The End of the Wasp Season

by Denise Mina

  “Why do I have to ask you?”

  “Because it’s good manners to pretend to care about a family funeral.”

  “OK: how was your auntie’s funeral?”

  “Fine.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Um, quite old. Eighties, I think.”

  “Fair enough, then…,” said Bannerman.

  “Yeah.” She glanced in the mirror and saw an old lag, hands deep in his pockets, limping up the path behind her. “Suppose so.”

  “Well…” He stalled, as if stale platitudes about death were hard to come by. “Great. Anyway, we’ve got a murder in Thorntonhall, if you’re finished there.”

  She looked in her rearview mirror and smiled. “I am finished here, sir.”

  FOUR

  Thomas sat down on the pebbled beach, waiting, hoping Squeak would know to come here. He should have been here by now. A chill wind came off the long stretch of water ahead of him. Thomas could see sheep on the hills ahead, tiny dirty-white dots on the exposed grass. They’d been for a visit to a farm once, long time ago. The annual day out was to a farming show as well. It was a holdover from a time when most of the boys at the school would be inheriting an estate and cared about sheep. No longer. They were a different crowd now. The talk in the bus on the way back from the farm was all of whether you could actually shag a sheep and how smelly and greasy they were.

  The pebbles on the beach were black, not of the soil around here, dumped by a landscaping lorry. He picked one up to chuck it at the rippling water but stopped himself. Kids did that. He wasn’t a kid anymore. He put it down and heard a footstep behind him.

  Squeak sat down next to him, a little bit away.

  They both had their jackets zipped up to their chins, their hands tucked tight into the pockets. Lunchtime in the big hall followed by free association. Twenty-one minutes and counting before they were missed. They had arrived by different routes, Squeak through the woods because he was coming from the chapel, and Thomas by the cemetery so that if anyone saw them they could say they happened upon each other.

  Though they hadn’t been to this bit of beach together for ages, Thomas had known Squeak would find him. They knew each other.

  When they both started school at eight they were the only two kids in their year. Most families, most boarders, waited until later. Thomas’s dad had started at six but that was regarded as too young now, damaging. They started at eight and everyone pitied them, knew that either there was trouble at home or their parents didn’t like them. So they grew close to each other, grew into each other, developed a language almost, blinks and looks, names for kids who picked on them and words for why they picked on them. Games with rules no one else understood.

  Squeak sighed at the water and Thomas glared at him. They had a lot to talk about but neither could find the starting point. They were each in their own private torrid stream, rolling through resentments against each other, secret worries, and shame, not of what they had done so much as what each thought of the other.

  They hadn’t spoken since they got into the car at Thorntonhall, Squeak driving and smoking, Thomas busying himself with wet wipes for the entire two-hour drive. He’d used two whole packets and now smelled like the world’s biggest baby, the sickly perfumed oil stuck to his face, leaking into his eyes, under his nails. His bath day was two days away and the smell of the wipes made him want to vomit, made him think of Nanny Mary, disgust so intense it felt like his gut was rotting.

  “There weren’t any kids,” said Squeak.

  When they got back after the drive, Squeak had parked in the village. They scaled the school wall and crept through the grounds, coming through the back field, staying away from the trip-lights around the back of the boarding block. Thomas didn’t care if they were caught. He wanted to be caught. But Squeak insisted that they climb in Thomas’s window, left open for the purpose, and they stood in the dark, looking away from each other until Squeak muttered “g’night” and left for his own room.

  They had seen each other at breakfast this morning, across the refectory floor. Squeak looked tired, red eyed, spooning porridge into his mouth mechanically, his blank eyes roving around the room, stalling on Thomas’s face, just for a moment, and then moving on.

  Now the water lapped softly at the stones. Squeak pulled his tobacco tin out of his pocket and opened it, taking out a small smoke, lighting it and drawing hard. He held his breath, rolled his eyes back with relief and exhaled before offering it across.

  Thomas took it, unable to refuse. He faked a draw, holding on to it for long enough, taking in a little but not breathing deep down. He handed it back.

  “Not into it?” said Squeak, letting him know he’d noticed.

  “Nah.” Thomas leaned back on his elbows, his quick furtive glance at Squeak’s back belying his relaxed posture. Suddenly convinced that Squeak knew he was pretending to be relaxed, he sat up. “You sleep?”

  Squeak glanced back over his shoulder, looking down, in a way that seemed despising, or maybe it was just his position. “Not bad.” He looked away and took another draw. A deep draw, like he was stopping himself from saying something, swallowing it down.

  Thomas couldn’t stand it anymore and snapped at him, “You got something to say to me?”

  Squeak turned slowly. “Me? Have I got something to say to you?”

  Blindsided by the strength of his reaction, Thomas flinched. Squeak flicked the spliff into the lake. “What the fuck would I have to say to you? There weren’t any kids.”

  Abruptly, Thomas’s eyes brimmed. His chin convulsed into a tight ball and Squeak was in his face, fingernail an inch from his eyeball. “Don’t you fucking cry. You fucking took me there. You said it was her, you said you knew. Don’t you dare fucking cry.”

  He let go and sat back, looking furiously over the water.

  Thomas whispered, “He told me—”

  “Did he say her name? Mention that house?”

  He hadn’t. He hadn’t said any name in particular. Thomas got her number from his dad’s desk, tracked down her address from an old text.

  Shocked into taking a deep breath, Thomas stopped his crying pang. His chin relaxed and he rubbed the wet off his eyes roughly as he imagined someone walking past the lakeside and seeing them and thinking it was some sort of lovers’ tiff.

  A rumor like that would stick to you, follow you for the rest of your life even if you fucked every bitch in Fulham.

  He was walking in a London street with his father once, last Christmastime; it was cold and everything had started to go wrong.

  His father was being named publicly, on the internet first and then in the papers. They were shopping for gifts and they ran into a man his father knew.

  The man was impressive, handsome and fit for a fifty-year-old. He was smug. Thomas remembered him pointing out a sports car and saying it was his Christmas present to himself. But his dad was dismissive of him, condescending. When they walked away his father said that the man had been in the year below him here and once got an inadvertent erection in the showers after rugby. He snickered about it, said they never let him forget it. He was called Stander forever after. Thomas laughed about it because his father said “erection,” and it seemed funny, but when he thought about it afterwards, really considered it, the story scared him. It wasn’t the suggestion of being a homo that frightened him, no one really cared about that, it was the vulnerability, being so raw in front of everyone, a private thing made public. Now he tried to avoid games when he couldn’t have a wank just before it, didn’t want to get that sort of name for himself.

  Squeak took another smoke out of his tin and lit it, a cigarette this time, drawing hard, pulling his cheeks in, opening his mouth and letting the smoke curl into a fist outside his mouth before sucking it back in again.

  “That’s how you get cancer, throat cancer,” said Thomas, he’d heard it somewhere.

  “Right?”

  “Letting the smoke linger in your mouth. Ci
g smokers get lung cancer but cigar smokers get face and throat cancer. Because they do that. My dad told me.”

  Squeak looked angry again. “Does he know yet?”

  Thomas shook his head. “He wouldn’t call until study anyway. He knows the rules.”

  “Didn’t have mobiles when he was here, I suppose.”

  “They used to ring the two big black telephones in the back corridor and a passer-by would answer it and then run off to find you, like a mug,” he smiled, knowing he sounded like his father. “Other end of the school sometimes but they’d do it.”

  Squeak didn’t care. “Tastes nice, though, when you blow it out and suck it back.”

  Thomas smiled, tentatively, sad really but a smile nonetheless. Squeak talked through a mouthful of smoke, “You should smoke. You’d look older if you smoked.”

  “Hmm.” It wasn’t a dig. Thomas didn’t care that he looked so young. Squeak was more ashamed of how thin he was and how his ribs stuck out at the bottom. They knew everything about each other. Thomas suddenly realized that it explained why yesterday had thrown them so much. For the first time since they were eight they had surprised each other. Surprised by what had happened.

  “Shock and awe,” he pondered aloud.

  Squeak had to look at him to see if he was taking the piss or starting something. When he saw it was neither he smiled. “Shock and awe?”

  Thomas nodded sadly at the lake. “Was though, wasn’t it? Yesterday.”

  Squeak drew on his cig again. When he exhaled he was grinning. “Fucking A.”

  FIVE

  All the houses in Thorntonhall were big and lonesome. Even the smaller cottages were nestled in ostentatiously large gardens or had massive extensions hidden at the back. The hedges along the road were groomed into immaculate angles.

  The arrangement of the village didn’t make sense to Morrow, looking out of the passenger window. On the outskirts the houses were tall Victorian villas, but towards the center they had seventies flair, angled roofs and big picture windows. She wondered if the center of the village had been bombed in the war.

  Her driver took a sharp left down a tree-lined avenue towards the incident address. Away from the main road the houses were even newer, beige brick mansions monkeying the style of the older villas but with double garages, double glazing, double everything.

  The avenue forked into two driveways at its end; a brand-new road of yellow chevrons led downhill to a modern ranch-style mansion and the uphill fork was a strip of raw-edged tarmac, leading up to a crumbling gray flint country house.

  “I don’t get this place,” she said. “Where’s the shops round here? Why would you build a mansion down the hill from that mess?”

  “That’ll be the original estate house,” said the driver, quietly nodding uphill.

  “The estate?” Morrow sat forward.

  The driver seemed embarrassed suddenly and Morrow had to strain to hear her. “Well, this one, the house we’re going to, it’s the oldest house on the highest position. See how the older houses are further away? All the land would have belonged to this house once. They’ve been selling it off in bits, furthest away, then closer, finally these giant new houses.”

  Morrow looked at the gloomy old mansion, saw what the driver meant. She felt a shivering thrill of realization, saw the village grow up in her mind.

  “How d’you know that?”

  But the driver was reluctant to show her cards. “Just…watch a lot of architecture shows…TV.”

  They craned forward as the car pulled up the steep incline, Morrow eager to be there and re-feel the synaptic twang. This was not the original driveway, she thought, trying to add to the driver’s conclusion, because a horse and carriage couldn’t have taken the sharp ascent. It was a new access to the property, built when the real driveway was sold off for the mansion with the chevron road. She looked at the driver for the first time. She was a new recruit but older, thirties maybe, had a just-out-of-uniform formality to her. She was pretty and dark with a fantastically Persian profile. And she was English.

  Morrow didn’t press her. At the top of the hill the tarmac gave way to gravel, the car losing pull. They came around the front of the house and saw DC Harris, looking worried, standing next to two squad cars and a big forensics van.

  The façade was pleasingly symmetrical and solid, built of gray stone, small windows and a big green front door at the top of a short flight of steps.

  “What style is that then?”

  The driver glanced up. “Georgian.”

  “How can you tell?”

  The driver frowned and looked at the house. She knew the answer, Morrow could tell, and she could see where the reluctance to admit it came from. A broad knowledge of architectural forms wasn’t much of a bonus in the canteen, and being a woman, older and English would already set her miles apart from the rest of them. The force was all about belonging, about them and us.

  The woman blushed a little. “Um, well, everything’s kind of square and the windows are a giveaway. See the three windows on the first floor?” Morrow looked up, saw three small windows equally spaced along the first floor with sash openings. “That’s typical, but it’s late Georgian.” She pointed to the green front door in a square porch, sitting at the top of six steps. “That’s Georgian. You get doors like that in Bath and Dublin. Did you see the oval rooms at the back?”

  “Where?”

  “The middle rooms at the back of the house come out in a semicircle. That’s Georgian. That extension there,” she pointed to a block attached at the side, built in the same stone but with long tall windows in a set of three, “that’s neoclassical. That’s later. Victorian.”

  Morrow looked at her. She was wearing a suit too expensive for someone of her rank. “Where the hell are you from?”

  “Surrey. East Molesey.”

  “What are you doing up here?”

  “My partner got a job up here and I applied. Late recruit.”

  It showed. She wasn’t intimidated by Morrow’s rank, had none of the schoolyard politics about her. “What did you do before?”

  “Had my own business, electronics.”

  Morrow grunted. They were dangerously close to making pleasant conversation. She wondered if “partner” was code for “lesbian partner” or just a common term in Surrey. She didn’t seem butch but then lesbians didn’t anymore. “They treating you OK?”

  She shrugged a shoulder and looked away, blinked. In short no, they weren’t, but she wasn’t letting it get to her and she wasn’t going to tell on them.

  Morrow was impressed. “Good for you. Ambitious?”

  She looked at Morrow, gave a sharp nod, eyes cautious behind. No one admitted to being ambitious nowadays.

  “Good. When you get promoted over their heads they’ll say it’s because you’re female. You’re smart, that’s against you, so’s being a bird and being English and—well, yeah.”

  The driver pretended not to understand the unspoken but her mouth twisted in a thwarted smile as she pulled on the handbrake. They sat together and watched Harris walk over to the car. His skin was as Scottish as it was possible to be without actually being tartan: white on the brink of blue. He had small eyes, black hair and a ridiculously small mouth that barely met the width of his nostrils.

  “Look,” muttered Morrow, as Harris walked over to the car, “I won’t tell anyone you said that, about being ambitious.”

  “Thanks, boss,” she said quickly.

  “You’re smart though, so you know, keep close and, um…” Morrow was suddenly aware of how short her time was, how soon she would be irrelevant. She wanted to be helpful but had nothing concrete to offer. “I’ll take your ideas and pass them off as my own.”

  She meant it as a stupid joke but the driver thanked her again, their voices overlapping.

  They opened the doors and stepped out at the same time. Morrow was relieved Harris was there so they couldn’t speak to each other anymore.

  “Aye,” H
arris frowned at the driver, “you—on the door-to-doors. Specifically: saw anything? Knew the residents here? And whether they’ve been up recently. We need to know whether anything was stolen. Wilder’ll take you.”

  The driver nodded and walked over to DC Wilder lingering by the cars.

  “Who is that?” Morrow asked when the woman was out of earshot.

  Harris looked. “DC Tamsin Leonard.”

  “She smart?”

  Harris grunted noncommittally. Morrow could have slapped him. Since the last round of pay increases DCs were getting a better wage and overtime for every extra minute over their shift. It was a disastrous decision. The men were making more than the DSs and didn’t need to stay on for days at a time until a case was resolved. Now, fingering someone for a promotion would be a betrayal and the smart ones were hiding among the donkeys. But the disenchantment went deeper than that. Bannerman’s rudeness had made it a point of pride among the men to hide their lights, as if being good at their job was helping Bannerman be a prick. The belligerence was bedding in. Morrow felt that she was watching it harden from a habit into the culture of their team.

  She looked up at the roof of the Georgian house, pretending to check the property over, glad of the excuse to arch her back. “Been in?” she asked.

  Harris nodded uncomfortably at the ground. “Hmm…”