in green. Wearily, Gilmore spun the wheel round and headed back to the cottage.
The Forensic team had almost completed their work and Harding shook his head at them as they passed through. ‘Nothing. We’re now going to try the shed.’
‘Then you can give us a hand,’ Frost told him. ‘Bring a torch.’ Harding slipped on a plastic mac and followed them down to the bottom of the yard.
‘This would be easier in the morning,’ moaned Gilmore as rain trickled down his collar.
‘Shouldn’t take us long,’ said Frost dragging out the deck-chair frame and flinging it into the dark of the garden.
It took nearly half an hour. As one item of useless junk was removed more and more was revealed.
‘I can’t think why he bothered to keep this,’ grunted Harding, struggling with a muddy iron-framed bedspring, heavily corroded with rust.
It was not until the shed was nearly empty that they found what Greenway had been hiding. Stacked high against the far end of the shed, white cardboard boxes, piled almost to the roof. Frost moved back to let Gilmore reach up and drag one down. He tore open the stapled lid. Inside, tightly packed, were cartons of Benson and Hedges Silk Cut cigarettes. Gilmore took out a carton and tossed it over to Frost who ripped off the wrapping. No ‘Government Health Warning’ on the side of the packets. These cigarettes were made for export.
Frost stared at the packets, feeling even more depressed. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting to find, but certainly not this. This would effectively shoot his case against Greenway right up the anal passage. He went to the shed door and swore bitterly into the rain and the wind and the dark.
The Interview Room now reeked strongly of stale shag tobacco smoke and cheese and onion crisps. There was a spit-soaked, thin hand-rolled cigarette end in the ashtray. Someone else had been interviewed since Frost’s questioning of Greenway.
‘All right, all right. Stop shoving.’ Greenway, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with a neatly bandaged hand, stumbled into the room, urged roughly from behind by a foul-tempered Gilmore. Frost waited until the man was sitting down, then he pulled a packet of Benson and Hedges from his pocket and pushed it across. Greenway stared at it for a while, turned the packet gingerly with a finger so he could confirm the absence of the health warning. ‘You took your bloody time finding them,’ he grunted.
Frost retrieved the packet and shook out a cigarette. He lit up and sucked in smoke. ‘Feel like talking?’
Greenway helped himself to a cigarette and accepted a light from the inspector. ‘I take it I’m no longer being charged with killing the school kid?’
‘No. The bloke you coshed has identified your photograph.’
Greenway thought for a moment. ‘All right. I’ll give you a statement.’
But as Gilmore turned the pages of his notebook, Frost waved a hand for him to stop. ‘This isn’t our case. Detective Inspector Skinner from Shelwood Division is on his way over. You can give a statement to him.’
Gilmore snorted in exasperation. ‘Would someone mind telling me what this is about?’
‘Sorry, son,’ apologized Frost. ‘On the day Paula Bartlett went missing a van-load of Benson and Hedges king-size cigarettes for export was hijacked on its way to the docks. The driver was flagged down, coshed, and his load nicked. This happened on the motorway at Shelwood, miles outside Denton Division.’
‘But Greenway told Inspector Allen he never went out that day,’ protested Gilmore.
‘I think he was lying,’ said Frost. ‘People don’t always tell us the truth.’
‘Of course I was lying,’ said Greenway. ‘The bloody van, full of nicked fags, was standing outside my house when the other inspector called that evening. I thought he was on to me, so when he asked me, I said I hadn’t been out all day. But it was about the missing kid . . .’
‘Can you help us at all about the girl?’ asked Frost.
Greenway shook his head. ‘I left home at six in the morning . . . didn’t get back until nine o’clock at night. The paper hadn’t arrived when I left and it wasn’t there when I got back.’
A tap at the door. ‘Detective Inspector Skinner is here,’ announced Sergeant Wells.
Skinner, a burly man in a trench coat, looked exactly how a detective inspector should look, a contrast to the rag-bag Gilmore had to work with. His sergeant, lean and mean, looked like a detective sergeant who would always be in his boss’s