‘… And I want a proper detective on the case, not that scruffy, rude, ignorant individual you saw fit to send to me this morning.’
‘Inspector Frost is a very capable officer,’ said Mullett, trying to sound as if he believed it.
‘Inspector Frost is an incompetent, ignorant oaf. A disgrace to the force. Are you going to organise a search party to look for my daughter, or do I have to go direct to my friend, the Chief Constable.’
Mullett straightened up in his chair at the mention of the Chief Constable.
‘He’s Debbie’s godfather – did you know that?’
Her godfather! Mullett’s heart skipped a beat. ‘Leave it to me, Mr Clark. I’ll get a search party organised right away.’
‘Is that a promise?’
‘You have my word,’ floundered Mullett, nodding furiously to emphasise the fact.
‘Good, because I have recorded this conversation.’
A click and the dialling tone.
Mullett carefully replaced the receiver, mopped his brow and picked up the internal phone to summon Frost.
Frost’s radio gave an attention-snatching cough as he coasted into his place in the station car park. It was PC Jordan reporting.
‘Inspector, we checked the swimming baths. Yesterday was senior citizens’ night. A twelve- year-old girl in a bikini would have stuck out like a sore thumb.’
‘Lots of other things would have stuck out as well,’ said Frost.
‘Next, we went round to the boyfriend’s house. No reply. I checked with the neighbours. His parents are away for a couple of days and he is looking after himself. They saw him cycle off around seven yesterday evening, but didn’t see him come back and didn’t see any lights come on. There’s milk on the doorstep, the paper’s in the letter box, and no answer to our knocks.’
‘Have you spoken to that girl, Audrey?’
‘We’re on our way there now.’
‘Right. Let me know what she says.’ He clicked off and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Boy missing, girl missing, both on bikes. It was looking more and more obvious that they had done a bunk together. But a nagging doubt kept chewing away.
As he opened the door to his office, the insistent ringing of his phone greeted him. Before he could pick it up, Sergeant Wells burst in.
‘Just had Beazley – the boss of the supermarket – on the blower, Jack. They’ve heard from the blackmailer – he wants fifty thousand pounds.’
Frost re-buttoned his coat. ‘Tell him I’m on my way.’ As he left the office, he jerked a thumb at his phone. ‘Answer that, would you?’
‘It came this morning,’ grunted Beazley, a short, piggy-eyed man in his late fifties. ‘The bastard wants fifty thousand quid.’ He passed a sheet of paper with an envelope clipped to it over to Frost.
Frost held it carefully by the edges and skimmed through it. Like the previous note, it was handwritten in block capitals:
THAT WAS ONLY A TASTER. I’VE PLENTY MORE POISONS LEFT. PEOPLE WILL DIE. TO STOP ME PAY?50,000 INTO ACCOUNT NUMBER FDZ32432, FORTRESS BUILDING SOCIETY. DO IT TODAY OR THERE’S MORE POISON TOMORROW.
As Frost was reading, Beazley stripped the wrapping off an enormous cigar and lit up. ‘I phoned the building society to get the bastard’s name. They wouldn’t give it to me. Said they had to respect their client’s confidentiality. The sod’s trying to screw me for 50K and they want to respect his bleeding confidentiality
This is a copycat crime, thought Frost. There had been a similar extortion case in London some years before, where the blackmail money was paid into a building society account which the villain had opened with a false name and address. But today building societies insisted on proof of identity so this bloke, obviously an amateur, must be a real prat giving away a traceable number.
‘Are you going to pay it?’ he asked as a cloud of cigar smoke drifted across his face.
‘You tell me,’ grunted Beazley. ‘I’m not risking a single penny unless you can guarantee you can catch him. The sod could take the money and do it again.’
‘Pay it,’ said Frost. ‘He’s got to contact the building society to withdraw it. We’ll catch him.’
Beazley shook ash from his cigar and stared at Frost in disbelief. ‘Pay him? You’re saying I should cough up 50K on the off chance you might catch the sod as he withdraws it? Supposing you are up to your usual standard of efficiency and he draws the lot out while you’re arresting some poor sod for a parking offence? No way.’
‘Your choice,’ said Frost, standing and buttoning up his mac. ‘Let us know when he puts rat poison in your baby food and cuts holes in your condoms.’
‘Hold it!’ barked Beazley, flapping Frost back into the chair with his hand. He tugged at his lower lip in thought, drumming the desk with a gold fountain pen. Then he chucked the fountain pen down on the desk and jabbed a key on his phone. ‘Archer, get your arse in here now.’
Barely had he released the key than there was a timid tap at his door and a little man with thinning, sandy hair blinked nervously at him.
‘You wanted me, Mr Beazley?’
‘Yes,’ snapped Beazley. ‘I want a cheque made out right away for fifty thousand pounds.’
‘Who shall I make it out to?’ asked Archer.
Beazley stared at him in mock surprise, as if he was being asked a stupid question. ‘How the bloody hell do I know?’ He turned to Frost. ‘Who does he make it out to?’
Frost read from the blackmail letter. ‘Fortress Building Society account number FDZ32432.’
Archer had barely left the room before he was back, breathlessly clutching a large chequebook which he placed on the desk in front of Beazley. He stood back deferentially. With barely a glance at it, Beazley uncapped his fountain pen and slashed his signature as if signing for petty cash, then ripped out the cheque, more or less along the perforation, and handed it to Frost, who stuffed it unceremoniously into his mac pocket.
‘Right, Mr Beazley, leave the rest to us.’
Beazley flailed a podgy hand of dismissal and returned to his study of the store’s trading figures with a series of grunts and groans. As Frost left, Beazley was already on the phone to his hapless grocery manager. ‘Hoskins, what the bleeding hell is up with your weekend sales figures…?’
Once outside Beazley’s office, Frost dragged his cigarettes from his pocket and lit up. As he walked away, someone called out that he had dropped something. He looked down. Bloody hell! It was the flaming fifty-thousand-pound cheque. He scooped it up and put it in the comparative safety of his inside jacket pocket. ‘Your money’s safe with me, Mr Beazley,’ he told himself.
The note on Frost’s desk, pinned down by his ashtray, screamed in red block capitals: ‘MR MULLETT WANTS TO SEE YOU URGENTLY’. His internal and outside phones both rang together. Mullett would be on the internal, so he answered the other one first. It was PC Jordan.
‘Inspector, we’re over at that girl Audrey’s house. I think you’d better get over here right away and hear what her mother has got to say about Debbie’s father.’
Audrey, a serious-looking twelve-year-old wearing glasses, looked troubled.
Her mother – dark-haired, plumpish, in her late thirties – nodded grimly to Frost in greeting.
‘What have you got to tell me, Mrs Glisson?’ he asked.
She took one of Frost’s offered cigarettes. He lit up for both of them. She inhaled deeply and held the smoke in her lungs for a while before exhaling, a look of bliss on her face. A woman after Frost’s own heart. ‘I shouldn’t really be smoking. Those health warnings on the packets frighten the life out of me.’
‘It’s not a very good sales pitch, is it?’ smiled Frost. ‘So what can you tell us?’
Mrs Glisson turned to her daughter. ‘Go on, Audrey. Tell the inspector.’
‘Mum!’ protested the girl, shaking her head. ‘I don’t want to.’
‘Tell the detective why you stopped going to sleepovers at Debbie’s house – go on, tell him.’
Audrey lowered her head and talked to the tabletop. ‘It was her dad. He used to keep bursting in on us when we were getting undressed for bed. Never knocked or anything. And when I was in the shower, he’d charge in saying, “Oops, sorry, didn’t know you were there.” But he knew. He’d taken the bolt off the door – said it was broken.’