DI Jack Frost 02 - A Touch of Frost

the car?” asked Webster.
    Terry shifted his gaze to the bearded bloke. “No, we’d already stopped. We were parked.”
    “Where?” This from the down-at-heel one.
    “Over there.” Terry pointed into the dark. “Round the back of that big tree.”
    “Why?” demanded the bearded one, another miser with words.
    “Why?” repeated Terry in a tone that suggested the answer should be obvious. “Why does anyone bring a bird to the woods at night?”
    “I see,” said Frost, motioning for him to carry on.
    “Anyway, we’re steaming away through the preliminaries in the back seat, and I’m trying to get her tights off her, when she suddenly goes all stiff and calls me a dirty sod. Then she starts struggling and scratching and pushing me off. I don’t reckon she’d ever done it before. Still, I wasn’t going to let the money I’d lobbed out on those disco tickets go to waste, so I tried again. This time she panics, jumps out the car screaming blue murder, and goes dashing down that path, pulling up her tights.”
    “Did you run after her?” asked Webster.
    “No bleeding fear!”
    “Seventeen years old,” said Webster, getting angry, ‘never done it before, gone eleven o’clock at night, and you let her run off in those woods on her own?”
    “She was already screaming I was trying to rape her,” said Terry. “If I’d chased off after her, I reckon she’d have thought I was trying to finish the job.”
    The wind stirred, shaking the trees until the branches creaked. Frost shivered and wound his scarf tighter. “What did you do then?”
    “I drove home and got my head down. About half past midnight, my phone starts ringing. I staggered out of bed to answer it, and it’s Wendy’s old man screaming and shouting because she isn’t home yet. I told him we’d had a bit of a barney and she’d legged it off on her own, but he sounded so worked up I said I’d go and look for her. I drove back here, then followed the path around.”
    “Show us,” said Frost.
    He took them along a narrow path which narrowed even more as it plunged deeper into the woods. A wall of thick bushes on each side brushed their shoulders as they pushed through. After some forty feet, Terry stopped.
    “When I reached here I heard this moaning noise. At first I thought it was a couple having it away, then I realized it was Wendy. I forced my way through those bush things there.” He indicated a gap between the bushes where branches had been bent back and broken. “It wasn’t like that when I first saw it - the ambulance men smashed it down getting their stretcher through. Anyway, that’s where I found her, stark naked, her face beaten up, her clothes all over the place. The poor bitch was moaning and whimpering. I piled her clothes all over her to keep her warm, and legged it back to the car. Then I drove round until I found a phone box and called the law.”
    Frost pushed through the gap and shone a torch around. A small glade, the grass flattened and trampled, but probably all from the ambulance men, the youth, and Jordan and Simms. A pair of laddered tights, screwed into a ball, was caught in a patch of stinging nettles which hugged the base of a beech tree. There seemed little point in picking them up, so he left them there. He switched off his torch and rejoined the others.
    “I suppose I’d better go and tell her father what’s happened,” said the youth.
    “I wouldn’t,” said Frost. “If I was her father I’d half bleeding kill you.”
    Jordan had moved some way down the path and was speaking quietly into his personal radio. He caught Frost’s eye and beckoned him down. “Charlie Bravo has been round the girl’s parents’ house and taken them to the hospital, sir. It seems there’s a bit of a discrepancy. The lad do here says he was home in bed around eleven. The girl’s father says he kept phoning him, didn’t get a reply, so he took a cab round there. He was at Terry’s place just after midnight. Terry’s car wasn’t outside. The father nearly kicked the door in, but got no reply so went back home. When he phoned at half past twelve, Terry answered the phone on the second ring and didn’t sound as if he’d been woken up from a deep sleep.”
    “I can well do without complications like this,” muttered Frost gloomily. “What do you reckon, then?”
    “My guess is Terry raped her, sir. He got all worked up in the car, then, when she ran off, he followed, looking for her. I reckon he