Winter Frost (11 page)

Police Sergeant Bill Wells squinted up at the wall clock, then pushed open the doors to the stairs leading up to the canteen for a tentative sniff. He frowned. He couldn't smell frying bacon. If they'd run out of cooked breakfasts again . . . PC Collier was due down to relieve him any second. He should have made Collier wait and gone up first himself but flaming Mullett kept phoning, demanding all sorts of stupid information for his meeting at County. Damn. Collier or no Collier, he was going up for his breakfast. It wouldn't hurt for the lobby to stay unmanned for a couple of minutes.

   
He screwed his face up in annoyance as the sound of someone clearing their throat and a gentle tapping on the desk demanded his attention. A little fat man in a checked suit, clutching a plastic carrier bag. Not another dead cat, he pleaded. People were always bringing dead cats into the station. "Found this in my front garden, officer."

   
"Yes, sir?" he grunted, ready to grab the bag, stuff it under the desk and belt upstairs.

   
"Can I speak to someone?" asked the man.

   
Aren't I bloody someone, muttered Wells under his breath. "What about, sir?"

   
The man pushed the carrier bag under Wells' nose. "I found this in my garden."

   
Wells peered warily inside, remembering the woman with a similar carrier bag who had brought evidence of a burglar defecating on her carpet for DNA testing. If this was the same, he'd made certain Liz Maud had to handle it. But this was different. Grinning up at him from the bottom of the bag was a human skull.

Frost raised his head from the folder when Wells burst in demanding to know where Wonder Woman had crept off to.

   
"The hospital," Frost told him. "She'll be back after lunch."

   
"Then you've drawn the short straw," said Wells, passing over the carrier bag. "Bloke found this in his back garden."

   
Frost looked inside. "Bloody hell!" He pushed the bag away. "If it isn't claimed within three weeks, tell him he can keep it." He went back to the folder. "Give it to Morgan, it will be good experience."

   
"He's out doing a job for Wonder Woman. It's got to be you. There's no-one else available."

   
"Sod it!" groaned Frost. "Why do I always get landed with the long-dead?" He followed the sergeant out to the lobby and nodded curtly to the little fat man. "Found it in your garden?"

   
The man nodded. "I was pulling down an old shed. We're selling the house and my wife thought the shed was an eyesore and would bring the price down. When I broke up the concrete base I found this."

   
"How long had the shed been there?"

   
"Donkey's years. It was there when we moved in and that was thirty years ago."

   
Frost fished out the skull from the bag and looked at it, hoping it would give him inspiration. He was struggling to find reasons to send Fatty away and forget the whole thing. "Probably built your house on an old burial ground—they did that, you know."

   
The man shook his head. "It was marsh land. They had to drain it before they could build. You don't have graveyards in marsh land."

   
You're too bleeding clever for your own good, thought Frost. Aloud he said: "That's all you found—just the skull?"

   
"That's all I brought. There's lots of other bones there as well. I thought it best not to disturb them."

   
Frost nodded gloomily. "We'll get someone down there to have a look." He waited for the man to go, then turned to Wells. "I want two uniforms with shovels." As the sergeant was making the arrangements he put the skull on the counter and stuck a lighted cigarette between its yellowed teeth.

   
"Very funny!" sniffed Wells. "Now get the bleeding thing out of here."

   
Frost put the cigarette back in his own mouth. "How old do remains have to be before we don't have to bother to investigate them?"

   
"Seventy years." Wells turned his attention to PC Collier who had returned back late from the canteen. "Any breakfasts left?"

   
Collier shook his head. "You might get a bacon sandwich if you hurry, Sarge."

   
Wells hurried. He would tear Collier off a strip when he got back.

   
Frost took one last look at the skull before dropping it back in the carrier bag. "You'd better be over seventy years old," he told it, "or you've ruined my bleeding day."
         
 

The area car pulled up outside the semi-detached house with the 'For Sale' board stuck firmly in the lawn by the front gate. PCs Collier and Jordan got out, picks and shovels over their shoulders, looking like two of the seven dwarfs returning home after a stint in the diamond mine. A grumpy-looking Frost followed them up the garden path. The front door opened before they were half-way and the fat man scanned the street anxiously before urging them in. Behind him, arms folded, stood his wife, a dragon of a woman, her lavender-dyed hair complementing the smell of lavender furniture polish which hit them like a baseball bat. She didn't look very happy. "That's right!" she barked at her husband. "Let everyone in the bloody street know we've got the police coming."

   
"I didn't know they'd come in a police car, did I?" protested the fat man.

   
"What did you expect them to come in—a corporation dust cart?" She switched her attention to Frost and Co. "Wipe your feet and shut the door—quick."

   
Her eyes glowered at them as they marched down the hall which had been lined with old newspapers to protect the carpet from police hobnails, through the kitchen, and into the back garden.

   
The broken concrete was stacked neatly alongside the components of the dismantled wooden shed. Poking through the compact earth was something that looked suspiciously like a human shoulder bone. "All right," sighed Frost, moving well out of the way. "Get digging."

   
From the row of houses overlooking the garden many lace curtains twitched. Uniformed policemen digging up a garden was of consuming interest.

   
"I hope you're satisfied," nagged the woman to her husband. "Now everyone in the flaming street knows!"

   
"What was I supposed to do?" pleaded the man.

   
"Like I said—dig another hole and bury the lot."

   
Best bit of bloody advice you ever had, thought Frost.

   
"There might have been other skeletons there for all I knew," protested the husband.

   
"
Might?
With our flaming luck you can bank on it. How are we going to sell the place now?" Her head jerked as she glowered up at the twitching curtains and open windows. "Had your bloody eyeful, have you?" she bellowed.

   
This had the effect of increasing the number of spectators as other people rushed to their windows to see what the noise was all about. Frost was finding it chilly, just standing and watching. "I suppose there's no chance of a cup of tea?" he asked as she spun round to return to the house.

   
"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 Denton 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.

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.