'You're bloody right — there's no chance,' she said, slamming the door. Her husband gave an apologetic smile and hurried in after her. They could hear her strident voice berating him non-stop as they worked. 'I bet she's fetching his pipe and slippers,' said Frost.
Liz Maud had stopped off at her flat on the way back from the hospital. The old boy hadn't been very helpful, simply confirming what little his wife had already told them. The smell of cooking from the hospital kitchen had brought on the nausea and she was sick in the car-park. There was no putting it off any longer. She opened up the pregnancy testing kit and read the instructions.
Collier and Jordan had shifted much of the covering earth and were now down on their knees, brushing dirt away carefully so as not to disturb the position of the bones. 'I think we've uncovered it all now, Inspector,' called Jordan.
Frost mooched over then looked down glumly. There appeared to be a complete skeleton, minus the head, lying full length. He tossed the skull to Jordan so he could put it in position. 'Great Plague victim,' he pronounced firmly.
'A bit later than that, I think,' said Collier.
'Fell out of a Zeppelin then. Eighty years old if it's a day.'
The back door opened and Dr McKenzie, the duty police surgeon, toddled out. Frost gave him a cheerful wave and hissed for Collier to nip out and move the area car if the doctor had parked his own in front. McKenzie had been known to put his own car accidentally into reverse when driving off, especially when too many grateful patients had given him a drop of something to keep out the cold. His florid complexion, slightly unsteady gait and a strong smell of whisky suggested the cold had been well and truly kept out this morning. 'What have you got for me, Inspector?' he asked as he accepted one of Frost's cigarettes.
'Stone Age skeleton,' said Frost, showing him the bones. 'Too ancient to bother you with really, but we've got to go by the book.'
The doctor hunkered down. 'Stone Age?' he mused.
'At least,' Frost assured him.
'It's a male and he's been dead for some time.'
Frost nodded. 'Trampled on by a dinosaur, I reckon, doc. So he's been dead at least a hundred years?'
McKenzie shook his head. 'Not as long as that.'
'Seventy-one at least?'
'You can't tell by just looking. You'll have to get them over to Demon Hospital. One of their consultants is an expert on bones; he'll be able to tell you.'
'Need we bother with all that?' pleaded Frost. 'Can't we tie it up now?'
McKenzie said nothing. He was gently prodding the back of the skull with a stubby finger. 'The skull's fractured.'
'And that's what killed him?'
The doctor put the skull back in position and rubbed the dirt from his fingers. 'No way of knowing, Jack — he could have been disembowelled and pumped full of arsenic first for all I know. The consultant at the hospital might help you there.'
Frost pulled a face. 'Let's be practical, doc. I've got a dead tom and a missing kid to worry about. I can't waste time sodding around with the Piltdown Man. I know I can't pin you down, but just say, in your honest opinion, bearing in mind that you're smoking one of my fags, that he's been buried for seventy years at least. I might even find a bottle of whisky in the car…'
McKenzie scratched his cheek thoughtfully, but suddenly squatted down again and began scratching away some caked earth from around the wrist. He frowned, scraped away some more, then stood up so Frost could see. 'If I remember rightly, Inspector Frost, Stone Age men told the time by the sun.'
'Shit!' said Frost.
Encircling the brown arm bone was a wrist-watch on a stainless steel strap.
'Am I still on for the whisky?' asked McKenzie.
'Like hell you are,' snapped Frost. 'Go and ask the lady of the house for a cup of tea.' He radioed the station for SOCO and someone from Forensic, then hurled his cigarette on the pile of bones and drove back to the station.
'
Shit!' said Liz. The plastic rod was showing a blue band. She checked the instructions just in case she had misread them. She hadn't. She was pregnant.
5
He was back on the edge of the desk in the murder incident room listening glumly to the string of negative reports from his team. After a day of knocking on doors, making inquiries, they were still unable to put a name to the dead girl. She had paid the first quarter's rent in cash, so the letting agents didn't bother taking up references. The name she had given them was Jane Smith but there was no Jane Smith at the address she provided, which turned out to be a newsagent's. Registration numbers of cars still parked in the vicinity of Clayton Street had turned up nothing that would help: the only registered women owners were in their sixties. The few prostitutes who had staggered from bed to answer the hammering at their doors knew little of the dead girl except she was fairly new on the game and didn't seem to have a pimp and kept encroaching on other girls' territories.
Frost's eyes gleamed up at this last piece of information. 'Follow that through,' he told Hanlon. 'If she encroached on another girl's patch, a pimp might have tried some heavy stuff to warn her off and it went too far.' His eyes travelled round the room. His team all looked tired; the tiredness that comes from working bloody hard and getting nowhere. 'I'm afraid you're all having to go out again tonight when the girls are all out working. Some of those who didn't answer the door this morning might know something.' He yawned. 'Until then, I suggest we all go home and get some kip.'
He stifled another yawn as he watched them file out. He could do with a spot of kip himself. The phone rang and the WPG in the corner answered it. 'Forensic, Inspector,' she called. 'Got some news for you on that skeleton.'
'Can it wait?' he asked, winding his scarf round his neck and edging towards the door.
'They say no.'
'Tell them I said "sod them" and I'll look in on my way home.' As he walked out to his car, shivering in the cold, he wondered where Liz Maud, his partner in the investigation, had got to.
Liz was back in her flat, finishing a phone conversation with the abortion clinic in London — a clinic well away from the prying ears and eyes of Denton Division. They would admit her tomorrow afternoon for an operation to be carried out the following day. All being well, they assured her, she should be back at work within a week. She gave them her credit card details and made the appointment.
Frost mooched into the Forensic lab, all white tiles and stainless steel, ignoring scowls from Harding, the senior technician, who was showing disapproval of the cigarette dangling from the inspector's lips. Frost grunted at the array of bones laid out on the table in front of them to form a human skeleton.
'It's complete,' said Harding proudly.
'Glad we've got the full set,' said Frost without enthusiasm. The grinning skull, cleaned of dirt, showed yellow fangs. Frost puffed smoke into the nose cavity and watched it emerge in swirls from the eye sockets.
'I'd prefer it if you didn't do that,' sniffed Harding.
Frost pinched out the cigarette and dropped it into his mac pocket. 'Right. Just tell me his name, address, inside leg measurement and who killed him, and I'll be on my way.'
A thin smile from Harding. 'We can't tell you that, Inspector, but we can tell you quite a bit about him.' He picked up part of the arm bone and showed Frost where it had been sawn neatly through. 'The consultant at Denton Hospital did that for his tests. In his opinion we have the skeleton of a man in his early thirties.' As Frost shrugged disinterest, Harding replaced the bone carefully in position, then pointed to the brown-stained leg bone where a crack showed near the ankle. 'See that fracture? He broke his ankle a few weeks before the time of death.'