Stretching out a hand, Slomon received the bottle from the constable and cautiously raised it to his nose. A delicate sniff, followed by a smug nod of satisfaction at his own cleverness. “Wine laced with industrial alcohol, a potent combination.” He handed the bottle to Frost for confirmation. Frost took his word for it and passed it to the constable. “He drank himself senseless, then fell,” continued Slomon dogmatically. “Then he choked on his own vomit. I’ll arrange for the hospital to carry out a post-mortem first thing tomorrow, but they will only confirm my diagnosis.” He consulted his watch. “The party calls. I’ll leave the tidying up to you.” With a curt nod he was up the steps and out into the clean night air.
“I wish they were doing a post-mortem on you, you bastard,” Frost muttered. He again looked around his unsavoury surroundings. Why was something nagging away? Why was that little bell at the back of his head ringing insistently, warning him something was wrong? He looked around again, slowly this time. But it was no good whatever it was, it wasn’t going to show itself. And why was he worrying? Death was from natural causes, and he had the party to go to.
“Do we know his next of kin, sir?” asked Shelby, his notebook open.
“His mother and brother live in Denton,” Frost told him. “The station will have their address.”
“Someone’s going to have to break the news to them, sir.” Shelby paused and looked hopefully at the inspector. “I’m not very good at it.”
Frost sighed. Why did he always fall for the nasty jobs? How do you tell a mother her eldest son had choked to death on his own vomit down a public convenience? He took one last look at the dripping heap of death sprawled at his feet and shook his head reproachfully. “Ben Cornish, you stupid bastard!” The open eyes of the corpse looked right through him.
“All right, Shelby. I’ll break the news to his old lady. You arrange for the meat wagon to take him to the morgue, and wait here until it arrives. I don’t want any late-night revellers peeing all over the body.”
He trotted up the steps to the street, Shelby, who wasn’t going to be left alone with the body, following hard on his heels. At ground level the wind was still prowling the streets. Frost took a deep breath. “Doesn’t fresh air have a funny smell?” He looked up and down the empty street. Or was it empty? He thought he saw something move down by the back entrance to one of the Market Square shops. As if someone had ducked into a doorway to avoid being seen. He caught a quick glimpse of the expression on Shelby’s face. The constable had seen the movement, too, but he was making a determined effort to keep his face passive. Strange, thought Frost. Very strange. He wondered what Shelby was up to… but if he was going to get to the party before the beer ran out… With a wave to the constable, he climbed back into his car. As he settled down in the driving seat, his sodden trouser legs flapped clammily around his ankles, and he felt the cold squelch of his wet socks as he pressed his feet on the pedals. On the back seat, unused and bone dry, his Wellington boots sat on top of a yellowing back number of the Dally Mirror.
He reversed, only hitting the kerb once. As he drove past the red-brick building with the creaking enamel sign, he realized he couldn’t see the broken metal grille. It was halfway down the stairs and completely out of sight from the road. Yet Shelby said he had spotted it from his car. It vaguely worried him, but there was probably a logical explanation which could wait, whereas the party couldn’t. The dull boom of the disco belting out full blast from the station canteen was waiting to meet him as he turned into Market Square.
She was nervous. The moon, a diamond-hard white disc in the starless sky, made the path as bright as day but buried the bushes in deep shadow. She had an uneasy, nagging feeling of danger. Of someone lurking. She felt in her pocket, and her hand closed reassuringly over the nail file. Not much of a weapon, but just let anyone try anything and she’d use it like a knife.
But she didn’t have a chance to use it. He was too quick for her. A slight rustling noise from behind her, and, even as she was turning, the cloth blacked out the moon, the stars. She opened her mouth to scream, but choking hands squeezed and squeezed.
Inside her head she was screaming, loudly, deafeningly. But only she could hear.
Tuesday night shift (2)
Police Sergeant Bill Wells, sad-faced and balding, raised his head to the ceiling where all the noise was coming from and bared his teeth in anger. Upstairs, that was where he should be. Up there, enjoying himself, instead of being stuck down here as station sergeant, trying to cope with the running of the district with hopelessly inadequate numbers of staff.
He was one of the few members of the Denton Division forced to be on duty on this special night, the night of the big party. And what was unfair was that he should have been up there. Today should have been his day off. But at the very last minute, for his own peculiar reasons, the Divisional Commander had revised the duty roster, so now Wells was on duty, as was Jack Frost. This didn’t worry Jack Frost, as he intended to sneak upstairs whatever the rosters said. You could get away with it in plainclothes but not if, like Sergeant Wells, you were wearing a uniform. There was no justice.
The skeleton duty force could only cope if the night was almost incident-free. Indeed, all duty men had been instructed not to look for trouble, to walk away from it if it crept up, and to turn a blind eye to all minor of fences But already things had started to heat up with the discovery of a dead body down a public convenience, and it was a well-known fact that shifts that started badly almost always ended badly.
And the damn phone, ringing almost nonstop, wasn’t helping; the calls were usually from members of the public complaining about the noise. It was so unfair. The people upstairs were having all the fun and he was having to cope with all the complaints.
The phone rang again. He snatched it up and blocked his free ear with his finger to try and drown out that monkey music from above.
“Would you mind repeating that, madam? I’m afraid I can’t hear you.”
The woman caller was gabbling away excitedly, but even with the phone pressed so tightly against his ear it hurt, he couldn’t make out what she was agitated about.
“Would you mind holding on for a moment, madam?” He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and relieved the steam pressure of his myriad grievances by yelling at young Police Constable Collier, who was painstakingly hacking out a report on the antique Underwood typewriter. “Do something useful for a change, Collier. Get upstairs and tell those drunken layabouts to keep the row down. Some of us are trying to work.”
But before Collier could move, the lobby doors parted to admit the tall, straight-backed figure of Police Superintendent Mullett, Commander of Demon Division. The Superintendent, with his glossy black hair, clipped military moustache and horn-rimmed glasses, looked more like a successful businessman than a policeman. He was wearing his casual party wear: a tailored grey suit, a silver-flecked shirt, and a blue-and-silver tie. Wells and Collier immediately stiffened to attention but were waved at ease. The thump of the disco from above made Mullett wince, and he could feel his head starting to ache, but he put a brave face on it. After all, he was one of the lads tonight, like it or not.
“They seem to be enjoying themselves up there, Sergeant Wells,” he shouted over the din. “Not too loud for you, is it?”
“No, sir,” lied Wells as he pushed the phone to Collier so the constable could take over the call. “Nice to hear people enjoying themselves… for a change.”
Mullett nodded his approval, his gaze wandering around the dingy lobby with its stark wooden benches and the Colorado Beetle Identification poster flapping on the dark grey walls. “I never realized just how dreary this lobby looked, Sergeant. It’s bad for public relations. Do you think you could see about cheering it up… get in some house plants, or flowers, or something?”