A Touch Of Frost (7 page)

Who needs your bloody help? thought Webster.

It was a teenager’s dream bedroom, straight out of the pages of an up-market pop magazine. The ceiling was finished in sky blue and dotted with a firmament of silver stars. Along one wall a custom-built unit held a music centre, a video recorder, and a small fourteen-inch colour TV to which was connected a computer keyboard.

Opposite, behind light-oak sliding doors, a built-in ward robe travelled the entire length of the wall. Webster slid back the door to reveal rows of dresses and coats rippling on hangers. In a separate section a white ballet dress shimmered and rustled next to a cat suit and three pairs of leotards. Neat lines of tap and ballet shoes occupied the wardrobe floor.

Webster moved to the corner, where a small desk faced a double row of bookshelves. On the desk were two blue-covered school exercise books with Karen Dawson, Form VB neatly written along the top. He opened one of them to read, in Karen’s neat handwriting,
If I were Prime Minister, the first thing I would do on taking office would be to abolish poverty throughout the land
 . . .  He dropped the exercise book back on the desk.

Frost was still stretched out on the bed, eyes half closed, watching puffs of cigarette smoke drift like clouds across the star-spangled ceiling. “OK, son, if you’ve got any theories, let’s have them.”

“Well,” Webster began, “if she has been kidnapped . . .”

“Kidnapped!” snorted Frost, reaching out for the exercise books. “I wish she had been, son. A nice kidnapping case might make Mullett forget I hadn’t done his lousy crime statistics.”

“The man Debbie Taylor saw . . .” said Webster.

Frost sighed deeply. “Yes. I wish she hadn’t seen him, son. That bloody man messes up all my theories. My theory is that Karen comes home, finds the house empty, and decides it would be a good opportunity to do a bunk.”

“Run away, you mean?”

“That’s right. Teenagers run away from home all the time, especially when their parents are always rowing like those two charmers downstairs.”

“The father’s a swine,” retorted Webster, “but the mother’s all right.”

“All right?” cried Frost. “Her daughter’s missing and she still finds the inclination to polish our buttons with her knockers as we have to squeeze past her into the bedroom? We could have had a quickie behind the door if we played our cards right. The pair of them aren’t worth a toss, my son. Karen’s run away, but give her a couple of cold nights and no clean knickers and she’ll soon come crawling back to finish her essay about saving the world from poverty.”

“But the man . . .”

Frost ran his teeth along his lower lip. “Yes, son, what about the man?” He crossed to the window, noticing that the curtains were open. Debbie had said she saw the man closing them. He opened the window and hurled out his cigarette, then leaned forward and peered along the drive, which sloped down to the main road, trying to locate the spot where Debbie would have been standing when Karen left her. Reluctantly, he was forced to agree that if there was a man, young Debbie would have been able to see him from the road. He withdrew back into the room and closed the window.

“If it was a kidnap,” said Webster, thoughtfully, “then how would the man know Karen would be home from school early?” He thought for a second, then answered his own question. “Suppose he was one of her schoolteachers?”

“The teachers are all women,” said Frost, poking another cigarette in his mouth, “though a couple of them have got moustaches. The only man is the caretaker, but he’s pushing seventy.” His fingers found a gap in his mac pocket. “Sod it!”

“What’s up?” asked Webster.

“There’s a hole in this pocket. My lighter must have dropped out. Now when did I use it last?”

“About five minutes ago. It’ll be near the bed.”

Frost went down on his knees and began patting the thick pile of the shag carpet. As his hand explored the area beneath the bed he touched something. He dragged out a small metal case covered in pale-blue leatherette. The legend on the lid read
The Intimate Bikini Styler for That Sleek Bikini Line
. Flicking open the lid, he looked inside. “Here’s a weird-looking electric razor, son.” He passed it over to Webster, who nodded curtly.

“They’re called Bikini Stylers.”

“I know that,” said Frost, still searching for his lighter. “It’s printed on the lid, but I’m none the wiser.”

Webster looked embarrassed. “Some of these modern bathing suits that girls wear . . .  the bottom half is cut very low . . .  they expose parts of the lower stomach . . .  the very low lower stomach.”

Frost looked at him blankly, then his eyebrows rocketed up as the penny dropped. “You don’t mean . . . ? Are you trying to tell me that women actually shave themselves down there before they put their bathing drawers on?” He stared hard at Webster. “You’re having me on.”

“It’s a fact,” Webster insisted. “My wife uses one.” His eyes glazed reflectively. “She looked a cracker in a bikini.”

Frost regarded the dainty shaver, shaking his head in awe. “Now I’ve heard everything. I wish the hospital had one of these when I had my appendix out. Before the operation they sent in a short-sighted nurse with a Sweeney Todd cutthroat. That was the first time in my life I really prayed.”

He snapped the lid shut and poked the case back under the bed, wondering what a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl would be doing with a thing like this.

“By your left foot,” called Webster, pointing to the missing lighter.

Frost retrieved it, lit up, and flopped back on the bed. He yawned. “I could stay here all night, son, especially if young Karen, all fresh, sweet, and clean-shaven, would slip under the sheets beside me.” He turned his head and saw the photographs. Two of them on the bedside cabinet, propped up against a tiny Snoopy digital alarm clock.

He sat up to examine them. One showed Karen in the white ballet dress from the wardrobe, standing
en pointe
, hands outstretched, looking demure and sweet. The other was a beach scene, brilliant sky, silver sand. Two girls—one, young Debbie minus her glasses, flat-chested in a one-piece dark-blue bathing costume, looking as embarrassed as if she were stark naked; next to her, smiling with the sensuous mouth she had inherited from her mother, Karen Dawson, long-legged, well-developed, posing in a white two-piece swimsuit that caressed and stroked every curve of her young body. An entirely different Karen from the scrubbed school girl in the other photograph.

“No sign of five o’clock shadow,” muttered Frost, looking closely before handing the prize over to Webster.

The detective constable winced. Anything prurient and Frost flogged it to death. But the photograph certainly showed the girl in a different light. Unlike the inspector, Webster wasn’t convinced the girl had left home of her own accord. There was one way to check, of course. He asked Frost to get off the bed, then he rummaged under the pillow and pulled back the bedclothes.

“I don’t think you’ll find her in the bed,” said Frost. He had pulled out the drawers of the bedside cabinet and was rummaging through the contents.

“I was checking to see if her pyjamas were there,” sniffed Webster. “If she’d done a bunk I would have expected her to take them with her. They’re not here.”

“But that doesn’t mean she’s taken them with her,” said Frost, pushing the drawers shut. “She might be like Marilyn Monroe and wear nothing in bed but her after-shave.” He lifted the top sheet and brought it to his nose. “Tell you what, though, my hairy son, she wears a pretty sexy perfume in bed . . .  smells like that stuff farmers use to get pigs to mate. Mullett’s wife smothers herself in it.”

Webster took a sample sniff. It certainly was pretty heady stuff for a fifteen-year-old. He was reassessing young Karen by the minute. “Could we check the bathroom to see if her toothbrush and stuff have gone?” he asked. “No girl would run away without her toothbrush.”

“Good idea,” said Frost, “I’m dying for a pee.”

The first door they tried led to the Dawsons’ bedroom, a vast room with a canopied bed, the walls covered in some kind of padded velvet. The next door opened on to the bathroom, fully tiled in red Italian marble. It contained a large circular sunken bath that could have doubled as a swimming pool. The bath had taps made of gold, as did the matching sink basin. A red carpet matched the tiles, and all the towels matched the carpet.

Frost surveyed the bath in awe. “If I had a bath like that, son, I’d definitely have to get out if I wanted a pee.”

The bathroom cabinet was concealed behind a mirror over the sink. Webster opened it and was searching through its contents when the door burst open and Dawson charged in.

He reacted angrily when he saw what Webster was doing.

“Who gave you permission to go through our private possessions?”

“We’re checking to see if your daughter’s toothbrush is still here, sir,” said Webster patiently. He had found two tooth brushes in a beaker, one red, the other green. He showed them to Dawson. “Do either of these belong to Karen? It is important, sir.”

“Karen’s brush is orange.” He pushed Webster out of the way and rummaged impatiently through the cabinet. “It
should
be here somewhere.” He yelled for his wife to come up. “Karen’s toothbrush—” he snapped as she entered the bathroom, “where is it?” He moved so she could get to the cabinet.

Standing on tiptoe, she peered inside, moving things out of the way. “It
should
be here,” she said.

“I didn’t ask where it should be,” Dawson told her sarcastically, “I asked where it was. Apparently, it’s important.”

“It isn’t here,” Clare said eventually. “None of Karen’s stuff is here—her toilet bag, flannel, toothpaste . . .”

Webster leaned against the wall and folded his arms. Annoyingly, it looked as if Frost’s theory was correct. The girl had run away.

“If Karen took her toilet things with her,” Frost told the parents, “it does rather suggest she went of her own free will.”

Dawson’s face reddened to match the Italian tiles. “Are you suggesting Karen has run away from home? You’re an idiot, man. A bloody idiot. You don’t know my daughter. She loved her home. She wouldn’t do such a thing.”

“Lots of teenagers do it, Mr Dawson,” said Webster. “Not necessarily because of anything to do with home. There could be trouble at school . . .  or an upset with a boy friend.”

Dawson regarded the detective constable as if he were an imbecile. “A boyfriend? My Karen? She’s only fifteen, for God’s sake, a mere child! And what about that man Debbie saw? What is he supposed to be, a mirage . . .  a teenage sex fantasy?”

“I’m not convinced she saw anyone, sir,” Frost said. “She had doubts herself.” He buttoned up his mac to show he was ready to leave.

“So you intend doing nothing?”

“Not a lot we can do,” said Frost. “We’ll issue her description, circulate her photograph, ask everyone to keep an eye open for her. I don’t think she’ll be away for long.”

They heard a phone ringing. Dawson snapped his fingers for his wife to answer, but when Frost suggested the caller might be Karen, he dashed out to answer it himself.

Frost sat down on the toilet seat and lit up his thirty-eighth cigarette of the day. He gave the woman a friendly smile. “Anything you want to tell us while your husband isn’t here, Mrs Dawson?”

Her face went white, then she pretended to be puzzled. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Frost shrugged. “Then it’s my mistake, Mrs Dawson.” He stood up as her husband returned. “It’s for you, Inspector—Denton Police Station. You can use the phone in Karen’s room.”

The caller was Bill Wells. To Frost’s delight, he could hear the noise of the party in the background. There was still a chance he would make it.

“Hello Jack,” Wells intoned in his usual gloomy voice, “Can you talk freely?”

“Yes,” confirmed Frost.

‘What’s the score with Karen Dawson?”

“Zero. Her old man thinks she’s been kidnapped, but my bet is she’s done a bunk.”

“Don’t be too sure she’s all right, Jack. We might have found her.”

Frost caught his breath. Suddenly he felt cold and apprehensive. “
Might?
”

“We’ve had an anonymous phone call. A man. He says there’s a girl’s body in Denton Woods. I think you’d better take a look.”

Dawson poked his head round the door. “Anything wrong, Inspector?”

“No,” said Frost. “Just something we’ve got to look into. I might be back to you later on, sir. If there’s any news, that is.”

Upstairs, the party was throbbing away louder than ever and showing no signs of breaking up. Wells heard stamping, shrieking, roars of laughter, and the sound of glass smashing. A load of bloody hooligans, he thought as he tried to hear what the caller was saying. “I’m sorry, sir, bit of a disturbance outside. Would you mind repeating that?”

The man sounded out of breath and was barely whispering into the phone. “I’ve found a body. In Denton Woods. A girl.”

Wells stiffened. Another body! Just when he was praying for a nice, quiet, peaceful night. With his free hand he knuckled the panel to Control and, when Ridley opened it, signalled for him to listen in on the extension.

“A girl’s body, you say, sir?” He picked up his pen, ready to write down the details.

“That’s right. A young girl . . . a kid.”

A kid! The sergeant’s first thought was of the previous call he had logged. Karen Dawson, fifteen, missing from home since this afternoon.

“I see, sir. And where exactly is she?”

“I told you. In Denton Woods. Off the main path, behind some bushes.”

“Where in the woods, sir? We’ll have to have the exact location.”

A pause, then a click and the line went dead. The caller had hung up. Wells replaced the receiver and cursed. “Damn!”

“Sounded a flutter to me,” called Ridley, hanging up the extension.

Wells nodded. They were always receiving bogus calls from cranks with a grudge against the law, who took delight in wasting police time and money. But you couldn’t take chances. It had to be assumed that all calls were genuine until proved otherwise. “What cars have you got?” he asked the controller.