DI Jack Frost 01 - Frost At Christmas

for the first time since Monday morning. A poster of Tracey fluttered on the wall - Have You Seen This Girl? Yes, he'd seen her . . . and tomorrow he'd see her again on the autopsy table as the pathologist cut and tore and probed.
    Young Barnard was waiting for him in the office.
    "You were right about the woman then, sir."
    Frost took the soggy-ended cigar from his mouth and mashed it to brown pulp in his ashtray. "Yes, son, for the wrong bloody reason, but I was right. And if you're going to praise me up, for God's sake forget it. I'm up to here with praise from our illustrious commander. To hear him going on you'd think it was the greatest piece of detection since The Mousetrap." He found a cigarette packet in his drawer, chucked one to Clive and lit one for himself. "I did sod all. I suspected the poor cow partly because I hate her mangy cats, but more for the skeleton, and she had nothing to do with shooting Fawcus."
    "You spotted the cat hairs on the coat," protested Clive.
    "It just happened I was the first to spot them. If I hadn't, then Forensic would have done so, and they'd have analyzed them and given us the bleeding things' pedigrees." He patted his scar and yawned widely. "Barely ten o'clock and I'm tired. It must be old age."
    Was that the time? Clive checked his watch. "Er . . . will you be wanting me any more tonight, sir?"
    "No - you push off early, son. Mr. Mullett says you're to report direct to Inspector Allen tomorrow, so you'll need all the sleep you can get. You don't mind walking home, do you? I'll be hanging on here for a while and I might need the car."
    As Clive left him, the earlier mood of depression seemed to have lifted and he was sitting at his desk, dribbling smoke through his nose and moving mounds of paper to new positions. He was singing himself a parody of a once beautiful Frank Sinatra song.
    "Maybe she's waiting,
    Just expectorating
    Onto her old shabby dress . . ."

WEDNESDAY (6)

    The church clock grated and whirled and hurled a salvo of eleven chimes over a sleeping town.
    Martha Wendle, awake in her bunk in the women's cells, heard it as a vague sound, barely impinging on her racing jumbled thoughts. The kitten ... the lovely white kitten, its skull crushed and blood streaming from its nose. And that child. Why didn't she run away when Martha first shouted at her? Why did she stay and throw stones? If Tracey had run away she would still be alive and life would have gone on as usual. But now the child was dead, her cats would die, and children would throw stones at her empty cottage windows. If only she could turn back the clock, relive it again, force the child to run away.
    The wife of the Reverend James Bell-heard the chimes as she lay rigid in the sagging marriage bed, right on the edge, as far away from him as possible, ready to shudder and recoil at the slightest nauseating contact of bodies. Those books, those disgusting books. And those photographs. And he had taken them himself, actually seen those girls undressed. His eyes dwelling on their naked bodies.
    Her husband was huddled in the fetal position and he heard nothing but his own internal mumblings, his pleas to God for forgiveness, his promise that if there could be no scandal - if it could be kept from his Bishop - then he'd stop. No more photographs, no more books. A promise, Lord. A solemn promise.
    And in the printing room of the Denton Echo nothing could be heard over the chattering and thudding of the presses. They had to completely remake the front page which now carried the familiar schoolgirl photograph and the self-explanatory banner headline TRACEY FOUND - DEAD. It was also necessary to make a slight alteration to the back page where a short paragraph, "Hunt Continues For Missing Girl", was replaced by an equally small paragraph reading "1951 Killer Strikes Again". The public's appetite could only feed on one sensation at a time.
    In Vicarage Terrace, Mrs. Uphill was asleep at last, the drained, empty, heavy sleep of exhaustion. Downstairs the phone was ringing.
    Clive Barnard heard the chimes and counted. Eleven. The earliest he had been to bed since . . . since Sunday, years and years ago. Hazel's body, cool and hot, hard and soft, was stretched out beside him. He pulled her to him and they kissed and buds of hardness flowered against his chest. His hands slipped down to the swell of her buttocks and . . .
    And there was a knock at the bloody door.
    "Are you in there, son?"
    Stupid, silly, sodding