don’t know about you, son, but I’m going home for some kip.’
Gilmore, still angry, watched the old cretin shuffle off down the corridor. Just his lousy luck to be stuck with that apology for a policeman. He was being associated with Frost’s many failures, but wasn’t getting the chance to be involved with his all too few successes. Just because the fool had killed all his own promotion prospects, there was no need to deny them to everyone else. Damn and blast the stupid burk. He stormed off to the car-park.
As he was settling down in bed, Frost remembered he hadn’t reported back to Mullett about Wally Manson. Ah well, he’d worry about that in the morning.
The jangling of a bell woke Gilmore up. He fumbled for the alarm, but the bell rang on. The bedside clock tried to tell him it was ten o’clock but he felt as if he had only been asleep a couple of minutes. The ringing went on and someone was banging at the front door. He pulled on his dressing gown and staggered downstairs.
A motor-cycle policeman holding a crash helmet asked him if he was Detective Sergeant Gilmore and told him to pick up Inspector Frost immediately.
There had been another Ripper killing.
‘Why knock me up?’ growled Gilmore. ‘Haven’t you heard of the telephone?’
‘Haven’t you heard of putting it back on the hook?’ called the policeman, kick-starting his bike and roaring off.
Yes, the damn handset was off. Mentally cursing Liz, Gilmore replaced it and dashed into the bathroom for a quick cold shower which he hoped would jar him into consciousness. He had finished dressing when the front door slammed and Liz returned from shopping, the bottles clinking in her carrier bag.
‘You’re going out again?’ she shrilled. ‘Out all night and now you’re going out again?’
He patted on aftershave, then knotted his tie and adjusted it in the bathroom mirror. ‘I’ve got to. There’s been another murder.’ His head was aching from not enough sleep and he could have done without any more aggro.
She pushed past him, her face ugly, not saying a word.
He slipped on his camel-hair overcoat and made sure he had his car keys. ‘I’ll get back as soon as I can – I promise.’
‘Don’t bloody bother,’ she snapped, slamming down the shopping. ‘Don’t bloody bother.’
Frost, looking as gritty and crumpled as he had done the night before, was waiting outside his house and he grunted thankfully as he slumped into the front passenger seat. ‘Another old girl slashed,’ he told Gilmore. ‘Haven’t got the full details yet.’
The address was Kitchener Mansions, a block of old people’s flats. The lift, its wet floor smelling of pine disinfectant, juddered them up to the third floor. DC Burton, waiting for them outside flat number 311, looked shattered. ‘It’s a messy one, Inspector.’
‘Tell me something new,’ muttered Frost gloomily, following Burton into the flat.
They walked into a tiny passage, squeezing past a small table holding a telephone and a plastic piano-key index, then on to a small living-room which seemed to be full of people, all keeping well back from the object in the centre of the floor. ‘Let the dog see the rabbit,’ said Frost, barging through.
The old lady, fully dressed, sat in an armchair, her head back, empty eyes staring at the ceiling. Her neck grinned with the blood-gummed lips of a cut throat. Her stomach had been slashed open so that her intestines bulged out on to her lap. At her feet the grey-carpeted floor was sodden with the blood pumped out by her panic-stricken heart as the knife ripped and tore. The tiny room had the smell of an abattoir.
‘Flaming hell!’ muttered Frost. He backed away. He had seen enough.
Even Ted Roberts, the SOC officer, no stranger to violent death, was shaken and had difficulty in keeping his hands steady as he adjusted his camera lens for close-ups of the neck wound.
Gilmore pulled his eyes away from the corpse, and looked around the room. He recognized the uniformed constable, PC Simms, who had arrested Manson the night before. He also recognized the two men from Forensic who had been at Greenway’s house. The duty police surgeon, a thin solemn-looking man busily engaged in filling in his Police Expense Claim form, he hadn’t seen before.
A light oak sideboard stood against the far wall. On it a cut-glass fruit bowl held some apples and a black leather purse. Gilmore nudged Frost and pointed it out to him.