Without raising his eyes from his correspondence, Mullett flicked a curt wrist toward a chair and deliberately took his time signing his letters, reading them through with studied slowness, and blotting them carefully afterward.
He heard Frost fidget in his chair. Good. The display of his superior's displeasure and the humiliation of being ignored were having the desired effect. His pen crawled at a snail's pace to intensify the torture.
More fidgeting sounds from Frost.
Mullett's pen crawled on.
The sound of a match being struck.
A match? Mullett's nose twitched. A smoke-ring gently nudged his pen and drifted across his desk. He followed it with incredulous eyes.
This was intolerable. Frost was smoking. Without even asking permission-which would have been icily refused- he was smoking, leaning at ease in the chair, swinging an unpolished shoe from side to side. He gave Mullett a reassuring smile.
"When you're ready, Super…"
Mullett winced. He hated being addressed as "Super". Everyone knew it but Frost.
"Put out that cigarette," he snapped with such ferocity that the cigarette immediately dropped from Frost's startled lips and landed on the carpet. There was a smell of burning wool from the blue Wilton. Frost ground at the pile with his dirty shoes and managed to distribute a mess of broken cigarette and charred wool over a wide area. He moved his chair to cover up the burn and smiled inquiringly at Mullett.
"You wanted to see me, sir?"
As soon as Frost had gone, Mullett would go down on his hands and knees and inspect the damage. In the meantime he contented himself with a long hard stare.
"I wanted to see you more than half an hour ago. You've kept me waiting, Inspector."
"I had to have a look at Bennington's Bank. Someone jemmied their door."
"I would have thought your Divisional Commander's summons took priority. And you weren't at the briefing meeting!"
A theatrical smiting of palm to freckled forehead. "The meeting? Clean forgot all about it, sir."
Mullen took the envelope from his drawer. "I've had a complaint about you, Inspector." He unfolded the memo. "From Superintendent Gibbons of the Police Training Center-"
Frost's blank expression masked his relief. This was a comparatively trivial matter. He'd been asked over to the training center to speak, as an experienced officer, to new recruits and to give them practical hints that would assist them in their chosen career.
"So, you told them how to fiddle their car expenses," accused Mullett.
"1 only mentioned it in passing, sir."
"In passing, or not, that was what you were talking to them about when Superintendent Gibbons entered the lecture room. 1 was ashamed to get his memo. Fortunately he wrote to me confidentially, as a friend, and didn't copy it to H.Q. I'm most concerned about you, Frost. I had occasion to look in your office today. Frankly, I was appalled. The mess, the untidiness… and I found that statistical return that County has been screaming for still uncompleted."
"Ah, yes. I must get around to that. Anything else, sir?"
Yes, there was. Mullett gathered himself for his main at tack.
"Were those the clothes you wore at the training center?"
Frost looked down at his apparel with surprise. "Why. yes."
The superintendent smoothed his mustache carefully as if it was insecurely fixed with spirit gum. "Superintendent Gibbons thought you had turned up in your gardening clothes-"
Frost shot up. "Of all the bloody cheek!"
"It's not a bloody cheek, Inspector! I've been meaning to talk to you about your dress for some time. That mac's a disgrace. And those trousers-when were they last pressed? And as for your shoes…"
Frost tucked his shoes under the chair to hide them from view. "With respect, sir, I'm supposed to be solving bloody crimes, not tarting myself up like a tailor's dummy."
Mullett sighed and slumped back in his chair. How could you get through to people like this? Very carefully, and explaining all the ramifications and dangers, he told Frost about the Chief Constable's nephew.
Sergeant Wells flung open the door to Inspector Frost's office. "You'll be working in here, Barnard."
It was a mess. A tiny dingy office; two desks, buried in paper, a filing cabinet that wouldn't close properly, and a hatrack. The room was overheated by an enormous cast iron radiator running beneath a window that overlooked the car park. The wall calendar still showed the previous month and untidy heaps of paper and opened files carpeted the brown linoed floor.
Wells stepped on to an oasis of virgin lino. "You'll have to get the place tidied up a bit, Barnard. Paperwork was never the inspector's strongest suit."
Clive was speechless. This wouldn't have been tolerated for a single day in London.
The door crashed against the wall and Frost entered, eyes blazing. He kicked a heap of papers and hurled himself into a chair.
"That bloody four-eyed bastard!"
The station sergeant smiled knowingly and gave Clive a broad wink. "Just come from the Divisional Commander, Jack?"
"I'd like to pull his bleeding mustache out, hair by hair." He spotted a fresh memo on his desk, gave it a brief glance, snorted, and screwed it up. It missed the waste-paper basket by a good six inches and joined the other debris on the floor. "Do you know the latest? I've got to wet-nurse the snotty-nosed illegitimate son of our Chief-bloody-Constable.''
Wells grinned and jerked a thumb toward Clive. "Not his son, Jack-his snotty-nosed nephew. And this is him."
Frost overflowed with apologies, handshakes, and offers of cigarettes. "Don't take any notice of me, son. I'm not usually like this-only when I've been rubbed up the wrong way by some horn-rimmed, hairy-lipped, stuck-up cow's son of a Divisional Commander who shall be nameless."
The station sergeant coughed pointedly. There was a newcomer in their midst.
Frost took the hint. "Yes, you're right, Bill, I'm supposed to imbue our young hopefuls with respect for rank even though I haven't any myself. Flaming arseholes-!
He had just noticed Clive's suit.
"One hundred and seven quid," announced Sergeant Wells gravely.
Frost's eyebrows shot up. He tested the material between nicotine-stained fingers and shook his head. "For that money you could have got a proper one, son. And for work the criterion is never wear a suit you wouldn't be happy letting a drunk be sick all over."
Behind an impassive face, Clive's resentment flared. Have your fun, you bucolic sods, he thought. We'll see who has the last laugh.
Frost, who had a cornucopia of tasteless anecdotes to suit every occasion, was telling a story about his early days in C.I.D.
"I'd bought myself this suit from the Fifty Shilling Tailors and the very first day I wore it this little fat drunk lurches up and deposits his lunch all over me. Naturally, I admonished him with a sharp knee to the groin, but that suit never looked the same again."
"It doesn't, Jack," agreed Wells, straight-faced, "and it's about time you had it cleaned."
Frost grinned. "Funny you should mention my clothes, Bill. Our beloved Divisional Commander has just informed me I'm doing the ragman out of a living. I suppose my mac compares unfavorably with that PS107 creation."
"He didn't care for this either," admitted Clive.
"If he said that, son, then I'm going to have to force myself to like it." As he spoke, he worried something on his right cheek with his fingertips.
Clive eyed Frost more closely. The right cheek! He hadn't noticed before. It was scarred. A knot of white puckered scar tissue under the right eye. He found himself staring and pulled his eyes away.
Frost's internal phone buzzed. It was buried beneath the papers on his desk, but he dragged the receiver out by its flex. A terse message from Inspector Allen-would Frost report to his office right away. Click. No "please", just the bare message. Frost reburied the phone. "Another bastard I hate. You might as well come with me, son. Give you a chance to see what a real detective looks like."