The End of the Wasp Season

by Denise Mina

  “What?” she said. “Mess?”

  “Bad mess,” he said quietly.

  “Since when?”

  “Last twenty-four hours. Probably yesterday evening.”

  Morrow looked up. The roof tiles were clustered, sitting not quite true. Lumps of dead leaves peeked out over the gutters around the roof. Standing in full view at the side of the house, a septic tank slumped on rusting stilts. On the far corner, above a window, a tiny yellow hexagon housed the alarm, but the plastic was sun faded and the blue lettering no longer legible.

  “This is one of those worth-a-fortune/cost-a-fortune houses, isn’t it?”

  Harris nodded at his notes. “How was your funeral?”

  “It wasn’t mine.”

  “No, I know—”

  “It was my auntie’s.”

  She’d had to lie. She’d already said her father died because she couldn’t bring herself to admit that her son had. Not for a long time. Eventually, she admitted that Gerald dying was the cause of her depression, but she’d still pretended her dad died around the same time. They made her sit for session after pointless session with a counselor in the welfare unit. She did her time, knowing nothing would help and all her bosses would ever see was the time sheet. Her father’s death was one lie she wasn’t prepared to admit to. It freed her, broke the link with the infamous McGraths and she felt triumphant, claiming he was dead when he wasn’t. It made her feel as if she had killed him.

  “Yeah,” said Harris, “your auntie.”

  “It was all right, anyway.”

  “Yeah, good.”

  She looked up again. The house had been dearly beloved of someone at some time: an apple tree in the front garden was overloaded with fruit, unpicked, dropping and rotting in the overgrown lawn. The flower beds had been turned but not replanted.

  She found it depressing—it made her think of Danny and John and the frailty of family, how easily, despite all the parts being in place, everything could suddenly turn to shit. “Where’s the cash?”

  Harris looked at her, the little “o” of his mouth like an undelivered kiss. “In the kitchen.” He raised his eyebrows. “There’s more than we thought. It’s in euros.”

  “High denominations?”

  “Five-hundreds.”

  They smiled up at the house. Five-hundred-euro notes usually meant money laundering, usually meant drugs. It was the highest denomination note available in a dependable currency and needed far less space than hundred-dollar bills. “How much?”

  “God, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands?” He grinned. “Wait till you see it.”

  “Someone in there with it?”

  “Aye, Gobby. He’s glad of the sit down.”

  She felt herself warm to the house. “She had the money but she’s not spending it? Is it someone else’s? Maybe she didn’t know it was there.”

  Harris shrugged. “Possible, not likely. Wait till you see where it is.”

  If it was drug money it could lead them to a team, a big international operation. It could make for a nice tidy case, give them extra clean-up.

  “It’s something well organized anyway ’cause it’s not loose cash. It’s got bank bands on.”

  “You know this area?”

  He shook his head. “Been in and around for an hour or so, haven’t seen a soul in the streets but workmen and gardeners.”

  “Ma’am?” Leonard had hurried over from standing with Wilder. “Boss called. Says your phone’s turned off so he called him.” She pointed back at Wilder, standing a hundred yards away holding his work mobile and looking shifty. He had been wise enough not to come over with the news. “Wants to talk to you.”

  “Does he now?”

  At her shoulder, Harris coughed a wry comment.

  Leonard didn’t understand what was going on. “Yes?” she said uncertainly.

  “Say you couldn’t find me.” She turned her back abruptly and asked Harris, “So what’s the story?”

  “Female, twenty-four years old. Her mother died here recently—”

  “That hers…?” She pointed to a steel ramp leaning against the steps to the front door.

  “Yeah, mother was in a wheelchair.”

  “Carers coming in and out?”

  Harris checked his notes. “Round-the-clock care. Found a set of accounts in the living room.”

  “Expensive?”

  “God, aye. Makes me want to save up paracetamol for my own mother, looking at that.”

  “Maybe the money was for that?”

  “You’d keep it in a bank then, wouldn’t you? If it was straight.”

  In their peripheral vision, they saw Leonard edge away.

  “Check the agency they used, find out who was coming, who had keys and so on.”

  They watched Leonard arrive at Wilder’s side and say “I can’t find her” to him. Wilder held the phone out to her. Morrow was glad to see Leonard hold her hands up and back off.

  “Shit runs downhill,” observed Harris pleasantly.

  Morrow allowed herself a smile. “So, victim’s name?”

  “Sarah Erroll.” Harris paled slightly.

  “You look ill, Harris.”

  “Oh…” He tipped his head up the stairs to the green front door, cringed and glanced down at her stomach. “I dunno…”

  Morrow tutted at him. “For God’s sake, don’t start that.”

  She looked back at him. Harris was genuinely not sure that she would be all right. It bode ill, she thought; Harris was fairly hardened.

  She looked up the steps to the open front door. A white-suited scene-of-crime officer was kneeling inside, examining the lock, but the house yawned black beyond him. “Who found her?”

  “Lawyer was expecting her at his office, a meeting about the estate details from her mother’s death. She didn’t arrive so he came here…”

  It didn’t sound right. “That was sinister enough to warrant a visit?”

  “Very out of character, apparently. She was steady, always where she said she’d be. Important papers. He came to find her and did. He’s still inside.”

  They had been there for nearly an hour. Morrow wasn’t just late because of the funeral, she’d had to drive back to the station to dump her car. Officers were not allowed to use their own vehicles on police business, in case they ran someone over or got followed home. “Still here? Get him out. Get him to the station—why’s he still there?”

  Harris drew a sharp breath. “Intruders came in around the back. We’re doing forensic there but also trying not to bring him out past the body. He’s kind of trapped.” He cleared his throat. “The men are calling her ‘nice legs.’ ”

  “Who?”

  “Sarah Erroll.”

  “Something happen to her legs?”

  “No—‘shame about the face.’ ” He hissed a breath in through his teeth. “’S a mess.”

  Morrow groaned. It was bad for a victim to have a dehumanizing nickname just one hour after the start of an investigation. It was hard enough as it was to get the men to admit that they cared. There was only one thing worse than a violent death, she thought, and that was a humiliating or funny death. No one gave a shit then and it impacted on the quality of the investigation.

  But there must be some pity in it: Harris looked pale, sad, and his eyes searched the gravel as if he’d lost something and it worried him.

  Morrow looked away and muttered, “What, is it sexual?”

  Harris paused to draw breath and she flinched. She hated sexual murders. They all hated them, not just out of empathy with the victim but because sexual crimes were corrosive, they took them to hideous dark places in their own heads, made them suspicious and fearful, and not always of other people.

  “No,” he said, finally, sounding unsure, “not superficially. No sexual assault. She was fine-looking though. Slim…there’s photos. We should think about that as a possible motive, maybe.” Harris took a deep breath and tipped his head sideways to the house, eyebrows raised
in a question. “Not joking, it’s bad, boss.”

  She was suddenly very angry. “You keep saying that, Harris—yes, you have managed to get that over.”

  He smiled at the ground. “OK.”

  She slapped his arm hard with the back of her hand. “Talk about a bloody buildup. You should do trailers for the movies.”

  As they set off for the steps Morrow was affecting barely contained fury and Harris was smiling, no longer worried for her.

  Anger was her trump card, the sole emotion that could sweep sorrow to the curb. Stay angry, stay detached. Everyone was worried about her doing the job because she was pregnant. She could feel herself fading in the eyes of the big bosses, becoming an invisible factor, dying in their eyes. They made ludicrous suggestions that her pregnancy might make her forgetful, emotional, incapable. Actually, the pregnancy had sharpened her mind and brought her into the day. She never wanted it to end. She knew her dread was partly about her son’s sudden death, but she had spent time in the special care unit once, as a cop, when she was sent to guard a newborn awaiting adoption. The mother had tried to stab it through her own stomach and they were afraid she would get out of her room and come for it. While Morrow was there a nurse had told her the statistics about twins. For now she lived moment to moment, enjoying it while she could, savoring the visceral minutiae of this time before, the taste of food, the depth of sleep, the intimate wriggles inside her skin. She had never been more acutely in the present than she was now.

  They took the steps up to the house together, watching the ground for traces. The stone was spotted with lichen, the balustrade moss-covered. A rotting cast-iron boot scrape was sunk into the bottom step, lions rearing on either side, their noses and ears eroded to stubs.

  The door at the top of the steps was green, heavy, solid, and a forensics guy was kneeling down, taking scrapings from the brass lock. The intruders hadn’t come in this way, but they would have to prove that no other method of entry had been used. A recent home-invasion case had failed because a wily defense had created reasonable doubt by suggesting a possible second entrance by an unknown crew. It came as an order from the top: they had to use their limited resources proving negatives while hairs and fiber traces got blown around hallways.

  Harris followed behind her and when, for a moment, she tottered on the doorstep, she felt his palm brush her back. She was only five months gone but she was already enormous. Her center of gravity was shifting every time the twins moved. She smiled back at him and heard him give a little snorting laugh.

  The shallow porch inside the door had a black stone floor. A worn oak bench sat on one side beneath a series of coat hooks, empty, apart from one gray woolen jacket on a hanger. It was unusual, chic, with round lapels, a tight waist and a flare at the hips. A red label with gold writing was just visible. On the door jamb a holy water font hung on a string from a nail, the little semicircular sponge inside dried up and yellow.

  “Papes?” she said, wondering instantly if the word was offensive.

  Harris nodded. “Suppose.”

  She shouldn’t have said that. She was sure the word was insulting. “That’s unusual, isn’t it? I thought you couldn’t be a landed toff and a Catholic. They couldn’t inherit land or something…”

  Harris shrugged. “Maybe they’re converts.”

  Morrow expected to see a line of muddy wellingtons in the porch. Instead, a pair of elegant black velvet high heels were casually discarded on the floor, one upright, one collapsed on its side. They were new: the scarlet sole was barely scratched. Next to them lay a small Samsonite wheelie bag: a molded white plastic oval with a crocodile-skin pattern punched out on it. It was a hand-luggage bag, very new, and clean, with a first-class British Airways luggage tag looped through the handle. She stepped over and looked down at it. Glas Intl from Newark, dated yesterday, in the name of Erroll. It was a very small bag to take to New York.

  She pointed to the handle. “It’s hand luggage but she checked it in. What did she do that for?”

  “Heavy?”

  “Maybe. She have other bags with her?”

  “Not that we can see.”

  She pointed at it. “Get that dusted and take it in, I want to see what’s inside. Call US immigration. Her visa entry form will have a note of which hotel she was going to stay in and how long for.”

  Harris scribbled in his notebook.

  “What have we got on her so far?”

  “Not much at all. Next of kin on the passport is her mother, who’s dead. We found her national insurance number but it looks like she’s never worked.”

  “Might be right. She could be living on family money?”

  “Still pay income tax, wouldn’t you? On interest or something?” Harris looked at the first-class luggage tag. “She had money.”

  “Could she have worked abroad? Or be married? Have another name?”

  He shrugged.

  Morrow looked into the dark hall. “The kitchen cash could be her inheritance, hidden for tax reasons.”

  “In new five-hundred-euro notes?”

  “Aye, right enough.” They were in it now, talking in shorthand, half voicing half thoughts, seeing through the same eyes. She thought again that it was a shame Harris wouldn’t put himself forward for promotion. For him it wasn’t just about the money, it was personal: he loathed Bannerman. She saw Harris flinch when the man’s name came up in his company, and when any routine humiliation was visited by Bannerman on one of the troops they looked to Harris. She was hoping to be out of the department when it came to a head.

  Through an inner door the reception hall was imposing but windowless. Two large oak doors led off it; one into a giant empty living room with faded blue silk wallpaper, one to a shabby library. The right-hand wall was punctured with a large flat arch leading to the Victorian extension and the stairs.

  The darkness was exacerbated by wood paneling up to waist height and deep chocolate wallpaper flecked with gold. All the light in the room came from the arch. The brown wallpaper on the left of the hall had faded to a striking orange diagonal where the sun hit it: a pale smear of time across the wall.

  The black and white tiled floor was pitted and grimy. Like the porch, the hall was curiously devoid of furniture and effects. She could see empty spaces, lighter tiles, darker wallpaper, where furniture had been removed and pictures had been taken down. She pointed at them.

  “Burglary?” Harris suggested.

  Morrow looked at a six-foot-high square of brighter paper on the wall. A giant dresser had stood there for a long time. “They’d have needed a hell of a big van.”

  It caught her eye because it was clumsy: through the opening to the stairwell, lying against the wall, was a red mobile phone. It was a chunky, inelegant handful that lay comfortably on its side. It didn’t match the velvet high heels in the hall.

  “What is that? Her mother’s phone?”

  “That,” smiled Harris, “is a taser disguised as a phone: 900,000 volts.”

  “They left it?”

  He shrugged. “They left it or it was hers, we’re not sure. They’re available in the US.” He nodded back to the suitcase. “She went there a lot, nearly once a month according to her passport.”

  Morrow was surprised. “The money coming from there?”

  “She didn’t seem to be going anywhere else.”

  The taser phone could have been left there by the intruder. Traceable objects left at the scene were sometimes hidden, fell under car seats, slid under heavy furniture, dropped down the side of settees but sometimes they were found in full view. Most people scanned a room as they left it, but in the heightened state of awareness after the commission of a crime people sometimes remembered to take their cigarette butts but forgot they’d left their car outside.

  She stepped back and looked around the hall again, bringing her eye to the phone afresh. Very visible. It seemed unlikely that they dropped it and didn’t spot it on the way out. All it would take was a backward glance.
There was nothing in the hall to lose it behind. “I think it might be hers. Has there been a threat, a recent break-in?”

  “I’ll find out.”

  She filed it away, aware of the soothing sense of calm that came over her when she spotted an incongruity. She noted them and waited patiently for the meaning to make itself known. This looked complex and distracting, the sort of case she’d mull over in her bath, as she rubbed the baby oil on her belly at night, as she dodged calls from a psychologist assessing her rapist nephew. She warmed at the prospect, as others would in anticipation of a football match, a concert, a drunken night out. It was the promise of utter absorption.

  Morrow approached the arch that led into the Victorian extension and a big room so light it was slightly dazzling after the darkness of the reception hall.

  The forensic team were still processing the scene; she could see their shadows shifting on the wall, hear the crisp crumple of their paper suits around the corner.

  She led Harris towards the body and felt him staying in her blind spot, trying to hide behind her. He was bracing himself for what he knew was coming up.

  It was another large, empty room, this time papered in time-yellowed cream, veined with blue, speckled with birds faded to an almost invisible pink. Turning the corner, they saw the edge of a white plastic stairlift chair folded flat against the banister at the bottom of a wide wooden stairwell. It was new, clean and the remote control was perched on the armrest, ready for use.

  “Careful…,” muttered Harris behind her.

  She was about to turn and reprimand him when she saw the woman’s feet, far apart from one another, toenails painted scarlet. Morrow’s weight shifted half an inch and, confronted with the full sight, she lost her breath. She had expected disgust, had defenses against that, but against sheer, suffocating pity she had nothing.

  The woman had come down the stairs, in a hurry, holding the banister maybe. She must have fallen backwards and they killed her where she lay. Her legs had fallen open at the knees, the orchid of her genitals assaulted the eye. The neck was still intact, the rest of the body apparently untouched. It was a nice body. Slim brown legs, slender sun-kissed thighs.