The End of the Wasp Season

by Denise Mina

  He looked at it, looked for the driver who should have opened it but the driver was carrying Ella’s suitcase from the open boot to the door. He didn’t know that it was his job to let everyone out first and then get the luggage. Hire driver for a limo firm. He was fifty or so, white-haired, probably a failed estate agent who’d been given a big car and someone else’s uniform.

  Moira and Ella were up by the front door, Moira looking through a set of keys, watched by Ella, no longer crying, just confused at her mother carrying keys for the house around with her. The housekeeper should have let them in. She should be standing by the door to take their coats.

  Thomas opened the car door himself and stepped out. He left it open and sauntered, to give them time to get back into the house and disperse before he got there. He came level with the driver on his way back from dropping the suitcase off.

  The driver thought he had come to talk to him and smiled, kindly, and said, “I’m sorry for your sister. Is she not well?”

  Thomas looked up and shrugged. “She’s upset.”

  The driver glanced up to the door, saw Moira putting the keys in the lock and Ella crying, straight-faced. “She’s more than upset, son.”

  Thomas tried to explain. “Our dad just died.”

  “Oh,” said the driver, shocked. “I’m sorry.”

  “He hung himself. Over there. From that tree,” continued Thomas, realizing that the man was right. Even a truly terrible shock didn’t really, fully explain Ella’s behavior. “She’s young.”

  The driver hmmed, muttered “terrible” but Thomas saw him glance back up to Ella. She was following Moira in the door but her hair had not been brushed at the back and the way she held her head, dipped sideways, mouth hanging open, she really did look odd.

  He didn’t like the driver talking about a member of the family like that. He couldn’t discount it on the grounds that the man was being nasty. He wasn’t nasty. And he didn’t seem stupid either.

  “Well, goodbye, sir.” The driver shifted his feet to move and Thomas held his hand out. The driver looked at him and hesitated. They weren’t supposed to shake hands but Thomas wanted to meet his eye, like an equal, to show him they weren’t all broken.

  The man hesitated and then took Thomas’s hand, pumped it, looking him in the eye and smiling.

  “Goodbye,” said Thomas, hoping he sounded as authoritative as Lars but nicer. “And thank you for your service.” He backed off, taking the steps up to the open front door.

  Inside, Moira and Ella had dropped their coats on the floor next to the suitcase. It looked as if they’d melted out of them. Thomas picked them up and looked around for a place to put them.

  He stepped over to a big door and opened it. The light came on automatically. He’d never been in here before.

  It was a small, square cloakroom with hanging rails around three sides, grouped by person, outdoor shoes on a rack and a high shelf with neat wooden boxes, each with a handwritten label: “Lars’s gloves,” “Moira’s hats,” “Scarves.”

  As Thomas hung the coats up the door fell shut slowly, sealing him in. He listened for the click, thankful when the light went off. And then he stood still and enjoyed being there, in the windowless dark.

  A phrase formed in his mind, slowly rising to his consciousness:

  We should not be seen.

  His head dropped slowly forwards to his chest and he stood like that until his neck began to hurt. Still he stayed there, his breathing constricted by the bend in his windpipe, a deep burn on his neck and shoulders, spreading down his arms. He never wanted to raise his face to the world again.

  And then Lars spoke to him. You fucking wet cunt. Stay there, you useless cunt. Do nothing. Just fucking stay there.

  Thomas lifted his head, pushed the door ajar, tripping the light on again. Slowly he reached into his pocket for the newspaper.

  On another page Sarah Erroll was photographed at a party, flanked by other girls with pixelated faces. She smiled, uncomfortable, wishing, he felt, that the photo was over and done with and she could stop being seen. She didn’t look very nice. Thomas thought she looked a lot prettier in real life.

  It said that Sarah was twenty-four, younger than Nanny Mary. After leaving school at eighteen she worked in a champagne bar in the City of London, the Walnut, but she had left to go home to Scotland and care for her mother.

  Lars drank in the Walnut. He ran up a legendary bill for wine one night: fifty grand or twenty grand or something. She must have met him there. Sarah may have looked up as Lars came to the bar, looked up with a dreamy smile. Maybe Lars saw that she wanted to be invisible and he liked that about her.

  He looked at her picture and felt, for the first time, that she was a real person who existed independently of Lars, or him, or Squeak, or any of this. He saw her standing in a cupboard in her own messy old house, with her head down, then she looked up and her face was a bloody pixelated mess.

  He threw his shoulder to the door and scurried out into the hall. He couldn’t face being alone so he picked up Ella’s suitcase and climbed the stairs up to the first floor, walking along the corridor, keeping his gaze down to avoid mirrors.

  He rarely came up to this bit of the house. He’d forgotten it was nice and warm. The doors were tall and solid, the panels around the door handles were made of warm russet copper, etched with winding flowers and little sun motifs. Ella’s rooms were right at the end, next to the door to the master suite. He knocked formally, unsure if Moira was in there with her. He heard a sniff and stepped around the door.

  “Your bag, ma’am.”

  Ella’s rooms were high ceilinged; a living room with a deep bay window, a bedroom and a large bathroom beyond it. She had chosen the furniture herself, everything in pink. Even the widescreen TV above the fireplace had a pink surround.

  She sat alone in the middle of her rose-patterned sofa, legs folded prettily under her, looking out of the window. She seemed tiny all the way over there. She was slim, winsome, had straggly blonde hair and an elfin face. Her eyes were red from crying. Looking at her Thomas thought he could see what Lars had liked about Moira once.

  He set the suitcase flat on a footstool, ready for unpacking.

  “You’re a fucking creep,” she said, very loudly. “I fucking hate you, you creepy fucking creep.”

  Thomas froze by the wall. She was looking at the window and he tried to see if she was talking to his reflection. She turned, abrupt, and shouted adamantly, “Thomas! I know you’re here!”

  “OK,” muttered Thomas.

  She smiled and turned away. Thomas moved along the wall, coming to a table display of small china ballet figurines. He was puzzled and hurt. “Am I creepy?”

  She gazed over at him, considered him. “No. Put that down.”

  He looked at his hand, a little relieved because her comment was appropriate: he was holding a figurine. He wrapped his hand tighter to get a reaction. Ella chewed her cheek and looked at it. Evidently it wasn’t one of her favorites because she shrugged.

  Thomas put it down again. “All that sobbing in the car, bit put on, wasn’t it?”

  She shrugged.

  “Lars tell you about his other family?”

  Ella’s mouth twitched in a smile. “Knew anyway.”

  She waited, making him ask.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, he’d take me to Harrods, buy eight dresses, give me four. Stupid fucking creep. She must be my age, then. Or my size anyway.”

  “He’s definitely my age. I needed to be told…”

  “Hmm.” She seemed pleased to have that over him.

  “Think Moira knows?”

  She shrugged one shoulder carelessly. Now that he was closer and could see out of the window he realized that she could see the oak and was probably talking to it and to Lars and not to an invisible man or anything.

  “How did you hear he was dead?”

  “Oh, that fucking chump Mrs. Gilly called me out of French and told me. Took her
fucking time about it as well, dancing around the fucking bushes, ‘prepare yourself, my dear.’ Really fucking ominous.”

  They were both thinking that Moira should have been the one who told them. Ella looked at him hard and whispered, “She off the…” she nodded at the door, “you know?”

  “Yeah. Well, her mouth isn’t dry.”

  Ella nodded. “She can see properly as well.” And she did the face Moira used to do, shutting her eyes and opening them superwide, as if her eyeballs were drying out. “When did she…?”

  “Past few weeks, she said.”

  Warily Ella watched the door and whispered, “Because people can go bonkers when they come off them. Kill their family and so on. Have you heard that?”

  Thomas couldn’t remember if he had or not. “Don’t know.”

  “They get, like, shotguns, go around the house and blast your face off while you’re sleeping.” She looked worried. “I mean I’d be first. You’re all the way downstairs but I’m just next door…”

  “She seems OK. Ella, that was all an act earlier, wasn’t it? You’re not mental.”

  Ella smirked at the door. “We still got guns here?”

  “Some. In Lars’s office safe downstairs.”

  She chewed her lip. “Hmm.”

  It was quite pleasant, speaking to each other.

  “Housekeeper’s gone. All the house staff have gone,” he said. “She sacked them.”

  Ella frowned. “That’s stupid. Who’s going to do everything?”

  “You are. We had a vote before you got here and you’ve to do it all now.”

  She smiled at that. “Really, though, who’s…?”

  “We’ve got to sell. We’ve got to move.”

  Ella looked around her little world, at her little armchairs, her pink mini-fridge, the telly. She set her face to the window and when she spoke again her voice was very low. “Will we get to go back to school?”

  Thomas didn’t think so. Three hundred k a year was bugger all. You couldn’t pay for schools out of that. He didn’t have to say it. Ella’s well-practiced eyes brimmed again.

  “I’ve only been there for a fucking year. I’ve just got used to it there.” She became suddenly very angry. “I’m not going to a fucking comprehensive, anyway, I’ll get stabbed, or raped or something. I want a home tutor.”

  “Don’t talk shit, Ella, we’re broke. There’s no money for a home tutor. There’s no money for anything.”

  “They can’t make me go to a comprehensive, I’ll get bullied.”

  He looked at her. The sunlight was behind her, making a halo of her hair, picking out the blue in her eyes. Her school skirt had ridden up her leg, baring her downy thigh. She looked pretty and posh and slim. “I don’t think you will.”

  Ella sensed a compliment coming, tipped her jaw coyly to catch it. “Don’t you?”

  “No.”

  She waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t, so she prompted, “Why not?”

  He walked over to the window bay, skirting the arm of her sofa, and pulled the curtain back, looking out over the front lawn. “Just don’t. Think you’d be top fucking dog in a new school. They don’t board, the other family. They go to day school.”

  “Fuckers. Lars tell you that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Lucky.” Day school when boarding was an option meant your parents wanted you at home, it meant local friends and a social life, it meant normal. “Which schools, do we know anyone there?”

  “Never said. He was supposed to come to St. Augustus’s, though. Next term.”

  Ella’s eyes widened. “With you?”

  Thomas couldn’t meet her eye but nodded.

  “Was she coming to my school?”

  “Yeah.”

  She looked at the oak again, gave a little choking gasp of indignation. “Prick!” She looked at Thomas. He’d been there already, that black lake, and it had taken him bad places. He didn’t want to go back.

  “They didn’t like me at school,” she whispered. “Wasn’t top dog at all. Lot of those girls were bitches…” Her voice faded. In a sudden change of mood, she grinned and flipped onto her knees, looking at the oak tree with Thomas. “I saw the newspaper,” she said. “Him hanging there like an idiot.”

  Thomas looked at the tree. Poor tree. “It’s nice to have you home,” he said, blushing because he meant it so much.

  Ella smirked at the window.

  “The crying in the car, was that for Moira’s benefit?”

  She looked around a bit and shrugged, as if she’d been caught in a lie. “Picture was taken from Nanny Mary’s room, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded, though rightly he shouldn’t know what the view was from there. She smirked. “You were fucking her, weren’t you?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Just asking.” She looked sly.

  “Hey,” he said, “let’s go and walk about on the lawn.”

  Her jaw dropped. Thomas monkeyed her, taking the piss. “Oh-my-GOD,” he said in a big doomsayer voice, “don’t-go-on-the-lawn.”

  Ella giggled and did it back. “Stay-off-the-fucking-lawn.”

  “The-lawn, the-lawn.” He dropped his voice: “Hey, we went in the freezer room last night and got some mini pizzas and Moira made them for dinner.”

  Ella jolted back and stared at him.

  He grinned. “Mini pizzas. We ate them in the kitchen. I had a beer.”

  She held her thumb and finger together to make a small circle. “Mini pizzas? Like mini burger canapés at a party?”

  “No.” He held both hands up and made a bigger circle. “Cruder than that. Actual supermarket mini pizzas. Moira made them in the oven.”

  Ella looked out of the window and disbelief rippled across her face. “Where is the freezer room?”

  “Under the kitchen.”

  “Wow.” She nodded, taking it in, understanding a little, he hoped, of the joy there was in this new life, out of the shadow of Lars.

  She gasped suddenly and held her hand out for his, even though he was behind the sofa. “Come on,” she said excitedly, being another person, someone in a movie, someone breathy, Helena Bonham Carter, probably. Or Keira Knightley.

  Thomas looked at her hand distastefully. “Fuck off, Ella.”

  She didn’t start a fight with him, she just dropped her hand and said, “Come on, though, let’s go and run the length of the fucking lawn.”

  Thomas looked out of the window at the sea of vibrant forbidden green.

  Moira had had enough. She was at her window smoking a cigarette, mid-morning, which she never did, even in the dark days, smoking, fretting about the children being home all the time and talking all the time and having incessant needs. Ella was just managing. They were so noisy. When they moved to a smaller house they’d have friends over and she wouldn’t even be able to pay for much help to look after them. She’d have to cook for them and mini pizzas wouldn’t do every night.

  She was smoking and worrying when she heard the commotion at the front door below her window, steps, shouting. She leaned forward to see what on earth it was but the front of the house was hidden under the window ledge. It wasn’t until Ella and Thomas appeared on the driveway that she saw them. They were running, Ella breaking into little leaping skips sometimes, her heavy woolen school skirt swirling around her bare legs.

  They ran over to the lawn and stopped at the edge, Ella dipping her toe into the grass as if she was testing the temperature in a swimming pool, and then they were on their marks–get set–go!—they bolted down the lawn, laughing loud to each other, their paths weaving away and together, away and together. Moira watched until they disappeared over the steep drop and came back up again, puffing but still smiling.

  They walked over to the oak and found the branch that Lars had hanged himself from, each of them standing under it, taking turns. Thomas reached up to touch it, jumping the last two inches, slapping the rope-raw branch.

  Ella looked so young and small. She was
looking at nothing, staring straight towards the house, a big blank grin on her face and Moira began to cry.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The lobby in London Road Station was drafty. The floor was tiled brown, lined by chairs screwed to the floor, all of them overlooked by a two-way mirror. As if to provide an illuminating counterpoint to the bitter welcome, an absurd, life-sized cut-out of a smiling female officer stood to the side.

  This morning the chairs were occupied by a group of women, and every one of them was pissed off. By the time Morrow passed through on the way to the interview rooms they had formed a committee to air their complaints: one of them stood up when Morrow came out of the CID wing. The other women watched expectantly as she anticipated Morrow’s trajectory and stamped over, blocking her path.

  “Hey, you. You in charge here?”

  Hands on ample hips, she tipped her head back, looking down at Morrow, ready for a fight. She was very round in the middle, wearing a gaudy purple top over black trousers. Her hair was short, dyed a shade of burgundy that didn’t flatter her yellow face.

  “Are ye? You in charge?” She was looking for a fight.

  Morrow wouldn’t have fought her with ten cadets and a stab vest on. “Do I look as if I’m in charge?”

  She examined Morrow, saw that she was pregnant and feeling it. “We’ve all been called in here at the same time—”

  Morrow interrupted. “You understand that this is a murder inquiry?”

  She craned into Morrow’s face. “And are you getting that we’re all missing our work to sit about here, waiting on you?”

  The chorus of women watched, nodding.

  “OK.” Morrow stepped around her and spoke to the women, “You’ll all be seen in good time.”

  But the purple woman felt she was winning and it made her confident enough to step in front of her again. “What does that mean?”

  “What does what mean?”

  “‘In good time,’ what does that mean?” She leaned in, determined not to be put off in front of the others.

  Morrow saw the light shift behind the two-way mirror. The duty sergeant was behind there. If the woman looked like raising a hand over an officer, he would be out in a heartbeat, glad of the excuse.