The End of the Wasp Season

by Denise Mina

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Thomas stepped down into the dark, feeling his way with his toes, Ella keeping tight behind him.

  “Tom! Tom! Put the light on,” she said, excited and frightened and annoying.

  But the string for the light was at the bottom of the stairs. He slid his hand along the bare plaster wall, his fingertips sensing the tiny smears of perspiration rising up from the soil foundations behind it.

  He tugged the string.

  The bright light blinked twice, searing snapshots of three bright white coffins onto Thomas’s retinas before it came on. Ella was being another character, another girl she’d seen in a film or a ballet. She gasped at the freezers, stepped around in front of him, still holding his shoulder as if for protection. This character touched him incessantly, not in a wrong way, just a clingy way, as if she was en pointe and needed him for balance. He suffered it because her moods were sliding about all over the place and he didn’t want to upset her.

  “What is there?” Moira was looking down from the top of the stairs, pointing to the chest freezer with the ready-made meals in it.

  Ella opened the lid and fell back a step at the sight of all the food. She ran her hand along it, frost crackling at her fingertips. “What is everything?” She smiled back at Thomas for an answer.

  “Everything is food,” he said flatly. “Moira, what would you like?”

  “Is there any mushroom pappardelle?”

  He looked along the top layer. All the lids were neatly labeled. No mushroom pappardelle. He raised the basket shelf to look below. Five portions marked “mushroom pappardelle” were sitting in a row.

  “Yeah.” He leaned into the deep body of the freezer and brought three containers out. “Got some.”

  Ella lurched forward, snatched them out of his hand and ran upstairs giggling as if she’d done something terribly funny and daring. She skipped past Moira, laughing into her face as if she was in on the joke, and disappeared from view.

  Moira smiled passively. As she turned to go after Ella into the kitchen the grin dropped and her eyes fell sadly, as if she’d been smiling along to bollocks like that for a long time.

  Thomas shut the freezer, pulled the light string and stepped carefully up the steps to the kitchen where Moira and Ella were standing on opposite sides of the black granite island. Ella saw him emerge and squealed, jumping back as if he’d caught her.

  “I’m not chasing you, Ella,” he said carefully.

  Ella waited for a moment, looked out of the big window, and then laughed as if he’d said something terribly witty. Moira smiled automatically, like the light in the cloakroom.

  Thomas turned on his sister. “What’s so fucking funny, Ella?”

  She stopped laughing, cocking her head.

  “What’s funny?” He walked across the room and stood in front of her. He was very close to her but she just looked straight over his shoulder.

  Thomas lost his temper, poked Ella in the shoulder, harder than he meant to. Afraid of the heat rising up the back of his neck he stepped away and glared at the frozen food on the counter.

  “Food? Is the food funny?” He picked up a portion and threw it, missing her, the tub landing heavily and skidding across the floor.

  Ella didn’t move but she’d stopped smiling.

  “Am I funny?” he shouted.

  In the silence of the kitchen his voice reverberated off the granite worktops. Ella’s fingers were shaking.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you, you mental cow?”

  “Tom, stop picking on her,” said Moira, silky voiced. “Let’s defrost these in the microwave and have supper.”

  A high-pitched alarm trilled gently.

  “What’s that?” asked Ella.

  Thomas stepped over to the freezer room and looked back down the stairs in case he’d left the freezer door open. “No.”

  “Car alarm?” suggested Moira.

  Ella pointed at a red light on the wall, blinking in time to the intermittent noise.

  “House phone,” she said triumphantly.

  Thomas reached for it. “See? And you’re back in the fucking room, Ella.”

  “Tom,” said Moira, “if it’s a journalist hang up at once.”

  “Hello?”

  A woman’s voice. She sounded angry. “Yeah, hi. Who am I speaking to?”

  “Thomas.”

  “Yeah. Would it be possible to speak with a member of the Anderson family?”

  Moira’s eyebrows rose in a question.

  “Whom shall I say is calling?”

  “I’m Lars Anderson’s other wife.”

  “Hang on.” Thomas dropped the phone to his belly.

  “Who is it?” Moira was coming over to him, hand out to take it.

  He faked a weak smile. “It’s only Donny McD from school pretending to be a fucking journalist. I’ll take it in the front room.”

  “Oh.” She seemed to know it wasn’t, but she retracted her hand and backed off. “Stop swearing, it’s common.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded Moira over to the food as he walked out to the hall.

  “Hang on,” he told the receiver and went into the living room. His hand hovered over the light switch but he left it off and stood in the dark to speak. “Hello?”

  “Who is this?” demanded the woman. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Thomas Anderson, Lars Anderson’s son. Who are you?”

  “I see, I see, I see.” She sounded very much in charge. Thomas felt a bit intimidated.

  “My father told me about you.”

  “Did he?” She softened. “Did he tell you I have a son your age?”

  “He said. Phils, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Phils. Phils…”

  “Dad told me about him.”

  She sniffed at the mention of Lars, mumbling something about him being gone as Thomas wandered across the room to the window. It was dark and had been raining. The lawn was as sleek as a badger’s pelt. He shouldn’t be intimidated. He should try to sound normal. “Sorry, what’s your name?”

  “Theresa.” It was a low name, Irish, but she made it sound Spanish by putting the emphasis on the first syllable and rolling the r—Theresa.

  “What’s your second name?”

  “Theresa Rodder.”

  It wasn’t a posh name, but she certainly sounded posh. He could see the drop of her jaw as she drawled her surname.

  “Theresa,” he said, mimicking her affected tone respectfully, “might I come and visit you?”

  A pause. He thought she was horrified by the prospect until he heard the bottle chink against the glass and the trickle of wine or whatever it was. “Yes, Thomas, I should like that.”

  Thomas stood with his cheek pressed to the cold windowpane. “Shall I come tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  “Will Phils be there?”

  “No, he’ll be at school.”

  “Oh, I see. What’s your daughter’s name?”

  “Betsy.”

  “So, Theresa, what’s your address?”

  She gave it to him. He didn’t recognize it but mouthed it over and over to himself in the dark: 8 Tregunter Road, SW10. She hung up without making a specific time.

  Thomas walked through the hall, sweating lightly as he tried to remember the name of the street, clutching the phone to his chest. He hurried into Lars’s office. It wasn’t his actual office, just a big room with a massive bookcase installed, even though he never read anything. The desk was matching yellow glossy wood with spots, poplar burr. Thomas went to the desk and looked in the top drawer for a pen, jotting the name of the street down on one of Lars’s embossed memo cards. Then he called 1471 and got the phone number, in case he got lost on the way.

  As he wrote he glanced back to the drawer and saw a black sheen. Thomas reached into the dark drawer. Soft, warm skin. Lars’s wallet. Lars always had his wallet with him. Thomas imagined him standing exactly where he was standing now, his feet where his feet were now. He imagined
his father reaching into his pocket, pulling the wallet out and tucking it away, his very final gesture before hanging himself.

  Thomas pulled the wallet out and flipped it open. It was crammed with big notes and credit cards, the leather worn smooth from being in his father’s back pocket, rubbing against his left buttock. Thomas shut it slowly and slipped it into his left-hand back pocket, just to try it. It felt heavy, tugged at his trousers, but the weight of it was comforting, felt like a morsel of Lars’s certainty. Very suddenly, Thomas missed that.

  The light snapped on above him. Moira was standing in the doorway.

  “What are you doing in Daddy’s desk?”

  Casually Thomas folded the memo card and put it in his pocket. “Lost Donny’s number, just jotting it down. I said I’d meet him in town tomorrow.”

  Moira folded her arms and looked skeptical. “Why isn’t Donny at school?”

  “He was sent home before me. Stepdad’s got cancer.”

  She knew it was a lie and narrowed her eyes. “I don’t think it was Donny at all. Why haven’t I heard his stepfather’s ill?”

  Thomas cleared his throat unconvincingly. “They’re keeping it quiet. Worried about stock prices or something.”

  Moira considered it and then said, “I don’t believe you. That’s a wicked lie to tell, Thomas—cancer.”

  Thomas shrugged and came around the desk.

  As he pushed past her at the door she was smiling and sang after him, “I think someone’s got a girlfriend.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Bannerman made short work of interviewing Frankie and then Joe but it wasn’t difficult: they had no evidence, no witnesses against them, nothing concrete to ask about at all. It was a fishing expedition. Since it was so late he took twenty minutes for each of them, asking them where they had been on the night of Sarah’s murder, who could confirm it, what they were wearing that night, had they ever been to their mum’s work, where they thought the ashtray, the eggcup and the watch had come from.

  Both boys had been in for the early part of the evening and out for the second part, and since they couldn’t definitively say what Sarah Erroll’s time of death was, it left them as possibilities. Neither had heard of any money in the house.

  McKechnie had pissed off home but Morrow and McCarthy stayed in the viewing room and watched Kay sitting next to Joe first and then Frankie. They saw her pretending to be calm for her boys, as if it was routine for them to be questioned in the middle of the night about a brutal murder. A couple of times when they looked afraid, she repeated the same phrase:

  “They just need to know it wasn’t you, son, so they can find out who it was.”

  But even on the grainy camera set high up on the wall, she didn’t look as if she believed it.

  Joe came over very well. He met Bannerman’s eye and tried hard with Gobby, addressing his answers to him a couple of times, failing to draw him out of himself.

  Frankie was younger by a year but a lot less mature. He was frightened and met the questions with a sulky glower, needing to be prompted by his mum several times. He should have been more forthcoming because he was the one with the alibi: he’d been at work, delivering pizzas, sitting in a car with a fat guy called Tam all evening. They needed two guys because Tam was the shop owner’s brother-in-law, needed the job, but was too fat to walk up stairs, so he gave Frankie a portion of his wages to do the leg work. Frankie made ten quid a night and got a pizza at the end.

  By the end of the interviews, as Bannerman was telling Frankie and Kay that he’d need to see them all again but they were being sent home tonight, Morrow knew in her gut that they were innocent. Morrow knew what a cover-up among family members looked like: no eye contact between them, well-rehearsed answers to the important questions, often phrases echoed from person to person. When people were colluding no one had to check their phone or ask their mum where they had been on the night in question.

  It was midnight when Bannerman shut off the tape and ejected it, bagging it for evidence. McCarthy went down the corridor to show Kay and her boys out, leaving Morrow watching the remote screen herself.

  Bannerman and Gobby stood up and stretched their legs, pulled their jackets off the back of their chairs and gathered their papers. McCarthy was waiting by the door but Kay put her arm around Frankie’s shoulders and made him stand up. “What happens now?” she said.

  Bannerman was magnanimous. “You can go home.”

  “How can I go home? I left my purse on the kitchen table.”

  Frankie looked at her. “I’ve got my Zone Card, Mum.”

  “But that won’t get me home, will it? Or Joe.” She looked expectantly at Bannerman. “How am I to get home?”

  She wanted a lift home. They’d never give her one.

  Bannerman had his jacket on and was halfway out of the door. “Can’t you get a minicab and pay when you get to the other end?”

  McCarthy touched her elbow, nodding her out.

  “I’m eight floors up, they’ll not let me out the cab.”

  “Send one of the boys up and you can stay in the car.”

  Bannerman and Gobby jostled past her, bully-buffeting her and Frankie as they made their way out into the darkness of the corridor.

  Morrow turned the car radio off. She was flying to London in the morning, catching the six-thirty flight, and should just go home, but she couldn’t just drive past them. It was a wild area. Blank walls were punctured with dark alleys and feral bushes grew over bits of wasteland. It wasn’t a place to walk at night. She saw them, one boy on either side of Kay, walking down the dark road, Kay’s head hanging forward, shoulders slumped low and Joe nudging his huddled mum and making a joke. They were taking the straightest path to walk the four miles to Castlemilk. Kay didn’t have taxi fare.

  Morrow drew up ahead of them, pulled on the handbrake. She shut her eyes for a moment’s respite. This wasn’t going to be nice.

  When she opened her eyes again she saw Joe looking in the window at her, frowning. She nodded to the back seat. He stood up and consulted with his mother in a whisper. Kay bent down then, glared in, angry and wet eyed, and stood up again. She told the boys something.

  Frankie opened the passenger door and leaned in. “What do you want?”

  “I’ll run you home.”

  He slammed the door but they didn’t walk away, they were whispering. Morrow watched Kay’s hands adjust her handbag strap across her shoulder.

  The back door opened and Joe got in first, climbing along to the far window, then Kay, then Frankie. He shut the door and they all pulled their seat belts on, managed to find the clips for them, though they were squashed up hard against each other.

  No one spoke before Rutherglen. Morrow was afraid to look in the mirror. She wanted to put the radio on but was afraid a cheerful song would be playing and it would make her seem even more callous.

  Finally Joe snapped, “This is good of you.”

  Kay whispered, “Shut up.”

  “But it is, Mum, it’s decent of her.”

  “Nasty fucking arsehole.” Kay didn’t specify exactly which person in the car was the nasty fucking arsehole, but she didn’t need to.

  It felt like a very long drive. Kay was crying at one point, sniffing, careful not to make too much noise. Morrow checked the mirror out of long habit and saw the shadow of Frankie’s arm moving over his mum’s shoulder. She looked away. She could be home now. She could be in her warm bed with Brian, sorting it out in her head, coming up with justifications, convincing herself that she was just doing the job, that she needed to make these hard choices for Sarah.

  When they finally arrived at the steps from the main road to the high flats Kay said, “Here’s fine,” as if she was in a minicab.

  Morrow was too tired to fight so she said nothing, drew up the hill and stopped.

  Frankie opened the door and climbed out before she even had the handbrake on. Kay followed him. It wasn’t in Joe’s nature to leave without saying something.
>
  “I do think that was decent of you. Thanks.”

  Morrow didn’t wait to watch them open the door to the lobby. She pulled out and drove away, a little too fast.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Thomas turned into Tregunter Road and stopped. His hands were balled in his pockets, angry sweat prickling his palms. Big cars, big houses with big windows.

  He had been hoping that it was a mess, one of those sudden shifts in tone that happened in London, when you turned a corner from a perfectly decent area and found yourself in a shit hole. This was the opposite of that.

  He’d just left a crescent of absurd opulence, of massive country houses jostling on a city street, and it must have been a beacon to robbers because the houses were metal-shuttered, cowering behind walls pitted with alarms and video cameras. He’d turned from that into a habitable street built on a human scale.

  The houses on Tregunter Road were big but some of them were semi-detached and none of them even had garages; most of the front gardens had been changed into parking spaces. One that he could see had a double buzzer on the door, which meant it was converted into flats. The doors had letter boxes on them, doorbells next to them. Members of the public could walk straight up to them. People lived nice, modest lives here. She lived here.

  Thomas already knew this area. Lars liked to take him for lunch in Fulham. Twice at least, Lars got his driver to come down this road. It seemed an odd route. It wasn’t on the way. Thomas remembered it because Lars explained his order, which he never did. He said they’d miss the traffic on the Fulham Road, and all the fucking pedestrians on the Kings Road. Thomas remembered looking at the yellow houses and wondering why Lars was explaining himself and had a funny smirk on his face as he did.

  It made sense now. She lived here. The other Thomas—Phils—he lived here.

  There was no one in the street. Thomas walked heavily, keeping his face hidden under the skip cap he’d bought from a market stall outside Charing Cross Station, his eyes flicking this way and that, scanning for movement and approaching people, noting that there were concealed video cameras on the properties.