The End of the Wasp Season

by Denise Mina

  He did and was glad to.

  She stepped down the corridor and found Bannerman’s door half open. He was talking to someone, yeah-yeahing. She knocked and walked in and found him on the phone, agreeing with someone. He eyed the chair in front of him and she took it, waiting while he finished, looking around his desk.

  When they shared an office he had the desk laid out in ham-handed messages, loudly advertising The-kinda-guy-I-am. Morrow didn’t believe any of them. She found it interesting to read though, to hone her skill at looking behind the stated to the obvious. Bannerman didn’t eat health bars for lunch because he was health conscious but because he was afraid of getting fat. She wasn’t taken in by the surfboard paperweight either: he didn’t enjoy an outdoor life of adventure but an occasional sunbed. She hated him because she saw him trying to stand out from the tone of the force, knowing he could afford to because he was so intensely of it; his father was a police officer, he knew the game inside out.

  Promoted, Bannerman wasn’t concerned with appearing anything but in charge.

  He hung up the phone. “I’m taking this investigation over a bit, Morrow,” he said without apology. “Because of the money. It’s a worry, not just that it’s there and there’s so much, but because it’s in euros.”

  Another lie. The money was part of it but he wanted more than the glory. He was up to something else. “Have they checked it for traces of drugs?” she asked.

  “Yeah: it hasn’t got any traces on it. Little or nothing. An unusual amount of nothing, these seem to be straight from the bank. Which bank we’re not sure yet, they’re not sequential. We’re checking for large withdrawals of euros in this country but they could be from anywhere.”

  “My guess is New York.”

  “Yeah, there’s enough floating about over there for that to be feasible.”

  She didn’t know how to broach the fact that the men wouldn’t work for him. “Sir: morale. They’re competing to see who can be most useless—it’s not supposed to be like this.”

  Bannerman checked behind her and dipped his voice. “I know. I’ve noticed. I’m coming in tomorrow morning to give them an earful.”

  “No, please—”

  “Morale is my job as much as yours. If they can’t bring it with them I’ll have to use the heavy hand.”

  The heavy hand: a boss phrase, as if the men could be slapped enthusiastic. These men were older, more confident, not straight out of Tulliallan. “They’re not that kind of crew, sir.”

  “I don’t want Harris taking on too much.” And here it was, his downcast eyes, signaling the significance. “Why don’t you use Wilder a bit more?”

  “Because he’s a dick.”

  He gave her a look, a warning. “You going home?”

  “Trying to.” She gathered her things together. “I think Sarah Erroll gave the impression that she was a daft Sloane but was actually double wide. We interviewed her lawyer and she’d—”

  “I know, I was watching.”

  She stopped and looked at him. He really was taking over and there was nothing she could do about it. “OK,” she said testily. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Good night.”

  She allowed herself a small curse at him under the click of the door.

  Routher was outside in the corridor again and she turned her venom on him. “Are you planning to hang about the corridor all night, Routher?”

  Startled by the strength of her annoyance he spluttered, “No, I’m…I’m waiting on you. Prelims are on your desk and McCarthy’s been looking at her phone. She was an escort.”

  “Oh, shite.” Morrow stepped over to her office and opened the door, swinging her bag in, bowling it to her desk. “Come on.”

  Mark McCarthy had the face of an underweight hemophiliac. He was the unhealthiest-looking specimen Morrow had ever encountered in the force. She was always amazed that he hadn’t been seconded by the drug squad for undercover work.

  He smiled up as she approached his desk. “Got some good stuff, boss. These phones have got your whole life on them.”

  She pulled a chair over and sat down. “Give us it.”

  “Okayyyyy.” He pulled the phone out of the plastic productions bag, the black dust from the fingerprint search sticking to his fingertips. “First off, we got prints on the face of it and they’re not hers. They’re good ’uns as well.”

  “Anyone with a record?”

  “No matches so far.”

  “Fuck,” said Morrow with more force than she meant to. What she really wanted was a home address of someone with previous in the same sort of crime so she could go home right now.

  McCarthy looked hurt. “It’s still good though, eh?”

  “Oh yeah, yeah, what else?”

  “The last call made was 999. This is what they sent us.”

  He had set it up to impress her: he shook the mouse back and forth and his computer screen opened to an audio file. He selected “copy” from the menu, dragged it to the memory stick, let it download and clicked the stick out, handing it to her. After all the pronounced disinterest of the day Morrow was quite touched.

  “Can you hear Sarah on it?”

  “Yeah. Also…” McCarthy clicked up a list of emails, each headed with the sender’s name. Most of them were from Scott and headed either “Glenarvon” or “Settlement of Estate” but as he scrolled down a series of older emails appeared, all from “Sabine.” “See how the messages are headed ‘Re:…’? That means they came from another email account. And they’re all the same sort of thing.”

  McCarthy opened one. P would be in London on business, had heard about her from a friend. He knew the score and the prices and hoped they could get together for some fun. He gave his hotel and a phone number. It was an internet hook-up.

  “Did she reply?” asked Morrow.

  “No. If there’s a wee arrow at the side,” he shut the email and went back to the listings, “that arrow tells you it’s been replied to. These don’t have one. She stopped replying about two months ago.”

  “When her mum died,” Morrow said. “And she stopped having to pay for the carers. Her mum had around-the-clock care in her house. It’s very expensive.”

  McCarthy nodded, but she could tell he was realizing it for the first time. She didn’t care whether he knew or not, she just wanted him to mention it to the other men in passing.

  “This phone got a camera?”

  “Yup.” He went back to the main menu and selected the pictures file. “It’s an old iPhone though. She must have been an early adopter: tiny memory, holds about a hundred photos, tops. We’re looking through her laptop,” he pointed to a tiny silver notebook on another desk, “but she’s got passwords for everything and they’re all different.”

  There were eighty-seven pictures on the phone. Some were of people but many were of odd items. They opened them and could see that they were Yellow Pages listing for roofers and septic tank engineers, photographed presumably so she didn’t have to jot numbers down. The rest were recent. Many were of New York street scenes, the park, badly framed images of other passengers on a sunny-day boat ride off Manhattan.

  “Was she downloading the photos regularly?”

  “Yeah, far as we can tell.”

  “I never remember to download. My phone’s polluted with old photos.” She frowned at the phone. It seemed strange.

  “Show me the dates on the New York ones.”

  McCarthy moved the mouse over them and the dates came up. They were taken within the past week. “They’re all new.”

  Morrow chewed her lip and looked at it. “She’d been there seven times in the past year. Doesn’t it seem strange to be thrilled enough to take photos? It’s like she’s pretending to be a tourist.”

  “Maybe she was a tourist.”

  “But she’d been there seven times in eleven months. Who still takes photos like that after the seventh time?”

  “She was doing touristy things when she was there, for definite.
She was going to museums and that.” He pointed over to the suitcase on an exhibits table. “She’s bought a museum catalogue. Must have really enjoyed it because the book weighs a ton. Tripled the weight of her luggage.”

  Morrow looked over at the small white suitcase from the hall. It lay unzipped and open next to the contents: a small pile of neatly folded clothes and a transparent toilet bag. A massive cellophane-wrapped book sat by it.

  She stood up and walked over to the table, looking down at the contents of the suitcase.

  The huge pale green catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art was still sealed in cellophane, the receipt sellotaped onto it. The purchase dates were right for her last trip. Also in the case were a change of underwear, a blue version of the pink lacy camiknickers they had found in the house, a silver dress, a toilet bag with all the creams and lotions transferred into flight-friendly small bottles and gathered in a transparent plastic ziplock bag. She’d been on the pill.

  There were no traces of an individual in the suitcase. No home address in case it got lost, no photos or magazines she was in the middle of reading, no notes-to-self or old tickets, nothing extraneous.

  Morrow looked at the catalogue. She tried to pick it up with one hand. It was so heavy that it strained her wrist. She took hold of the suitcase lid and shut it, looked, opened it again, put the catalogue in and shut it again. The catalogue took up almost half of the case. She took it out again and sat it on the table, looking at it. There was something wrong with it, the cellophane was slightly loose and the seams inconsistent, wavering.

  She took out her car keys and caught the edge of the plastic, scratching at it to start a rip and pulling it off. She used the edge of the key to flip the book open.

  Morrow smiled. Inside, off center, in among black-and-white photographs of tatty cubist collages, someone had cut a perfect bed for the fat brick of crisp purple five-hundred-euro notes wrapped in two elastic bands. Sarah could have taken the same catalogue through time after time, rewrapping it, buying a new one for the receipt with the right date. And it explained why she checked it in. If she’d taken it through hand luggage the catalogue would look new to the naked eye but the security X-ray would show a gray rectangle and the inconsistency in the paper. The photos of New York were part of her cover as a gallery-visiting tourist.

  McCarthy was standing across the table from her, staring down at the money, hypnotized. Routher came over too and a young DC stood up at his desk, standing on tiptoes to see.

  Morrow looked around at them, at their mouths hanging open, eyes locked on the money but their minds far away, in bookies, in car showrooms, wherever their yen took them.

  The night shift was fractured after that: McCarthy and Routher had to guard the cash until the armored van driver could be roused from his bed. Bannerman insisted on taking the catalogue over to the lab himself for processing, even though traces of anything relevant to the murder investigation seemed unlikely. Morrow was left alone in her office looking through the files from the phone.

  In among the photos she found three of a man, a silver-haired man, and made a note to herself to check whether his photo was in Glenarvon somewhere. The older photographs were of Sarah’s mother, a tiny tortoise of a woman wearing out-of-date dresses that had belonged to her in a heftier time. The later ones showed her peering at the camera, cross, wearing brand-new nightclothes in pale blue and powder pink, blankets over her knees, in the armchair in the kitchen, in her bed, by a window. The photographs were very tender. Sarah had crouched to take them at her mother’s eye level and the light was soft in all of them. Kay was in the background of some of the kitchen photos, smiling over her shoulder at the late Mrs. Erroll, looking plump and motherly. Morrow touched Kay’s face on the screen and smiled to herself.

  The emails on Sarah’s phone nearly all concerned the house. Scott seemed determined to write to her about every detail of the sale and the estate settlement, doubtless charging every time. The emails were so overwritten and obsequious he sounded kickable. She could well imagine the level of deference would make Sarah despise him, feel a certain glee about tricking him.

  Many of the other emails were addressed to Sabine, arrangements to meet up in specific hotels at very specific times, promises of hearty fun but ambiguous as to the exact nature of it. It was a disaster that she’d done that. Cops had little sympathy for sex workers, however many courses they were sent on. They were too much trouble, too chaotic, magnets for nutters. The only way most cops could summon up sympathy was to frame them as children who’d been tricked into it, call them “girls” and “boys.” Or else they made it an accident of addiction: they did it for drugs, because of drugs, needed drugs to do it. Either way they couldn’t help themselves. Sex workers, in the habit of telling people what they wanted to hear, always agreed. Few did it for the money, she’d noticed. Few admitted it was an economic option.

  Morrow covered her face and thought of Sarah on the stairs. At some point she must have known what was happening, and the job would have made that moment of realization even more appalling. Sex workers blamed themselves, however appalling a crime against them. Half the battle when taking a rape report or the details of a brutal assault was getting them to admit that they had been a victim. They needed the illusion of control. Morrow rubbed her stomach. They all needed that. She imagined Sarah lying on her back as a foot came towards her face and her last conscious thought being a personal reproach.

  She sat back and knuckled her hot eyes. It was getting late. The room was dark and the corridor outside was quiet. She wanted to be home, in front of the telly, seesawing the settee with Brian. As a final chore she put in her earphones and called up the audio file for the 999 call.

  If Sarah had just spoken five seconds earlier they could have saved her life.

  But that wasn’t what happened.

  The pause between Sarah dialing the number and speaking made the operator tag it as a silent call and put it through to the recorder. Silent calls were usually made by drunken teenagers or attention-seeking idiots, or by five-year-olds playing with the phone while their mum went for a bath. The recorder was a pragmatic, statistically based system that nearly always served to weed out time-wasters. Nearly always.

  Morrow listened and heard Sarah’s soft voice in the far, foggy distance. She saw the cold, blank eyes of the coppers at the brief, waiting to get to their warm, safe homes.

  She listened to the end of the 999 and then listened to it again. She found herself crying in the dark, not just for Sarah Erroll but for her own dead father and for JJ, for all the unloved and the unlovely.

  When she had finished she dried her face, listening for noise outside in the corridor before slipping out of the front door of the station. She walked around the back of the giant planter pots, following the wall to her own car, parked in the black street.

  She slipped into the driver’s seat and locked the door, flicked the cabin lights off and sat, ashamed, feeling raw and porous and stupid and pregnant.

  EIGHTEEN

  Thomas was exhausted but wired. He’d had a shower and felt clean now, sitting on the sofa in his living room, watching TV in a towel, changing channel every thirty seconds, looking, for what he didn’t know. Family Guy. Something short. His burning eyes were busy on the TV, vague thoughts half-formed in his mind, thoughts he couldn’t have dealt with if he’d been alone with them, focused on them.

  He watched a video of a rap collective, ugly guys in a mansion poolside, batting away beautiful strippers. He thought about his parents. To Thomas, Lars had always represented a great aching need to impress, an imminent performance that was doomed to disappoint. It had taken up a lot of his head space because he wasn’t great at anything much. Lars had told him many times that the biggest thing he’d ever be was Lars’s son. But now Lars was gone. All that head-fuck was over with. And Moira had been cold and distant, but she was here now, warm. If they never spoke again, if she took an overdose tonight in her rooms, Thomas knew he couldn’t
have asked for more than this evening, chatting, making eye contact, her apologizing.

  He knew he didn’t deserve either her warmth or the delight of Lars leaving. Two incredible strokes of luck, just after what he had done. It wasn’t right. Like Hitler winning the lottery.

  He shifted a buttock on the damp itchy towel and changed channel. Sharks in murky blue water, mouths open, coming straight for the photographer, and he thought of Sarah Erroll at the top of the stairs, looking at her bare buttocks as she held the banister and dropped her foot to the first step, and the bump to his shoulder as Squeak came past him, his hand outstretched for her hair. Blonde hair. Lots of different colors of blonde, dark, yellow, traces of white and then pink and scarlet through it, clumps of hair hanging from Squeak’s fist where it came out when he pulled her back.

  The trilling made him sit up and look around before he registered what it was. His mobile. Still in the duffel bag sitting next door, on his bedroom floor. Nanny Mary had dropped and left it, because she’d been called to see Moira and told she was sacked. Obeying the trilling, he padded through to the bag, lifted it out and saw the name on the screen: Squeak.

  Thomas held the phone and looked at it as it rang. Squeak wanted to threaten him. It was pathetic. He was going to run through all of that again: you took me to the wrong house. Thomas didn’t want to talk to him. And yet the need to obey the ring tone made him stay looking at the phone, imagining Squeak in the toilet in his room in the dormy, sitting in the dark because it was after lights-out. He’d be sitting on the toilet: the bathrooms were small and it was the only place to sit down. They had to hand their mobiles into housekeeping at the start of term and got them back at weekends but Squeak had an illegal phone, an extra phone that he just used for looking up porn. He’d be sitting in the dark on the toilet, calling on his porn phone, waiting for him to answer.

  Thomas pressed the green button and lifted the phone to his ear. “Man?” He was whispering too because Squeak could get in trouble having a mobile.