DI Jack Frost 02 - A Touch of Frost

Her bosom was heaving and her eyes were ablaze with defiance. “Nice one, Sadie, but what’s the point? He can’t keep running all his life.” She said nothing. Her lethal expression said it all.
    They let themselves out. As they closed the door behind them they could hear her crying.
    Back in the car Frost was wondering whether to tuck it around a side-turning and wait a while in case Stanley returned, but he decided against it. Even Useless Eustace wasn’t that stupid.
    Then the radio called him. Johnny Johnson, sounding grim.
    “Yes, Johnny?”
    “We’ve just had a phone call, Jack. A Mr. Charles Fryatt. He reports seeing an apparently abandoned police car.”
    Frost stiffened. “Where?”
    “In Green Lane, the cut-through to the main road.”
    Frost felt his heartbeats quicken. “And Shelby?”
    “Mr. Fryatt says he saw no sign of a driver, not that he looked very far. He thought he’d better get straight to a phone and tell us. Can you get over there?”
    “On our way,” said Frost. “Over and out.”

    Green Lane was little more than a bumpy dirt track turning out of Bath Road and almost petering out before it reached Denton Road. The Cortina jolted and shuddered as it picked its way over the potholes and followed the twisting lane down into a depression completely hidden from both main roads.
    “Look out!” called Frost and Webster braked abruptly as the headlights swooped down on the bulk of something directly in their path. It was Shelby’s patrol car, the Ford Escort, looking lost and miserable in the darkness.
    Cautiously, they approached. The driver’s door gaped open; a stream of police-channel chatter flowed from the radio. Frost’s torch beam pried inside. The keys swung from the ignition, a clipboard with the day’s standing instructions lay on the passenger seat. He picked up the handset and radioed through to Control to report they had arrived at the scene.
    “Any sign of Shelby?” Johnson asked anxiously.
    “Not yet,” replied the inspector.
    “Don’t move!” called Webster urgently. “Just look down, by your feet.”
    About an inch or so from where Frost was standing the beam of Webster’s torch glinted on something. The ground was wet. Stained with red. Frost dropped to his knees to examine it closer. He dabbed it with his finger. It was blood. A lot of blood.
    “And look there!” called Webster, swinging his torch up to the rear-door window of the patrol car.
    The window was a crazy paving of shattered glass, milkily opaque. Embedded in the glass, also held in the paint work of the door, were tiny flattened pieces of metal. Lead pellets, identical to the pellets found in the wall at the pawnbroker’s. Ingram’s theory wasn’t looking so farfetched now.
    “Shit!” said Frost. He returned to the handset. “Johnny. It doesn’t look too happy, I’m afraid. There’s blood and shotgun pellets all over the place. You’d better send a full team down here right away.”

    Within twenty minutes the area was cordoned off and was droning with mobile generators that fed the many floodlights illuminating the scene. Men from Forensic were crawling, inch by inch, over the car. Scene-of-crime officers were taking photographs with blinding blue flashes, dusting for prints and circling blood splashes and lead pellet pockmarks with white chalk. A group of off-duty men who had spent most of the previous night and this morning combing Denton Woods on their hands and knees now scoured the scrubland on their hands and knees.
    Frost, leaning against his Cortina, watched gloomily, the smoke from his cigarette spiralling upward. This was the time for experts and specialists and for attention to detail, so he kept well out of the way. Webster, who had been talking to a couple of the Forensic men, came over to join him.
    “Forensic says the ground’s too hard to leave any proper impression, but there are traces of a second car. The other vehicle was ahead of Shelby’s patrol car, probably blocking the road. It looks as if Shelby stopped, got out, and was fired on as he walked toward the other car.”
    “Then where is he?” asked Frost.
    “Probably been taken away in the other car. There are marks where something was dragged.”
    “Why?” said Frost, scratching his head. “Why not leave him?” He looked up. “Hello . . . what does that toffee-nosed git want?” One of the Forensic team, a man with long grey hair, was waving Frost over to the abandoned car.
    “Preliminary