DI Jack Frost 02 - A Touch of Frost

Tuesday night shift (1)

    A cold, clear autumn night with a sharp wind shaking the trees. The man in the shadows was trembling. The palms of his rubber-gloved hands were moist, and warm sweat trickled down his face under the mask. Soon he would be able to see her. To touch her. She wouldn’t see him, deep in the black of the moon shadow. She wouldn’t know he was there until it was too late.
    At first he thought it was a police trap. A girl, a young girl, in school uniform, walking all alone in Denton Woods at eleven o’clock at night. But how could the police know he’d be here? The other attacks had taken place miles away. And how could the police know it was the really young girls who turned him on. The police knew nothing. He was too smart for them. Far too smart. They had questioned him. They had cleared him. They had even thanked him for his co-operation.
    Even so, he hadn’t taken any chances. Only fools took chances. As always, he had carefully reconnoitred the area. Nothing. Nobody. For miles around there was no-one but him, and the girl. The girl! In that school uniform. Wearing those dark thick stockings. She couldn’t be much more than fifteen . . . a schoolgirl young and innocent, unaware of her developing body . . . just like the girl in the book, the book he had hidden away in his bedroom.
    What was that?
    He stood stock still, ears straining, his heartbeats booming in the screaming silence. He had heard something. Something moving. He tensed, ready to tear off the mask and run. It was only the mask that could give him away. Without it the police had nothing. No leads, no clues, nothing. Even if they brought him face to face with his victims, they couldn’t identify him. The first they knew of his presence was the sudden suffocating blackness as the cloth went over their heads, and then the pressure of his fingers on their throats, squeezing, choking. One of the girls . . . the second, or was it the third? . . . had managed to tear the cloth from her face. But all she saw of him, before his fists pounded her into unconsciousness, was the mask. The black hood that completely covered his hair, his face, his neck. The newspapers had dubbed him the ‘Hooded Terror’. Tomorrow’s headlines would read ‘ Hooded Terror Strikes Again. Schoolgirl Latest Victim '. He liked reading about himself in the papers. It made him feel important.
    He slid deeper back into the shadows, his body tensed, his ears tuned. The sound again. A rustling, a snapping of twigs. His hand crept up to the mask as he listened, trying to make out what it was. Then a snuffling and grunting as something blundered through the undergrowth. Something small. An animal of some kind. A badger, perhaps, but definitely not human. He relaxed and eased forward. He could smell his own sweat, his excitement. Soon he would hear her.
    Such a shame he would have to hurt this one. She was so young, so innocent. How wonderful if she submitted without protest, her eyes wide open and wondering. At first terrified, but gradually, as she experienced the new delights, the unbelievable sensations he was offering, she moaned, as if in pain, gasping with pleasure, drawing him on . . . the way the girl in his book reacted the very first time it happened to her. She was a schoolgirl, too.
    His ear caught another sound. The dry whisper of fallen leaves on the narrow path scuffed by quick, nervous footsteps.
    It was her. The girl. Again he held his breath. Stood stock still and tensed . . .
    Ready to spring.

    Police Constable David Shelby, twenty-five, married with two young children, shivered and stamped his feet as the wind, cutting down the deserted back street, found an empty lager can and rattled it across the cobbled road. He checked his watch. Twelve minutes past eleven. He wondered who the station would send, hoping it wouldn’t be Detective Inspector Allen but whoever it was, he wished he would come soon. He had far better things to do tonight than stand guard over a dead body.
    Above his head an enamel sign, hanging from a wrought-iron frame like a gibbeted body, creaked as it swung to and fro in the wind. The wording on the sign read Gentlemen, with an arrow pointing downwards. Behind Shelby a broken metal grille sagged, no longer fit to perform its function of denying entry to the worn, brass-edged stone steps which descended to the dank darkness of the underground public convenience, built by the Works Department of Denton Borough Council in