The inspector stretched his arms out above his head, then massaged the back of his neck. “You might have helped us there, Tommy.” He heaved himself up from the chair. “You might have helped us a lot. Now, we can either lock you up or set you free and let Mr. Baskin know where you are. What do you prefer?”
“Locked up, Mr. Frost.”
“Well,” smiled Frost as if bestowing a great kindness, ‘as a favour to you.” He shook some cigarettes from his packet and pushed them over, then he called in the uniformed man and asked him to lock up the prisoner. That done, he flopped back into the chair, clasped the back of his neck with his interlocked fingers, and purred contentedly at tjbte ceiling.
“Have I missed something?” asked Webster.
A beam from Frost. “I’ve got a feeling in my water, son. One of my hunches.”
“Amaze me with it,” Webster said without enthusiasm.
“Fancy shoes, son. Brown-and-cream fancy shoes. Roger Miller has got a wardrobe full of them; we saw them when we had that little nose around his flat.”
“Thousands of people have got brown-and-cream shoes,” said Webster as he sneaked a look at his watch. He wanted to be in the canteen for lunch at the same time as Susan Harvey and was hoping that this bumbling half-wit of an inspector wouldn’t detain him much longer.
But Frost had no intention of being hurried. “Try this out for a scenario, son. Roger is in Baskin’s ribs for a lot of money. He knows Baskin will get very nasty if he isn’t paid.”
“We’ve been through all this,” sighed Webster.
“That was when I thought Baskin had nicked Roger’s motor. Just hear me out,” insisted Frost. “Roger hasn’t got the money to settle his gambling debt, so he gets the bright idea of stealing it from Harry Baskin. He gets his girl friend with the mole on her bum to help she’s got all the inside gen and she’s the one who phones pretending to be the nurse, while Roger, in his Stan Laurel mask, does the dirty deed.”
“It’s a possible theory,” sniffed Webster, patently unimpressed and more concerned with getting this stupid conversation over and done with.
“I haven’t finished, son.” Frost stood up and began to pace about the room. “I’ve always worried about the way that licence plate came off the Jag. But what if it was meant to come off?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“They knew what Baskin would do to them if he ever suspected, so they badly wanted an alibi. An alibi that would put Roger miles away. Everyone knows his flash motor. So the girl friend puts on one of Roger’s caps, drives the Jag round and round the old people’s flats, bashing into dustbins, trumpeting away at the horn, making sure no-one could avoid seeing the car. And just in case no-one got the registration number, she chucks the licence plate out of the window for the cops to find. When the police followed it up, Roger would say, “Yes, officer, it was I who caused the public nuisance,” pay his fine and for fifty quid he’s bought himself a cast-iron alibi for the time of the robbery. What went wrong, of course, was the girl knocking down that old man. That sodded everything up. There was no way Roger was going to say he was driving after that.” He sneaked a glance across to Webster to see how this was being received.
It wasn’t being received too well. Webster immediately saw the flaw in the reasoning. “Very ingenious… except for the fact that Miller didn’t owe Baskin any money. He’d settled his debts two days before the robbery.”
Frost stopped dead in his tracks. “Damn and bloody blast!” he shouted. “I’d forgotten all about that.”
The door opened and the sergeant from the motor pool walked in. “Been looking for you everywhere, Mr. Frost,” he said. “You borrowed a car from the pool this morning.”
“Did I?” said Frost, a nasty feeling of more trouble starting to creep up his back.
“Yes, sir. When that stolen Vauxhall was found you wanted to get over there in a hurry. You told us your assistant was using your own car so you took one from the pool and promised you’d bring it straight back.”
“We came back in your Cortina,” said Webster.
Damn! thought Frost. I must have left the flaming pool car down that lane. He patted his pockets for the keys. He didn’t have them. “I must have left them in the ignition,” he admitted sheepishly. “Still, no problem. I’ll nip over and bring it back. I know where it is.”
“You don’t know where it is, Mr. Frost,” the sergeant told him grimly. “At this moment it’s being hauled up from the bottom of a canal in Lexington. Lexington police have arrested two joyriders.”
“Bum holes!” said Frost, now feeling very depressed. “I don’t think it’s going to be my day.”
Thursday day shift night shift
It wasn’t going to be Webster’s day either. Before he had the chance to explain about his lunch date with Susan, he was dragged by the inspector out through the back way to the car park. Frost was anxious to make himself scarce before Mullett learned about the pool car fiasco.
First they went to Denton Hospital to interview the seventeen-year-old rape victim, but she could add nothing to the statement she had already given to Susan Harvey. Indeed, she remained convinced it was her boy friend who had assaulted her, despite the medical evidence to the contrary.
That chore out of the way, Frost directed Webster to some appalling little back-seat transport cafe where they dined on burnt sausages, greasy chips, and tinned peas. To add insult to injury, Webster had to pay the bill for both of them when Frost realized he hadn’t drawn any cash from the bank. The deepening scowl on Webster’s face was threatening to become a permanent feature.
Sulkily slinging himself back in the car, the acidic stewed tea and the stale chip fat fermenting in his stomach, Webster asked the inspector where he wanted to go. He just didn’t care anymore. life was one long round of chauffeuring Frost, teetering from one crisis to the next while having to endure his unfunny jokes about beards and whiskers.
“Demon Woods,” said Frost. “Mr. Mullett is very cross with us because we didn’t search the area for clues last night.”
“It’ll take more than two of us,” grunted Webster, slamming the car door too hard and wincing as acid indigestion made its first tentative stab.
“Only if we do it properly,” said Frost cheerfully, leaning back and puffing contentedly at a cigarette. “Not a bad meal, was it?”
The thin, yellow afternoon sun did little to warm up the woods, and they hunched up inside their coats as they trudged along the path. “You know, son,” said Frost when they squeezed through the bushes and found themselves in the clearing with its wet, flattened grass, “I’ve got a hunch. I reckon he’s going to try it on again tonight.”
“Oh yes?” grunted Webster. He just couldn’t care less. He had had his fill of Frost and was counting the hours until he would be off duty and round to Susan Harvey’s little flat with the door bolted and the phone off the hook.
“The weather’s getting colder,” Frost went on. “He’s going to have to grab his opportunities. If he does his stripping-off act much longer he’ll end up with a frostbitten dick.” He scuffed the grass with his foot, already anxious to be away, but Webster suddenly bent down and tugged at something, a scrap of cloth caught on the lower branch of a bush. He held it out to Frost, who backed away. “It’s not a clue, is it, son? I’m not in the mood for clues.”
By the look of it, the scrap of cloth had been hanging around the woods for years, but Webster slipped it into a small plastic envelope. “I’d like to send this to Forensic… unless you’ve any objection?” His tone dared Frost to demur.
“If it makes you happy, son. Now let’s get the hell out of here before you pick up any more rubbish.” He squeezed back through the gap to the path, while Webster protested that they hadn’t even begun to search the area. “We haven’t got time,” said Frost, hurrying back to the car. “We’re never going to nab this sod by sniffing around for clues. The only way we’ll do it is by catching him in the act in flagrante dick-o, as the lawyers say.”