‘Good,’ grunted Frost, his mind whirling, his doubts multiplying. Superficial! None of the Ripper’s other victims had superficial wounds. That poor cow with her head hanging off — that wasn’t superficial. The canker of doubt gnawed and chewed and got bigger and bigger. But it had to be Gauld. It just had to be. Only vaguely was he aware of Gilmore answering a radio call in the car, then hastening across to Mullett and murmuring something in his ear.
'What?’ Mullett couldn’t believe what he had been told. He listened, open-mouthed, as Gilmore repeated it, then spun round to Frost, his whole body shaking with uncontrollable anger. ‘You were so damn sure!! While you were chasing Gauld with his Boy Scout’s penknife, the real Ripper has struck again.’
Frost went cold. Icy, shivery cold. He could only gape at Mullett. He looked pleadingly at Gilmore, willing him to say it was all a mistake.
‘Elderly lady,’ said Gilmore. ‘Slashed to ribbons. They’ve rushed her to Denton Hospital.’
Hospital! Then she was still alive. He almost knocked Mullett over as he dashed for the car.
‘Come here, Frost,’ choked Mullett. ‘I haven’t finished with you yet…’ Doors slammed and the car roared off. ‘My office!’ screamed Mullett to the dwindling red lights. ‘I want you in my office
… now!!’ Panting with fury, he gasped for breath, then was aware of someone at his side. A stocky figure in a dark blue anorak poking a miniature cassette recorder at him.
‘Mr Mullett, I’m from the Denton Echo. Is it true you’ve caught the Ripper?’
Hunched over the steering wheel, dragging savagely at a cigarette he didn’t want, he went over the night’s events again and again. Could he have saved Gauld if he had tried that much harder to reach out and grab him? Was it his stubborn certainty that Gauld was the Ripper that stopped him from trying harder? And now, it seemed, Gauld was innocent.
He lurched to one side as the car spun into the main hospital access road. Out of the corner of his eye he was vaguely aware of an ambulance parked outside the mortuary and the stretchered body-bag being carried in.
The car had barely stopped when Frost was running up the steps and barging through the swing doors. A uniformed constable seated on a wooden bench by the night porter’s cubicle snatched the cigarette from his mouth. ‘She’s in Intensive Care, Inspector.’
His running footsteps clattered and echoed along the empty corridors. The night sister in Intensive Care looked up angrily as they barged into her domain and was completely unimpressed with the warrant card Frost flashed at her.
‘One minute, that’s all I’m giving you.’ She led him across to a bed where liquid-filled plastic bags dripped through tubes into the veins of a barely breathing woman who was swathed in white bandages through which blood seeped. The nurse adjusted the flow of one of the drips and gave the plastic bag a squeeze.
‘Will she live?’ asked Frost.
The nurse shrugged. ‘Cut throat… slashed abdomen. She’s barely alive now. She regained consciousness for a couple of minutes, then drifted off in a coma again.’
‘Did she say anything?’
‘She tried to. It was all garbled. Something about her son. She said he did it.’
Her son? Frost pushed the nurse to one side and bent close to look at the face. Shrivelled and sunken with her dentures removed, she looked a hundred years older than when he last saw her.
It was the mother. It was Mrs Gauld.
Her eyelids quivered, then fluttered open to reveal watery colourless eyes. She didn’t seem surprised to see the blurred face of Frost hovering over her. Her lips moved and her voice was so weak he had to press his ear close to her mouth and feel the hot rasp of her breath on his cheek. ‘I told him it had to stop or I’d tell the police. That made him angry. He always had a temper.’ With a strain of effort that made the nurse look worried, she lifted her head from the pillow and stared pleadingly at Frost. ‘He didn’t mean it. Not his own mother.’
‘Of course not,’ whispered Frost.
‘You won’t hurt him?’
‘No,’ said Frost. ‘Of course we won’t hurt him.’
She managed the ghost of a smile as her head dropped back.
He sat with her until she died.
‘So it was Gauld?’ Mullett’s mind was racing. Frost had dropped him in the mire yet again. The phone on his desk was still warm from his call to the Chief Constable, explaining that Frost had screwed up and Gauld wasn’t the Ripper.
Having dumped the blame for the debacle on Frost, it was going to be difficult to claw back any credit for himself.
‘Yes, Super,’ said Frost, dragging the visitor’s chair across the carpet and flopping wearily into it. ‘Those photographs of the victims I showed his mother apparently did the trick. She told him she was going to shop him, so he knifed her. Then he panicked and went on the run.’
‘I see.’ Mullett pointedly fanned away the smoke which drifted across from the cigarette Frost was puffing at without permission. ‘Well, somehow or other you seem to have muddled through to a correct result on this one.’
‘Thank you, Super.’ He pushed himself out of the chair and brushed away the cigarette ash that was all over the front of his coat. It snowed down all over the blue Wilton carpet. Making no attempt to cover his mouth, he gave a loud yawn and moved towards the door. ‘If there’s nothing else, I’m going home.’
Mullett looked down at the long list of casualties from the pub fight. The men returning from sick leave would not make up the deficiency and the manning level would be worse than before. Damn Frost. Why did he have to be saddled with such an incompetent? His eyes glinted malevolently. He’d almost forgotten. He’d poked through Frost’s in-tray earlier that evening and, to his fury, had found the inventory return, completely untouched. ‘Oh.’ He tried to keep his voice casual. ‘Before you go, Frost, I’d like you to drop in the completed inventory return. I’ve promised County they’ll get it tonight.’
‘Sure, Super,’ muttered Frost. He pulled the door shut behind him and felt his shoulders slump. How the hell was he going to get out of this one?
Back in his office, watched by Bill Wells, he retrieved the bulky wad of blank forms from the depths of his in-tray and thumbed through them despairingly. ‘The bastard,’ he moaned. ‘He knows damn well I haven’t done it.’
‘But you told him you’d finished them,’ said Wells.
‘He knew I was lying,’ said Frost. His eyes skimmed round the room. ‘Two desks, two chairs and a filing cabinet.’ He flipped through the pages and scribbled in the figures.
‘You’ve missed out the hat-stand, the typewriter, the filing trays, the telephones, the stationery stocks. You’ll never do it, Jack.’
The cigarette packet was generously proffered. ‘But if you helped me, Bill.’
‘If I did, it would cost more than a lousy cigarette. There’s no way you’re going to get it done tonight, Jack, even if we all pitched in. It used to take Mr Allen the best part of a week with three people to help him.’
Frost admitted defeat. He dragged his scarf from the hat-stand and wound it round his neck. ‘I’ll give the bastard the blank form and tell him to stick it up his arse. He can only sack me. Then I’m going home. I think I’ve got a dose of flu coming on. With luck, it’ll kill me.’
He shuffled along the corridor to the Murder Incident Room to collect Gilmore. The detective sergeant, anxious to take advantage of his new-found freedom, was chatting up Jill Knight, the red-headed WPC who operated the computer. She didn’t appear very interested.
‘I’m off home,’ announced Frost.
‘Message just in from Birmingham Police,’ Gilmore told him. ‘They traced a copper who remembers something about Gauld. Apparently, when he was twelve he attacked his grandmother with a knife but she wouldn’t press charges, so the case never went to court.’