The End of the Wasp Season

by Denise Mina

  She took another draw. No. There would be other jobs. She still had the Campbells. Maybe they would know someone else here who needed a cleaner. Maybe.

  She dropped the cigarette, quite impressed that she had managed to finish it in four draws. She stood on it, gathered herself, straightened her hair and walked around the lane to the Campbells’ house, slipping through the garden, keeping off the lawn, until she got to the kitchen door.

  Molly Campbell was in the kitchen. She was waiting for her, watching, and Kay knew. Margery had been here, blowing off about her and Molly was going to ask for her key back.

  Miserably, Molly smiled and opened the door.

  “Hello, Kay.” She tilted her head to the side, sighing, stepped back to let Kay into the kitchen, pointed to a chair that she had pulled out from the table for Kay to sit on. Kay sat and tried to listen while Molly Campbell sacked her, went through the details of her tax, explained why it was better for everyone if Kay never came back here. It’s the tax: Margery had explained that Kay was “leaving” her employment and without that job this one just wasn’t worth it. Best for everyone. She’d put out a plate of biscuits.

  Kay tried to listen but she felt the loss of Joy Erroll rise in her chest as a wave of warmth and sorrow. She felt a bony little hand in hers and saw Joy’s tea-stained teeth as she laughed happily. She had five teeth left by the time she died, little pegs. Her gums had shrunk and she wouldn’t wear her false teeth anymore. Kay felt the weight of Joy as she lifted her off the loo, both arms around her skinny body, Joy’s little arms around Kay’s neck, and Joy, startlingly appropriate, singing an old big band tune and pretending they were dancing together.

  Kay burst out crying. She gathered her things and stood up, got the door open and stepped out into the garden.

  “Oh, no.” Molly Campbell reached out for her. “Kay, I’m so sorry, please come—”

  But Kay waved her away. “No, I’m fine.”

  “Please come back in and sit for a minute.”

  “No, no.” She fumbled in her bag, still crying, wishing for the warmth of Joy’s body against hers, for the deep love she had lost, and she found the key and put it in Molly’s outstretched hand. “It’s not this,” she said, feeling ridiculous because it was two mornings a week, for God’s sake, “it’s not the job.”

  She scurried away, skirting the lawn again, desperate to get away and hide her face.

  She smoked at the bus stop, something she never did. Margery Thalaine could be driving past and see her but she didn’t care anymore. She’d never see her again.

  She managed not to cry, pushing to the back of her mind the realization that this could well be the last time she would ever come here. She didn’t have any jobs now and wouldn’t even get the Asda job without a reference. Maybe Molly would feel bad and would give her a reference.

  As she waited, her face numbing in the wet, her phone rang in her handbag and she didn’t answer it but waited until the bus came and she was settled in a window seat.

  Donald Scott wanted her to call him, please, regarding the settlement of the Erroll estate. She had to dredge her memory for the name. He was the Errolls’ lawyer. He used to come to the house to see Joy. Always asked for biscuits with his tea and never ate them. He sounded snooty in the message, and said something about the police and the bowl and the watch. Kay tutted at her phone. As if a watch and bowl were going to make any fucking difference to the final settlement of the estate. But it occurred to her, she could call Scott and get a reference off him. He’d known she worked well for Mrs. Erroll. Maybe she could get a good reference and get a job in an old folks’ home. She might even get trained.

  The spark of hope snowballed: Scott was a lawyer too, that would be a good reference. Kay watched the road this time, seeing the familiar hedges and turnings and trees. Calmed, she could see what her mistake had been: Margery regretted confiding in Kay. Kay had listened to her and crossed the line from employee to intimate and it was easier to justify being mean to an intimate. Margery had probably been looking for an excuse to sack her, as if Kay could be tied up at the handles and thrown in the bin.

  The job would have ended soon anyway. Margery was broke and the Campbell job would hardly cover her travel on its own, so she’d have left that too.

  She sat back, feeling the burn of cigarettes and grief in her lungs. A new beginning. She felt able and competent again. A mother of four. The only shadow on her mood was last night. They would be brought in for questioning again. It could happen at any time of the day or night. The police could come to the boys’ school and whip them out. They could turn up at a friend’s house and whip them out, and smears like that stuck to a boy. She thought of the teachers looking at the boys differently, of them being asked not to come back to friends’ houses, being excluded.

  Kay decided to do something about it because she had never learned the skill of being passive.

  She was back at the house with Frankie and Joe, sitting squashed together at the tiny kitchen table. Joe and Kay had taken the seats, leaving Frankie to perch on a step stool that sat him too high for the table.

  “Now, I’m going out for the afternoon,” she said firmly, knowing she seemed in charge and certain. “Does everyone know what they’re doing?”

  Frankie looked at his list of tasks. “I don’t think you needed to drag us out of school to do these things, Mum.”

  “Aye,” said Joe, looking at his list. “Most of these guys are in school. I need to wait until they get out before I can talk to them anyway.”

  “Boys,” she said, “don’t tell the wee ones but I got a fright last night and I need to sort this out today. I’ve phoned the cops and we’re going back in at teatime so you need to be back here at four thirty to meet me to get the bus.”

  Joe blinked at his list, looked at her, quizzical. “We know you got a fright, Mum.”

  “We all got a fright,” Frankie said quietly.

  “How are you not at your work?” asked Joe.

  It hadn’t occurred to Frankie that Kay would normally be at Mrs. Thalaine’s.

  Kay reached for a cigarette, changed her mind and looked back at them. “I’m going for a career change. I’m going to be a nurse.”

  Kay got off the bus at the Squinty Bridge and walked across the river to Broomielaw. A brisk wind streamed across the river from the broad plane of Govan, rising up the boom of the flats. Even in the deep doorway, it lifted the tail of her coat and blew her hair up over her ears. Cars passed quickly, anticipating the motorway five hundred yards away.

  Kay told herself that this was a mistake but she pressed the buzzer anyway.

  The receiver was picked up and a woman spoke. “Who’s it?”

  Kay said her name and the woman made her repeat it. She hung up and Kay waited. A bus passed and slowed, stopping a hundred yards down the road. Kay considered running for it but the receiver crackled to life again: “’Mon up.”

  She looked at the glass doors, expecting a signal, but none came. She pressed the door with her fingertips and it opened in the lobby.

  These were private flats, expensive, but the lobby was filthy compared to hers. She found herself tutting at the sticky floors and fag butts in the plant pots. They shouldn’t be smoking in there, not in a communal space. Someone had even burned cigarette holes in the leaves of the fake plants. The kids around theirs wouldn’t do that. They’d get chased.

  She called the lift and stepped in, pressed the button, turned to face the doors and watched them close. As the lift took off she cleared her throat and straightened her hair, saw her reflection in the door and saw that she looked old and dowdy and worn, 45–60. The lift stopped, the doors hesitated before opening and she suddenly wished she hadn’t come.

  At first she thought it was another lobby because it was as big and high as an airport.

  A wall of windows two stories high looking out onto the river, facing down it to the sea. The surrounding walls were yellow sandstone and there was hardly any fur
niture, just a big settee. But then she saw the woman. She was standing ten feet away, diagonally across the room. It was a strange place to greet anyone coming out of the lift, not where your eye would fall. She wanted people to look for her.

  Bleached hair, pink lippy, heels. She waved like a child, raising her arm at the elbow, hand nodding from side to side. “Hiya.”

  Kay nodded and looked around for someone else.

  “I’m Crystyl.”

  “OK.” Kay didn’t have the fucking time for this. She just wanted to make a mistake and get out and get home and smoke in peace.

  “Danny’s in here.” Crystyl held her hand up to a door on the same wall as the lift and Kay walked over to it. It was open a little so she pushed and the woman hurried over, hobbled by the heels, making a big deal of it.

  “I’ll tell him—”

  Kay held her hand up. “I’m fine, hen.” She stepped into the room to get away from whatever the fuck was going on with her.

  It was a low room, a den. Startling halogen lights were punched into the ceiling. The carpet was thick, the walls clad in pine shelves with a big mirrored bar inset into one. The biggest telly she had ever seen took up the far wall. The footballers on it looked life size.

  Danny McGrath had not aged. He had not spent long nights nursing temperature spikes that came to nothing, or stayed up sewing last-minute costumes for school concerts. He had never worked double shifts back to back, the first to pay for child care, the second for rent money. He had done none of these things. He had pleased himself and worked to get the things that he wanted, like the big telly he was sitting in front of now, like the leather recliner armchair he was lying on. The expensive bottles of drink, all of them full, glittering on the glass shelves behind him. He looked young and fresh and rested.

  He sat his chair upright when he saw her and used the remote to pause the football match he was watching. He didn’t bother standing up and didn’t invite her to sit down. He wasn’t expecting this to take long.

  “Kay, hen, how are you?”

  She kept her hands in her pockets and nodded around the room at all his things. “Nice.” But Kay had a good eye and knew the furniture was vulgar and factory made and wouldn’t last.

  “What can I do for ye?”

  It was a mistake, she was making a mistake. She held her breath.

  She looked at the far wall and said what she had rehearsed in her head on the bus over here: “I need to ask you a favor.”

  They looked at each other. Danny nodded. “What is it?”

  “Your sister,” she said, looking at the moonlight whiteness of the belly peeking out from under his T-shirt, “I need you to speak to her. She wants my boys for something and they’re good boys, they didn’t do anything.”

  Danny cleared his throat. “I don’t see Alex.”

  “She wants them for a murder. They didn’t do it.”

  “Kay, hen, I don’t see her. I leave her alone, she body-swerves me.”

  But Kay was tearful. She was stupid to have come here. She was panicking and being stupid. “You’d think with her expecting…” She began to cry. She’d have hidden it better if she’d been in front of someone she respected.

  Danny watched her cry. “She’s pregnant again?”

  “Twins.”

  “I never noticed…”

  “She’s showing already.”

  His eyes flickered towards the television. “Ah, well, she’d a coat on.”

  “You’re not going to say anything to her, are you?”

  Danny tutted, shifted his backside in the leather chair. “Alex is nothing to do with me. If I could help I would. If there’s anything else I can do…I’ll pay for lawyers if they charge them, how about that?”

  Kay managed a deep breath. Beneath her feet the thick carpet creaked as the fibers shifted. Kay wanted to get out of here. She had never asked Danny for anything and it was a mistake to come here now.

  “OK.” She stepped back towards the door.

  “Sixteen?”

  Kay caught her breath. “Eh?”

  “Sixteen, is he?”

  She had her hand on the door. “Who’s this?”

  “Joseph. Is he sixteen?”

  She turned square to him. “Yeah, Joe’s sixteen.”

  They looked at each other. Danny’s eyebrows rose slowly.

  Kay tutted. “Don’t flatter yourself, Danny, Joe’s good-looking.”

  But Danny wasn’t to be put off. She’d never told him but somehow he knew Joe was his. He looked away from her, cleared his throat. “What sort of a boy is he?”

  He was thinking about JJ. Kay suddenly saw him properly. His eyes were red-rimmed, his paunch was settled, his ankles looked a bit swollen. Danny: 45–60.

  Kay stepped towards him and cupped his cheek in her hand, startling him, and she said, “Danny, Joe’s a lovely, lovely guy,” and she held his face in both her hands as he fought off a crying pang like a child.

  Embarrassed, he stood up, brushed her hands off and turned away, drying his face on his sleeve, sniffing.

  “Pet,” said Kay. “Pet?”

  He couldn’t turn back to her. “Wha?”

  “I shouldn’t have come here.”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  She opened the door, wanting to get out before he got it together but he was by her side. He was holding a chunk of twenty-quid notes, trying to press them into her hand.

  Kay looked at the money, keeping her hands in her pockets. “Stay away from us,” she said, and left.

  THIRTY-TWO

  They ate their sandwiches in Bannerman’s office and she talked him through the Walnut interviews. He wasn’t listening. She stopped short of telling him about the party, feeling it was too personal to Sarah to tell someone who plainly didn’t care. He was waiting until she was finished so that he could talk through his theory. He was excited by it, she could see that it had come to him as a realization and he was glad of it. Bannerman didn’t want to get stuck in the endless gathering of information and getting nowhere and his theory was their means of escaping that fate. It seemed very unlikely to Morrow.

  What Bannerman was suggesting had happened was this: the Murray boys had broken into Glenarvon through the kitchen window, possibly at their mother’s instruction. Breaking in would make it look as though it had nothing to do with her, since she had a key. Once in the kitchen they left no prints until they climbed the stairs to Sarah Erroll’s bedroom and Frankie, the younger one, broke off and went to the bathroom. He touched the toilet seat lid with his thumb, leaving a perfect print. They then committed the crime and threw their clothes away on the way home. Unable to find the money, they left with nothing but an ashtray and a watch. The silver eggcup had been discarded as the proceeds of a theft now because it wasn’t silver, but electroplated, and had been on top of the cupboard for years.

  Morrow shook her head, “Saying they broke in to make it look as if they didn’t have the key sounds a bit convoluted. Maybe whoever did it just didn’t have a key?”

  “But it would make us think they didn’t when they did.”

  “That’s a bit sophisticated for robbers who lost it and kicked her head in, don’t you think?”

  “And then they panicked and grabbed the watch and the bowl.”

  “Again, a bit sophisticated. They put the watch in a sock under their mother’s bed and use the bowl as an ashtray.”

  He could see she wasn’t buying it. “She said they hadn’t been there.” He slid a photograph of a fingerprint over to her. “We found Frankie’s print on the toilet seat.”

  “But nowhere else?”

  “Nowhere. Wearing gloves?”

  “Why would you wear gloves and take them off at the loo?”

  Bannerman had been preparing this, she could tell by his smirk. He reached his hand forward, palm down, thumb opposing, and mimed lifting a toilet seat up to the wall. He raised his eyebrows. “Having a pee. Break in, very excited, need to go…”

  “N
ot a pee,” she said, sounding vague because she was thinking. Harris would have known what she meant by that but it wasn’t obvious to Bannerman. Burglars and home intruders often voided their bowels in a house, often in strange places like the living room floor or in a kitchen. Adrenaline made everything move, speeded up the small intestine. Usually they got in and the wave of excitement passed and they found they couldn’t walk for needing the toilet, couldn’t even get to the bathroom. It wasn’t, as many victims thought, a statement of disrespect or defiance. It wasn’t a statement at all, just a biological imperative. It seemed unlikely that they would urinate in a loo and then flush it away, nice and tidy, and put gloves back on and then carry on to commit a murder. They’d found prints on the phone anyway. They weren’t Frankie’s. He’d have said if they were.

  She looked down at the photograph of the print on the white plastic. It was verifiably Frankie’s thumbprint: the fingerprint analysis stapled to the back had sixty points of identity and it was only a cursory examination.

  Bannerman added, “She says on film that her boys have never been to that house.”

  He was right, Kay had said that, but it was a hell of a big case to base on a single fingerprint.

  “Shirley McKie,” said Morrow quietly. He looked at her as if she had threatened to kick his balls.

  “I’m just saying,” she said, “it’s just one print, we don’t want to bring that up again.”

  The DC Shirley McKie case was a police horror story. The Strathclyde Detective Constable’s thumbprint was found at a murder scene that she had never been to. It wouldn’t have mattered but forensic evidence against the murder suspect consisted of a single fingerprint at the scene as well. His conviction was overturned and McKie’s disputed suspension had thrown the service into a tail spin: if they didn’t prove she was lying and had been there then all fingerprint evidence over the past forty years would have been open to question, opening up a huge number of cases for retrial. It was ignominious, but the bosses decided to eat their own. Then Shirley McKie got a lawyer and won the case anyway. Everyone was waiting for the second shoe to fall.