The End of the Wasp Season

by Denise Mina

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Heard something about you,” said Danny. “Brought you something.”

  He stepped back from the doorway. Behind him on the step was a giant box with Mamas and Papas tape around it and the receipt sellotaped onto the top. It was a buggy for twins. They’d looked at buggies online and Brian knew it was the most expensive one.

  “Oh.” But he pulled the door shut a fraction more.

  Alex didn’t want baby furniture in the house in case they lost the babies. She didn’t want Brian to meet Danny. She’d be upset that he’d been here.

  Danny stepped in front of the box again and looked over Brian’s head into the hall. “Can I come in and talk to you?”

  “No, Alex wouldn’t like it.”

  “No? Doesn’t want me here?” Annoyed, he looked away.

  Brian looked over his shoulder to the street. “Would you like her coming to your house when you weren’t in?”

  Danny didn’t answer.

  “You wouldn’t like it. You’d be suspicious if she came to your house specifically when she knew you’d be out.”

  Danny looked down his face at Brian, his mouth turned down as though he found him sickening. He rolled his head away, looking back out into the street. “Wee man at nursery?”

  “Wee man?”

  “Your son.”

  “Are you here to threaten me?”

  “I’m not threatening ye,” he leaned in, “I’m just asking how your son is.”

  Brian nodded. “My son?”

  “Aye, what’s his name? Gerald, is it?”

  Brian stared at him. What’s his name. He stared too long at Danny’s mouth. He was scared but he squared up to Danny McGrath in honor of Gerald. It was a moment stolen from the future he and Gerald would never have. It was the gesture of a good dad, the shooting of the mad dog in the street with a single shot, scaring the bullies off, putting down the spiteful teacher. Brian pointed to the box with the twin buggy in it. “Get that out of here.”

  Astonished, Danny looked from the box to Brian, awaiting an explanation.

  Brian kept his eyes on the box. “Gerald died. Two years ago.” The box was navy blue and gray, blurred, a photo of two smiling identical babies on it. “Meningitis. Sudden.”

  Danny couldn’t look at Brian. He coughed and covered half his face with his hand.

  “Yeah,” said Brian who was used to it. “So, you can imagine how nervous we are about this pregnancy, twins and so on. I don’t want Alex getting upset. We can well do without this.” He pointed Danny up and down, realized it was insulting and shifted his finger over to the buggy.

  “Aye,” Danny looked at the box, “and, um, some people don’t like to have baby stuff in their house before it comes.”

  “It’s not just that,” said Brian. “You, coming here, what’s your business here? Leave us alone. Go away.”

  But Danny shook his head. “I can’t go away,” he said heavily, “I need your help.”

  They sat in the kitchen sipping instant coffee and eating malted milk biscuits. Danny was trembling and Brian hadn’t the heart to leave him on the step. It didn’t seem to be about Gerald—Danny had never met him—but about some grief of his own.

  He sipped his coffee, which he took weak with three sugars. He seemed smaller in the kitchen. Not threatening, just poor, as if no one had ever shown him how to dress properly. He looked much older than Alex, not on his features, but his skin looked tired and dry. It looked like a smoker’s skin.

  “This is a nice house.”

  Brian looked around the kitchen. It was a plain house. A nineteen thirties semi with a circular window in the hall and long wide windows front and back.

  “I always wanted to be from a house like this.”

  Brian was from a house like this. That’s why he liked it so much when they viewed it. Alex liked it because of the light—the garden was south facing and they were on a hill so it streamed in the back of the house—and the area was quiet.

  They did nothing to it when they moved in, happy to settle for what was there; the wooden eighties kitchen, the plain bathroom, the orange walls in the hall.

  “Quiet here,” said Danny.

  Brian pushed the plate of biscuits over to him. There was only one left. Danny looked at him and Brian nodded him on. He took it. It was a child’s biscuit. They bought them for Alex’s indigestion.

  “She doesn’t want you here.”

  Danny took another bite. “I don’t want to be here.”

  “Why are you?”

  He chewed the biscuit and sipped his coffee. “My son,” he said.

  Brian nodded. “Young John?”

  “Aye,” said Danny. “I need her to speak to the woman, she needs to know what the boy’s been through and I need you to tell Alex something from me—”

  “I don’t know if I’m going to,” interrupted Brian.

  Danny took it in, nodded. “OK.” He finished his coffee and put the cup down carefully on the table, turning it by the rim. “There’s a case she’s involved in, someone involved in it came to see me. They came to me, want me to pressure her to stop looking into it.”

  Brian didn’t understand. “You asking her to stop?”

  “No,” said Danny sincerely. “I’m warning her. If they’re coming to see me they’ll maybe see other people. I want her to know she’s getting warned off the Murray boys.”

  Brian was reluctant to suggest it so he left a pause. “Are you warning her off?” he said as if he was guessing.

  Danny looked skeptical. “I’m not stupid, as if that would work.”

  They smiled at each other until Danny broke it off. “Just tell her: there’s stuff going on in the background she doesn’t know about. The Murray boys are good boys. But someone’s desperate.”

  Brian watched through the front window as the Audi pulled away. It was a four-by-four and the windows were shaded: a gangster’s car. He watched it drive slowly out of the cul de sac and stop at the end of the road, signal and turn back into the city.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Morrow was keeping out of Bannerman’s way, staying in her quiet office, following up loose threads of inquiry. She listened to the ringing, half expecting to be put through to the answerphone, but the call was answered by a light-voiced girl speaking in a sing-song.

  “He-llo?” A classical music radio station played in the background.

  “Oh, hello, um, my name’s Alex Morrow, I’m with Strathclyde Police, I was calling about—”

  “Oh, God, Sarah! I’d forgotten for a minute, Sarah-farah, God…”

  “Yeah, could I talk to you for a minute? Have you got a minute?”

  “Yeah…” Morrow could hear her sitting down, turning the radio down to a murmur. “Yeah, sure.”

  “Um, I really just wanted to ask about what sort of person she was.”

  “Sarah?”

  “Aye.”

  “Hasn’t anyone told you about her? You must have talked to people who knew her…?”

  “Hmm.” Morrow wasn’t sure what she wanted from her either. “Sorry, let’s start again: could I take your name and address, just for the record? All I have at the moment is that you’re Maggie’s sister—”

  “Half sister. She’s my half sister.”

  “OK.”

  “I’m Nora, surname Ketlin. Her surname’s Moir. Different father.”

  She seemed very keen to have that made a matter of record so Morrow repeated the names as if she was writing extensive notes. She wrote down Nora’s address and swapped email addresses in case anything came up later. “So you were all at school together?”

  “With Sarah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, she was in my year. Not in my house, we didn’t know each other very well at school, different groups, but we got to know each other once we’d left. We were hanging around in London, wondering what to do, sort of thing. Our school sort of trained us to be wives, really, not very academic…”
<
br />   “What was Sarah like?”

  “A very nice person.”

  Morrow dropped her pencil. “Nora,” she rubbed her eyes, “that’s all I’m hearing about Sarah—niceness. Was she really bland?”

  Nora stumbled at that. “No…she’s…no, she wasn’t bland. Sarah was…”

  They listened to each other breathe for a moment.

  “Look”— Morrow heard Nora sit forward; her voice became low and sounded closer to the receiver—“what you have to understand is the sort of people Sarah came from: not an old family but a good one. Reserved. Well mannered.”

  “Did you know she was working as an escort?”

  “I did, actually.”

  Morrow was surprised by that.

  “She didn’t tell me, I was looking for a bookshop on her phone once and stumbled on her emails. We argued about it.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That she needed the money and she had no skills and she wasn’t bright but she wouldn’t marry a wanker from the City and pump him for money. She said she could stop escorting any time. If she married for money she’d have to get a bloody divorce. And this way, the money was her money. She needed it for her mum’s care—”

  “She was making about three times as much as she needed for that, you know.”

  “I do know. She saved a lot of it for her next life, when she stopped. She was going to move to New York and reinvent herself. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t a martyr. She had lovely clothes and always traveled first class.”

  Morrow found herself smiling at that. “She sounds quite ballsy.”

  “No,” said Nora simply, “she wasn’t. Thing about Sarah was she was honest. She said she got that from her mother. Her mother called a spade a spade. To do with being older when she had her.”

  “Did she love her mum?”

  “She worshipped her mother. It was as if she was the only person in the world for Sarah, except, well…” she stopped herself. “They were really close, yeah.”

  “Except who?”

  “Well,” Morrow could hear her wincing, “um, she’s—”

  “Lars Anderson?”

  Nora tutted and huffed.

  “Did Sarah make you promise?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Promise not to say?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s dead too, you know.”

  “I saw that.”

  “Do you think their deaths are related?”

  “No. Lars was a shit.” She spat the unaccustomed word. “He didn’t give a toss about anyone but himself. I can’t see him caring if she lived or died, frankly.”

  “But she loved him?”

  “Really loved him. That was what was so despicable about him—he made them all feel they were the only one, that he really needed to take up space in their lives, you know, declared his love. It was a cheap trick. I told her so at the time, I said, ‘He’s a shit, Sarah, a fat old shit,’ but she wouldn’t hear me. I think she just needed someone to love and decided on him.”

  “Did she take money off him?”

  “No. She wouldn’t even accept jewelry. She wanted him to know that she loved him, not his money. He knew that. He was skimming money and giving it to her to hide it for him. He knew she’d never touch it on point of principle. She wanted to differentiate herself.”

  “From who?”

  “All of them, the other women, the families. He had two families. Not been in the papers but everyone knows. Had one filed away in Sevenoaks and another one in London.”

  “Did he have kids?”

  “Yeah, four that I know of.”

  “Any boys?”

  “Probably. I know one of them was at his old school in Scotland.”

  “Where in Scotland?”

  “Um, Perth, I think.”

  She saw Harris watch her from the incident room as she crossed the corridor to Bannerman’s door. She knocked and bent back to catch Harris’s eye and smile at him. He didn’t smile back.

  Bannerman called her to come in. He was reading a manila file incident report.

  “Sir,” she said firmly, “remember the priest in Perth?”

  He sighed, reluctant to discuss Perth again.

  “Well,” she carried on, “Lars Anderson, the man in the iPhone photos? He has two sons. One of them is at boarding school in Perth.”

  She stood back and smiled at him. Waited. She saw his eyes glaze over. He looked back at the sheet of paper in front of him.

  “I want you to call the Serious Fraud Office. Get some background on Anderson.”

  Background gathering was a DC’s job, a chore.

  “You’re determined to ignore this.”

  “Morrow, you got to ask everyone if they’d been to Perth, we’ve phoned Perth, Sarah Erroll never went to Perth, you’ve made extensive notes about what little we’ve got from the Perth lead, give it up.”

  Morrow backed out and slammed the door. When she turned away she found Harris standing at the door of the incident room, watching.

  A skeptical Met officer took her name and said he’d have to phone her back through the station switchboard, for verification that she was a Strathclyde police officer. He sounded very up himself, not at all collegiate, and made it clear that the information he’d be prepared to share with her was very curtailed and she was lucky to get it.

  He was relieved when she made it clear she didn’t want specifics about the company. He was even happier when she said there might well be hundreds of thousands to be reclaimed from Sarah Erroll’s estate.

  “So, what’s the paper trail?”

  “Um,” she tried to think of a way to bullshit him and then lost the will, “what does that mean?”

  “Receipts for the money, transaction notes, that sort of thing. What have you got?”

  “What, like from a till?”

  “Or handwritten would do.”

  “Um, there’s almost certainly none. Is that bad?”

  He laughed at her. “Yes, it is, if there isn’t any evidence the money can’t be recovered.”

  “I see, probably why it’s there, eh?”

  “You’ve got nothing?”

  “Well, we’ve got sightings of them together in a hotel in New York.”

  “No use at all. Can you fax over a photo of her?”

  “Yeah, you got anything you can give me in return?”

  “Hmm, how about records of missing funds?”

  “Good—specifically chunks of euros missing from New York?”

  He hesitated, she could hear a keyboard in the background. “Well, I’m going home in a minute but, straight off, I can tell you I’ve got several big euro cash withdrawals from a Manhattan bank branch?”

  “Why would he do that? Why not just take the money out here?”

  “Less tracking there and he knew we were watching him.”

  “So New York was the easiest option?”

  “Safest, probably. But he’d have to smuggle it into the UK.” He read something, she heard him whispering “let’s see” to himself. “Yeah, this account is a personal one. An expenses deposit account.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Slush.”

  “Slush? It’s a hell of a lot of money for slush.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how much these people get through.”

  “Is it like petty cash?”

  “That’s exactly what it is.”

  “But there’s hundreds of thousands of it.”

  “I know. Businessmen are emptying these accounts all over the world right now. No one in the office watches them all that closely. The amounts are peanuts to them usually so there are few safety checks. The office just tot it up every so often and make sure no one in the bank is siphoning it off. As long as he took it out consistently and admitted he did there would have been no checks at all.”

  “So, with no receipts, where does that leave us?”

  “Well, out of our investigations anyway. We’d like as muc
h as you have on Sarah Erroll though, where they met, how often and so on.”

  She managed to get off the phone and call Perth CID to ask about the drunken priest. She got bounced around from department to department. She knew the sound of a ricochet well enough: no one had been to see him. She was hanging on the phone listening resentfully to classical music when Harris knocked briskly and stepped in, shutting the door behind him.

  He thought she was through to someone and made a big thing of signaling that he wouldn’t say anything but would just wait here until she was finished.

  “I’m listening to a recording of Vivaldi.”

  He looked at the shut door. “Ma’am, Bannerman wants to know what you’re doing.”

  She hung up.

  Harris was looking at her expectantly. Bannerman had made a tit of himself over Frankie and Joe and he was throwing his weight around the men, picking on her to make it seem fair. He was hassling the good workers, questioning everything they did. The injustice of it was infuriating. It didn’t seem to occur to him that police officers, more than office workers or insurance salesmen or any other profession, might have an innate sense of the rightness of certain things.

  Harris raised his eyebrows and muttered under his breath, “You know, ma’am, you’re not the only one who feels that way. The men—”

  She held her hand up abruptly. “Ah!” She’d had other people’s fights made hers before.

  “Sorry, you seem a bit annoyed.”

  “I’m always a bit annoyed.” She stood up. “This isn’t about Bannerman for me. I’ve hated every boss I’ve ever had.” She gathered a pen and notebook from her desk, put her handbag in her bottom drawer and made sure it clicked locked as she shut it.

  Harris was still nodding when she looked up again. “I haven’t.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Thomas stayed in the freezer room for a while, thinking about the phone call from Father Sholtham. He couldn’t say how long, but it felt like a long time.

  Squeak was an altar boy but he wasn’t religious, he said he did it for the trips. He was devout like Lars was. For Lars religion was like a membership of an afterlife country club: he despised people who weren’t Catholic, and really believed they were going to hell and good riddance to them. Thomas struggled against the reflex to prayer, especially now, when everything was so mixed up. Maybe Squeak was going through that too. Maybe he genuinely confessed to a drunken priest the morning after. It was just possible that Squeak had found his faith again in a moment of despair. Thomas shook his head. Squeak was scheming. He was scheming even before they met on the beach. Squeak didn’t want to get caught. He was so far ahead of him, Thomas was defeated before the fight began.