‘My God!’ croaked Compton.
It was a funeral wreath of white lilies, yellow chrysanthemums and evergreen leaves. Attached to it was an ivory-coloured card, edged in black. A handwritten message neatly inscribed in black ink read simply, and chillingly, Goodbye.
‘The sod doesn’t waste words, does he?’ muttered Frost, passing the wreath to Gilmore. He stared out at the empty, dead garden, then pulled the curtains together. The night air had crept into the room and that, or the wreath, was making him feel shivery. ‘Did you see anything of the bloke who did it?’
‘No. Jill said she’d heard someone prowling around, but I couldn’t spot anyone. I thought she’d imagined it, then the glass smashed, then the damned alarm. I saw someone running away, but that was all.’
‘And you’ve no idea who it might be?’
‘I’ve already told you, no.’
Frost scuffed a splinter of glass with his shoe. ‘He’s going to a great deal of trouble to make his point. He must really hate you.. or your wife.’
‘There’s no motive behind this, Inspector,’ insisted Compton. ‘We’re dealing with a nut-case.’
‘Mark!’ His wife calling from upstairs.
‘I’m down here with the police.’
Gilmore pushed himself in front of the inspector. ‘A quick question before your wife comes in, sir. Simon Bradbury — the man you had the fight with in London…’
‘Hardly a fight, Sergeant,’ protested Compton.
‘Well, whatever, sir. It seems he’s got a record for drunkenness and violence… and now we learn that his wife — the lady you obliged with a light — has given him the elbow. Any reason why he might believe you were the cause of her leaving him?’
Compton’s face was a picture of incredulity. ‘Me? And Bradbury’s wife? I lit her damn cigarette over four weeks ago and that is the sum total of our relationship. You surely don’t think Bradbury’s responsible for what’s been happening here? It’s ridiculous!’
‘The whole thing’s bloody ridiculous,’ began Frost gloomily, quickly cheering up as the door opened and Jill Compton entered in a cloud of erotic perfume and an inch or so of nightdress. Her hair hung loosely over her shoulders and while Frost didn’t know how breasts could be called ‘pouting’, pouting seemed a good word to describe Jill Compton’s breasts as they nosed their way through near-transparent wisps of silk.
She smiled to greet Frost then she caught her breath. ‘Oh my God!’ She had seen the wreath. Her entire body began to tremble. Mark put his arms round her and held her tight. ‘I can’t take much more of this,’ she sobbed.
‘You won’t have to, love,’ he soothed. ‘We’ll sell up and move.’
‘But the business…’
‘You’re more important than the bloody business.’ He was squeezing her close to him, his hands cupping and stroking her buttocks, and Frost hated and envied him more and more by the second.
From somewhere in the house a phone rang. It was 00.39 in the morning. Everyone tensed. The woman trembled violently. ‘It’s him!’ she whispered. Her husband held her tighter.
‘I’ll take it,’ Frost barked. ‘Where’s the phone?’
Mark pointed up the stairs. ‘In the bedroom. We switched it through.’
Frost and Gilmore galloped up the stairs, two at a time. The bedroom door was ajar. Inside, the room held the sensual smell of Mrs Compton. Frost snatched up the onyx phone from the bedside table and listened. A faint rapid tapping in the background. It was the sound of typing. At this hour of the morning? And indistinct murmurs of distant voices. Frost strained to listen, trying to make out what was said. There was something familiar… Then a man s voice said, ‘Hello.. is there anyone there?’ and he flopped down on the bed in disappointment. The caller was Sergeant Wells.
‘Yes, I’m here,’ replied Frost. ‘Sorry if I’m out of breath. I’m in a lady’s bed at the moment.’
‘Got a treat for you, Jack. Another body.’
‘Shit!’ said Frost. The only body he was interested in just now was Mrs Compton’s. ‘What’s the address?’ He snapped his fingers for Gilmore to take it down.
‘The body’s out in the open. It was dumped in a lane at the rear of the corporation rubbish tip.’
‘Ah,’ said Frost. ‘Sounds like a job for Mr Mullett. I’ll give you his home phone number.’
‘Don’t mess about, Jack. Jordan and Collier are waiting there for you. Could be foul play, but I’ve got my doubts.’
‘Collier? You’re pushing that poor little sod in at the deep end?’
‘I had no-one else to send. Both area cars are ferrying the wounded down to Denton Casualty after the pub punch-up. There’s blood and teeth all over the floor down here.’
‘Excuses, excuses,’ said Frost, hanging up quickly. ‘Why do I always get the shitty locations? Rubbish tips, public urinals… I never get knocking shops and harems.’ Well, he was in no hurry for this one. He stretched himself out on the bed and inhaled Jill Compton’s perfume. ‘Nip down and tell the lady of the house I’m ready for her now,’ he murmured to Gilmore. ‘And ask her to wash her behind. I don’t fancy it with her husband’s sticky finger-marks all over it.’
‘Don’t you think we should hurry?’ asked Gilmore.
‘I can’t work up much enthusiasm about a body in a rubbish dump.’ Reluctantly, he hauled himself up from the soft, still warm bed and had a quick nose around. Other people’s bedrooms fascinated him. His own was cold, cheerless and strictly functional, a place for crawling into bed, dead tired, in the small hours, and out again in the morning to face a new day’s horrors. But here was a bedroom for padding about, half-undressed, on the soft wool carpeting, and for making love on the wide divan bed with its beige velvet headboard. By the side of the bed, a twin-mirrored, low-level dressing table where pouting-breasted Jill Compton would splash perfume over her red-hot, naked body, before sprawling on the bed, her hair tumbled across the pillow, awaiting the entrance of her rampant, adulterous sod of a husband.
He shook his head to erase the fantasy and walked across to the wide window to look out, across the moonlit garden. The wind had dropped and everything was quiet and still. ‘Any chance the bloke we saw could have been the husband?’
‘The husband?’ Gilmore’s eyebrows shot up. What was the idiot on about now? ‘Smashing his own window? Scaring the hell out of his own wife?’
‘I just get the feeling there’s something phoney about this.’
‘I don’t share your opinion,’ sniffed Gilmore. ‘And in any case, there was no way it could have been the husband. He was with his wife when the window was smashed.’
‘Then I’m wrong again,’ shrugged Frost.
Downstairs, husband and wife were in close embrace, the shortie nightdress had ridden up to pouting breast level and hands were crawling everywhere.
Frost scooped up the wreath and passed it over to Gilmore. ‘We’ll see ourselves out,’ he called.
They didn’t hear him.
Police Constable Ken Jordan, his greatcoat collar turned up against the damp chill, was waiting for them at the lane at the rear of the sprawling rubbish dump. The lane was little more than a footpath with rain-heavy, waist-high grass flourishing on each side. In the background the night sky glowed a misty orange.
‘Blimey, Jordan, what’s that pong?’ sniffed Frost, inhaling the sour breath of the town’s decaying rubbish. ‘It’s not you, I hope?’
Jordan grinned. He liked working with Frost. ‘Pretty nasty one this time, sir. The body’s a bit of a mess.’
‘I only get the nasty ones,’ said Frost. ‘Let’s take a look at him.’
They followed Jordan, stumbling in the dark, as he led them down the narrow path, the wet grass on each side slap ping at their legs, ‘The old lady died, sir — at the hospital. I suppose you know.’