. You tried it on with Wendy. She wouldn’t have it, which was an insult to your virility, so you chased after her, choked her, broke her jaw, and raped her.”
“I didn’t. If there’s no bleeding co-operation, then I don’t want it,” cried Duggan, trying to pull away, but the detective constable’s grip was vice like
“Before you leave this room you are going to give us a signed statement admitting everything.”
“I want a lawyer,” said the youth.
Webster snatched away the blanket. “When you’ve given us a statement, you bastard.”
The phone rang. As Webster had taken over the questioning, Frost had to answer it. He listened, thanked the caller, then hung up.
Webster, his fists clenched, was standing toe to toe with the naked Duggan, his face red and angry. The youth looked terrified.