Frost glanced up at the clock. Who the hell was calling him at this unearthly hour? ‘It had better not be bleeding double glazing,’ he growled, taking the phone.
It was Sandy Lane from the Denton Echo.
‘What the hell do you want, Sandy?’ asked Frost, putting his hand over the mouthpiece to tell Collier he wanted sausage in batter with his chips. ‘Tell them that last bit of cod I had from them was off.’ Everyone began changing their orders from cod and he had to shout to make himself heard on the phone. ‘What do you want, Sandy? Couldn’t you sleep?’
‘I was in bed. The office phoned me. They’ve just had another phone call.’
Frost flapped an urgent hand for silence. ‘Another phone call? When?’
‘A couple of minutes ago. Same woman as before. She said, “Ask the fuzz about the whipping.”
Frost went cold. The lash marks on Debbie’s back. They hadn’t released that information to the press. ‘Where did she phone from?’
‘A call box – not the same one as before. I got the number, but the exchange wouldn’t give me its location.’
‘We’ll get the location,’ said Frost. All public call boxes were supposed to be under twenty-four-hour surveillance, but he’d pulled everyone off for the Kelly caper. His white-knuckled hand was squeezing the living daylights out of the handset. Whoever the tart was who had phoned, it certainly wasn’t Bridget Malone.
‘What’s this about a whipping? Was she beaten up?’
‘Later, Sandy, later. Just give me the flaming phone number.’ He scribbled it down and banged the phone back on the handset. ‘Forget fish and chips,’ he yelled. ‘That tart has phoned again about the video.’
‘I thought we had her banged up,’ said Lambert.
‘Unless she’s in two places at once, we’re bloody wrong.’ He gave Collier the phone number. ‘Speak to the phone company and find out where this call came from.’ As Collier picked up the phone he turned to the others. ‘The rest of you, get in your cars and start driving around. There can’t be many motors on the road at this hour. I want registration numbers of the lot, so shift… Now!’
They thudded out while Frost waited impatiently for Collier to finish the call.
‘Shouldn’t you let Skinner know about this, Jack?’ suggested Wells.
‘He said he wasn’t to be disturbed and I always do what I’m told, especially when he asks so nicely.’ He turned back to Collier, who still had the phone pressed to his ear. ‘Come on, son…’
The other phone rang. He snatched it up. ‘What the bloody hell is it now?’ It was the Fortress Building Society – another five hundred pounds had just been withdrawn from the cashpoint.
‘You’ve made my day,’ he grunted, banging the phone down. Hell! Beazley would be on to him first thing in the flaming morning. It never rained but it peed down. Still, one lousy crisis at a time. He turned his attention back to Collier. ‘Don’t take all flipping day, son.’
Collier snatched up a pen and scribbled on a pad. ‘Thank you.’ He hung up. ‘The call box under the railway arch by Levington Street – the one I should have been watching.’
‘Don’t rub broken glass in the flaming wound,’ said Frost, grabbing his scarf. ‘Come on, let’s take a look.’
Levington Street, with its cobbled roadway, snaked up a hill, under a railway arch, then fizzled out. Redevelopment work which would have transformed it into a more modern slum area had been on hold for six years. There were no CCTV cameras anywhere near to film traffic. That tart knew what she was doing when she picked this spot, thought Frost.
The door to the darkened call box, with its smashed light bulb, was ajar. It stank of urine, with torn yellowing pages of the phone directory carpeting the floor and a batch of prostitutes’ calling cards stuck to the wall. ‘Mind where you put your feet,’ grunted Frost. ‘Hello.’ He bent and picked up a small square of paper – a Post-it self-adhesive note. Holding it carefully by the edges, he shone his torch and read it. ‘655555.’ He beamed triumphantly. ‘That, my son, is the phone number of the Denton Echo, and this is what we call in the trade a clue!’ He foraged through his pockets, found a used envelope and slipped it in. ‘Just in case she’s obliged us by leaving her dabs.’ He plucked one of the calling cards from the wall. ‘Flaming heck – is she still going? She went to school with my gran.’
With his handkerchief he carefully lifted the handset and studied it under the beam of his torch. ‘Wiped clean. If I had a suspicious mind I’d reckon she didn’t want us to find her finger prints.’ He replaced the phone, then thought for a while, staring at the coin box. ‘You know, son, I reckon hardly anyone uses this call box It’s stuck out on the arsehole of Denton on a road leading to nowhere, and the way it smells you’d be better off making your phone calls down a sewer.’
‘What are you getting at, Inspector?’ Collier asked.
‘I bet there’s hardly any coins in that coin box and they’ll all have fingerprints on them, and one will have the dabs of our lady caller.’ He pulled his penknife from his pocket and began to saw away at the flex on the handset.
Collier looked on, horrified, turning his head from side to side in case anyone could see what Frost was up to.
Frost examined the flex. His knife had made hardly any impression. ‘I don’t know how these bleeding vandals do it,’ he said. ‘There’s a pair of wire-cutters in the glove compartment of my car. Fetch them for me, son.’
The cutters sliced through the flex in one go. ‘Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job,’ said Frost in his Churchill voice.
‘Why did you do that?’ asked Collier.
‘Because I don’t want anyone else using this phone until we’ve got all the coins out of the box for testing. When we get back to the station, phone British Telecom. I want one of their engineers to liaise with someone from SOCO at the crack of dawn. I want the coins removed and fingerprinted.’
‘But she could have been wearing gloves,’ said Collier.
‘If she was wearing gloves, my son, she wouldn’t have had to wipe the handset clean after using it. Oh, and you can tell BT that some vandalising bastard has hacked the handset off – give them Skinner’s description if you like.’
Skinner charged out of the Interview Room and yelled down the corridor to Wells, ‘That bleeding woman’s thrown up all over me. Get her to Denton General. Look at my suit – it stinks of puke.’ His jacket was splattered with vomit.
‘Dear, dear,’ tutted Wells, trying not to laugh.
‘Get me a tea towel or something to wipe this off. Where’s Frost?’
‘Gone home, I think,’ Wells told him.
‘The bastard’s never here when you want him. What about the rest of the team?’
‘I believe Inspector Frost sent them home. He said you’d instructed him to do so.’
‘He picks and chooses what flaming orders he wants to obey,’ snorted Skinner. ‘Sod it. I haven’t got time to waste on a drug-possession and petty-thieving case. Bang Kelly up and I’ll finish questioning him in the morning.’
‘What about the dead girl’s phone, sir?’ asked Wells.
‘That Malone woman probably nicked it. She threw up when I asked her. She claims she nicked the other stuff from lockers at the school. She also says there’s about half a ton of bog rolls she knifed in their garage. If Frost had done a proper search he would have found them. I can’t see anyone who nicks bog rolls being a killer, somehow. Bloody Frost. The sooner he’s out of Denton the bloody better…’
The hands on the wall clock in the Incident Room crawled round to five fifty-eight. Frost yawned and rubbed his stubbled chin. His team had returned with the registration numbers of the few vehicles that had been spotted, but none had had woman drivers or passengers, so they didn’t look at all promising. He yawned again. ‘We’ll check the CCTV footage later. Might find some thing we missed on there.’ He stretched his aching back. ‘The important question of the moment is this: do we go home and grab a couple of hours’ kip before reporting to Skinner for a bollocking, or do we go down to the all-night cafe and have a fry-up?’