DI Jack Frost 02 - A Touch of Frost

sneaked in to pinch?”
    “On my dead mother’s grave, Mr. Frost,” the tramp whined, “I haven’t come here to pinch anything.” A mighty sniff reprieved another dewdrop that was in danger of obeying Newton’s law of gravity. “I’m just a poor old man looking for shelter.”
    “Well, you’re not going to find it here,” said Frost, "so push off before I kick you out.”
    “I’m an old man, Inspector. Send me out in the cold and I’ll die.”
    “Promises, promises,” said Frost. “Why don’t you go and kip where you usually doss down?”
    “I couldn’t go to my usual place. There was a policeman standing outside.”
    “A policeman?” queried Frost. “Here . . . what usual place are you talking about?”
    “The public convenience behind the Market Square. Me and Ben Cornish usually kip in one of the cubicles.”
    “You won’t kip with him anymore,” Frost said, and, as gently as he could, he broke the news.
    The tramp, genuinely upset, clutched the wooden rack for support. “We was good mates, me and him, Inspector. Ben wasn’t eating properly. He was on drugs used to inject himself with a needle. I told him it would kill him in the end, but he wouldn’t listen.” He reflected sadly for a while, then said, “Did he have any money on him? He said he was going to give me some for food. He promised me.”
    “Sorry, Wally. He had no money. In fact he had sod all,” said Frost. “Now beat it.”
    The tramp’s face fell. “You’ve got to arrest me, Mr. Frost. Put me in a cell for the night. I looked at that nurse . . . saw all of her body. I lusted after her. I thought carnal thoughts. I deserve to be locked up.”
    “You shouldn’t have run away, Wally. She said she fancied you. Now hop it, or I’ll tell my colleague to boot you out.”
    "Please, Inspector. Look at the weather out there. You’ll be signing my death warrant if you send me out in that!” He pointed dramatically to the windows, and, on cue, the wind lashed and hammered its fists at the glass.
    Against his better judgement Frost relented. “All right, Wally. Go to the station and tell Sergeant Wells I want you locked up for the night. Tell him I suspect that you’re an international diamond smuggler.”
    The dirt around the tramp’s mouth cracked as he burbled his gratitude. They watched him shuffle painfully down the corridor, his arms folded around the carrier bag which contained everything he had in the world. Then the dead face of Ben Cornish swum filmily in front of Frost, the eyes insisting, “You bloody fool . . . you’ve missed something.” As he later realized, Wally had shown him the answer, but he hadn’t seen it.
    Webster was saying something.
    “What was that again, son?”
    Webster’s quartz digital was shoved under his nose. “Four twelve. We’d better get back to the station.”
    Frost winced. The station meant the crime statistics and the overtime returns and all the other mountains of paper work that had to be attended to. He thought hard. Surely there was something else they could do instead of going back. Then he remembered Tommy Croll, the security guard from The Coconut Grove. Why not interview him? That should waste a good hour.
    “I’m looking for a bloke called Croll,” he told the nurse as she pulled sheets down from the rack. “He came in tonight with concussion.”
    “Then you’re in luck, Inspector,” she said. “He’s in my ward.” She frowned at her tiny wristwatch. “But it’s very late.”
    “I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important, Nurse,” said Frost. And what was more important than avoiding the crime statistics?
    They followed her into a small ward where a ridiculously young student nurse was crouched over a desk with a shaded lamp, anxiously watching over the twin rows of sleeping, snuffling, and moaning patients, and hoping none of them died on her before the other nurse’s return.
    “All quiet,” she reported with relief. No sooner had she said this than one of her patients called out and started bringing up blood.
    “Another one for the morgue,” Frost whispered to Webster.
    “Mr. Croll's in the end bed,” called the nurse as she and the student dashed off to attend to the crisis.
    Their shoes squeaked as they tiptoed over the highly polished floor to the far bed where a weasel-faced man, his forehead decorated with a strip of sticking plaster, was sleeping noisily. Frost undipped the charts from the end of the bed and studied them. “Hmm.