The End of the Wasp Season

by Denise Mina

  Bannerman turned a page of his notes, signaling a change of conversation. “Leonard’s ‘friend’…” He looked up. “Is she…?”

  “Is she what?” said Morrow, belligerent, as if she hadn’t wondered herself. “Friendly?”

  He smirked and dropped it. “Just, they don’t look like they do in films.”

  “What, you mean scratching at each other with big, dirty-looking false nails? What about her friend?”

  He seemed irritated by the implication that he’d ever had access to pornography. “Spoke to her on the phone, she’s preparing a presentation for us. We had the photos enlarged and it seems there’s a scar on the sole of one of the shoes. She thinks she can separate their movements. Work out who did what.”

  “Good. We can charge them both with conspiracy if you think she’d be all right on the stand.”

  “She’s very giggly.”

  “Ah.” That was bad.

  “She sounds about fifteen.”

  “What age is she actually?”

  “Twenty-three. I saw a picture of her online.”

  “Was she young-looking?”

  “Her Facebook picture is of her topless on a beach. But she did look very young.”

  They couldn’t use her as an expert witness if she seemed young or silly. Juries wouldn’t like her, the prosecution case would look foolish by association, and the papers loved an excuse to print a topless picture in the news pages. They’d use it if her evidence became material. “No one else in the lab who’s presentable that we could use?”

  “No, she’s developing the technology herself, it sounds interesting though.”

  “Why,” pondered Morrow aloud, “are we discounting the possibility of a client attacking her?”

  He nodded, considering it seriously. “Something goes wrong, a young man maybe, can’t get it up, angry with her, comes back and kills her?”

  “It’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s silly. She never met clients in her house and she’d stopped answering the emails. The fact that it’s in her house probably means it’s something else, doesn’t it?”

  A knock on the office door interrupted them and Harris opened it. He couldn’t even look at Bannerman.

  “Ma’am, there’s a journalist on the phone. He wants to talk to someone in charge.”

  They both frowned at him. Journalists phoned all the time. Harris was supposed to bounce them off to the media and press department.

  “He’s from Perth.”

  “Why would I talk to him?”

  “He’s telling us about Sarah Erroll having no knickers on when she died.”

  Greum—he spelled it for her—Jones sounded middle-aged but enthusiastic for his job. He worked on a small local paper, had retrained after being made redundant from some job she had no interest in. He had relatives in the force. He hadn’t published the story yet but wanted to pass on the information immediately, in case it was useful.

  He’d been doing a small story about the closure of a community center. Normally he wouldn’t bother going there, they were a small paper and only had four staff so they didn’t have a lot of time, but it was near his aunt’s house and he thought he could fit in a visit there too. So he went. The center held tea dances for pensioners but had to stop because the priest who organized them had got drunk and taken the petty cash and bought vodka with it. It could be a big story.

  Morrow was starting to wonder why she’d agreed to take the call when he got down to it: he went to see the priest and found him pissed, crying and reading a copy of a paper and he pointed out the story about Sarah Erroll’s murder. He said that she was asleep in bed when they came for her and she didn’t have any underpants on. Greum had checked back on all the newspaper articles printed about her and it didn’t mention that in any of them. Was he right? Was she asleep? Did they find her naked from the waist down?

  Someone involved in the investigation was talking. That was clear. But that could be any number of people: the officers, the bosses, the scene-of-crimes, secretaries, the scientists and doctors, anybody. They could have been talking for money, or it might have been some small power play related to Bannerman and Harris.

  Greum repeated the question: was she naked from the waist down? Morrow said she couldn’t comment.

  The priest also insisted that nothing had been stolen from the house. Morrow started to make notes as she listened. They kicked her face beyond recognition, that was how she died. And a bit of her ear had come off and was on the stair beneath her shoulder.

  Morrow stood up abruptly and hurried across the corridor to the incident room, looking at the board, the scene-of-crime photos, keeping Greum on the line by asking him for the priest’s name, where he worked, was he a habitual drunk? None of the photos had the earlobe detail in them. She walked back into her office and pulled out the full set of photos. Only one of them had the earlobe in it. It was taken after Sarah Erroll’s body had been moved. None of the coppers had seen these pictures.

  “Greum, I don’t think this is leading anywhere.” She tried to keep her voice flat. “These facts are widely known.”

  He was disappointed but tried to be a gentleman about it. “Oh, really?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. But thanks very much for phoning us.”

  “Auch, I had my hopes up there. I thought I’d stumbled on a story.”

  “Well, never mind. Sounds as if the man’s in enough trouble as it is.”

  “He certainly is that.”

  They said their goodbyes and he hung up.

  Morrow remembered the holy water font inside the door at Glenarvon. Just to be sure Greum wasn’t still there she picked another line and called the local coppers, getting through to her equivalent officer in Perth.

  DS Denny was surly and unhelpful. He would send some coppers out to speak to the priest but he knew for a fact that the man was a drinker and you would hardly take the word of a drunken priest against anybody, eh?

  She rang off and went to see Bannerman.

  “Sir.” She was breathless as she hung in the door.

  Bannerman glanced up.

  “There’s a priest in Perth who’s describing Sarah Erroll’s injuries in detail…”

  He sat back, raised his eyebrows in a question and she knew what he was asking. “Not in the press, no. Definitely, even if Leonard’s pal’s leaky, what he’s saying isn’t in the photos.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  Bannerman’s mood seemed to have shifted utterly since she had left the room four minutes ago. He was angry, not with her, but with someone specific.

  Morrow sighed and slumped at the door. She was in no position to challenge him about anything, least of all his moodiness, but she shook her head. “I’m going to Perth—”

  “No, you are not.”

  “I can’t do this investigation—”

  “You can do what I tell you to do.”

  They looked at each other for so long that the twins began to stir.

  “And what are you telling me to do?”

  “We’ll pursue the Murray line until we find out what happened there,” he said.

  Morrow imagined a luxury ceiling seen from a luxury bed. “Sir, I’m entering the Perth lead into the notes. If it turns out to be significant, it’s your lookout.”

  Bannerman flicked his hand dismissively, telling her to fuck off. “Yeah, why don’t you just do that.”

  She shut the door between them before he could change his mind. Out in the corridor she allowed herself a triumphant smirk.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Kay sat at the table next to Frankie, waiting. She looked around the cold room, cold in its colors and the furnishings. The architecture of this whole building seemed designed to communicate hostility, from the buttresses on the street to the cell-like plainness of the office they had to wait in.

  Frankie sat hunched over, his back so bent it looked unnaturally round. She traced the curve of his spine, as if she was checking he
was all there still, from the nape of his neck down to the little bumps of fat on his hips. It was the pizzas. He was eating three pizza dinners a week at the moment, enjoying having money and working, feeling what it would be like to be a man and make his own way. He was a good boy. She rubbed his back, correcting his posture under cover of an affectionate gesture. He shook her off and looked up at the camera in the corner of the room.

  “No.” She pointed. “The light’s not on yet, darlin’. Camera’s not on.”

  Sure her hand was gone, he slouched further over the table, his hands out.

  “Let’s get this over and done with,” she said, half believing it herself, “and then we can go home and get on with our lives.”

  He gave her a look then, searched her face to see if she believed it and saw that she didn’t. She shrugged, exasperated.

  “It was your idea to come in here,” he said.

  Kay held her hands up. “I just thought, you know, we can sit at home with our fist in our mouths and get yanked in at ten o’clock or we could come in at a reasonable hour and get it over and done with.”

  But it wasn’t that. She was here with her boys, brushed and washed, with the papers they had prepared and the statements she had gathered to prove to someone that they were good-living people. She was smart enough to know who she was trying to prove it to.

  “I’m going to miss my work.”

  “I know, pal.” She loved him for that. “I know. It’s just one night.”

  They heard a noise behind them in the corridor and turned to see the man, Bannerman, with Alex Morrow tripping after him, her eyes down, a wee bundle of papers in front of her. Kay stood up to meet them and prodded Frankie to make him get up too. Alex looked small and round today, standing behind her tall slim boss, and Kay wondered if he knew she’d driven them home in her own car. Probably not.

  He sat down and then Alex Morrow sat down and neither of them made eye contact with her or Frankie, or said hello or thanks for coming or anything. They busied themselves with cassette tapes. A woman came in and checked the camera and gave them the OK and left without meeting Kay’s eye.

  They were ignorant people. That’s the only way she could account for their lack of warmth or social decorum. Margery Thalaine, Molly Campbell, Alex Morrow and this tube sitting at the table here. Ignorant.

  The man introduced himself again, Bannerman, as if they’d have forgotten. He said it was an informal interview and thanks for coming in but he didn’t look grateful and it didn’t feel informal. Frankie’s face was blotchy pink and he was scratching the back of his hand. He looked guilty.

  She poked him at the waist, making him bend towards her, and gestured to him to sit up. He flashed her an angry look and she was pleased, it was better.

  “First of all,” said Bannerman, as if it was nothing at all, “what shoe size are you?”

  Frankie looked at Kay. “Seven,” she told him.

  He relayed it to them: “I’m a seven.”

  Bannerman wrote it down. He wanted another rehash of the night Sarah Erroll died, where Frankie had been, how long everything had taken. Frankie handed over the brand-new red folder Kay had given him.

  “What’s this?” asked Alex.

  “Um,” Frankie looked at her again, she wished he’d just say. “It’s, um, stuff my mum made me get…”

  Frankie had been to Pizza Magic in the afternoon for a photocopy of their delivery receipts for that night. Fat Tam had given him a written statement, more of a note really, saying Frankie’d been with him all night and he hadn’t been out of the car for longer than ten minutes. It was written on the back of a pizza order form, on cheap paper that was supposed to fold around a carbon slip, and didn’t look very official. But Tam signed it with a big flourish, as if that made it a more compelling piece of evidence. He also said, and underlined it, that Frankie’s brother had never been in the car with them and they hadn’t seen him all night.

  Bannerman looked at Tam’s statement, his lip curling up at the side. He unfolded it and finished reading. His eyebrows shot up at the end as he looked at Fat Tam’s big signature.

  “This,” he held it up, “is actually worse than useless. You can’t go around getting people to write statements for you.”

  Frankie touched the folder defensively. “How not?”

  “Because it could be construed as coaching a witness.”

  “What am I meant to do then?”

  “Just let us do our jobs.” He gave a bitter little smile, first to Frankie, then to Kay.

  “The polis at our bit are bent,” Frankie told Alex, annoyed now, sounding like himself.

  Alex craned forward, encouraging him, glancing to the left, up to where the camera was filming, telling him to go on.

  “When there’s a break-in at the flats they send one officer up to take a statement and look at the doors and that, and we found out that it meant they weren’t even processing the complaint ’cause it was making their numbers look bad.”

  Bannerman did not want to hear it, his eyes were open wide. “How is this relevant—”

  “So you’ll excuse me,” interrupted Frankie, fifteen and a gentleman already, “if I seem a bit wary of you ‘just doing your jobs,’ it’s ’cause my experience with the polis has been mostly bad.”

  Alex sat back. “Is there any record of that, Frankie?”

  The way she said it made Kay feel that she had looked into it and knew there was. She felt a shock of sudden gratitude towards her.

  “There is a record of that, yes, the local police station—”

  Bannerman leaned in between them. “This isn’t what we’re here to talk about.”

  Frankie got stuck and looked at Kay. He’d trusted her about the folder and it hadn’t panned out. She didn’t know what to do now.

  Bannerman started again: “Are you and your brother close?” It sounded like a threat, the way he said it.

  Frankie looked nervous again. “Aye.”

  “Would you say you’re very close?”

  It sounded sinister and he hesitated. “I would, aye.”

  “You hang about together? Do stuff together?”

  “We share a bedroom. We’ve no option.”

  “You’re of a similar mind?”

  Frankie shrugged his shoulders up and looked confused. “Suppose.”

  Bannerman nodded and wrote something down. Alex licked her lips.

  “You wear the same sorts of clothes?”

  Frankie looked at him. He looked at Alex and then at his mum and the nervousness left him suddenly. He laughed, boyish, merry.

  Bannerman wasn’t joining in. “What’s funny about that?”

  “What, you mean the shoes you took off us, the trainers?”

  “Yes, you had the same trainers—d’you dress alike?”

  Frankie laughed again. “I’m fifteen,” he said and looked at Kay, deferring. She was smiling too now, not because it was funny but just because she was so relieved to see him smile.

  “Mr. Bannerman,” she said, “I’m their mum. I buy their clothes.”

  He seemed embarrassed. “Where did you purchase those particular trainers?”

  “I got four pair at Costco, one pair for each of them.”

  He scribbled it down. Kay said, “They’re actually pretty chuffed you took them because they all hate those trainers.”

  “Mum, they look medical,” Frankie told her.

  “They’re well made,” Kay told him, “and they’re waterproof.”

  “Teenagers don’t care about waterproof, Mum. They’re diddy shoes.”

  “Well, fine.” They were smiling at each other and Kay saw Alex was smiling along with them. “Diddys don’t get wet feet.”

  “You’ve no style, Mum. That’s why I got the job, to buy us some decent gear.”

  They grinned at each other. He didn’t spend the money on clothes at all. He blew it every week on taking his brothers or his sister out, or buying knock-off movies, but it was a relief to talk
to each other.

  Bannerman took charge, asking details again, very annoyed, but the spell was broken. Frankie was back with her and confident again, himself again.

  No, he’d never been in a gang. His attendance at school was flawless. He’d cooperate in any way he could. He was happy for them to come to the house if they needed to, they could look through his things if they wanted to, speak to anyone about him.

  Alex asked him if he’d ever been to Perth, which Kay thought odd. Bannerman did too, apparently, because he listened to her asking questions about it and was interested in Frankie’s answers. Frankie had never been to Perth. He did not attend a church, though he had been to a disco at the local Orange Lodge two years ago but that was only because his friend had tickets and did that count as attending a church? Alex said it didn’t. Frankie got embarrassed and said he wouldn’t go now, he thought that was wrong. He actually supported Celtic now, they could ask anyone.

  Kay interrupted, “Are you allowed to ask about religion?”

  “Yeah,” Alex said, kindly. “You’re thinking of job interviews: they’re not allowed to ask you about religion.”

  Bannerman asked if Frankie had ever been to Glenarvon? Just once, he said. When was that? Well, it was half term and Mrs. Erroll had died and he was off school anyway. He went to the funeral and they left from the house because there was room in the car. She didn’t have a lot of family and his mum was so upset that he wanted to go with her.

  Bannerman acted as if this was hugely significant. “Where did you go in the house?”

  Frankie didn’t remember. They’d been in the front room mostly—

  “Did you go upstairs?”

  He nodded.

  “What?” said Kay. “When did you go upstairs?”

  “I went to the loo.”

  “How?”

  “I couldn’t find the other one.”

  Bannerman asked him personal questions: how did he do the toilet, did he sit or stand? Frankie got embarrassed because his mum was there but answered anyway: he stood. Was the seat down when he went in? He couldn’t remember. Did he usually lift the seat when he did a wee? He supposed he did. Kay saw his right hand push out under the table as he thought about it.