DI Jack Frost 02 - A Touch of Frost

I’d like you to initial every page, then sign it at the end.” But Price, anxious to get the unpleasantness over, initialled the pages automatically with barely a glance at the contents, endorsing the final page with a signature in almost childlike handwriting. Frost and Webster witnessed it.
    “No chance of bail, I suppose?” Price asked hopefully.
    “No chance,” confirmed Frost.
    “I’ve got some books hidden under the bed,” Price confessed shamefaced. “Dirty books. It would be awful if my wife found them. Any chance you could get to them before she does?”
    “Happy to oblige, Mr. Price,” smiled Frost. “We don’t want you to get into any trouble.”

    He took a copy of the signed statement and marched with it, in triumph, to Mullett’s office, pausing first to chat up Miss Smith. “You can take your rusty chastity belt off, Ida,” he smirked. “We’ve caught the rapist.” She stared right through him and continued sealing the flaps of envelopes marked Confidential. Not in the least put out, Frost asked, “Is Dracula in his coffin?”
    “The Superintendent is off,” she snapped, encouraging a flap to stick with a thump of her fist and wishing it was Frost’s nose. “He won’t be back until tomorrow.”
    Damn, thought Frost. He’s never here for my rare moments of triumph and never absent when I foul things up.
    When he got back to the office, Detective Sergeant Hanlon was chatting up Webster. Hanlon, beaming from ear to ear was bursting with news.
    Sod your news, thought Frost, you listen to mine. “We’ve caught the rapist, Arthur. The flower of Denton womanhood can safely walk knicker less in Denton Woods tonight, as long as you stay at home.”
    Hanlon giggled. “Well done, Jack.”
    Frost slumped into his chair. On his desk was a subscription list for the widow of PC Shelby. He saw Mullett was down for fifty pounds so, out of spite, he put himself down for sixty, which he could ill afford, and tossed it into the out-tray. He looked up to see Hanlon grinning down.
    “Why are you still hanging about, Arthur? Do you fancy me or something?”
    Hanlon pulled up a chair. He had a lot to tell. Charlie Bravo had sped off to the pawnbroker’s shop in time to arrest the man who was trying to sell Glickman a further quantity of stolen sovereigns.
    “Marvellous!” exclaimed Frost. The earlier message from Control had completely slipped his mind. “I’m solving so many cases these days, I can’t keep track of them all.” .
    “You haven’t solved this one,” retorted Hanlon. “I have. They’ve coughed the lot and I’ve charged them.” He handed Frost the carbon copies of two statements.
    “Why are there two statements?”
    “Because there are two prisoners,” explained Hanlon. “They’re brothers.”
    Responding to Glickman’s phone call, Charlie Bravo had roared round to the pawnbroker’s and apprehended Terry Fowler, twenty-four. Fowler had thirty-three Queen Victoria sovereigns in his possession. He was brought back to the station and searched. Six packets of a substance believed to be heroin were found in his jacket. The drug squad was informed, and a team went to Fowler’s digs, where they arrested his brother, Kevin, twenty-five. The room was systematically searched. Taped to the back of the wardrobe was a plastic bag packed tight with white powder, which tests confirmed to be heroin of the type being pushed around Denton for the past couple of weeks. The drug squad was overjoyed. They had found the two new pushers.
    “The Drug boys will take all the credit for this, Arthur,” said Frost, skimming through the statements, ‘just as you’re trying to take all the credit from me.”
    The brothers, Trevor and Kevin Fowler, came from Poplar, east London, but were now of no fixed address and were continually moving around the country. Two weeks ago they arrived in Denton, taking a room in a bed and breakfast boarding house near the railway station. The metropolitan police knew them and had tele printed details of their past form, which included petty theft, robbery with violence, and possession of drugs.
    “If they’ve only been in Denton a couple of weeks,” observed Frost, ‘then we can’t push all those petty housebreakings on them.” This was a big disappointment. He had been hoping to clear up his backlog of unsolved burglaries in one fell swoop.
    “They only admit to the sovereigns, Jack, not to anything else,” said Hanlon. He showed Frost the