‘Anyone at home?’ yelled Frost down the passage.
A door at the head of the stairs opened. ‘Up here, Inspector.’ Tubby Detective Sergeant Arthur Hanlon beckoned them in.
A bedroom, its bed askew in the middle of the floor, the sash window open and Roberts, the Scene of Crime Officer, bending, engrossed in dusting the bottom edge of the frame for fingerprints. There were fragments of a smashed blue and white vase on the floor and the top centre dressing table drawer gaped open, its riffled contents spewing out.
By the dressing table a hooked-nosed woman in her mid-forties wearing a quilted dressing gown was talking earnestly to PC Jordan.
The scene was familiar. This burglar seldom varied his technique. A quick in and out job. Straight for the dressing table to grab indiscriminately whatever jewellery was instantly available, then, starting with the top centre drawer, he looked for the ‘cleverly hidden’ cache of notes which couldn’t be trusted to the bank and which were nearly always at the back of the top centre drawer. Then out again, the whole operation lasting a maximum of five minutes. A familiar scene, but this time with a difference. There was blood everywhere, on the floor, on the bedding and on the curtains.
‘How’s the old girl?’ asked Frost.
‘Not good,’ said Hanlon, honking loudly into a handkerchief and dabbing a sore-looking nose. ‘Stab wounds and a possible fractured skull. The ambulance men don’t think she’ll regain consciousness.’
‘Damn,’ muttered Frost, but his eyes were looking over Hanlon’s shoulder at the SOC man, who was offering an irresistible target. ‘Excuse me a moment.’ Frost tiptoed over and accurately jabbed a nicotined finger at the seam of the tight trousers. ‘How’s that for centre?’ he roared.
Roberts shot up, hitting his head on the window sill. He spun round angrily, only to grin when he saw Frost. ‘It’s you, Inspector. I might have guessed.’
Gilmore raised his eyes to the ceiling in exasperation. A potential murder investigation and the fool was indulging in schoolboy games. Well, someone had to act responsibly. ‘What happened?’ he asked Hanlon.
‘The victim is Alice Ryder, a widow aged eighty-one. She occupies the top half of the house, a Mr and Mrs Francis live downstairs. Mr Francis is on night work — that’s the wife over there.’ Hanlon nodded towards the woman with Jordan. ‘She found the old lady.’ Sensing their eyes on her, the woman came over, anxious to relate her part in the drama.
‘I woke up about quarter-past three to go to the toilet and I noticed her light was still on. I was worried, so I went up to check. Her telly was going full blast and her bedroom door was open. I looked in…’ She paused, shuddering at the recollection. ‘There she was, on the floor and blood everywhere. I couldn’t get to the phone quick enough. She was terrified of anyone breaking in… she must have had a premonition.’ She wrapped her dressing gown tighter around her. It was cold in the room with the window open. ‘That’s all I can tell you.’
‘You didn’t see who it was who did it?’ asked Gilmore. She gave him a thin smile. ‘I’d have mentioned it if I had — just in case it was important.’
‘Sarcastic cow!’ seethed Gilmore when she had gone.
‘I thought she was quite nice,’ observed Hanlon, who was irritated at the way the new bloke kept trying to take charge.
‘I didn’t like her nose,’ said Frost, ‘or her dressing gown.’ He nodded to the SOC officer. ‘Surprise me. Tell me that this time he left fingerprints.’
Roberts shook his head. ‘He wore gloves, as always.’
‘Consistent bastard!’ snorted Frost. ‘All right, Ted, paint me a word picture. Let’s have a reconstruction.’
‘Right,’ said Roberts. ‘The old lady was in the front room watching the telly. Our intruder gets in through the bedroom window, but this time he was unlucky. She’d stuck that blue and white vase on the window ledge and as he clambered in, he knocked it over and it fell to the floor. The old lady heard it, came charging in to see what it was, so he went for her with this…’ Roberts clicked open his ‘evidence case’ and pulled out a sealed, transparent polythene bag. Inside the bag was a black-handled kitchen knife, its blood-smeared blade honed to razor sharpness. ‘It was on the floor, by the bed.’
‘You’re saying he had this knife in his hand when the old girl came charging in?’ When Roberts nodded, Frost shook his head. ‘I can’t buy that, Ted. If I was climbing through windows I wouldn’t want a lethal thing like that in my hand… I could cut my dick off.’
‘He wouldn’t carry it in his hand when he was climbing. He’d have it in a tool bag.’
‘All right,’ said Frost. ‘I’ll pretend to accept that for the moment. Then what happened?’
‘He stabs her, but she puts up a fight. He drops the knife in the struggle, punches her repeatedly in the face then finishes her off by smashing her skull in with a cosh or something.’
Frost’s finger prodded away at the scar on his cheek as he worried this over. ‘I can’t believe it’s the same bloke who did all the others. He’s never resorted to violence before.’
‘He hasn’t been disturbed before,’ offered Hanlon. ‘His other victims were damn lucky they never heard anything.’ He sniffed and dabbed his nose. ‘I think I’ve got the flu.’
‘No, you haven’t,’ said Frost firmly. ‘We’re too busy. Do we know what’s been taken?’
Jordan stepped forward. ‘Same as all the others. Bits and pieces of jewellery — Mrs Francis has given me a description — and money. Mrs Francis doesn’t know how much, but says the old lady always kept a fair amount of cash by her — a couple of hundred at least.’
‘I want this bastard,’ said Frost. ‘People who kill for a couple of hundred lousy quid are dangerous.’ He looked at the bed, knocked askew with splodges of blood all over the pillows and sheets. Someone must have heard or seen something. ‘Get as many men as you want from Bill Wells and start knocking on doors.’
‘I’ve already asked. He says he can’t spare anyone until the next shift.’
‘He’s bloody well going to have to. We’re not going to wait for her to die, Arthur, she might sod us about and linger. We’re going to anticipate. This is a murder enquiry as of now. I want a team knocking on doors, I want Forensic, I want someone by the old girl’s bedside night and day in case she can give us a description, if I’ve forgotten anything, I want that as well.’
While Hanlon radioed the station, he ambled over to the open window and looked out on to a small rain-puddled yard. Below him was the dustbin used by the man to gain entrance. It reminded him of the yard in Jubilee Terrace and the mummified corpse. What a bloody night this had turned out to be. First the mummy, then Paula Bartlett… Paula… Flaming heck! The autopsy! He daren’t be late for that. He was in enough trouble with the pathologist as it was.
He checked his watch. Ten to four. They could just do it if they ignored fiddling details like adverse traffic lights. ‘I’ve got to leave you to it, Arthur. Just solve the case and tie it all up before the end of the shift.’ He dashed across to the door. ‘Come on, Gilmore. We’ve got an autopsy to watch and ten minutes to get there.’
At four o’clock on a cold, dark, rainy morning, the mortuary lights gleamed across the driveway to the hospital and bounced off the black, supercilious shape of the pathologist’s Rolls Royce. Frost’s mud-coated Cortina shuffled in and parked alongside. ‘Don’t forget.. ours is the one on the left,’ he reminded Gilmore.
The night porter, a gangling twenty-year-old with an embryonic moustache, snatched a cigarette from his mouth and dropped it to the floor as the two detectives walked in. He thought it was that toffee-nosed pathologist who had already rebuked him for smoking on duty.