and listened to the noises off – several minutes of ill-tempered barking and a lot of swearing.
‘OK. I’ve got it!’
The bedraggled dog, muzzled and shaking with rage, snarled as it was pulled through by the leash. It charged at Gilmore then shook rain all over him as it was dragged off.
Frost beckoned to Gilmore who, frozen-faced, waited with ill-concealed impatience. ‘Let’s take a quick look in the shed, son.’
Shoulders hunched, they splashed to the end of the yard. The rusty padlock which secured the shed door yielded to the first key from Frost’s bunch.
The torch beam danced over rubbish. The shed was stacked roof-high with junk. The dirt-encrusted frame of a deck-chair rested against a rusting lawn-mower. Twisting, crumbling remains of old chicken wire strangled sodden strips of mouldering carpeting, rotting fence posts and jagged-edged sheets of warped plywood. The torch beam bounced from item to item. Junk. Stacks of half-empty paint tins, torn bags spewing damp fertilizer. Useless, hoarded rubbish. Frost tugged at the deck-chair, but this caused paint tins to topple and he had to jump back quickly.
‘Satisfied?’ asked Gilmore, smugly.
Frost’s shoulders drooped. ‘Yes, I’m satisfied, son. A quick poke around the house, then we’ll go.’
He really thought he had found something in the kitchen. On the work top, thawing from the freezer and ready to be popped into the microwave, was Greenway’s planned evening meal. A box of microwave crinkle-cut chips and a chicken and mushroom pie. ‘Stomach contents,’ exclaimed Frost delightedly. He yelled for Harding, who listened and shook his head.
‘They don’t help us, Mr Frost.’ He picked up one of the packets. ‘Both common brands . . . the market leaders. Even if we could prove the girl’s last meal was an identical product, the supermarkets sell tens of thousands of these every week.’
‘Damn!’ growled Frost.
‘You ready to go yet?’ asked Gilmore pointing yet again to his watch.
‘A quick sniff around the bedroom and then you can get off to your conjugals,’ Frost promised.
The bedroom reflected the state of the rest of the house with the bed and the floor strewn with dirty clothing and unwashed, food-congealed crockery. Was this where Greenway dragged her and raped her? Was this pigsty of a room the last thing that fifteen-year-old kid saw before he choked the life out of her?
One of the Forensic team pushed past him and began stripping the clothing from the bed. ‘We’re taking the bedclothes for further examination, Inspector, but I get the feeling they’ve been washed during the past four weeks or so.’
‘I only wash mine once a year,’ said Frost gloomily, ‘whether they need it or not.’
Another long, deep, irritating sigh from Gilmore.
‘All right, son,’ said Frost. ‘We’re going now.’
In the hall, Harding looked even gloomier than Frost. ‘We haven’t come up with a thing, Inspector. There’s no evidence at all that the girl was ever in the house.’ He plucked a Dobermann hair from his jacket. ‘There’s dog’s hairs all over the place. Would have been helpful if we’d found some on the girl, but we didn’t.’
‘Find me something, for Pete’s sake,’ pleaded Frost, ‘otherwise I’m in the brown and squishy up to my ear-holes.’
Gilmore put his foot down hard on the drive back in case the inspector thought of some other outlandish spot to visit. Frost slumped miserably down in the passenger seat, stared at the rain-blurred windscreen, smoked and said nothing. Gilmore could almost feel sorry for him.
Then Frost sat up straight, pulled the cigarette from his mouth and rammed it into the ashtray. ‘I’m a number one, Grade A twat!!’ he announced.
Tell me something I don’t know, thought Gilmore, slowing down at the traffic lights in the Market Square.
‘Turn the car around,’ ordered Frost. ‘We’re going back to the cottage.’
‘You’re kidding!’ gasped Gilmore, looking at Frost whose face was bathed red by the traffic signal.
‘Under my bloody nose and I missed it . . . All that junk in the shed. You’d expect it to be dry, but it was wet, dirty, muddy and rusty. It must have been out rotting in the open for months . . . so why gather it up and bung it in the shed?’
‘Perhaps he just wanted to tidy up his garden,’ said Gilmore.
‘Do me a favour. His place is a rubbish tip, just like mine. I’d never tidy up my garden and neither would he. That junk was dumped in his shed to hide something . . . so let’s go and find out what.’ Frost’s face was now bathed