Morgan looked doubtfully at the sodden grass. ‘I’ll get wet, Guv.’
Frost smiled sweetly. ‘Only your clothes and your body… now get under there, fatty.’
With theatrical grunts and groans, Morgan managed to squeeze himself under the fence and emerged on the other side. He stood up, his clothes sodden, and stared ruefully at Frost from the other side.
‘That’s how the boy got in,’ said Frost. ‘You wait there. We’re coming in the dry way through the gates.’
Frost and Norton walked with the caretaker to the main entrance, which Harry unlocked. They joined Morgan. Again Frost looked up at the metal trellis. ‘Do you reckon you could shin up to one of those balconies, Taff?’
Morgan looked up and gaped. ‘You’re joking, Guv?’
‘All right,’ said Frost, ‘forget it. I’m not paying 5p for a bleeding wreath if you fall.’ He beckoned the caretaker over. ‘I want to take a look inside.’
Harry checked his watch. ‘Not tonight, Inspector. A time lock kicks in at four o’clock. We can’t get in until the morning.’
Frost snorted. ‘I haven’t got time to sod about until then. This is a murder investigation. Find a brick, Taff. We’ll smash one of those windows.’
‘Hold on,’ said Harry alarmed. ‘No need for drastic measures. We might be able to get in through the boiler house. We’re supposed to bolt it on the inside, but we sometimes forget.’
His torch showing the way, he took them down stone steps, selected a key from a bunch and opened the door. ‘Your luck’s in, Inspector. I must have forgotten to bolt it.’
I bet you never bolt it, thought Frost. The stepped into a small cellar-like room which held a bank of electric switchboards and two commercial central-heating boilers which weren’t operating. Passing through another door, they climbed some more stairs and were in the darkened lobby. Harry pressed a switch and fluorescent lights shimmered into life. A small reception desk stood alongside a lift.
‘How many floors does this place have?’ asked Frost.
‘Ten.’ He opened the lift doors. ‘What floor do you want?’
‘Let’s start at the top.’
They stepped out of the lift into black emptiness. Harry found the switch and the lights clicked on to reveal a barren, empty floor with rows of windows on each side.
‘If ever they rent this place out, the floors will be partitioned off into separate offices,’ explained Harry
There were plenty of radiators, all stone cold. The entire building was like an icebox. Their footsteps echoed eerily as they walked across the uncarpeted composition floor. Frost moved over to a window and looked out. Blackness was speckled with lights from distant Denton. So what else did he expect to see – Halley’s flaming Comet?
The balcony door wasn’t locked. Turning the handle, he pushed it open and stepped out, bracing himself and grabbing the iron rail tight against the force of the wind, his hair and tie streaming.
Frost looked down ten storeys into yawning blackness, then took the cigarette from his mouth and let it fall. It was like dropping a stone down a bottomless well. The red dot took ages before it shot out a miniature shower of sparks when it hit the ground and was swallowed up by the darkness. That was a bloody long way down. The boy couldn’t have fallen from here. He’d have done more than break his legs. He would have been smashed to pieces when he hit the concrete of the patio. He must have fallen from one of the lower floors. But which one?
Frost stepped back from the balcony and closed the door, conscious that the others were looking at him, expecting him to come up with something. Well, they could bloody well expect. It felt warmer inside after his stint on the balcony, but it was still an icebox.
‘Debbie Clark was here,’ he said. ‘Not on this floor, but she was here, in this building. It’s too dark to do a proper search tonight. We’ll get our team together and go over it inch by inch in the morning.’ He stabbed a finger at Harry. ‘When we leave, you stay out of here. This is now a crime scene. If we catch you inside I’ll have you up for perverting the course of justice.’
‘You try and bleeding help,’ moaned Harry, ‘and that’s the bleeding thanks you get.’
Chapter 13
Frost was woken up in the middle of the night by the insistent ringing of his mobile phone. He staggered out of bed and clicked on the light. Where the hell was the phone? The damn thing was in the room somewhere, but he couldn’t remember where he had left it. He eventually located it under the bed.
‘Frost.’ It had better not be a flaming wrong number.
‘Fortress Building Society, Inspector. Some one is withdrawing five hundred pounds from the cashpoint in Market Square right now. If you hurry, you can get him.’
‘Thanks,’ said Frost. ‘For a minute I thought it was bad news.’ He clicked off the phone and put it where he would forget it again.
Shit! Beazley would chew his privates off in the morning. He shrugged. There was sod all he could do about it, he’d just have to cross that bridge when he came to it. He lit up a cigarette and smoked for a while before crawling back into bed. He switched off the light, but was unable to sleep. His mind kept whirring round and round, reminding him of all the vital things he had to do and didn’t have time for. Why wasn’t flaming Skinner taking some of the load off his back?
He was still awake when the milkman rattled by at six and had just drifted off to sleep when the alarm went off at half past seven. It was still pitch dark outside.
Frost swept through the lobby on his way to the Briefing Room, yelling a greeting to Station Sergeant Johnny Johnson. ‘How’s it going, Johnny?’
Johnson slammed the incident book shut. ‘Our paedophile prisoners are complaining about the standard of their accommodation. They want bail.’
‘They want castrating,’ said Frost. ‘I thought Skinner was dealing with them.’
‘He’s had to go back to his old division.’
‘I wish he’d bloody stay there. I think we’d better oppose bail for their own safety. Let’s try and get them put on remand – oh, and when that nice Mr Beazley phones, you don’t know where I am.’
He pushed through the swing doors and into the Briefing Room, where he gratefully accepted a mug of steaming hot tea from Collier. He stirred it with a pencil and wiped the sleep out of his eyes, then turned his attention to the search team.
‘As you probably know, we’ve found the boy’s bike. It was hidden in some shrubbery outside that big empty office block on Denton Road. I’m pretty certain that’s where the boy was killed and that’s probably where the girl was killed.’
He paused as Johnny Johnson came in and handed him a memo from Forensic. He scanned it, then waved it aloft. ‘Forensic have confirmed it. The boy was killed there – the grit matches. There’s a metal trellis running up the side of the window by the balconies. I reckon something was going on inside that the boy wanted to see, so he climbs up the trellis, gets a grip on the balcony rail and is hanging there, ready to haul himself over, when our friendly neighbourhood murderer hears him and smashes his knuckles with a stick, making the kid lose his grip and fall. The fall didn’t kill him, so while he’s lying there, moaning with pain, the bastard comes down and bashes the kid’s skull in.’
‘Why?’ asked Jordan.
‘Because the boy had seen something he should not have seen. He could have seen the girl being killed. There’s no proof of that at the moment, but I’m bloody certain Debbie Clark was killed there.’
‘So why didn’t the killer chuck the boy’s bike in the river along with the girl’s?’