Frost staggered up the stairs to bed just after three in the morning. The stake-out had been a complete waste of time. They had waited, shivering in the wind and rain until a couple of minutes before midnight, when the Fortress computer people phoned to say that five hundred pounds had just been withdrawn from a cashpoint at Frimley, a small town some three miles from Denton. Frost had phoned the Frimley police who sent a car round, but far too late. They had staked out the cashpoint in case the blackmailer returned after midnight to make a second withdrawal, while Frost and his team covered the Denton cashpoints. At two o’clock, cold and dispirited, he had decided to call it a night.
In his dream Frost was running for dear life. The figure chasing him had a knife. A long knife. He crashed through a door, heart pounding, and found himself inside the refrigerator room at the butcher’s. The light was on, the white-tiled walls were smeared with fresh blood and crawling with maggots. On the floor were newly slaughtered lambs, their throats bleeding on to the white tiles. His pursuer was at the door. There was no way to lock it. He leant against it. The man out side started pounding at the door, which shook with the blows. The door crashed open…
He awoke, dripping with sweat and panting, his heart hammering. Bloody hell, you can stick these sort of dreams, he thought. What about the ones with the naked nymphos, which have been missing from the agenda for far too long? He clicked on the bedside lamp to check the time. Half past four in the morning. He had been asleep barely an hour.
Suddenly the pounding started again. He sat up in bed. It was coming from his front door.
He staggered from the bed to swish back the curtains and look out into the darkened street below. The blue light of an area police car was flashing. Shit! What the hell had happened now?
He padded down the stairs and opened the front door. He vaguely recognised the officer standing there – it was someone from Traffic, but he couldn’t think of his name.
‘Sorry to knock you up, Inspector, but your phone’s off the hook.’ He pointed to the hall table.
‘So it is,’ grunted Frost, replacing the phone on its base. ‘So kind of you to wake me up at half past flaming four in the morning just to tell me that.’
The officer grinned. ‘PC Lambert from Control is anxious to talk to you, Inspector. He says it’s urgent.’
‘At half past four it had better flaming well be,’ snarled Frost.
It was cold in the hall. Frost slipped his mac over his pyjamas before phoning the station. ‘This had better be good, Lambert,’ he yawned into the mouthpiece. ‘Who’s dead, Mullett or Skinner? Please say it’s both.’
‘The charge nurse from Denton General Hospital has phoned, Inspector, worried about one of their nurses. She hasn’t reported for duty
‘Then tell them to sack her,’ grunted Frost.
‘She’s always been conscientious, loves her job, this is the first time she hasn’t turned up for night duty and she’s not answering her phone. They sent someone round to her house – it was in darkness.’
‘There’s a surprise. At four o’clock in the morning I’d expect every bleeding light to be on.’
A token chuckle from Lambert, who pressed on. ‘Three pints of milk on the doorstep and papers stuck in the letter box. They fear some thing might have happened to her.’
‘Like she’s gone off drinking milk and reading papers? Why the flaming hell did you wake me up to tell me this? It would be just as bleeding pointless at nine o’clock.’
‘She lives next door to Lewis, the butcher,’ said Lambert.
Frost’s knuckles whitened as he gripped the phone tighter. ‘A nurse?’
‘Yes, Inspector.’
‘A paediatric nurse?’
‘Yes, Inspector.’
‘Get back to the hospital and check if she was one of the nurses who looked after Lewis’s kid.’
He sat on the stairs and smoked. Lambert was back in five minutes.
‘Yes, Inspector, she was.’
A warning bell started tinkling softly in Frost’s brain. ‘It might be a coincidence, but I’d better check it out. Get on to Taffy Morgan. Drag him out of bed if necessary. Tell him to pick me up in ten flaming minutes or they’ll be finding parts of his legs and dick all over Denton Woods.’
Apart from the odd porch-light, the street was in darkness. Morgan parked the car outside the nurse’s house, then gave Frost a nudge to wake him. ‘We’re here, Guv.’
Frost shook himself awake, yawned, then climbed out of the car. ‘Right. Let’s take a look.’ He gave a passing glance to the butcher’s house next door, half expecting, even at that late hour, that the curtains would twitch.
There were three pints of milk on the doorstep and three morning papers protruding from the letter box, which Frost tugged out so he could poke his torch through. Its beam picked up a few letters strewn across the mat. He straightened up. ‘Just so we don’t make proper prats of ourselves…’ He hammered the door knocker. They waited. Nothing.
‘I don’t think she’s in, Guv,’ offered Morgan.
‘I wish I had your perceptive intuition,’ grunted Frost. He walked across the front garden to the window and slashed his torchbeam through the gap in the curtains. An empty room. So what did he expect to see – a pile of body parts on top of a nurse’s bloodstained uniform?
‘I suppose there’s no rear entrance to this place?’
‘Back-to-back houses, Guv.’
Frost returned to the front door and knocked again. ‘Never know your luck, she might have gone to the lavvy.’ After a couple of seconds of silence, he stepped back and nodded at the glass door panel. ‘Break the glass, Taff. We’re going in this way.’
‘What do I use, Guv?’ Morgan asked.
Frost pointed to the step. ‘One of the milk bottles.’
Morgan grabbed a milk bottle and used it as a club, smashing both the door panel and the bottle, which shattered, sending milk flying everywhere.
‘… first pouring the milk out, of course,’ said Frost mildly.
‘Sorry, Guv,’ said Morgan.
The door swung open as Frost stuck his hand through and turned the catch. He shone his torch on an expensive, milk-sodden carpet topped with milk-sodden letters. ‘If we don’t find a body, Taff, you’re in deep trouble.’ They skirted the mess and looked through all the rooms. Everything was as it should be.
‘What do you think, Guv?’ asked Morgan.
‘I think I’m a prat for letting Lambert talk me into this. We’re either going to have to pay for the smashed door, the ruined carpet and the bottle of milk you poured all over the bloody place, or lie our bloody heads off and say it was like this when we came.’
‘That last bit sounds good to me, Guv,’ said Morgan.
‘The first bit never stood a chance,’ said Frost.
It was gone five when Morgan dropped him off. The damn phone started ringing the minute he opened the front door. ‘Dr Shipman’s surgery,’ he grunted. ‘Do you want a house call?’
‘Too early in the morning for flaming jokes,’ said Station Sergeant Johnny Johnson. ‘The hospital have phoned again, Jack. They’re still worried about that nurse.’
‘Then book her in as a missing person. She’s only been gone a couple of days.’
‘It’s longer than that, Jack.’
‘There were only three bottles of milk on the step and there was nothing suspicious in the house.’
‘She was supposed to have gone off on holiday for two weeks, sharing an apartment with a nurse from another hospital. They’ve managed to get hold of the other nurse. Our one never turned up. She’d paid for the holiday and she never turned up. She was mad keen to go. All she’d been talking about was this flaming holiday and she never turned up.’