A Killing Frost (21 page)

   Frost pushed himself out of his chair and hurried to the door. He was doubly pleased. First, because Miss Fowler wasn’t going to prison, and second because, in all the excitement, Beazley had forgotten all about the latest withdrawal of five hundred quid.

   A terrible scream interrupted his thoughts.

   He dashed to the window. Six storeys down, in between the toy cars, lay a crumpled figure. People were running towards it.

   There was red. Lots of red.

   He sensed Beazley standing behind him, staring down in disbelief at the scene below.

   Frost ran to the vacant office where he had left Miss Fowler, crashing into Morgan on the way. The DC was carrying a glass of water and seemed completely oblivious to the commotion outside. Frost barged him out of the way and flung the office door open. The room was empty. The window was wide open, the blind flapping. Behind him, Morgan was looking round the empty room, puzzled. ‘Where is she, Guv?’

   ‘Get an ambulance, you silly sod,’ screamed Frost. ‘Get a bloody ambulance . . .’

   The ambulance took the body straight to the morgue.

Frost sat slumped in the passenger seat, listening to Morgan saying for the umpteenth time how sorry he was. ‘She said she felt faint, Guv. She asked for a drink of water. I had no idea - ’

   ‘You
never
leave a prisoner unattended,’ snapped Frost. ‘You should know that. Now bloody shut up!’
Why the hell am I taking it out on Taffy? he thought. If she’d told me she felt faint, I’d have done exactly the same thing. I should have warned Taffy. She said she’d rather die than go to prison. If she’d only waited a couple of minutes . . . 

   ‘I’m sorry, Guv,’ said Morgan yet again.

   ‘For Pete’s sake, shut up.’ Frost rammed a cigarette in his mouth. This had all the makings of another lousy day.

‘How did it go, Jack?’ asked Wells as Frost crashed through the lobby doors.

   ‘Don’t bleeding ask!’ he snarled.

   In his office he thudded down in his chair and looked for something to hurl at the wall to give vent to his burning fury. She said she’d rather die than go to prison, so why didn’t he warn Taffy to be on his guard?

   He looked up as Wells came in.

   ‘Morgan’s told me what happened, Jack. You can’t blame yourself.’

   ‘I do blame my bloody self.’ He shook a cigarette from the pack, stuck it in his mouth and passed another one over to Wells. ‘I expect there’ll be a bleeding inquiry.’

   ‘Bound to be, Jack, but they can’t blame you. You hadn’t charged her or arrested her, so she wasn’t in police custody. They can’t blame you.’

   ‘Maybe they can’t blame me, but I flaming well do. She said she’d rather die. I should have been on my guard.’

   ‘All right, so she said she would rather die. You had no reason to think she meant there and then. But if there is an inquiry, Jack, I wouldn’t mention that if I were you.’

   Before Frost could answer, the door swung open and Skinner burst in. He glowered at the two men. ‘What’s this - a flaming mothers’ meeting?’ He jabbed a finger at Wells. ‘The lobby’s unattended. Why aren’t you there? And take that bloody cigarette out of your mouth.’

   ‘Just going,’ mumbled Wells, snatching at the cigarette and squeezing past Skinner, who watched him scurry down the corridor.

   ‘Bloody useless,’ he snarled, before turning to Frost.

   ‘Another of your sod-ups, I understand? A prisoner killed herself in police custody?’

   ‘She wasn’t a prisoner and she wasn’t in custody,’ Frost told him. ‘She hadn’t been arrested or charged.’

   ‘Hmmph,’ sniffed Skinner, as if it made no difference. ‘I’ve got some things to sort out with Superintendent Mullett this afternoon, so I won’t be able to attend the post-mortem of that body you found on the railway embankment. I want you to attend on my behalf and give me a report. And try not to balls it up, for a change.’ He spun on his heel and left the office.

   Skinner was closing the door behind him when the sound of a soft, wet, juicy raspberry followed him out. He immediately charged back into the office to find Frost apparently deeply engrossed in paperwork. Frost looked up, eye brows raised, as if surprised at the DCI’s return.

   All right, sunshine
, thought. Skinner grimly.
You’ll be laughing on the other side of your face soon.

   He closed the door, waited a minute or two, his hand hovering over the door handle, in case of a repetition, then made his way back to his own office.

Frost was on his way to drag Taffy Morgan from the canteen when Wells called after him, ‘Hold on, Jack.’

   ‘I’m in a hurry,’ he replied. ‘I’m late for the autopsy.’

   ‘It’s about the autopsy. Skinner wants the new WPC to attend.’

   ‘No bleeding way,’ replied Frost. ‘This is going to be a stomach-heaver. What’s left of the body stinks to high heaven - it’s almost liquid. It would be enough to put anyone off the force, let alone a nineteen-year-old probationer.’

   ‘That’s what Skinner wants, I reckon. He’s finding all the shitty jobs for her. Oh, and he said to get that stupid Welsh prat to do the archive collation in her place.’

   ‘Stupid Welsh prat?’ echoed Frost. ‘Mullett isn’t Welsh.’

   Wells grinned. ‘You know what prat he means, Jack. And about the girl - you’ll have to take her. You can’t ignore an order.’

   ‘All right, I’ll take her, but she can wait in the car outside. There’s no way she’s being subjected to this.’

There were three cars outside the mortuary. Frost parked behind a blue Citroën and Kate Holby made to get out.

   ‘Hold on, love. Sit down a minute.’ He handed her his mobile phone. ‘I want you to wait out here and take any phone messages.’

   ‘DCI Skinner said - ’

   ‘I know what Skinner said, love. Have you ever attended an autopsy?’

   She shook her head.

   ‘They’re super-shitty at the best of times, but this one is super-shiny de-luxe, which is why Skinner has ducked out of going and sent me instead. You don’t want to see it, I promise you.’

   She stuck her chin out defiantly. ‘I don’t want favours shown to me just because I’m a girl. I want to be a good cop.’

   ‘Listen, love, I’ll tell you what a good cop does. He does all the lousy stinking jobs that have to be done, but if he can get out of doing them, he bloody well gets out of doing them. I’ve seen strong men faint at post-mortems which were Mills and Boon stuff compared to this. I’ve come near to crashing out once or twice and I’ve seen hundreds. Skinner would love for you to go out cold. Well, I’m not going to let it happen. A good cop can lie his head off when it’s necessary. I shall tell him you watched it all the way without turning a hair. His disappointment will make my day.’

   ‘I still want to come inside,’ she said stubbornly.

   ‘Then I’m ordering you to stay in the car.’

   ‘You can’t do that.’

   ‘I know I can’t, love, so I’m saying “please”.’ He put on his appealing, heartfelt expression, which had never failed him before. It didn’t fail him this time. She stayed in the car.

The first thing that hit him when he pushed open the door of the autopsy room was the thudding sound of pop music. Bending over the autopsy table, a green-gowned, plump bottom was jiggling in time to the music.
Flaming hell!
thought Frost.
A bit of a change from misery-guts Drysdale
.

   The second thing that hit him was the stench of putrefying flesh, a sickly smell that lingered for days and clung to your clothing and hair, no matter how much you scrubbed. There could be no doubt which body she was examining. Overhead the extractor fans were going full blast, but they were fighting a losing battle. Leaning against the tiled wall, looking as green as his gown, was the forensic photographer.

   The pathologist turned at his approach. ‘Hardly Chanel No. 5,’ she shouted over the din of the music. When she saw that he couldn’t hear her, she turned the volume down and said it again. She pointed to a ball of cotton wool and a jar of Vicks VapoRub. ‘Stick it where you think it will do the most good.’

  He grinned, pulled a couple of plugs of cotton wool, dunked them in the Vicks jar and gratefully inserted them in his nostrils. The pungent aroma made his eyes water, but mercifully over powered the smell of decaying flesh.

   ‘I started without you - I hope you don’t mind,’ she said.

   ‘With this one you can finish without me,’ he told her. The body on the slab was a disgusting mess. He wondered how she could possibly glean anything from it.

   ‘My name’s Carol,’ she said.

   ‘Jack,’ he told her. First-name bleeding terms now!

   The scalpel slashed a path in the neck. ‘Hard to believe it, but I reckon she was a pretty girl once,’ she said.

   Frost nodded. ‘I can believe it.’ He had seen the rotting bodies of too many pretty girls in his time with Denton CID. ‘Can you tell me any thing we don’t know?’

   She gave him a knowing grin and lowered her voice so the photographer couldn’t hear. ‘I’m free tonight, did you know that?’

  
Bloody hell!
thought Frost.
A sex-starved pathologist propositioning me over a rotting corpse. I’ll be dating the undertaker’s daughter next.
‘I’ll pick you up at seven,’ he said. ‘But what about the body?’

   ‘Female, eighteen to twenty-three, about five foot four. She probably had quite a good figure. Been dead some four to five weeks, perhaps a little longer. The entomologist should be more precise. She looked after her teeth, so you’ll be able to identify her from her dental records and then get a positive ID from her DNA.’

   ‘Cause of death?’ asked Frost.

   Carol pointed to the neck section she had opened with the scalpel to expose bone. ‘Look!’

   Frost didn’t want to look that closely, but bent forward. Putrescence and slime. He was glad of the nose plugs. Then he saw what she meant and nodded. ‘The cicoid?’

   ‘Yes - it’s fractured. It would take quite a bit of pressure to do that. Mind you, a karate chop would do it, but the fracturing would be different. It’s invariably damaged with strangulation. I’d say manual strangulation, in this case. Even with a cadaver in this condition I’d expect to see ligature grooving, but there doesn’t seem to be any.’ She shrugged. ‘If the body was in any sort of decent shape, I’d be certain, but in this condition I can only say more than likely.’

   She beckoned the photographer over and they stepped back so he could take photographs of the splintered neck bone.

   The photographer finished and returned to his wall position. Frost and the pathologist moved back to the body. She pointed. ‘The neck has been chewed and ripped - probably by a fox - which doesn’t help much.’

   ‘Was she sexually assaulted?’

   Again she shrugged. ‘No way of knowing. I can’t even tell you if she was a virgin. She was naked when you found her, but I can’t say if she was stripped before or after death.’

   ‘No remnants of clothing under the body when we moved it,’ Frost told her.

   ‘Then almost definitely she was naked when she was dumped. The odds are she was sexually assaulted, but I can’t give you any proof.’

   He tried not to watch as she cut, poked and probed the squelching tissue, but the body was a magnet for his eyes.

   At last she straightened up. ‘This is a waste of time. I can’t tell you any more.’ She dictated some notes into a small cassette recorder, then called for the mortuary attendant to remove the body.

   Frost waited for the overhead fans to cleanse the air before pulling out his nose plugs. Carol peeled off her surgical gloves and dropped them in a waste bin. She then shrugged off the green gown. Under it she was wearing a grey sweater and black slacks. The sweater was well filled and for a brief moment Frost’s thoughts were not of death and decay.

   ‘Seven o’clock, then,’ he whispered, feeling quite excited at the prospect.

   She gave a conspiratorial nod. ‘I’ll be waiting.’

Outside, in the fresh air, he lit up a cigarette and inhaled a lungful of smoke. With a cry of disgust he snatched the cigarette out of his mouth and hurled it to the ground. The smoke tasted of Vicks VapoRub. He scrubbed his nose with his handkerchief, but to no avail. He could smell, he could taste, nothing but Vicks. Cursing loudly, he made his way to the car.

   Kate was waiting for him. She looked up and smiled, glad her boring wait was over. ‘How did it go?’ she asked.

   ‘Not as many laughs as I hoped,’ said Frost. The car radio was playing the local news:

   . . . hunt for the three missing teenagers has entered its third day. The officer in charge of the investigation, Detective Chief Inspector Skinner, says there is no obvious link between the disappearance of Jan O’Brien, and Debbie Clark and her boyfriend Thomas Harris, who have not been heard of since they left home three days ago . . .

   ‘Switch it off,’ said Frost. ‘They’re dead.’

   Kate turned and looked at him, her eyebrows raised in query

   ‘Just a feeling,’ he told her. ‘One of my fallible intuitions. But I reckon they’re dead. Stone-cold bleeding dead.’ He had had enough of death. He was glad it wasn’t his case any more.

‘How did you get on with the new pathologist?’ Wells asked as Frost passed through the lobby.

   ‘As pathologists go, she’s not a bad bit of crumpet,’ Frost told him. ‘I think she fancies me.’

   ‘Well, after looking at decomposing bodies all day, I reckon even you might look tasty.’

   ‘I’m taking her out to dinner tonight,’ said Frost.

   ‘Let’s hope she washes her hands first,’ grinned Wells.

   ‘Frost!’ Skinner’s acidic bawl echoed down the corridor and a moment later he strode through the door. ‘How is it you’re always talking, never working, when I see you, Sergeant?’ he snapped at Wells.

   Wells quickly grabbed a pen and started totting up non-existent columns of figures.

   ‘How did the new tart like the post-mortem?’ Skinner asked.

   ‘She was brilliant,’ lied Frost. ‘I was ready to pass out, but she never turned a hair - not even when she saw the maggots.’

   Skinner’s nose wrinkled in disgust. ‘She can see a few more, then.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Mullett wants to see you in his office in half an hour. No excuses, Frost. You be there.’