DI Jack Frost 02 - A Touch of Frost

farm labourer. He had found the body.
    “He’s down here,” said the man, his boots clomping as he took them down a winding lane that snaked back to the farm where he worked. They followed in silence. Tall boundary hedges on each side made the lane very dark. A little way down, and they could hear the gurgle of water. It reminded Frost of the previous night when he’d followed Dave Shelby down those steps to the body of Ben Cornish. The clomping of boots stopped. The man pointed to where the lane started to make a lazy curve and where a drainage ditch, some two feet deep, hugged the side of a hedge-bordered field. From behind the hedge the plaintive lowing of cattle quivered gently in the darkness.
    “He’s in there,” said the farm labourer. “In the ditch.” He wasn’t going any farther. He had seen it once. He didn’t want to see it again.
    The two detectives moved forward. A narrow verge, overgrown with lank grass, separated the ditch from the lane. Flattened grass lurched over and combed the surface of muddied water which overflowed slightly at that point because of some obstruction. Webster fumbled for his torch and clicked the button.
    A waxen hand, bobbing gently up and down, poked through green slime. The body was sprawled facedown in the stagnant murk. The water made the police uniform look jet black.
    “I tried to pull him out,” called the labourer from the other side of the lane. “I thought he might still be alive. But when I saw his face . . .”
    Frost knelt on the wet grass and plunged his hand through the slime to grab Shelby’s hair so he could lift the head. As it broke through the surface, Webster stifled a cry and Frost felt his stomach writhe in protest.
    The head, dripping water and blood, had only half a face. The left-hand side was bloodied pulp with part of the cheek and lower lip flapping down, showing teeth and bone. There was no left eye, only a spongy red socket, and the forehead was pocked with embedded lead shot. Frost couldn’t look any more. He released his grip, letting the head fall back in the ditch with a hollow plop. He dried his hand by wiping it on his mac.
    Webster was the first to speak. “Shall we get him out?”
    “No,” said Frost, staring into the distance. “Not until the police surgeon has seen him. You know what a fussy little bastard he is.” What is this, he thought, a rerun? I said all this last night.
    After taking a few details, they let the farm labourer get off home. Then a scene-of-crime officer arrived with his expensive Japanese camera and his ultra fast colour film and took flash photographs of the ditch, the grass, and the bobbing white hand. Nothing else to photograph until the arrival of the police surgeon.
    “There he is,” called Webster, watching a car gingerly nose its way up the lane, pulling up a few feet away from the two detectives. Slomon climbed out, nodded briefly to Frost, then peered into the ditch. “Have I got to get down there?” he asked.
    “Yes,” said Frost, "you bloody well have." Just let Slomon try to skimp this examination.
    The doctor returned to the car for his Wellingtons. He pulled them on, removed his coat, and rolled up his shirt sleeves. Then, very carefully, he stepped down into the ditch. “I’d like some light, please.”
    Three torch beams homed in on him as he busied himself with his instruments and thermometers. In spite of the difficult working conditions, Slomon took his time, determined not to repeat the fiasco of the previous night. He explored the body very carefully before clambering out.
    “At a guess, he’s been dead between four to six hours,” he reported, drying his hands on a towel from his car. “Impossible to be precise in these conditions, but the post-mortem will pin it down.” He rolled down his sleeves and shrugged on his jacket. “Again, the post-mortem will confirm, but I’m pretty certain he was dead before he was dumped in the ditch. He wouldn’t have survived long with those injuries, anyway.”
    The poor bastard wouldn’t have wanted to live with his face looking like that, thought Frost. “Can we move him, Doc?”
    “I don’t see why not. The pathologist won’t be able to do much with the body as it is.” Slomon went back to his car promising his written report within the hour.
    The scene-of-crime officer seemed too busy with his camera to help, so Webster and Frost pulled off their shoes and socks, rolled up their trouser legs, and stepped into the