The End of the Wasp Season

by Denise Mina

  They looked at each other. He seemed to be expecting an answer. “Is that a question?”

  “Did you notice anything odd about it?”

  She tried to think. “Couldn’t get it clean? It had marks. Is that what you’re asking me?”

  “Did you mop the floor in the kitchen?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And you went under the table?”

  She was really puzzled. “Well, I myself didn’t climb under the table but I did reach under it with the mop if it needed it. Was there a trapdoor underneath or something?”

  He didn’t answer. “The dresser in the big hall is missing—”

  “Sarah sold it.”

  He wrote it down.

  “At Christie’s, I think it was Christie’s auction house. They had the name painted on the side of the van. It took four of them to get it in the back.”

  “Did she sell a lot of things from the house?”

  “You’ve been listening to gossip in the village, haven’t you? They were angry that she was selling things off, like the house belonged to them or something, but do you have any idea how much it costs to nurse an old dear at home? It’s a bloody fortune.”

  “She sold a lot of things from the house?”

  “Yeah. She was leaving after anyway, soon as her mum was away she was leaving to live in New York. She said I could visit her there.”

  He seemed surprised. “Were you that close to Sarah?”

  She was irritated that he seemed so surprised. “A bit.” But they weren’t. The invite was one of those meaningless invites, as if she’d want Kay pitching up in New York in her cleaning tabard.

  “What sort of person was Sarah, in your view?”

  Kay shrugged. “Good to her mum.”

  “Was she nice?”

  She thought about it for the first time and hesitated. “She looked after her. Spent a lot of money she didn’t have looking after her.”

  He tried to prompt her. “Was she clever? Was she depressed about her mum? Was she lonely?”

  “I dunno.” Kay didn’t have the time to speculate about what went on with other people. “I take people as I find them. I liked her company. She was quiet. We only talked about Joy, what she’d eaten, when she’d slept.”

  “You must miss the money?”

  “Course. But I’d have done it for nothing. Me and Mrs. Erroll…” she moved the food around her plate, “best friend I ever had.”

  “Wasn’t she confused?”

  “Oh, aye.” She felt again the sharpness of her loss. “But when you’re confused it sort of strips away a lot of shite about ye. All the stories you tell about how great ye are or where you’ve been; she couldn’t remember those things. She just was. And what she was was lovely.”

  She looked at her half-eaten plate of food. Remembering Joy had given her a knot in her throat that she couldn’t swallow past. She put her plate down by her chair, picking up her drink. The hall buzzer rang briefly and she heard John pad out to the hall, lift the receiver, snigger into it and press the button to open the front door.

  “Hmm.” Harris looked at his form. “A couple of the carers we interviewed said you sacked them.”

  “Who’s that? Anne Marie Thingmy and someone else, skinny lassie?”

  He looked a blank.

  “Anne Marie was a lazy, torn-faced cow and the skinny lassie was late every day. You can’t have people not turning up. Joy couldn’t be alone for a minute. She was still mobile when it suited her and the house was full of stuff to trip over. I mean there’s a steep drop not fifty feet from the house. If she got out—”

  “Did Sarah have anything of value lying around the house?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Hmm.” He nodded as if this was significant.

  Out in the hall Robbie had arrived at the front door, she heard him and John whispering out there. She wanted to go and tell the wee cripple-dick bastard to fuck off back to his own house.

  Harris saw that her attention was on the hall and he nodded out there. “These boxes, out in the hall, where are they from?”

  Kay lifted her pint of Bru, glaring at him over the rim as she took another drink. When she had finished she put it down. “Where do you think they’re from?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”

  “You think they’re nicked? That I’m a thief? Reduced to stealing empty cardboard boxes?”

  He blinked slow. “Why don’t you just tell me where they’re from?”

  “Because the insinuation’s insulting. Why don’t you ask Alex Morrow what I said when she asked where the fucking boxes came from?”

  Kay watched him look back at his clipboard and realized that he hadn’t known Alex had been up here, on her own. She hadn’t meant to tell on her. A principle was a principle, it couldn’t be a question of how much you liked the person you were applying it to. But he was smart and he knew now.

  Outside, in the hall, John shut his bedroom door very firmly. Kay stood up abruptly. “I’m going to ask you to leave now. If you don’t mind.”

  She walked out into the hall and leaned over to John’s door, opening it and shoving it wide. “Finished your dinner?”

  A pause was followed by John calling in a guilty, sing-song voice, “Finished!”

  “Bring your plate out and wash it then.” She glanced back into the kitchen. Marie’s dinner was untouched, congealing on the plate.

  The police were in the hall, the man, Harris, putting his clipboard back in his bag. Joe and Frankie came out of their room, Joe carrying the stacked plates and cutlery. She was embarrassed to see that the top plate had been licked clean, big tongue marks around the rim and she saw both police officers looking at the boys critically, sizing them up.

  “Well, Mother,” said Joe, oblivious, “another culinary triumph! Is that you guys off?”

  Harris didn’t even have the courtesy to look up when Joe spoke to him. His eye shot from Joe to Frankie. “We’ll need to speak to you again.”

  “Any time,” said Kay, hating him for looking at her boys like that, head to toe. She took his elbow and pushed him gently towards the door. “Any time at all.”

  She shut the door on them and saw them linger there, behind the glass, not speaking. They moved away and she waited until she heard the lift doors open and shut.

  From the corner of her eye she saw John’s bedroom door swing very slowly shut.

  Furious, she turned to it, kicked it with her foot so it bounced off the wall, and hissed, “I know what you’re doing in there.”

  Joe was behind her. “Let him have a wank, Mum, it’s nature’s way.”

  Frankie laughed loud at that. She even heard Marie laughing in her room. She hadn’t heard that for months.

  Morrow and McCarthy weren’t sure the hotel manager could see them but they could definitely see him: lean and cold, with an attentiveness that was a little overpracticed. He stared unseeing through the webcam, still, as if he was in an Edwardian photographer’s neck clamp. He blinked rarely as he answered their questions about Sarah Erroll, seemed haughty and irritated. Morrow hoped he couldn’t see her too well, she didn’t think she’d pass muster.

  Morrow and McCarthy had to speak very, very slowly, to overcome the problem of accents, sieving their language for Scottish words and enunciating their t’s. Morrow felt that she was being ridiculous: “WhaT can you tell us abouT SarAh EErroLL?”

  He spoke without hesitation, as if he was reading a monologue from an autocue: Sarah Erroll had been a guest at the hotel many times. She had never been anything but a charming guest. No, there certainly was no suggestion of her engaging in prostitution. She always met with the same gentleman when she came here. Occasionally, he would stay over with her.

  “I see,” said Morrow slowly, picking her words for clarity. “By ‘staying over’ you mean sleeping together?”

  “That would seem likely.”

  “Did you know the man?”

  The manager smi
rked but he actually looked a little offended. “The gentleman called himself ‘Sal Anders.’ That was not his real name.”

  He left a pause for her to ask, which she found a bit annoying. “What was his real name?”

  He gave himself a single disapproving nod. “Lars Anderson. I can tell you now because that gentleman has passed.”

  “Passed what?”

  He looked confused. “Um, Mr. Anderson died.”

  “When?”

  “This week?” His disbelief was tangible across the Atlantic. “The story has been in all the newspapers over here. I believe it happened in England.”

  “Was he famous?”

  “Very famous.” He paused. “Here. He died in England.”

  “Yeah, we’re in Scotland. Scotland’s a different country than England so it’s maybe not a big story here.”

  His intelligence insulted, the manager blinked and spoke again, his tone exactly the same as before. “I’m aware of that. This is a very big story, can you really not have read about it? Allied Global Investments? Billions of pounds lost? Lars Anderson?”

  Morrow thought she had heard something about that but looked to McCarthy who guessed, “Is he the financial guy?”

  “At the center of the financial scandal,” nodded the manager. “He hung himself two days ago. You know, it’s a rumor over here but we heard the British press published photographs of him hanging. We don’t have that kind of press over here. It’s quite different…”

  Morrow asked him how he knew the man’s real name was Lars Anderson, had he seen a card or something? The hotel manager shifted in his chair and said it was his business to know such things.

  “Do you have any proof it was him though?”

  “I have credit card receipts from the hotel shop.”

  “In his real name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would he change his name to check in and then pay with his own card?”

  He looked very arch at that. “I don’t think that particular gentleman was concerned with keeping his identity a secret. I think it was a token. He was telling us to be discreet.”

  McCarthy sat up as it came to him. “Oh, aye, I remember he was married?”

  “So I believe…”

  Morrow began to recap his evidence, making sure they had it right so that they could write it up and fax it over for him for notarization: Sarah and Lars Anderson were having an affair—No. He stopped her dead. It was not a love affair. They may have been sleeping together but this was not a love affair. He bought her a gift from the hotel shop, a bracelet. A lover doesn’t do that. A hotel present means that he remembered her on the way into the hotel, not that he had been thinking about her when he wasn’t with her. Morrow said maybe he was forgetful. His face remained neutral. How did he know the bracelet was for Sarah? He smirked again, genuinely amused this time, because Sarah gave it to the maid as a tip.

  “So the relationship was, what? Stormy?”

  “Possibly, it was an accommodation…,” he suggested.

  Morrow was tiring of him and his subtle social nuances. “What the hell does that mean?”

  The manager blinked slowly, tired of her too. “They were using each other.”

  “OK.” Morrow stood up. “I’ll let my colleague here recap your statement with you, and he can fax it over for you to sign.”

  She left without saying goodbye and went out to the incident room.

  Routher was looking over someone’s shoulder, watching them work. “You,” she said, “I want a newspaper search on this name.” She wrote “Lars Anderson” on a scrap of paper and handed it to him. “I want a printout in twenty minutes.” He took it from her.

  She went into her office. A scant ten minutes later Routher knocked on the door and came in with today’s newspaper and printouts still warm from the printer.

  “I’ve been following this story,” said Routher, excited. “He was a right bad yin.”

  Morrow nodded, pretending she’d heard of Anderson, but she wasn’t prone to reading the newspapers.

  “Ma’am? See like ‘here’ and ‘hair’? ‘Lars’ sounds like ‘liars.’ ”

  She looked at him. He was right. “Good. You’re not a waste of skin.”

  Routher smiled, and went to leave.

  “Come back here,” she said. “Shut the door.”

  Suspicious, he did as he was asked and stood in front of her.

  “So,” she nodded at the door behind him, “what’s going on?”

  “In what way?” he said stiffly.

  “What are you guys plotting?”

  His chin trembled and he began to sweat.

  “Routher,” she said quietly, “if a face could shit itself then yours just has.”

  He didn’t find it funny. He looked as if he might cry.

  “Get out,” she said.

  He scuttled out and shut the door. He’d go and tell them she knew something was up, might flush something out.

  Morrow turned to the first story. She was shocked at the front page showing him hanging from a tree—she didn’t know they could print that. She knew the one rule about reporting suicides was generally not to report them because they encouraged so many copycats.

  The sum of the articles seemed to be that Lars Anderson was a City financier who had become the focus of a hate campaign in the press. She read a Sunday Times explanation of his scam three times but didn’t understand what he had done to lose so much money; it ran into billions. The most she could gather was that he had given people mortgages at a rate they couldn’t afford, but she didn’t really understand why this made him so evil. She thought maybe the people who took out the mortgages should have checked whether they could afford it.

  Whatever he’d been doing, he’d made a lot of money at it. His Kent house was pictured from the air and the ground. There were aerial images of his holiday home in South Africa and estate agent photos of the interior. It didn’t look that nice. His wife was pictured driving, walking, always with dark glasses on, frightened but prim.

  Several of the photos of Lars were the same one. She wondered why. There were a few in which he hurried into a car, came out of an office door with his face hidden behind a rolled-up newspaper or hand. But the posed photo was glamorous.

  In it, a silver-haired man with a tall forehead stood in front of a manned helicopter. His coat was open, he carried a briefcase and he looked as if he had stopped for a snap to be taken before he got into the helicopter and went somewhere important. It was a carefully set-up photo, he was carefully posed and made up but still his slight belly and raspberry nose weren’t entirely disguised. Lars looked straight to camera, haughty, malevolent. Most people would have smiled and tried to look pleasant, but this was how he wanted the world to see him. She found that telling. The newspapers detailed his wealth and belongings, they seemed dazzled by him.

  According to the reports, AGI and his personal bank accounts had been frozen by the fraud office, awaiting investigation. Mrs. Thalaine had mentioned AGI, that’s where she’d heard it before. Two days ago Anderson had left a civil court hearing which disqualified him from ever holding office in a limited company again. A Serious Fraud Office investigation meant that he wouldn’t be able to operate under any capacity. He’d gone straight home and hanged himself. He was found four hours before Sarah Erroll was killed.

  Calling up the thumbnails from Sarah’s iPhone, she found the New York pictures of the silver-haired man. It was out of focus but if she squinted she could see it was Lars Anderson.

  She picked up her phone, chose an outside line and called the Serious Fraud Office in London. Shut. The message said they were only open until five fifteen. Nice shifts.

  A sharp, familiar knock on the door.

  “Come in, Harris.”

  He opened the door and stuck his face in.

  “Harris, you OK for going to London tomorrow? I was trying to make an appointment with the SFO but they’re shut.”

  He looked excited, st
ill had his coat on. “Ma’am: Kay Murray’s got antiques in her house, Leonard says they’re worth a lot of money, rare things, and her kids have got matching black suede trainers. She’s as hostile as buggery. We need to get her in.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Morrow sat in her office, nervously chewing a nipple of raw skin at the side of her mouth. She had a foreboding that something awful and wearing and sad would come out of Kay’s interview, that it would be a keeper.

  For Morrow, the cases that kept her burning eyes blinking into the dark were not the bloody ones, not the vicious ones when eyes were gouged or fingers snapped or children hurt. Morrow’s keepers were those where events seemed inevitable, the cases that made her doubt the possibility of justice, the value of what they were doing. Sarah Erroll was starting to feel like that.

  She stood up and shook off her sense of dread, opened the door and paused outside the incident room. They were more comfortable now, thinking the end was in sight. The scene-of-crime photos were no longer the focus of anyone’s attention, no one was avoiding it. They thought they had solved it.

  Bannerman’s door was open a chink. She knocked and stuck her head in before he had the chance to ask who it was, and was surprised to find him talking to their boss, McKechnie. Morrow didn’t even know he was in the building.

  McKechnie was an old-school procedure-priest. A politician, broad around the middle, small about the chin.

  Bannerman was leaning over his desk, grinning, McKechnie smug, hands on stomach, leaning back in the hard chair. There was always a bond between them. McKechnie had brought him on and was here to witness his prodigy making the kill at first hand.

  “Sir.” She nodded.

  “Good work on this, Morrow,” he said, looking to Bannerman for confirmation.

  Bannerman smiled encouragingly. “Very good work. Tomorrow, I need Harris here.”

  They had already bought Harris’s plane ticket for London and it wasn’t transferable.

  “But we’re only going for the morning, we’ll be back mid-afternoon.”

  “I want him in the morning. You’ll take Wilder.”