Hard Frost

Nine

When Frost got back to his office he nearly tripped over the fur coats the insurance assessor had dropped on the floor. Mullett was right, the office did stink. He opened the window a fraction to let in some fresh air, while he made a few phone calls. Liz was still attending the postmortems where, no doubt, Drysdale was being his usual thorough self with all three tiny bodies. Bill Wells confirmed there was still no sign of the missing mother. Frost drummed the desk in thought had he called off the dragging of the canal too soon?

The jewellery was still on his desk. He'd have to get Margie Stanfield down for a formal identification of her property and the sooner she took back her skunk-smelling furs, the better. Margie! She must be Stanfield's second wife. He seemed to remember an entirely different woman when he was at the house all those years ago for the arson case.

He stared at the jewellery. Damn. This phoney abduction case was irritating him. He wanted to get it out of the way, but he couldn't wait for Liz to come back from her autopsy treat so he collared Burton from the incident room.

"Where are we going?" asked the DC, sliding behind the steering wheel.

"Bennington's Bank," Frost told him. "I want to take a look at their security video for when Stanfield was drawing out all that cash." The car slowed at traffic lights. "How are you getting on with Sergeant Liz?"

"She tore me off a strip today," said Burton, moving forward as the lights changed. "I put the wrong date down on a report." He grinned. "I think I'm starting to fancy her."

"She wouldn't be a bad looker if she tar ted herself up," mused Frost. "Reminds me of those old Hollywood films where the heroine is a schoolmistress with no make-up, thick glasses, her hair in a bun and a flat chest. When she has her first kiss from the hero, she takes off her glasses, lets her hair down and her tits swell up to twice their previous size." He started unbuckling his seat belt as the bank loomed into view. "The same thing could happen to our Liz."

Burton grinned again as he turned the car into the "Staff Only' car-park behind the bank. "I wouldn't mind being the bloke who makes it happen."

The bank manager brought in the videotape and fed it into the player for them. "I'm rather busy, so I'll leave you to it, inspector."

"Yes, you go and foreclose on some poor sod," answered Frost. "We'll manage." He pressed the play button.

On the monitor a black and white picture of the customer area of the bank. It was a minute to opening time so no customers. A running clock superimposed on the corner of the picture showed the seconds zipping on to 9.30 a.m. A cashier walked across the customer area, checked the time with the wall clock, then opened the doors. He was shoved to one side as an impatient Stanfield, barging his way through other customers, managed to reach the cashier's window before anyone else. He was carrying a large briefcase.

It was a wide angle shot taken from behind the counters. Other customers went to different cashiers, but the two detectives kept their eyes on Stanfield who pushed across a withdrawal slip, drumming his fingers impatiently on the counter as the cashier read it through. He snapped some angry remark and then moved to the end of the counter. The cashier came out and led Stanfield to the assistant manager's office and out of camera range. "He's waiting in there while they're getting the money out of the vaults," explained Frost.

More people came into the bank. Queues shuffled forward, cashing cheques or paying in money.

"What are we looking for?" asked Burton.

"I haven't the faintest bloody idea," admitted Frost.

Ten more minutes of watching people come and go and Frost's attention was starting to wander. He began to read a confidential letter on the manager's desk. "There he is!" said Burton. He was all attention again.

Stanfield moved back into the picture. The briefcase bulged and seemed heavier. He snarled at someone who dared to get in his path as he barged his way through the crowded customer area. The doors closed behind him and he was gone.

Frost let the tape run for a couple of minutes, then fished out his cigarette packet. "There's something there, son, something screaming at me… but I don't know what it is." He wound the tape back to the start and played it through again, only half watching as he dribbled smoke from his nose. Suddenly, he stiffened. "Yes I do!" His finger jabbed the freeze frame button making the picture quiver and stop. "In the corner, there at the automatic cash machine." The frozen picture was quite blurred and Burton couldn't make out who Frost meant. Then he saw a figure right in the corner of the screen drawing money from the service till. The person's back was to the camera. They could just make out light-coloured trousers and a dark duffel coat with the hood up.

"So?" asked Burton.

Frost pressed the play button again. The figure, not much more than an out-of-focus blur, seemed to be getting money from the machine, then a swirl of customers hid him from view. Frost forwarded the tape. The superimposed clock had moved on another six or seven minutes. The crowd suddenly thinned. "Look!" said Frost. "The bastard is still there… What's he doing now?"

The figure had now moved away from the service till and was by the automatic deposit machine where he seemed to be finding difficulty in filling in one of the bank's forms, screwing up the current effort and starting on a new one. He was still there as Stanfield emerged from the assistant manager's office carrying the briefcase. Stanfield left. The man screwed his form up, tossed it in a bin and sauntered out of the bank.

"He followed Stanfield in," said Frost. "He was here all the time Stanfield was in the bank. When Stanfield left, so did he." He zipped back the tape, replaying some of it, freeze-framing from time to time.

"Assuming he was involved," said Burton, 'the picture's nowhere near good enough to identify him."

"There's more than one way of skinning a banana," said Frost. He called the manager back into the office and pointed at the shape on the screen. "I want to know who he is."

The manager gave a shrug. "I've no idea."

"Yes you have," said Frost. "Look he's using his cash card to draw money from your cash machine. You can see the clock that gives the exact time he took out the money. You've got to have a timed record of all money withdrawn from that machine."

The manager went to a computer terminal on a small table by his desk and rattled away at the keyboard. "Yes. 9.34. 5 withdrawn." He peered at the screen. "That's strange. At 9.39 it was paid back in again."

"He was stalling for time," said Frost. "I want his name, address and inside leg size."

The manager twitched an apologetic smile. "I can't give you information about our customers. You will have to go through the proper channels."

"Tell me that next time you come whining to me because you've got a parking ticket," said Frost.

The manager clicked away at a few more keys and the screen display changed. He stood up. "I have to go out for a few minutes. Please do not look at this screen. It contains classified customer information."

Frost beamed his thanks and was at the computer even as the door was closing behind the manager. His eyebrows rose in surprise. The customer was a girl. Tracey Neal, 6 Dean Court, Denton. She had a balance of 25 in her account. Her date of birth was shown. She was fifteen, the same age as Carol Stanfield. Burton scribbled down the details.

"Mullett banks here," said Frost, sitting down in the chair by the computer. "I wonder how much he's got in his account. What's the betting he's in the red? Let's see if he's made any cheques out to ladies of ill repute." He pulled the keyboard towards him.

Burton looked nervously towards the door, expecting the manager to return any minute. "Do you really think you should…?"

Frost ignored Burton's concern. "Do you reckon we just type in his name?" He pressed a key and the words account name? appeared on the screen. Frost started to peck out M… UU… L… when the computer let out a high-pitched buzz, the screen display kept flashing on and off, and a Dalek-like, electronic voice bawled: "Unauthorized input.. unauthorized input…"

"Flaming hell!" Frost leapt from the keyboard to the vacant visitors' chair on the far side of the room. As the manager came running in, looking angry, Frost gave a puzzled frown towards the computer. "What the hell is up with that?" he asked with all the innocence he could muster.

Liz was sitting at the spare desk when he got back. She looked shaken, but was busying herself with heaps of papers. She accepted the cigarette Frost tossed over to her.

"How did it go?"

Her hand was unsteady as she put the cigarette in her mouth, but she tried to sound calm. It had been a harrowing experience. Drysdale was always thorough, even when the cause of death was obvious, and to watch him being thorough three times, and on the bodies of tiny children, was almost too much. Even Cassidy had been affected and had mumbled some excuse about a phone call, leaving her to see it through, and she had managed a smug smile as she watched him leave, but now she felt shattered. "Asphyxiated with a pillow, probably while they were sleeping. They wouldn't have cried out and they wouldn't have known anything about it."

"Poor little sods." He saw she was having trouble in striking a match, so leant across with his lighter. "What about the stab marks on the boy's arm?"

"Not very serious and made after death. That's all he could say."

"Time of death?"

"Between 11 p.m. and midnight, Drysdale will be able to pin it down closer when he knows the time they had their last meal. I'm seeing the father later on, he should be able to tell us when she usually fed them." Liz shuddered as she thought of the mother preparing their food, cooking it ever so carefully, the last meal they would ever have… "They all died within minutes of each other."

"And still no sign of the mother?"

"No."

"Let's hope she's killed herself. It'll save everyone a lot of sodding about."

Liz winced at Frost's apparent callousness, but she knew what he meant.

"What about that row people heard? Has anyone owned up to it?"

She shook her head. "I questioned our witnesses again and they still say they thought it was the wife and husband quarrelling, but as we know, the husband wasn't there."

Frost scratched his chin. "The man who never was. Ah well… one of life's little mysteries." He switched to the Stanfield case. "I've got a job for you." He told her about the girl hovering about in the bank when Stanfield drew out the money. "Check her out."

Glad of anything that would take her mind off the memory of those three small bodies on Drysdale's autopsy table, she inserted her papers in a folder and grabbed her handbag. She had to squeeze past Burton who was coming in and who hadn't left her enough room to get through easily.

"You enjoyed that, didn't you, son?" grunted Frost.

"Never thought I'd fancy a sergeant," replied Burton, pulling Liz's chair up to Frost's desk and sitting down.

"Is it still warm from her lovely bottom?"

"Red hot!" grinned Burton. "Right. The phone booths at the supermarket. I've had them all bugged, as you asked, ready for when the kidnapper makes contact. Every phone call in and out is now being recorded."

"What about bugging the money case so we can track it?"

Burton took a padded envelope from his pocket and carefully tipped out a small, grey plastic object, not much bigger than a fifty pence piece, and put it on Frost's desk. "Self-powered… range up to two hundred yards."

Frost prodded it with a nicotine-stained finger. "Doen't look much. You sure it works?"

"Positive. I tested it on the way over. But how will we get it in the suitcase with the money if Cordwell refuses to co-operate?"

"Leave that to me, son. One of Savalot's security guards is going to slip it in for me."

"Which one?" Burton asked.

"A bloke called Tommy Dunn. He used to be a copper took early retirement under pressure from Mullett. He'd been taking back-handers."

"Can you trust him?"

"No but he'll do anything for a bottle of whisky. Tommy's done a bit of nosing around. The accounts manager is going to make the ransom money up from today's takings at the store. It will be put into an overnight case ready for Cordwell to collect. Tommy reckons he can slip the homing device under the lining so no-one will notice it." He returned the tiny transmitter to its padded envelope and handed it back to Burton. "Get over to Savalot, and ask for Tommy Dunn… Drop it in his pocket and leave."

As Burton went out the internal phone rang. Bill Wells from the front desk. Mrs. Stanfield was here to identify the furs and jewellery fished out of the canal. "Right," said Frost, but as he spoke, panic set in. His eyes began a swift search of the office. Liz had picked the sodden furs from the floor and had hooked them over the hat-stand, but where was the flaming jewellery? "Hold on a tick, Bill." He put the phone down and started to ransack the place, looking everywhere, even where he was sure he hadn't put it. 40,000 worth of jewellery and he'd left it lying on his desk in full view where anyone could see it and the door open… Don't say some bastard has nicked it, he silently pleaded. A sudden thought. The insurance assessor. He must have taken it. A quick phone call. "No, inspector. It was still on your desk in a black plastic bag when I left."

"Oh yes of course," said Frost, trying to sound as if he had just spotted it. He lit up a cigarette for inspiration then realized angry noises were coming from his internal phone. Bill Wells was still hanging on. "Tell her to wait,

Bill. I'll call back." He banged the phone down and again searched everywhere he had searched before, hoping that, in some magical way, the bag would suddenly appear.

His internal phone rang again. Mrs. Stanfield was getting impatient. "She'll have to come back later," said Frost. "Tell her the insurance assessor has got to check it first."

"But I thought began Wells.

"Just tell her!" snapped Frost.

"OK," said Wells, miffed by Frost's manner. "By the way, Mr. Mullett wants to see you."

"He wasn't carrying a black plastic bag by any chance?" Frost asked.

"As a matter of fact, he was."

Frost put the phone down, relief mingled with irritation. It was his own stupid fault, but if you couldn't leave stuff unattended in a police station, where the hell could you leave it? He was trying to work out his ploy with Mullett when Cassidy stormed in. Flaming heck, thought Frost dolefully. Not more bloody moans.

Cassidy jerked a thumb at the spare desk. "Where's the girl?"

"Doing a job for me," said Frost. "Why?"

"Call from the track inspector at Denton railway station. There's a body on the track. It could be the missing mother."

"Let's hope it is," said Frost. "We haven't got time to keep looking for her." Cassidy could handle this on his own.

The phone rang. This time an angry Mullett demanding the inspector report immediately to his office. Frost put his hand over the mouthpiece. "Hold on I'm coming with you," he called to Cassidy. Back to the phone. "Sorry, super urgent call." He hung up quickly.

As they drove down the road running parallel with the railway track all signals were at red. There was a stationary passenger train, its windows studded with heads of angry passengers trying to make out what the hold-up was. Cassidy parked the car on the stone-walled bridge which continued the road over the tunnel and the two detectives slithered down the embankment to the mouth of the tunnel where two railway track inspectors in fluorescent yellow jackets were waiting for them. Cassidy looked nervously at the gleaming rails. "Is the current off?"

The senior track inspector nodded. "Yes and it would help if you could be as quick as possible. This is playing havoc with our train schedules."

Emergency lights were on in the tunnel, but did little to dispel the gloom. A strong wind roared noisily past their ears and they had to shout to be heard. Frost wrapped his scarf tighter around his neck and squinted his eyes against the dust and grit which the wind was hurling through the tunnel like bullets.

"There!" The railway man stopped and pointed, turning his head away. He had seen it before and that was more than enough. He squeezed against the wall so they could get past him.

She was some thirty yards into the tunnel, a crumpled heap, one arm lying across the rail and partly severed. As Frost bent to examine her he realized that she had been decapitated and the head was a few feet forward in the middle of the track. So cleanly was it cut, it could almost have been done with a very sharp knife, but was the result of a high speed train going over her. The train would have barely quivered as it sliced its way through. Frost pulled his eyes away from the bloodied stump of the neck and gingerly touched the flesh of her arm. Hard and ice cold. She was lying length ways along the rail and wore a black acrylic jumper and green slacks. He forced himself to look at the head. The eyes were open and staring, the face bruised and battered, light brown hair all over the place and matted with blood. He checked with the photograph in his pocket. No doubt about it. She was Nancy Grover.

"Could she have been hit by a train as she walked through the tunnel?" asked Cassidy.

"No way. If a train had hit her while she walked, she'd have been sent flying and would probably have been cut in half as it went over her," replied one of the railway men "My guess is she jumped from the bridge. I can't tell you the number of suicides we've had to bag up from here. It's all flaming copy-cat. One does it, the others read about it in the paper, then they all do it."

"They used to jump from the top floor of the multi storey car-park," said the other track inspector. "Sod that for a way to die, strawberry jam all over the concrete."

"This is worse," put in the first railway man "You could end up with your arms and legs cut off by the train and still be alive."

"So if your bum itched you couldn't bloody scratch it," added Frost. "So come on… how would she have ended up half-way down the tunnel?"

"They go to the bridge, climb on to the wall and wait for a train, then jump down in front of it. Only I reckon this poor woman left her jump too late, fell on top of a carriage and as the train took the bend, she was thrown off and smashed against the tunnel wall. Then she slid down, her head fell over the rail and the wheels sliced it off."

"Wouldn't the train driver or any of the passengers have heard her crash on the roof?"

"Not over the noise of the train."

Frost shuffled forward to take another look at the head. The face looked strained and in torment. "You silly bitch," he whispered. "You've properly sodded this up."

The senior of the track inspectors was muttering into a mobile phone. He beckoned Frost over. "There's a log jam of trains going right back to four stations. We'd like to get her shifted out of here so we can get things moving."

"I bet you would," said Frost. He scratched his chin, working out the distance from the tunnel to the woman's home. She couldn't have walked here in less than half an hour. The kids were killed around midnight, which meant she must have done her diving act at half-past midnight at the earliest. "So what train did this to her?"

"There's one at five past midnight."

"Too early," said Frost.

"Then it would have to be the 00.35. That's the last through train until 5.22 this morning."

A yell from the mouth of the tunnel where a disgruntled passenger, fed up with waiting in a stationary train, had walked along the line to complain. "How much bloody longer? We've been here nearly an hour already."

"Get back in the train," shouted the track inspector.

"I'm going to report you," called the passenger.

"And I'll bloody report you it's an offence to walk on the track. Now get back!" He turned to Frost. "Can't we move her?"

"Not until the police surgeon has certified she's dead."

"Dead? Her bloody head is off!"

"If it was a man and all we had left was his dick, we'd still have to wait for the doctor to certify he was dead." He shouted down to the mouth of the tunnel where Cassidy was in contact with Control on his radio. "How long's the doctor going to be?"

"He's on his way," called back Cassidy.

"Can't we cover her up and let the trains go through?" pleaded the senior track inspector. "This is causing one hell of a disruption."

"All right," said Frost. "But shift her head off the track first."

The man shuddered. "I'm not touching her head."

"Then we wait," said Frost.

They didn't have to wait long. Dr. Slomon, the on-call police surgeon, was scowling because this was miles out of his way and he had slipped on the mud coming down the embankment, smearing his light brown camel-hair overcoat. He looked anxiously at the rails. "Is the current off?"

"Should be safe as long as you don't pee on the live rail," said Frost, moving back so Slomon could see the body. Slomon shuddered as he eyed the trunk, then the head. Why did Frost always have to be involved with the messy ones? He remembered only too well the tramp in a toilet swimming with urine. He bent down and briefly touched the hardened flesh. "Been dead some time nine, ten hours."

"Did the decapitation kill her?" asked Cassidy.

"Well, it certainly didn't help," sniffed Slomon. "You'll need a post-mortem to find the exact cause." He scribbled on a pad and tore off a sheet. "She's dead. You can move her." He scrambled back up the embankment, glad to be away from the macabre scene. Cassidy was radioing to Control to get them to contact an undertaker to remove the body and to arrange an autopsy.

Frost wandered off, happy to let Cassidy attend to all the detail. The suicide tied up the case nicely. He clambered up the embankment, then realized he had travelled in Cassidy's car and would have to wait for him to get a lift back to the station. Damn. Down to his left he could see clusters of angry passengers arguing with the guard on the halted train. The sound of a car approaching. A bit too soon for the undertaker, surely? He hoped Control had warned them there was a severed head to collect as well. Some of them were a bit fussy about the state of the corpses they transported. But it wasn't the undertaker. It was Liz Maud. She braked to a sliding halt alongside him.

"We've found the mother?" she asked.

Frost opened the passenger door and slid in beside her. "Yes, love. Parts one and two she jumped in front of a train." Liz made to get out, but he restrained her. "You don't want to see her."

She shook off his hand. "Why not?"

"The poor cow is in two bloody halves."

"But if Mr. Cassidy is down there '

"Sod Mr. Cassidy. The case is all tied up. It's the fiddling, messy tying up the ends now and he's quite capable of doing that on his own." He heard footsteps echoing from the tunnel below. "Let's get out of here… I think he's coming."

She drove off, swerving to avoid a battered black van that lumbered towards them. The undertakers didn't use their shiny black Rolls-Royces for messy jobs like this.

He lit up. "Have you seen that girl Tracey what's-her-name?"

"Not yet. I called at her house, but she's at school. Denton Grammar- the same school as Carol Stanfield."

Frost pulled the cigarette from his mouth. "Same school, same age they must be in the same class. Very interesting."

"It's probably a coincidence. Half the girls of her age in Denton go to the same school."

Frost's eyes glistened. A school full of pubescent, busty teenage girls had the edge on following a maimed corpse to the mortuary. "Let's visit the school and question her there. I want to get this lousy case tied up so we can concentrate on more important matters."

The head teacher, Ms Quincey, was not too pleased. This scruffy man, who appeared to be a detective inspector, seemed more interested in watching the fifth-form girls playing handball in the gym through the glass partition of her office, than in listening to what she was saying. She cleared her throat noisily and snatched his attention away from the spectacle outside. "It's just as a witness you wish to talk to her?"

Frost nodded. "She might have seen something that would help us."

Ms Quincey was still doubtful, but was relieved there was a woman police officer with him. She would have preferred to have sat in on the questioning, but had to take 4B for Social Studies while their normal teacher was away having an abortion. "Ah here comes Tracey now."

Tracey pushed through the swing doors into the gym and hurried past the excited, squealing, flush-faced handball players. She was wearing her school uniform, a light brown jacket over a white blouse with a black skirt. She looked a lot younger than the figure on the bank security video.

"Come in, Tracey," said the head teacher.

Frost flashed both his warrant card and his frank and innocent smile. "Won't take more than a couple of minutes, Tracey. You might have seen something that could help us." The girl sat down and crossed her legs, with an almost too studied expression of unconcern. Frost squinted up at the wall clock where the minute hand was quivering on the hour. He was itching for the bell to signal the start of the next period so Ms bloody Quincey would leave them alone. "Better just take your name and address for our records." He tried not to show his delight as the bell jangled.

"I'll have to leave you now," said Ms Quincey, gathering up some books from her desk. "Perhaps you could see yourselves out."

"Of course," nodded Frost, disappointed to note that the bell also signalled the end of the handball game and the girls had all disappeared into the dressing-rooms where… God!.. they'd be having showers! AH those sweaty little nubile fifteen-year-olds, stark naked… Then he realized the girl was talking to him and was snatched back from his fantasizing. "Sorry what was that?"

"You wanted my name Tracey Neal, 6 Dean Court, Denton."

He scribbled it down although it was unnecessary as they already had her details from the bank. "You were in Bennington's Bank just after nine-thirty yesterday morning?"

"That's right." She flicked away a strand of chestnut hair that had fallen over her face and tried to look bored.

"You know Carol Stanfield, don't you?"

"Yes."

"And you heard about the robbery at her house?"

"It was on the radio. They kidnapped her and stripped her…" Her eyes widened as if she had just realized. "Her father when I saw him in the bank was he picking up the ransom money?"

"So you saw him?"

"Only briefly. I don't know him that well. I sort of gave him a smile, but I don't think he noticed me."

"You're being a great help," said Frost. "Did you notice anything suspicious anyone hanging about apart from yourself, of course?"

She screwed up her face to show she was trying hard to remember. "There were lots of people there. I didn't notice anyone especially."

"When you left the bank, did you spot anyone hanging about outside, or in a car…?"

She shook her head. "Sorry."

Frost beamed his deceptively reassuring smile. "Not your fault, love. Oh just for the record. What were you doing in the bank?"

She frowned. "Why? What has that got to do with it?"

Frost spread his hands vaguely. "Just routine. We have to check out everyone who was in the bank at that time, even if it is obvious they weren't involved. So what were you doing there getting money out?"

"Yes."

"You weren't at school yesterday?"

"No."

Frost noticed she was starting to wriggle and look uneasy. He fished out his cigarettes and pretended to be preoccupied. Actually, he was looking through the glass to the doors of the dressing-room where the first of the damp-haired, squeaky clean girls were scampering out. "Why didn't you go to school?"

She shrugged and looked up at the ceiling. "Didn't feel like it."

A sympathetic smile. "As good a reason as any. So what did you do with yourself all day? Read the bible take soup to the sick?"

"I went round a boy's house and we listened to some music'

"That's terrific," said Frost. "Then he can vouch for you save us doing a lot of checking. What's his name?"

"Ian Grafton."

"Address."

'23FairfieldRoad."

"Right." Frost scribbled this down on the back of a supermarket till receipt, then suddenly seemed to think of something else. "This may sound silly. You took 5 out. What did you want the money for?"

"I was going to the disco at Goya's. It's a big night."

"The disco was in the evening. Why did you draw the money out in the morning?"

"Why not?" she said defiantly. "It was as good a time as any."

"I suppose so," said Frost, grudgingly. He worried away for a while at his scar. "After you drew it out, you waited a few minutes, then paid it back. Why was that?"

"I suddenly realized I had a standing order coming up and if I withdrew the money it couldn't be met."

"So you had to give the disco a miss?"

"No. Ian lent me the money."

"Good old Ian. Did you go straight to the bank from your house?"

"Yes."

"Your mother seemed surprised when we told her you were at the bank. She thought you would have been at school."

"I don't tell her everything."

An understanding smile. "I bet you don't. Did you go straight from your house to the bank?"

"Yes."

"Right." He started to scribble this down, then paused. "Wait a minute. Your mother said you left the house at your usual time for school and you were wearing your school uniform."

"Yes well, I wanted her to think I was going to school, didn't I?"

"And you went straight to the bank."

"That's right." She wasn't so quick with her answers now.

"We've got a witness.. He shuffled through some pieces of paper and pretended to read from one. "Ah yes… an old dear. Not very reliable, I'm afraid… half blind and didn't have her glasses with her. She says she could have sworn you were wearing jeans and a dirty old duffel coat… not your nice smart uniform."

"Then she was mistaken."

"So you were in school uniform the one you are wearing now?"

"Yes."

Frost turned to Liz Maud as he scratched out what he had just written down. "You see, sergeant that silly old dear got it all wrong." He patted the papers together and stuffed them in his pocket, then swung the chair round to face the girl and smiled with a nod as if that was all he wanted her for. As she got up to go he suddenly snapped his fingers. "I'm a stupid git — I'm getting all confused. It wasn't the old lady who said you were in casual clothes, it was the bank security video… black duffel coat with the hood up and light trousers." He beamed at her. "So either you or the bank video camera are telling me porkies."

She stared at him, her lips moving silently as she tried out alternative answers. At last she said, "I took different clothes with me and changed in the public toilets."

"So what did you do with your school clothes flush them down the pan? They weren't with you while you were in the bank."

"All right, all right!" She was almost shouting. "Ian met me round the corner from my house in his van. My mother doesn't like me going out with him. I changed in the back of his van while he drove me to the bank. He waited for me, then took me to his place. Satisfied?"

"Perfectly," said Frost, standing up. "I just wanted to get the incongruities straightened out. Thanks for your time." He gave the girl a brisk nod, then he and Liz left the school.

In the car, Liz said, "She was lying."

"Of course she was," said Frost. "So let's nip round and see Ian what's-his-name and find out what sort of lies he's going to tell us."

There was a van parked outside the house, a battered, rust-riddled light brown Ford with the name of the previous trader crudely erased with black paint.

"Your witness said the van he saw was light brown," said Frost.

"I thought you didn't believe him," sniffed Liz.

"I can be flexible when it suits me," smirked Frost. "Sometimes I'm flexible when it doesn't suit me." He pressed the door bell.

Ian Grafton was eighteen, tall and wiry, wearing his black greasy hair in a thick pigtail. He took them to his upstairs flat.

"I expect Tracey's phoned you about us, Ian," said Frost, noting the pay-phone on the landing. "Just wanted to confirm a couple of things."

Grafton occupied a bed-sit. He was unemployed. Social Security paid the rent. His last job was doing deliveries for a local furniture shop, but the job collapsed when the firm went bust some twelve months ago. He hadn't worked since. They sat on the bed in his small room with its pop posters and the midi hi-fi unit and went through the motions of scribbling down his confirmation of Tracey's story. He agreed every word of it and Frost was sure he too was lying.

"You waited outside the bank for her?" asked Frost. "Now, thinking back on it, did you notice anything suspicious… any weirdos hanging about?"

"The only weirdo was a fat tart of a traffic warden who gave me a flaming ticket for parking on a double yellow line." He snatched it from a shelf and waved it at Frost who squinted at the date and time. It tallied.

"Thank you, Ian. We might want to speak to you again."

He took another look at the van as they left. The same colour as the one the witness saw, but if it received a parking ticket at 9.35, then it couldn't have been the van the naked Carol Stanfield was held in. He worried away at this, but the pieces refused to fit.

He didn't have time to brood for long. As soon as Liz opened the car door, there was a radio message. Would Frost get over to the mortuary right away. The mother hadn't committed suicide. She had been murdered.

"Murdered?" said Frost.

The hospital pathologist, who had thought he was going to carry out a routine autopsy, nodded. "Come and see."

The body was on the autopsy table and much of the blood had now been washed off. Her clothes had been removed and the head had been put in place, ready to be sutured back on to the torso to make her presentable for relatives. The junior technician who had been summoned to perform this task was hovering in the background.

Frost and Liz looked down at the body. With the clothes removed, the pathologist had no need to explain. There were stab marks all over the abdomen and the area of the heart. The lower incisions were encrusted with dried blood. Frost did a quick count. She had been stabbed eleven times.

"Shit!" This was a complication he could have done without.

"The incision through the heart would have been enough to kill her," said the pathologist. "She was dead before she went over that railway bridge."

Frost gave a deep sigh. "Any chance the wounds were self-inflicted, doc?" He knew it was a stupid question, but he wanted to cling to his suicide theory.

The pathologist shook his head. "Look at her hands."

Frost knew he should have checked before he asked. The backs of the hands showed slashes and stab wounds. They were inflicted as she tried to defend herself.

"This is right outside my league," said the pathologist. "You'll have to get Mr. Drysdale to do the autopsy."

"All right," said Frost. "Put her back in the fridge until he gets here."

The junior technician helped the mortuary assistant to slide the torso on to a trolley then, with a look of distaste, carefully picked up the head and dropped it into a large polythene bag which he also placed on the trolley.

They met Cassidy as they were walking back to the car. "Stabbed," said Frost tersely. "About eleven times. Dead before she was chucked in front of the train."

Cassidy barely concealed a smirk. "I knew this case wasn't as straightforward as you tried to make out."

"Nothing I touch turns out to be bloody straightforward," said Frost ruefully.

"Have they done the autopsy?"

"They've sent for Drysdale. If it's anything more complicated than an ingrowing toenail, this bloke doesn't want to know."

"I'm going to pull Snell in," announced Cassidy.

"Don't be a prat," said Frost. "You want to start putting pressure on the husband."

"The husband couldn't have done it. Snell broke in, started to stab the kid when they all woke up and started screaming. He panics and silences them with the pillow. The mother runs in and he has to kill her as well."

"Then why didn't he leg it and leave her? Why try to make out her death was suicide?"

"I don't know, but I'm going to find out."

"I'll give you a better scenario. The husband comes back from work to find his wife smirking all over her face. She tells him she's killed his kids to pay him back for leaving her on her own, night after night. He takes it amiss and goes berserk, stabbing her again and again. He realizes suspicion must fall on him, so he carts the body away and tries to make her death look like suicide."

"He couldn't have done it," repeated Cassidy, stubbornly. "He's got a watertight alibi. Three people can confirm he was in that store until nearly two o'clock in the morning."

"Then recheck his alibi… see if we can break it." He turned to Liz. "Is he still in hospital?"

"Yes. They should be releasing him tomorrow."

"Good. He was taken there straight from the house, so he was still wearing the clothes he had on that night. Get those clothes. I want Forensic to do a proper job for a change and go over every inch of them for bloodstains… there must have been one hell of a lot of blood." Back to Cassidy. "You'd better hang on for the autopsy. Drysdale should be here any minute. I'll make my way back to the house and wait for Forensic and the Scene of Crime boys."

Cassidy wasn't happy at the way he was being ordered about. After all he was, if only temporarily, the same rank as Frost. But he decided to swallow it. It looked as if there could well be some embarrassing foul-ups with this case so it would be better if Frost was in charge. "Right."

He went back through the swing doors of the mortuary to wait for the Home Office Pathologist.

Liz dropped Frost off at the house in Cresswell Street and drove on to the hospital. The constable on duty, young PC Packer, handed over the front door key. "Go and get yourself a cup of tea or something," said Frost. "I'll be here for at least an hour." Packer nodded gratefully. It was boring standing on guard, nothing to do, no-one to talk to except when he was fending off questions from the inquisitive. There was a burger bar in the main road. He'd nip off there for a bite to eat in the warm.

Frost let himself in and closed the door behind him. In the oppressive background of silence small sounds seemed to be exaggerated. The lounge door creaked as he pushed it open. The curtains had been drawn to stop people peering in and the room was in darkness. He clicked on the light. Was the woman killed here and taken away? If so, there should be blood, but he couldn't see any.

He clicked off the light and went along the passage to the kitchen where there were still unwashed mugs on the small table. He should have got someone to tidy up after they left. Blue polythene sheeting had been laid over the floor to protect it from the feet of everyone tramping in and out. He hitched a section back and peered down on to blue and white vinyl. Blood would have screamed. There was none. The white surface of the tall fridge freezer gleamed coldly. He took a look inside. Near the top, an opened tin of Heinz baby food.

Over to the back door. At some stage one of its glass panes had been broken and a makeshift repair of a sheet of plywood nailed over the gap. The bottom of the ply was loose where the nails had been wrenched out, making it possible for anyone outside to squeeze a hand through and reach the key. This had been noted the night before, but not much attention was paid to it as the case then seemed uncomplicated.

He left the kitchen and went down the corridor, the soft padded creak of his footsteps following him. The children's bedroom still breathed Johnson's baby powder. The beds, stripped of their clothes, were icy to the touch. Across the room, on a shelf, a row of soft toys, animals, golliwogs, dolls, stared reproachfully at him. As he turned to leave, his heart froze. A child's voice cried, "Mummy."

It was a doll. A bloody doll on the floor and he had trodden on it. He picked it up and put it on the shelf with the others.

Shaken, he hurried off to the darkened lounge where he sat and smoked. The heavy curtains insulated the room from outside noises, but kept in the stifling silence of the house. It was chilly and he shivered. At one stage he was jolted from his thoughts by a sound like a child giggling, but when he listened hard there was nothing.

Footsteps up the path and someone knocking at the door. The Forensic team. "Not today, thank you," he said. "I never buy at the door."

He went back to the lounge and left them to it. Painstaking, methodical work was not his forte and he got impatient with people who had to work this way. Young Packer reported back and was sent to check with the neighbours about what they saw or heard last night. If the mother was killed in the house she would have had to be driven to the railway bridge, so did anyone see or hear a car?

A tap at the door. "We'd like to do this room, inspector." He was getting the distinct impression he was in the bloody way.

He moved on to the kitchen. Harding from Forensic was out in the garden examining the door in the wall that led to the outside lane. He saw Frost and hurried over to him. "Something to show you." It was the back door. With rubber-gloved hands Harding eased back the plywood panel and pointed to its jagged bottom edge.

Dots of red and flecks of skin. "Someone forced back the wood to get a hand through so they could turn the key from the inside. The edge of the ply grazed the back of his wrist, drawing blood. Whoever did it would have a nasty scratch on the back of the hand."

"It could have been the father… or even the mother," said Frost. "Forgot their front door key so came in through the back."

"Possible," said Harding. "We should be able to do some DNA testing on the skin fragments. Find a suspect and we could match him to this. You wouldn't need a confession."

"Science is wonderful," grunted Frost. "It's making the rubber truncheon obsolete." Two men from the Forensic team in their gleaming white boiler suits came in. "We'd like to do the kitchen now, inspector."

Nowhere where he could sit and think and be undisturbed. He let them get on with it and caught a bus back to the station.

Cassidy was waiting for him in the murder incident room. He had the results of the post-mortem on the mother. "Numerous stab wounds to the abdomen and heart. The wound to the heart killed her and she would have died almost instantly. Stab marks on her hands where she fought off her attacker."

"What sort of knife?"

"Single edge, sharp-pointed. Could have been a kitchen knife."

"Time of death?"

"Between eleven and one o'clock last night."

Frost told Cassidy about the back door panel. Cassidy's eyes glinted with satisfaction. "I want to bring Snellin… now."

"He should be back at Newcastle," said Frost. He hoped and prayed Snell would be there, sitting in his flat, reading his bible, the backs of his hands entirely without a scratch… "He isn't," said Cassidy. "The Newcastle police have checked."

Frost stared out of the window. With low-lying, heavy black rain clouds, it was already dark outside. "AH right. Let's try and find him."