The End of the Wasp Season

by Denise Mina

  Morrow didn’t have time for a scuffle, or to fill out the forms for ancillary charges. A little overconfident from the triumph of the morning briefing, she held a hand up at the mirror, telling the sergeant not to come out. She sensed that the gathered women didn’t really want to leave, so much as have something concrete to do; she walked straight over and addressed them directly:

  “Right, ladies,” she said, and she saw them note that her accent echoed theirs. “Here’s the deal: Sarah Erroll was killed the day before yesterday—”

  “We know that already,” said a woman from the back.

  “What you don’t know is how she was killed.” She looked around them, let them imagine it. “Now, I can’t tell you that but what I can tell you is this: we have got to find this person and we have got to do it quickly.”

  “Are we getting paid?” It was the purple woman, coming up behind, trying to reassert her authority.

  Morrow was indignant. “For finding a murderer?”

  “She’s right enough, Anne Marie,” another woman called to the purple leader from the sidelines. She looked at Morrow. “But see, we’ve never even been spoke to. Just told to get in here. And we’re all missing work and we were all asked to come at the same time. You can’t interview us at the same time.”

  “OK, right.” Morrow nodded at the ground. “Right. We’re going to try and get you all seen before lunchtime. There’s a takeaway café two blocks down.” She pointed out the door and to the right. “You’re welcome to send one or two of you for teas.”

  Some nodded, some murmured. Purple Anne Marie slunk towards her seat, defeated. “Aye, you,” Morrow pointed at her, “don’t you order anything, ’cause I’m taking you first.”

  Anne Marie had worked for Mrs. Erroll for less than three weeks. The money was good, make no mistake about that, she liked the money well enough, but the old lady was a lot more disabled than she had been told by the agency and the daughter never took to Anne Marie at all.

  She told Morrow and Leonard this with a degree of disbelief, while reaching down the neck of her top, into her sleeve and yanking a stray bra strap back up to her shoulder.

  During the three summer weeks Anne Marie was there, Sarah Erroll went away twice, once to New York and once to London. She never had any friends over. No one called her on the house phone or left a message.

  “What sort of person was she?”

  Anne Marie shrugged. “Well, I didn’t like her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Thought she was a bit wet. Bit vague.” She wobbled her head. “Head in the clouds.”

  “In what way?”

  “In what way what?”

  “How did she have her head in the clouds? Did she have ambitions or talk about what she wanted to do with her life?”

  “Nah.”

  “How did she seem wet?”

  “Well, when I got the sack I went to her and said, ‘Look, that’s not right, I gave up a job to take this one and now she’s saying I’m out on my ear—’”

  “Wait, who’s she? Who sacked you?”

  “Her. The other one. Said I was lazy and I’d been sitting on the bed when she came in and said Mrs. Erroll needed changed, but I was just—”

  “Who’s the other one?”

  “That Kay Murray.” She screwed her face up. “Her.”

  “Kay Murray sacked you?”

  “Well, she never actually sacked me. She just kind of trapped me. She made us a cup of tea and said, ‘Oh, I can see you’re not happy here.’ ” Anne Marie was waving her arms about and making an angry face, as if Kay had been unreasonable, when she sounded perfectly measured. “And I’m like, ‘well, I’m not’ and she’s like ‘well, maybe another position would suit you better and you’ve said about the traveling and that’ and I’m like ‘well, if you could pay my travel—’ ”

  “Yeah.” Morrow cut her off. “So you went to see Sarah about it and what did she say?”

  “Kay’s the one who decides.”

  Morrow was surprised by how much power Kay’d had. She wasn’t trained as far as she could tell and she’d specifically said that she wasn’t close to Sarah.

  “Did you have a key?”

  “No. Kay Murray let us in and out. She had a key.”

  “Who else had one?”

  “No one. Just Kay Murray.”

  “So Kay and Sarah were close then?”

  “No. Just Kay and the mum, Mrs. Erroll.”

  “Joy Erroll?”

  “Aye.”

  Leonard chipped in, “I thought she had Alzheimer’s?”

  “She did. Doesn’t mean ye cannae have pals though, eh?” She gave Leonard a superior look.

  “How were they pals?”

  “The mother lit up at the sight of her. Loved her. Cried when she left for the night. Couldn’t remember her own name but she knew when Kay Murray wasn’t in the house.” She twisted her lips in a bitter little smirk. “Nice for us, if you’re the one left looking after her, eh?”

  “Do you remember the big square hallway just inside the porch?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was in the hallway when you were there?”

  “Just that big black cupboard. Like something out of a horror movie. Big knobs on it, hanging down.”

  “Big…” Morrow nodded, prompting her to describe it.

  Anne Marie nodded. “Big, aye.” Seeing that Morrow was looking for more she added helpfully, “Cupboard…”

  The next woman had worked there for five months until her granddaughter had a baby and she had to give up working to stay home and look after it. The baby was premature and the new mother had postnatal depression. She nodded at Morrow’s stomach. “You know how it is.”

  She was small and fit and fantastically messy. Even the three buttons on the side of one of her boots were done up wrong. She was wearing a black T-shirt with a gold ABBA logo and the left shoulder was faded to gray. Morrow smiled when she realized that it was washed-out baby sick.

  The woman remembered the black cupboard and said it was a dresser, at least ten feet high, which was wrong. They measured the height of the mark left on the wall and it was seven feet. She didn’t know what had happened to it. Sarah Erroll was a lovely person and was very good with her mum, even though her mum was quite confused and not always very nice.

  “In what way wasn’t she very nice?”

  The woman giggled and blushed. “Used a lot of language.”

  “Did she?”

  The woman pressed her lips together, as if afraid that she herself might suddenly blurt something filthy. “It was the confusion,” she confided in a whisper, “being confused. She spoke like a lady but put dirty words in it. You got some right laughs with her, right enough.”

  “Was it a nice house to work in?”

  She thought about it for a moment. “It was lovely. I do this job, ye know, and it’s a bit sad sometimes, the way people get treated.”

  “But this wasn’t?”

  “No. The pay was very good and Kay was her pal, I mean really her pal, and because of that Mrs. Erroll was still treated like a person. I mean, right at the beginning Sarah sat us down and said that the house had always been a happy house and she wanted the people who worked there to be happy too. She said her mum was confused but she still knew when folk were happy or not. She said if I had any complaints or something was worrying me I should speak to Kay about it.”

  “Did you have any complaints?”

  “No.”

  “Was Kay easy to work with?”

  “Fine. She was all about the old lady. Dressed her in all her favorite clothes, they didn’t even fit her anymore but she’d do it. She’d find old movies for them to watch together. If Mrs. Erroll was upset she used to tell her she’d just met the Queen and it would cheer her up. They did cooking together and that. Made bread and scones.”

  “Kay and Mrs. Erroll liked each other?”

  “Oh my God.” She rolled her eyes for emphasis. “Loooove
d each other.”

  Two more of the women had nothing much to say, had stayed for only a few months before they had to leave, one because of the traveling, the other because her back went wonky and she couldn’t lift. Kay kept her on as a cleaner because she liked her but her back condition deteriorated and she couldn’t do that either, then.

  Morrow was about to call in another one of the women when Wilder came into the interview room and told her that Jackie Hunter, the head of the carers’ agency, was downstairs.

  Jackie Hunter was fifty and looked divorced. Her black bob was streaked with chocolate stripes and so shiny and well conditioned it looked as if she’d stolen it from a younger woman; ditto her magnificently white teeth. She spoke in a soft voice, her accent very definitely Giffnock, resting her hands on her lap, one on top of the other, nodding and listening carefully. Morrow could well imagine her radiating sympathy at clients as they wept, making them feel heard.

  Jackie explained that Sarah had come to see her three years ago when her mother first had a minor stroke. Sarah had been working in London, in the City, living with girlfriends from school. She hadn’t realized that her mother was becoming confused. Mrs. Erroll was a proud woman and, like a lot of people with Alzheimer’s, she hid her illness well. Sarah had realized that her mother sounded different on the phone, but thought that she was angry because Sarah had moved to London.

  Jackie arranged for Mrs. Erroll to be privately assessed. It was immediately clear that she would need a lot of care and it would be very expensive.

  “How did Sarah feel about that?”

  “I remember that Sarah was quite upset about it. She said she couldn’t afford it, they had no money left. Either Sarah had to do all the care herself or they sold the house. Mrs. Erroll would never settle anywhere else. Then a few weeks later she contacted me and said could we send people for interview. Someone else had agreed to pay for her care, a relative.”

  “Who was the relative?”

  “I don’t know. The relative was never mentioned again.” She set her face firmly to neutral.

  “How much was it, roughly?”

  “Round-the-clock care can cost up to twenty thousand pounds a week, depending on the number of staff and the level of their qualifications.”

  “What level was Sarah interviewing for?”

  Jackie sat back and crossed her legs carefully, doing the calculations in her head. “Two full-time carers, auxiliaries, and a night auxiliary. That would cost about five thousand pounds a month.”

  It tallied with the amounts in the accounts books. “About sixty grand a year?”

  Jackie Hunter nodded. “That’s just for the carers. That’s not for equipment or food or for overtime. It’s a heavy, heavy bill. She was working in a bar in the City of London. I think she knew a lot of people with a lot of money…”

  Morrow didn’t want to tell her where Sarah Erroll got the money from.

  “Did you like Sarah?”

  “I didn’t really see her after that. I mostly dealt with Kay Murray.”

  Morrow was in the canteen eating the packed lunch Brian had made for her. Ham and cheese on brown bread and an apple. It was busy but she found a seat alone by the window with a couple of pages of notes open in front of her so she could pretend she was reading them if anyone tried to talk to her.

  She glanced around. They called it the canteen but it was just a room with drinks machines and tables, used for eating food they brought in themselves. It had been a real canteen once but the kitchen had been shuttered for as long as she’d been here. As well as clumps of uniforms around the tables, some of her own crew were on their piece break. And she noticed them come in, see her and sit well away. The more socially skilled caught her eye, smiled, invited her over, knowing she wouldn’t move, but others were blatantly shifty and couldn’t look at her. Routher stared at his packets of crisps as if he might cry. There was a shift in atmosphere in the department, it felt different. A war was about to break out over Bannerman, and she would have to choose a side. But it was different for her than the others because she was right in the middle of all of them, wouldn’t be here to try to control the outcome and would have to deal with whatever the fall-out was when she got back from her maternity leave. It wasn’t much of a choice: either the men would hate her or the management would.

  She looked at the uniforms: their faces uncomplicated, resentful, hungry, laughing. At least they were clear about their motives. They were thinking about the money.

  Her eyes strayed across the page of her notebook. Sarah Erroll’s laptop password had been bypassed and they were in. She had kept meticulous spreadsheets charting her income. At the height of Sabine’s working life she was earning a hundred and eighty thousand pounds a year. The payments were entered individually and ranged from eight hundred to three thousand. It seemed very naive to Morrow, keeping a tally like that. There must always have been the possibility of arrest, of her files being found.

  She took a bite out of her apple and tried to imagine allowing herself to be fucked by an unattractive stranger in an unfamiliar room. She found it hard to imagine allowing someone to even touch her without seeing herself punching a nose. When she was still in uniform she’d arrested men who used sex workers and knew they weren’t all unattractive, some of them were even quite nice people. It was the interaction between the buyers and sellers that was ugly. Even between fond regulars there was an edge to the interaction, like a marriage gone bad, a despising undercurrent.

  She imagined herself as Sarah lying on a luxury bed, looking up at a luxury ceiling as a man who faintly despised her lay on top of her, pressing his cock into her for money. She knew then why Sarah kept her records: when she lay on the luxury bed she was thinking about the money.

  When she sat on the airplane home she was thinking about the money. When she got home and filled out the spreadsheet and wrote in the amount, she was writing over the memory of a despising man.

  How she developed that skill was what bothered Morrow. How Sarah had learned to keep her hands by her sides and think of the money. She’d learned it somehow.

  Morrow looked up to shake the image of the ceiling. Routher was headed back downstairs with his cronies. Busy. Lots to do. They were reaching a critical stage in the investigation: the story had been on the news last night, papers were full of it this morning and the householders in the local area were pro police. The quantity of information coming in was on the verge of being crippling. Old school friends and nutters were contacting the police with tiny scraps of apparently irrelevant information. If any one of the tips turned out to be significant or crucial and they did nothing with them they’d be pilloried. Now they were using their limited staff to sift through the notes for relevant stuff, when they had nothing to go on.

  The double door opened and Harris came in with Gobby, spotted her and came over looking pleased with himself. The other CID eyes in the room followed them to her table and she thought of purple Anne Marie.

  “So,” he said, “we’re not including the money found in the museum catalogue: today the grand total is £654,576.”

  “Oh, I dunno,” said Morrow, grateful to be out of the luxury hotel and back in the scabby canteen. “Is that if you changed it in a Bureau de Change though? ’Cause I think the banks give a better rate.”

  Gobby grinned at Harris’s back.

  But Harris was unfazed. “Any high street bank will put the total closer to my guess than yours.”

  “You’re a fly wee monkey, Harris.” She reached into her handbag and took a tenner out of her purse. “Were you up the house all morning?”

  “Aye.” He pocketed the tenner and he and Gobby sat down opposite her. “All the forensics are done now.”

  “I’ll go back for a final scan.”

  “Found some slips from auction houses for some of the furniture as well.”

  “Selling it off?”

  “Aye.”

  Morrow took another bite of her sandwich. “Did Kay Murray
come up the house today?”

  “No. Was she supposed to?”

  “She was, yeah.”

  Harris looked at his watch. “Well, it’s only three o’clock. She might pitch up yet.”

  “She was very close to them, it turns out.” She took another bite. “I’d no idea. She never let on.”

  Harris nodded. “More significant than she seemed?”

  “Much more.”

  The door opened to the canteen and a distinct chill settled in the room, the chat dampened down, Harris sat upright as a cat. Bannerman stood in the doorway, looking around, looking for Morrow and found her at the table with Harris and Gobby. She watched with interest as he came over, saw Harris reel back from the table top, saw Bannerman look from her to him.

  Bannerman stood at the end, fingers on the table top to steady him. “So,” he said stiffly, “she was a working girl.”

  Morrow nodded reluctantly.

  “Could be anyone then,” he said, and shrugged.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Morrow stood with her bum on the still warm engine and looked up at Glenarvon. It was a brighter day today and the house looked less creepy and faded. Gray stone glinted in the patchy sunlight. The solidity of it gave the house the air of a firm elder, playful in parts but stolid and benign.

  She didn’t want anyone to talk to her, and had sent Leonard off to the officer on duty to quiz him about who had been and to check his record-keeping of entries to the house. Leonard was being left out of whatever was going on in the department and Morrow found herself drawn to her company, to the balm of neutrality. So she stood facing the house, clearing her mind as she approached the steps and walked up, letting her impressions of before flood aimlessly in. She needed to get to know Sarah but she was slippery. Bannerman had booked her on a flight to London for the next day, to interview the people from the bar Sarah had worked in, to get a fix on her and try to get her national insurance details. She needed to know what sort of person she was.

  Carers coming and going, through the front, always through the front door. No one had a key because Kay Murray was always there to let them in and out. She must have worked long hours. Morrow was pleased Kay had a key: it made it less likely that she had anything to do with the break-in through the kitchen window.