by A. A. Dhand
Joyti reached out to hold Saima’s hand. ‘We have to alter our traditions. It is time.’
Saima felt her eyes welling up. ‘Does Harry know about these?’
Joyti nodded. ‘He used to joke with me that if he married a white girl, she wouldn’t understand and would sell them to buy shoes.’
‘Sounds like him.’ Saima laughed, grateful for the distraction from her tears.
‘Always joking,’ said Joyti. ‘Does he still joke like this? About his culture?’
‘All the time.’
‘Good. It suited him. He never believed in the things we did.’
‘He misses you,’ said Saima, putting the bangles back inside the drawstring bag and holding it tight in her hand.
‘I know. But he is strong.’
Saima wanted to tell her she was wrong. That Harry had buried the hurt somewhere deep so that it couldn’t ruin him any more. But that every morning, when he touched his mother’s slippers, that hurt rose quickly and sharply and, for the briefest of moments, chipped away at the hope he held on to for better times.
Saima pushed the thought aside. ‘What time is Mandy collecting you today?’
‘Whenever I call her.’
‘My shift’s over now.’ Saima hesitated and checked the time, three p.m. ‘I need to pick Aaron up from nursery.’
Joyti checked her watch.
‘Is it far from here?’ she asked.
‘No, it’s just around the corner. Sometimes I walk.’
Joyti placed her hand on Saima’s. ‘Do you think I might come with you?’
‘I couldn’t think of anything I would like more,’ said Saima.
TWENTY
HARRY WENT STRAIGHT from the car garage to Leeds University for his three o’clock appointment with the wasp woman, entomologist Dr Katrina Schultz. Wendy’s office had managed to get him in to see her urgently once they’d had the cause of death confirmed.
He was running behind and didn’t want to miss this slot he’d been given. Now that he knew they were the murder weapon, Harry needed to know as much as possible about these wasps.
He hurried past the Infirmary towards the medical school. At the bottom of the road, he veered away into the Biological Sciences building and took the lift to the third floor.
From the reception desk, he was taken through to Dr Schultz’s lab by a nervous-looking student.
He’d expected some middle-aged, unkempt insect-geek. What he found was a sleek, tall woman in her late thirties, with curly blonde hair, wearing rimless glasses and dressed in dark jeans and expensive-looking black boots.
‘DCI Harry Virdee,’ he said.
She stood up from the microscope she had been using and offered her hand.
‘Dr Schultz, although please, call me Katrina.’
Great smile.
Definitely not what he’d expected.
Katrina offered him a seat on a wooden stool at the lab-bench next to her and walked away to get the sample she’d been sent from Wendy’s path lab.
The room was clean and orderly: rows of benches neatly lined with wooden stools and the walls covered in insect posters – it looked like a very tidy school.
One poster in particular caught Harry’s eye: a collection of words.
Scary. Horrible. Annoying. Yellow. Nasty. Elegant.
There was a picture of a wasp in each corner.
Katrina returned, carrying a small plastic container. Harry could see one of the wasps they’d found in Usma’s eyes inside.
He pointed to the poster. ‘What’s with that?’
‘Oh,’ she said, using her fingers to tuck her blonde curls behind her ears, ‘we did a data collection from a thousand people asking them what they thought of wasps. Those words were the most commonly used.’
‘Right.’ Harry looked at it more closely.
‘Which would you choose?’ she asked.
He took a moment.
‘Scary is about right.’ He pointed to the container in her hand. ‘Especially that thing.’
‘This is a spider wasp,’ she said, eyes bright. She used a pair of tweezers to remove it from the container and place it on a plastic board on the side.
Harry tensed a fraction.
‘It’s dead, Harry.’
He smiled weakly.
‘The body is somewhat longer than the wasps we routinely see in this country, which are mostly common wasps or German wasps. The sting on this is quite something, much more pronounced and with a far more potent venom.’
‘Do we get these in the UK, then?’ he asked.
‘No. That is, I cannot say they do not exist here definitively, but these are more commonly found in the tropics. The Americas, Asia and Australia. I understand this forms part of an investigation you are leading?’
Harry nodded. He didn’t want to tell her exactly how the wasp had been found. That was information they would keep to themselves. If the case spiralled and got media attention and any lunatics wanted to claim credit, that way they would have at least some information that the public couldn’t know to help differentiate people of interest from time-wasters.
‘Could somebody grow these?’
He regretted his words as soon as he said them and saw Katrina’s eyebrow raise.
‘I didn’t mean grow,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Could they be bred? Brought back from somewhere and kept as pets?’
‘Oh yes. If you have the right storage, temperature, UV light, it wouldn’t be so difficult.’
‘Why anyone would want to keep a wasp as a pet is beyond me,’ said Harry.
Katrina pointed at the wall chart. ‘That’s because you chose “scary” as your word. Some people, myself included, think they are fascinating, this species especially.’
‘Why this one?’
Katrina, with more enthusiasm than Harry was comfortable with, told him they were called spider wasps because the females hunted spiders and paralysed them with their sting in order to lay their eggs inside the spider’s abdomen. That way, the larvae would consume the spider’s body as they grew, eventually hatching as adult wasps.
‘Would you like to see a video?’ she asked, reaching for her iPad.
Harry sighed. ‘I’m going to regret saying this, but yes. Go ahead, terrify me.’
‘Thank you,’ said Harry, handing her back the iPad. ‘Sleep will come a little harder tonight, I’m sure.’
‘Just nature at its finest, Detective.’
‘Tell me,’ he said, trying to forget what he’d just seen, ‘can you find out how old that wasp is?’
‘Old?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not exactly. I can tell you it’s a female, because it has a sting. But beyond that, I can only make an educated guess. It has no wing-wear and its eyes are very dark. I’d say this specimen was recently hatched, but I wouldn’t put my life on it.’
‘Good enough for me. And if somebody did have these as pets, would they be able to predict, give or take a few hours, when a wasp was going to hatch?’
‘Yes. We have wasps and bees in the lab and I’d say we can predict, or I certainly can, within say six-to-eight hours that a wasp is going to hatch.’
Harry looked at the wall chart again.
‘Are spider wasps more aggressive than normal wasps?’
‘By normal, you mean common wasps?’
‘Yes.’
‘Their sting is most certainly more painful and delivers more venom.’
Harry couldn’t help but think of Wendy’s assessment earlier that day: Usma had died of a massive allergic reaction. Perhaps that took more venom than a normal wasp.
‘As for aggressive – I’m not comfortable with that word. Because they are larger they are associated with being a more aggressive species, but I think it’s more to do with the spider element and how they hunt them,’ Katrina concluded.
‘Is it labour-intensive, looking after them?’
‘Not particularly. They only need sugar-water to survive.’
> ‘One last thing.’ Harry held up his index finger.
‘Of course.’
‘If you had to say where that particular wasp came from, could you?’
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head and biting her lower lip.
‘Educated guess?’
‘Statistically speaking, I’d have to say Asia,’ she said.
TWENTY-ONE
AT THE PLAYGROUND adjacent to the nursery, Saima watched Joyti and Aaron queueing for ice cream. Saima would never normally have allowed it, especially in the cold. But when Aaron had pointed to the van and screamed excitedly, Joyti had been a slave to his demands.
The first thing she had ever bought him. A 99 covered in strawberry syrup. Saima smiled ruefully, wishing Harry were here to share in the creation of the first memory between Joyti and Aaron. The burden of keeping his father’s condition from Harry was being compounded by the bitter-sweet scene playing out in front of her, Aaron carefully accepting the ice cream and walking alongside Joyti to a small bench.
Such beautiful innocence.
Such cursed karma.
Harry had phoned to say he’d be home in time to bathe Aaron that evening. Saima had almost hoped he wouldn’t make it so that Joyti could come back with her.
Exasperated, she looked towards the sky, as white as Aaron’s ice cream, and whispered a prayer.
Can’t you make this last for ever?
Can’t you make it right?
Saima removed her phone and opened the camera. She zoomed in and snapped a picture, only one. She checked it for clarity.
Perfect.
Aaron was smiling, Joyti was kissing his ice-cream-covered cheek.
It might be the only picture they’d ever have together.
‘Look at that face,’ said Saima, approaching the bench where her son sat with his grandmother. Aaron’s face, hands and clothes were covered in ice cream.
So were Joyti’s.
‘Mamma, i-cream! I got i-cream!’ He waved it at her, spilling more over Joyti’s coat. She appeared not to notice.
Saima removed a packet of wet-wipes from Aaron’s nursery bag. ‘What a mess,’ she said dramatically to Aaron, who popped the remaining piece of the wafer-cone into his mouth.
‘Mamma, hands,’ he said, waving them at her.
‘Hands and face, mate,’ she replied and quickly wiped them clean. She handed one to Joyti as well.
‘Come. Sit down,’ Joyti said softly in Punjabi.
Saima sat beside her. Surprisingly, Aaron stayed on Joyti’s lap, calm and content.
‘He never sits that still with me,’ said Saima, laughing.
‘Grandmother’s touch.’
‘Full belly, I think.’
‘Tell me,’ said Joyti, ‘I’ve never been able to ask you: what did your parents make of all this?’
Saima was surprised by the question. And a little unsure how to answer.
She shrugged and blew out her cheeks, watching her breath fog in the winter air.
Her hand went instinctively to the scar on her cheek, the one she kept concealed behind her hair.
Her father dragging her by her hair and throwing her into the middle of the street when she told him about Harry.
Her mother watching, emotionless.
A kick to Saima’s side.
The flashing blue lights.
He’d spat in her face as the police arrested him for assault. It was the last time she’d seen him or her mother.
Not quite as dramatic as Harry’s father charging at him with a knife, but not far off. She told Joyti all this, keeping her eyes firmly fixed on the paving beneath her feet.
‘They moved back to Pakistan. They’d built a house there and since I was the last child to marry, albeit without their consent, they felt no reason to stay here.’
Joyti was silent.
‘You both made such a hard choice.’
‘It was the right one.’
‘What will you tell Aaron when he gets older?’ said Joyti.
‘The truth.’ Saima turned towards Joyti now, determination in her face. ‘He’s a British boy with parents who love him. He’s not Indian. Or Pakistani. Or Muslim. Or Sikh. He’s whatever he wants to be when he’s old enough to decide what that is.’
Joyti nodded but there was no conviction to it. ‘He’s going to have it hard,’ she said. Saima thought she saw Joyti’s arms around Aaron tighten a little.
‘Life’s hard. We will raise Aaron to be tough enough. Like we were.’ Saima corrected herself: ‘Like we are.’
Joyti sighed. ‘And you have no one?’
‘A sister. We’ve got back in touch over the past year or so. It’s not like it was, but it’s okay. We’re getting there.’
‘That’s good. It’s important to have some family.’
Saima reached to find the bag containing the gold bangles Joyti had given her and waved them at her. ‘And I have you now.’
Joyti’s smile was full of remorse. ‘This is only our third time meeting and even yesterday, when I saw you speaking to my husband, you were positive. I don’t know how you do this, with everything you and Harry have been through.’
‘I don’t focus on what I’ve lost. Only what I’ve gained. Together we’ve overcome our loss and together we will raise Aaron with so much love that he never feels the absence of grandparents or cousins. Many couples have the superfluous stuff without ever having a marriage they can rely on. Whilst we don’t have close family relations, we do have the one thing many would envy …’
Saima waved the bag at Joyti again. ‘A bond stronger than gold.’
Joyti squeezed Aaron tightly, nodding towards a car which had pulled up beside the park. Saima saw Mandy sitting inside.
‘My time is up,’ said Joyti, kissing Aaron, her face pained at having to leave.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Saima, slipping her arm around Joyti, ‘I’m sure there are better times ahead.’
TWENTY-TWO
USMA’S EYES FASCINATED me. Seconds after the sting, they were bulging with so much life. Those moments, when her whole world could be seen in her pupils, I felt pure power.
My doing.
Her eyes faded just as quickly.
A startling transition.
One I’ve seen before.
At school.
My classmate had died within minutes, by my side.
I hadn’t cried like the rest of them.
People thought it was shock.
It wasn’t.
How could such a small thing kill? It wasn’t a fair fight.
Like tonight.
I’m going to change this completely.
Throw Virdee off his game.
In a place full of hundreds of sinners, my choices will be limitless.
Tonight is all about power. Showing Virdee that I can strike when I want and how I want. I want newspaper headlines and mass hysteria. And in a few hours’ time, that is exactly what I am going to get.
He won’t catch me tonight.
But he will have another chance tomorrow.
And the day after that.
And when he has failed at every turn and he’s broken and desperate, he will realize, this was a fight he was always destined to lose.
TWENTY-THREE
HARRY ARRIVED OUTSIDE Inderjeet Kaur’s home, a small terraced house in Hipperholme. Palmer had got him the details and offered to accompany Harry. But this was one meeting he had to do alone.
He waited for the door to be answered, identification to hand. The hallway light came on and a female voice asked who was there. Harry told her and, anticipating her response, slipped his badge through the letterbox. The delay lasted a couple of minutes before the door was opened.
‘Long time, Indy,’ said Harry.
‘About time,’ she replied.
The kitchen was simple, sparsely furnished with no personal photographs. Harry hadn’t seen any men’s shoes by the front door and there was no sign anyone else lived here other than Indy.
He paused by a framed picture of the military symbol of Sikhism on the wall; three swords and a circle.
‘Just because the bastard cut off my hair, doesn’t make me any less of a Sikh woman,’ said Indy, putting the kettle on.
‘Couldn’t agree more,’ said Harry. He was pleased at how well she looked, seemingly having put the past firmly behind her.
A decade before, Harry had attended what at first had appeared to be a domestic incident. Indy had been lying on the floor, unconscious, her long flowing hair cut from her head. Beside her, sprawled in a pool of his own blood, was her white boyfriend Tony, a knife sticking out of his stomach. Harry had called an ambulance for Indy and as uniformed officers attended to the scene he had spied a video camera in the corner of the room.
Red light still blinking.
The sick fuck must have wanted to record Indy’s humiliation.
Before anyone else had arrived, Harry had examined the device and played the recent footage which showed Indy’s ex-husband Gurpal beating her before cutting her hair from her head in a perverse act of religious punishment. Sikhs were forbidden from cutting their hair, so this was a pointed insult.
Gurpal had been disturbed by Tony and in the ensuing altercation, Tony had charged at Gurpal with a knife. In the struggle, Tony had fallen victim to his own act of aggression, the knife ending up in his own body. He’d died almost instantly.
The footage would have easily got Gurpal off a murder charge on self-defence.
The camera had never made it into evidence.
Amidst a volatile trial, Gurpal had somehow avoided the murder charge but been convicted of Tony’s manslaughter and grievous bodily harm for his attack on Indy. Even after his conviction, he had been adamant he had acted in self-defence.
And he knew the footage was there to prove it.
Harry took a seat on a stool by the kitchen counter.
‘I’m glad you’ve got a new life,’ he said.
‘Had,’ she said bitterly.
Harry nodded. ‘I’ve just seen the police reports. Honestly, I didn’t know.’