The End of the Wasp Season

by Denise Mina

  “I have a patient that I have to see,” explained Hollis. “But I must say, if your sister is not under adult supervision in this house then I will have to take her to hospital for observation because I cannot leave a child in charge of a suicidal child.”

  “Look, it’s OK to leave me.”

  “No, it really isn’t. You’re misunderstanding me. I am not asking for permission, I am telling you: it really isn’t OK. I may have to telephone the social services department. Ella might not be OK. She has tried to kill herself before, a serious try. She has cut her wrists, she knows what she is doing.”

  All Thomas could hear was “social services department.” They’d take them away. The papers would hear. “She won’t kill herself.”

  Hollis stood up, readied to leave. “You know, in a family, if a parent kills themselves a child is much more likely to do it. Much more likely.”

  “Please…” Thomas’s voice was high and wavering, “don’t phone the social services department…”

  Angry, Hollis fixed on Thomas as if he had done something to Ella. “I would ask you to stay with your sister until I get back. I will be as quick as I can.”

  FORTY-TWO

  Morrow wouldn’t explain the trip to Harris, or what the consequences would be for her. She didn’t want him involved or for the trip to turn into a tedious bitching session about their boss. She could tell, though, that he was delighted to get out of the office. He was so pleased he seemed a little bit agitated, said it a couple of times, God, it was good to be out. He seemed to know that she had defied Bannerman, seemed a bit nervous about it.

  The sky was a wide expanse of picture-book blue as they passed through Stirling’s flat valley floor. Morrow watched as the castle on its sharp spur of rock appeared around the side of a hill and wondered why she didn’t come out of the city more often. Her phone was in her hand and she knew it would ring any minute now, that Bannerman would be livid, that she would defy him and go on to Perth anyway. There would be a lot of fall-out when she got back to London Street. Even if she single-handedly brought in a gang of murderers this afternoon she’d still get her arse felt when she got back but she was fine with it. She knew she was doing the right thing for Sarah. She could get suspended for the rest of her pregnancy, sit at home with her feet up. She wouldn’t mind that.

  Harris saw her glancing at her phone. “Waiting on a call?”

  “Aye.” She looked away.

  “I’ve an awful druth,” he said. “Can I…?” He looked ahead to a petrol station.

  “Aye, pull in.”

  He went into the shop and bought them a can of juice each and a bag of toffees to share on the forecourt. The motorway was only separated from the petrol pumps by a strip of grass and lorries passed at seventy miles an hour, kicking up the wind. The day was cold but beautiful and clear, bright enough to squint at.

  Morrow took a toffee and downed her fizzy orange.

  “You shouldn’t be eating rubbish like this,” he said to her over the roof of the car. “You should be eating a sensible lunch.”

  “That’s the nicest thing about being pregnant…,” she said, and didn’t have to finish the thought because it was Harris.

  “Everyone’s got an opinion.” He chewed.

  “It’s worse later,” she said, “when everyone wants to paw you.”

  He nodded down the road, back to Glasgow. “Wonder what we’ll be coming back to?”

  She shrugged, conscious of the silent phone in her jacket pocket. “Shit storm. Thought I’d have a call by now.”

  She took another toffee out of the bag and looked over at the road. It was a flat low valley, green and rich, and the road snaked through and around the ancient river, finding its way in the deep shadow in a cleft of abrupt hills.

  Neither of them wanted to get back in the car and drive through it, but eventually Morrow groaned, “Oh God, let’s lever ourselves back in.”

  They were pulling their seat belts on when Harris said, “Ma’am?” He waited, making her answer.

  “What?”

  He was looking at the hills.

  “Harris? What is it?”

  He took a deep breath. “We’re not supposed to be here, are we?”

  “Never you mind about that.”

  “Bannerman…”

  “I’ll get the bollocking.” She took a breath. “You know, it doesn’t matter—”

  “No, the men…They can’t stand him.”

  She snorted. “They’ll just have to learn how.”

  “You won’t be getting any call.”

  She felt sick, didn’t want to know and tried to make a joke of it. “Did you order him killed, Harris?”

  He didn’t want to tell her and looked away. “Safecall.”

  “Calls about Bannerman to Safecall?”

  He didn’t start the car, seemed afraid to move. He stayed, elbows on his knees, fingers resting on the bottom of the steering wheel, looking at the speedometer.

  Morrow looked at him. “My God, Harris.”

  Safecall was an anonymous helpline for officers who were being bullied or who wanted to report police corruption in safety. It was a great and decent idea but, like a lot of them, had a terrifying dark side. Reports could lead to instant suspension, demotion, and an officer being whipped out of their posts, all with no known accusers. Even if the case was found not proven, it spat officers out the other side, bitter and paranoid and ruined.

  “Who’s calling Safecall?” She realized immediately that the question was illegitimate. Harris could phone Safecall and report her for asking it. “Oh fuck, forget it.”

  “Different…” He hesitated. “Lots of people. He took a laptop home, never brought it back…”

  “Bannerman stealing? Fuck off!”

  “Not just that—”

  “That’s ridiculous, at least meet him head on.”

  “He is a bully, ma’am.”

  She turned and shouted at him, “He’s your boss!”

  Harris looked away out of the window. It was a low trick. She didn’t know what to say to him. “Oh, Christ. Start the fucking car and let’s get to Perth.”

  He did, pulled out onto the motorway and built up speed, pulling out into the fast lane just in front of a lorry that was threatening to overtake a truck and block the lanes. She took another toffee and unwrapped it angrily. “You shouldn’t have told me that. I don’t want to know those things.”

  He didn’t say anything but she could see he was glad he had. He’d meant to tell her all along. He was implicating her and he would only have done that if the end was in sight. He was marking her for their team.

  As they drove on into the shadow of the hills Morrow tried to imagine the station without Bannerman. She couldn’t.

  It was hard to remember that Glasgow was not Scotland. Morrow grew up in Glasgow, lived there and worked there, but this was Scotland outside the attention-hungry central belt: mild gray stone houses, built low and graceful, set on wide streets, vivid with history.

  They took a wrong turning and skirted the Tay, passing pretty bridges and public buildings with fat, fluted columns and pediments. She wished Leonard was there to tell them what they were looking at.

  It was after lunch and the traffic was heavy so they took a while getting back through the town. Divisional Headquarters was a nineteen sixties white cube punched with windows, squat, the edges rounded and of slightly comedic proportions. Harris drove in and parked in a reserved parking space next to the front door.

  Morrow raised her eyebrows at him.

  “They must have known we were coming.” Harris opened the door and stepped out.

  They waited for twenty minutes in reception to be told that DCI Denny was unavailable at the present moment but someone else would see them. The duty officer neglected to give them a name. Fifteen minutes later he came back to them, lifted the counter and told them to come through. A ginger DC with tiny eyes led them upstairs, through long corridors and up a fire escape stairwel
l into a small room. Then he sat down at a desk and gave them a three-minute report which he read off a typewritten sheet.

  Father Sholtham had been visited by his officers and was too inebriated to be questioned. He’d been unable to answer questions about Sarah Erroll.

  “Was he rolling drunk or fast asleep?”

  “Doesn’t say.”

  Morrow was pissed off about it but had to be gracious. They were from Glasgow, were expected to be rude and pushy.

  “It’s a shame you didn’t go back to interview him again,” she said, “because we really think he has some significant information.”

  The DC looked through her. “We did go back. We went back twice. Three times we went and three times he was passed out or pissed.”

  “Have you ever met him before?”

  “Oh,” he was suddenly animated, off the page and passing on gossip, “he’s well known. He was sober for a long time, he’s a good bloke.”

  “How long was he sober for?”

  “Ten years or something.”

  “Does anyone else have any information?”

  “About what?”

  Harris sighed audibly and she decided to cut it short. “Where can we find him, then?”

  The DC told them that Sholtham had been moved from the parish house to a local house used for visiting clergy. He snickered at that. “Guess that they didn’t want parishioners turning up at the doors and being greeted by a drunk priest walking about in his underpants.”

  “That’s hilarious,” Morrow said flatly. “And you’ve been a great help.”

  FORTY-THREE

  It was a modern council estate, neat little houses fitted together like a puzzle, built in the same gray as the older houses in the town.

  The door was answered by a young man with very short hair and haunted eyes. He was wearing slacks and a shirt, neither of which fitted him terribly well. He welcomed them and brought them into the kitchen, insisted on serving them tea in a steel pot, and a plate of Happy Shopper custard creams. Father Sholtham was upstairs and would be down in a minute. He knew they were there.

  They were left alone.

  After a short while they heard steps on the stairs, the shuffle of slippered feet. The feet paused outside the open door. Father Gabriel Sholtham walked in and introduced himself.

  Morrow stood up to meet him, introduced herself and Harris and shook his hand. She looked down: his hands were big and soft and she saw a blue swelling on the back of his right hand where he must have knocked something incredibly hard.

  He had a square face, big features, the sort of face that in a healthier man would have commanded trust and obedience, a police face. But he wouldn’t look at either of them and kept his eyes cast down to the worktop, pouring himself a black tea from the pot, adding in two sugars as they explained that they had come up from Glasgow.

  He wore a gray jumper over a gray T-shirt, black trousers and blue slippers. The slippers were telling a story. They were suede and speckled with dried drips and splashes. Morrow didn’t want to speculate what they were splashes of.

  He pulled a third seat up to the table and sat down.

  “We’re the officers investigating Sarah Erroll’s death,” said Morrow. “We understand that you have some information about that.”

  He winked at his tea as he stirred it, a micro-tic. She didn’t know if it was a needle-pin pain through the eye from his hangover or the mention of the name. When he spoke his voice was a low rumble, west coast with a trace of Irish. What he said sounded very considered, as if he was giving evidence in court.

  “I read about it in the newspaper. I talked about it. I was foolish. I’ve wasted your time, making you come here. I’m sorry.”

  “I see,” said Morrow. She didn’t know how stern to take it. He seemed very brittle. “That’s not enough, Father, because you know things about that girl’s death that weren’t in the papers.”

  He knew that already. He sipped his tea noisily, taking care not to look up at them.

  “So,” she said softly, “you’ve either been part of her murder or you know someone who has.”

  He glanced towards her, looked away quickly, hiding in his tea. “Maybe I am part of the crime,” he said. A deep sadness flared in his eyes and he drank hot tea to shove it back down.

  “Part of the crime?”

  “Yes,” he told his mug of tea.

  It was interesting. Morrow had a talent for spotting lies and liars. She knew how to trap someone who was pretending to tell the truth, ask for details and then ask again later when they’d forgotten what they said, confront them with the inconsistency. She knew how to spot a suggestible person, someone who lied and didn’t know they were lying, ask outlandish questions, see if they agreed they’d shot Kennedy. But this man was attempting a different kind of deception. He was taking a theological approach to it, treading very carefully, he was tiptoeing around a big fat bloody lie and was willing to be charged with murder rather than give it up. She felt that he’d tell the truth if she asked him but the question would have to be the right one.

  “What did you do?” Her voice was very soft, hangover-respectful. “Father, what did you do?”

  He frowned and shook his head.

  “What ‘part of the crime’ did you do?”

  He hadn’t prepared an answer for that question. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, let’s go through it: did you break into her house?”

  “No.”

  “Did you creep through her house and go up to her old nursery room?”

  “No.” His voice was flat but his eyes skittered around the table, trying to map the angles to the questions, work out where the ambush would come from.

  “Did you then find her asleep in her bed after a long day’s traveling and wake her and frighten her?”

  “No, I didn’t do that either.”

  “Did you chase her downstairs until she fell on the steps?”

  “No.”

  “Did you stand over her and bring the heel of your foot down over and over again on her face?”

  “No.”

  “Did you use your body weight to break her nose, stamping so hard that her eyes burst—”

  He was weeping and whispering, “No, didn’t do those things. No.”

  She let him cry. Harris clasped his hands tightly together on the table. She handed Father Sholtham a hankie. He took it and thanked her and wiped his nose. She started again.

  “OK: did you drive the people who did it away from her house?”

  “I can’t drive, I lost my license…”

  “They’d just brutally murdered an innocent woman. I don’t imagine they’d be stopping to check your license.” She took a custard cream and bit it. Chewing it, she kept her face to him, innocent. “Did you drive the people—”

  “No. I didn’t drive them. I wasn’t—I was in hospital when it happened. Having my teeth out.”

  “Did you leave the hospital at any time during the day of—”

  “No. I had eight teeth taken out. They gave me a general anesthetic. It was day surgery and I got out at eight that night.”

  “Where did you go then?”

  “Back to the parish house. I was still living there…then.”

  She bit her biscuit again, chewed again, watched him wiping his face. He pushed the tissue so hard into his eye that it was compressed as small as a mint.

  “Can I ask about the drink?”

  He nodded.

  “You’ve had a problem before?”

  “I have.” He seemed more deeply and sincerely ashamed of that than implicating himself in a murder. His voice had dropped to a whisper and he looked almost too sad to move his mouth.

  “But you haven’t drunk for a good long while?”

  “That’s right. Good long while.”

  “How long?”

  “Eight and a half years.”

  “It’s a dark place, isn’t it?”

  He looked her in the eye, searching for sy
mpathy and found none. Disappointed, he went back to examining the table top.

  “When did you start again?”

  “Few days ago.”

  “How many days ago?”

  He tried to answer but couldn’t work it out. “What day is it?”

  “Thursday.”

  She could see him working backwards. “It started on Tuesday, I think.”

  “The day after Sarah was killed?”

  “Was it? I lifted the drink because I’d had surgery…they gave me opiates…I was confused.”

  He knew the excuse for drinking was bullshit and he knew it was the day after Sarah was killed. Morrow gave him a reproachful look and he dropped his eyes in shame.

  She watched him for a moment, and he felt her watching him, sipped his tea, smacking his lips at the bitterness of it. Clearly a man shackled by conscience, he was protecting someone. She didn’t know why he would do that and she was finding it annoying.

  She tapped her fingertip on the table and said, “You wait here.” She stood up and motioned for Harris to follow her.

  They went out through the hall. The young man who had let them in was coming through the living room and waved, trying to catch their eye, wanted a chat but Morrow shut the front door after themselves. They went back to the car and got in.

  “He’s lying to protect someone,” she said, “I think it’s another priest.”

  “No,” said Harris, certain. “Someone’s confessed to him, he’s drunk, blurted it out and now he’s trying to save his soul by taking the blame.”

  “How would you know that?”

  Harris smiled. “I’m a Pape.”

  She didn’t know what to say. It was easy to get these things wrong and she had a poor enough track record with tact. “Well…good for you.”

  Harris laughed because it was a ridiculous thing to say and he could see how hard she was trying.

  She held her hands up. “I don’t know what to say, I didn’t know.”

  “Aye, well,” he said awkwardly. He didn’t know what to say either.

  “Good for you,” she said again. “So…how does it work? He has to take the blame because someone confessed to him?”