First Frost (39 page)

And DI Allen, who’d now be in his cramped inspector’s office, beating himself about the head for not having been around when it really mattered. Wells had an idea what that felt like.

The phone rang, disturbing Wells from his reverie. Similar accent, but different code word. Bill Wells looked at his watch, then at the clock behind him. They had been given twenty minutes, and something told him that this time it wasn’t a hoax. He readied himself to make the Tannoy announcement, but before he could speak into the contraption, Sergeant Webster was at the front desk. ‘What now?’ he said.

‘Bomb alert: TA headquarters,’ said Wells.

‘Shit!’ exclaimed Webster. ‘That’s just across the road.’

Frost swore under his breath when he saw it was Simms outside the door to Blake Richards’s private room. Just his luck. He shuffled up, clasping his mac about him, his head clearing by the minute. ‘This what you have to do to get top-class treatment round here – rob a bank?’

Simms gave Frost a disdainful look. ‘Forget to put your trousers on this morning?’

Frost peered down at his bare legs – he was still wobbly on his feet. He’d be for it if the sister caught him out and about. ‘A young nurse helped me out of them last night. Don’t know what she’s done with them.’ He edged up to the door, peered through the small porthole. ‘Conscious, is he?’

‘Yeah,’ said Simms. ‘Can’t move an inch, but he can talk, all right.’

Frost turned the handle, pushed open the door.

‘You can’t go in there. That’s the super’s direct orders.’

‘Look, Simms,’ said Frost, turning back and squaring up to the PC, ‘why don’t you shove off. You’ve been getting on my nerves all week.’ Frost walked into the room, shutting the door in Simms’s face. He knew the constable wouldn’t rush in after him. The boy had no real bottle when it came to it, making do with easy targets. Frost knew his type, all right.

The private room was awash with wires and drips, cylinders and canisters of this and that, an array of monitors flashing and quietly beeping away, all centred around the bed where Blake Richards lay, one tube stuck up his nose.

Frost paused as he noticed the second-floor room had a spectacular view of Denton: there was the clock tower of the town hall, the spire of St Margaret’s, the copper cupola on the roof of Aster’s, the rows and rows of quiet semis, the tall Victorian warehouses lining the canal, the floodlights of Denton FC, the grim sprawl of the Southern Housing Estate and, on the horizon, the brown, autumnal belt of Denton Woods.

He turned back to the bed and leant over Blake Richards. Seeing Frost, his eyes widened, his brow furrowed. Panic slowly crept across his bearded face.

‘Remember me?’ threatened Frost, anger welling up. He was on the verge of pulling out every tube he could find, and then burying Richards under all the equipment he could dump on top of him.

‘I didn’t do it,’ Richards whispered, frightened and hoarse.

‘Didn’t do
what
?’

‘I didn’t kill Bert Williams.’

‘What was that snooker cue doing in the back of your car, then? Covered in Bert’s blood.’ Frost found he was pinching one of the tubes, the tube that ran into Richards’s nose, knowing he was gambling with the facts, but knowing too that Betty Williams needed the truth.

‘Someone borrowed my car that day. It’s my cue, sure, it’s always in the boot – I play snooker. But I don’t know anything about any blood on it. Haven’t used it all week.’

‘What day are you talking about? What day did they borrow your car?’

‘The Saturday, wasn’t it.’

Frost felt a wave of dizziness – perhaps he should have waited until tomorrow before making bedside visits. He let go of the pipe and clutched the railings at the side of the bed, sweating and breathless. With relief he found a half-crushed packet of cigarettes in the pocket of his mac.

‘I was at work all day, Frost. Easy enough to check,’ Richards added, his voice bone-dry and growing fainter.

‘Who are you trying to pin it on now, Richards? I need to know what happened to Bert. I hardly need to remind you that convicts don’t like bent coppers any more than coppers do.’

‘You think I care about that? Look at me! I can’t bleeding move. Paralysed from the waist down.’

‘But you arranged to meet Bert on Saturday, right? Why?’

‘Look, he’d had a tip-off about the Wallop job and he was on to me. Truth be known, we’d met a few times. We had this procedure, knowing we had to be careful. He didn’t trust me much – don’t blame him, I suppose. But he really wanted this one, I could tell. Wanted to hand it all wrapped up straight on to his new super’s desk. Made out that no one at the station took him seriously any more.’

I did
, Frost wanted to say. ‘If I’ve understood this right, why were you snitching on this gang anyway? You were right in there, part of it.’

‘I was stupid. Thought it wasn’t too late. Thought I could get out. Look, George Foster had been blackmailing me one way or another for years, whether he happened to be inside or not. OK, I made a few mistakes when I was in London, but that was ages ago.’ Richards struggled for air, to clear his throat. ‘But when Foster hooked up with Kelly, after they’d both been released from Dartmoor, he got a whole lot nastier, a lot more ambitious. Started leaning on me because I was working for Security Guard.’

‘Likely story. You just wanted the money, like the rest of them.’

‘I couldn’t have refused to help them. They’d have killed me. I suddenly knew too much and that’s how they worked. But I wanted to come clean, honest. I wanted a clean break. That’s why I came to Denton. That’s why I started spilling the beans to your colleague. I did used to be a copper.’

Frost exhaled heavily, not thinking as he tapped the ash straight on to the floor. ‘What happened to Bert, then? Who killed him?’

‘OK, I set up the final meeting, down that lane – that was where we always met. I had no option, you see. They were suddenly on to me, Foster and Kelly. Nothing escaped Kelly – I should have realized that from the beginning. You see, they’d found out I’d been meeting Williams. Thought I could bluff my way out of it, told them, yeah, that was where I was getting a lot of my information from, about the police response procedures, that sort of thing. I said Bert was as bent as me. A washed-up drunk, too.’

Frost glanced towards the door. It was still firmly shut, no sign of Simms peering in.

‘So come last Saturday they decide they want to check him out for themselves, see if he was as bent as I was making out. They took my Range Rover – knowing Bert would have been expecting me. The thing is,’ Richards continued, ‘Bert knew those roads, he’d picked that spot. If he’d thought anything unusual was happening, he would have known how to get away. I thought he’d be all right.’

‘You could have warned him.’

‘I tried, I promise. I rang, two, three times.’

Frost dropped the cigarette end on the floor and stood on it, before realizing he wasn’t wearing shoes. ‘Arseholes!’ he yelled, hopping on one foot. He quickly caught his breath. ‘There’s still a number of things I don’t get. If they were so suspicious, why didn’t they snuff you out too? Why take a risk?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe Bert convinced them he was bent but they decided to get him out of the way anyway. He was tough, wasn’t he. Maybe they had plans for me later, after the Fortress job. Who knows. They left that snooker cue in my car, didn’t they – could have been trying to frame me. Kelly was smart, well trained.’

‘He wasn’t that smart. He’s flaming dead.’ Looking up, Frost glanced once again at the Denton skyline. ‘Who did he take with him when he went for Bert? Just Foster?’

‘What’s it matter?’ said Richards.

‘Heard of closure?’ snarled Frost. ‘Think of Bert’s widow. You can’t have been a tosser all your life.’

‘Yeah, it was Foster, Kelly and Foster, and the tart. She would have driven them.’

‘Louise Daley’s the only one we don’t have,’ said Frost. ‘Are you going to help us find her?’

‘What’s it worth?’

‘Your life.’ Frost was running his hand through a mass of tubes, deciding which one to yank out first.

‘I’m not going to have much of a life, whatever happens.’

‘My heart bleeds,’ said Frost. ‘Well, why not do something good for once? Can’t believe you ever signed up to be a copper. What a fucking disgrace.’

Richards took a breath. ‘You could try the Hope and Anchor, a strip pub in Bermondsey, south-east London. That’s where she came from.’

‘I thought she was George Foster’s niece,’ said Frost.

‘Don’t think they were related by blood, if you know what I mean.’

Frost had heard enough – enough depravity for one morning.

He had a sudden urge to ring Betty Williams. He wanted her to know that her husband hadn’t died in vain, that he had stuck his neck out, had shown the temerity to go after someone like Blake Richards, and the others, single-handed. That he was courageous. A hero. The best bloody copper Denton had ever seen.

Bert would never be forgotten, Frost would make sure of that – he would carry on where Bert left off.

Making for the door, Frost was stopped in his tracks by a massive boom, and then felt a shockwave wallop him in the back.

He immediately spun round, saw the window flexing and, beyond, a dark cloud of smoke mushroom into the sky.

If his geography was right, it was rising over Eagle Lane, home to the Territorial Army HQ and Superintendent Mullett’s spruced-up Denton Division.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Bill Scott-Kerr, Doug Young, Katie Gurbutt, Nick Reeves, Nicholas Shakespeare, Peter Straus, David Miller, Philip Patterson, Rob Nichols, Sam Evans, Sarah Neal, Sarah Adams, Selina Walker, Rachel Potter, Tony Stewart, Phil Wingfield.

James Henry
is the pen name of James Gurbutt and Henry Sutton.

James Gurbutt is a publisher at Constable & Robinson, R. D. Wingfield’s original publisher in the 1980s.

Henry Sutton is the author of seven novels under his own name. His latest,
Get Me Out of Here
, was published by Harvill Secker in January 2010. He is the Books Editor of the
Daily Mirror
, and teaches creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

After a successful career writing for radio, R. D. Wingfield turned his attention to fiction, creating the character Jack Frost. He published six novels featuring Frost. The series has been adapted for television as the perennially popular
A Touch of Frost
, starring David Jason. R. D. Wingfield died in 2007.

‘James and Henry have captured my father’s style superbly. Fans and newcomers alike will not be disappointed.’

Philip Wingfield, son of the late R. D. Wingfield
.