AM02 - The End of the Wasp Season (12 page)

“Dee-uulz,” she said, watching his expression wilt as he realized he’d given himself away. “Mr. Scott, where is it you’re from?”

“I live in Giffnock.”

“No,” she said carefully, “where is it you’re
from
. Where did your parents live when you were born?”

“South Side.” He blinked.

Morrow cocked an ear. “Priesthill?”

“No,” Scott said carefully, “Giffnock.”

“Aye,” she nodded, “Priesthill.”

He sat back, his mouth twitching with disgust. “Giffnock,” he said quietly.

She put a consoling hand on the table. “Listen, we won’t tell anyone, ye don’t need to lie to us.”

He chewed his cheek unhappily and Harris added, “We can find out…”

“Kennishead high flats,” he said quietly. They would have laughed at him but his shame was so raw that it took the fun out of it. “What’s that to do with anything?”

“What university did you study at?”

“Glasgow Uni Law School.”

Morrow nodded again. She’d been to the Law School to interview someone once. If she’d been a student there she’d have lied about her background too. “Sarah was as posh as you can get, wasn’t she?”

He blinked defensively at the table top, adopting his posh voice again. “As I say, she was a well-bred young lady.”

Morrow watched discomfort and conflict ripple across his face, as if his idea of himself was melting. “Sarah asked for you specifically?”

“Yes.”

“D’you think she knew you were a bit impressed by how posh she was?”

“I was always respectful—”

“No, no: d’you think she spotted you passing for white? Knew she could intimidate you?”

Scott sat back in his chair and glared at her. His eyes flicked to the cassette tapes whirring in the recorder and he narrowed his eyes and mouthed at her—fuck off. A criminal lawyer would have known not to do that.

Morrow looked hard at him. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Scott, could you just repeat what you said for the benefit of the tape?”

“Didn’t say anything,” he smirked.

Slowly Morrow raised her hand to the corner of the room. He followed the trajectory of her finger and froze when he saw the red light on the camera.

Morrow leaned across the table to him. “Did Sarah Erroll seem bright to you?”

“No,” he told the camera quietly, “not really.”

“Violent?”

“
Violent?”
Still looking at the camera. “God, no.”

“Talk to me, please, Mr. Scott.”

He turned his remorseful face to her but his mind was on the watcher. “Sarah was harmless. Horsey.”

“We found a taser gun in her house disguised as a mobile phone. The initial forensic traces suggest she carried it in her handbag.”

He forgot the camera then. “A
taser
gun? What, like an electric shock gun?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s dangerous.”

“Nine hundred thousand volts,” said Harris and left it hanging in the air.

Scott shook his head at the table. When he spoke his voice came from the high flats, “I’d her down as a diddy.”

Morrow watched him, reading his confusion, seeing him rerun every meeting with Sarah Erroll, looking for clues, wondering if he could have known. She watched him and saw yet another person lose sympathy for Sarah Erroll.

She watched him until a tiny heel, no bigger than her thumb, karate-kicked her heart and stole her away from the world.

Moira and Thomas were in the big freezer room below the kitchen. Neither could remember the last time they came in here. Usually the kitchen was full of staff, or the threat of staff, and had been a public space, but Moira had dismissed almost all of the live-ins.

She had kept Nanny Mary on for Thomas’s sake but they talked about it and Thomas said she needn’t have. He didn’t want her anymore. As he said it Moira watched the curl on his lip, not his eyes. He couldn’t be certain that she knew about Mary’s midnight creeping, but she agreed and called Mary in and said they couldn’t afford to employ her now. Mary seemed relieved, said she’d pack and be gone in the morning before they woke up. Then she shook both their hands, cold and professional, not searching Thomas’s face for anything or trying to look him in the eye. He watched her leave the room, her buttocks pert through her silk skirt, and he was struck suddenly by the impression that his father had ordered Mary to fuck him and she was glad it was over too. He did think it odd that she didn’t ask for references.

Jamie had taken two grand cash as an
ex gratia
payment. Moira hadn’t mentioned the choking incident and Thomas felt she probably wouldn’t now.

So the hall, the kitchen, the whole of the house was empty. They hadn’t had any supper and Moira had suggested an expedition to the kitchen.

The freezer room was warm and windowless. The whir of the motors bounced off the subterranean walls. It took them a while to find the light switch, a cord hanging down at the very bottom of the steep stairs in the pitch dark. Three big sarcophagus freezers purred quietly. One of them was padlocked shut. Moira went straight over and fingered the lock.

“This must be the meat freezer,” she said.

Thomas thought suddenly of a bed of meat, of a body in the locked cabinet, but it was just a spooky, unfamiliar room. That was all it was. It was dark and quiet and spooky.

He lifted the lid of the freezer next to him, looked down and found the contents were well ordered. Clear plastic tubs full of handmade gourmet meals prepared by their cook before he left, individual portions, each dish marked clearly on the lid in thick curly writing.

Moira had opened the other freezer and found it crammed with loaves of different kinds of bread, ingredients, frozen herbs and cheese, frozen juice. She held up a frosted cylindrical bag triumphantly by the tail. “Look!”

Mini pizzas. Cheap mini pizzas. “This must be what they eat,” she said, “the staff. Let’s have them!”

“What do you do with them though?”

“Put them in the oven.” Thomas was impressed until Moira explained, “It says it on the packet. I can do it.”

She hurried past him, up the stairs to the kitchen proper to cook a meal for him and prove she was able. But she had left the freezer lid leaning against the wall, the smoky cold crackling out of it into the warm room. Thomas waited until her ankles disappeared up the steps into the brightness of the kitchen then stepped over and shut it. She heard it slam and bent down to a crouch, smiling. “Sorry. Fell at the first fence.” She stood up and vanished into the kitchen.

Thomas looked at the locked meat freezer again. There was no one in there. Sarah Erroll wasn’t in there. Ella wasn’t in there. It was just a spooky room.

He took the steps up to the kitchen, emerging to find Moira with her head in the oven. For a moment he thought she was trying to gas herself, in an electric oven, thought of her gone and he found he didn’t move to yank her out.

“Oh, there it’s…” She pulled the top of her head out and smiled at him. “Electric. Silly me.” She pressed the button and turned the knob.

Thomas considered himself with a kind of horrified wonder, his capacity for callousness, and then changed the subject. “Mum, where did Cookie keep the keys?”

She pointed to a small metal cabinet on the wall behind the kitchen door. He opened it and found six key hooks, each occupied, each labeled. “Freezer 3” had a small key on a loop of pink string. He took the key, stepped carefully back down the steep steps to the freezer room and looked across to the padlock.

Small. Brass. He didn’t want to open it. Never wanted to see a mess like Sarah Erroll again. But the longer he left it the more frightened he became. Forcing himself to walk over, he stood in front of it, looking down at the white coffin. Blindly, he fumbled the tiny key against the hole, feeling for the lock, missing, feeling there was something sexual about this and it was terrible and soiling and filthy, but making himself go on because not knowing was worse and he wouldn’t sleep for thinking about it.

The padlock sprang open and dropped into his open hand.

He flicked the hinged shackle up, stood, looked and lifted the lid. A bed of frosty meat. Steaks, chops, venison, joints. A giant leg of lamb. No bodies, no blood, no dead Ella.

“Meat?” Moira had followed him down.

“Yeah.” He slammed the lid shut. “Just meat.”

“Did you think he’d hidden money in there or something?”

“No, I just…I wondered.”

As they waited for the pizzas to cook he cracked open a beer from the fridge and they enjoyed the quiet of the house. Moira explained that Lars’s business collapse had left them with no more than three hundred thousand a year. They’d need to sell the house and live somewhere else. The ATR-42 was owned by the business, as was the house in South Africa that Thomas had never even been to because they always went in term time, and most of the cars and the central London office space and the Stamford Bridge memberships, so they wouldn’t be seeing them again. Thomas didn’t care. He didn’t even like football much.

She took the pizzas out and put them on a chopping board to cut them up. They were delicious.

Thomas watched Moira eat. “Your mouth isn’t dry anymore.”

She looked back at him and knew what he was asking. “You’re right. It’s not. I came off them.”

“When?”

“Five weeks ago. Your father hasn’t been home much.”

Thomas wondered if she knew where Lars had been. Thomas knew exactly where he had been. With her, the other wife.

It was the last conversation he had with his father. Lars took him out the day before autumn term started, to Fortnum’s ice cream parlor, where every second table had a distant-eyed father in a city suit escorting an estranged brat. Thomas was older than the other kids, wondered if his father had even noticed how much older he was.

Thomas looked at Moira. She might know. She might not care.

“Why did he really kill himself?”

Moira shrugged. “They disqualified him. I think he knew he’d never be the big player again. He couldn’t live without the game. He’d no friends left, no other interests, I suppose.” She looked dreamy. “You didn’t know him when he was young. He was fun. Funny. He had a sense of humor back then. And early on, we really loved each other. We had
friends
. We could have been happy, instead of, you know what happened. God…it’s such a lot to squander.”

Thomas listened, nodding, until Moira looked at him and saw his eyes were red and told him to go to bed.

“I need a shower,” he said quietly. “I really need a shower first.”

Morrow was in the office, pulling her coat on, checking her bag for keys and phone when Routher knocked gingerly on the open door.

“DCI Bannerman would like to see you in his office, ma’am.”

“Thanks, Routher.”

He slipped back into the corridor and she called him back. “Why were you late for the briefing?”

Routher would never have made a spy: his face was so expressive she could see the whole story unfold in the tiny shifts of his facial expression: eyebrows meeting because he had been late for a good reason and it wasn’t his fault, a sudden recollection that lateness was bad and not being promoted was good, a half smile congratulating himself on being so fly and finally the lie: “Sorry, I slept in.”

“At five in the afternoon, you slept in?”

He looked confused. “It won’t happen again.”

She stared at him, watching him redden. “Get out of here.”

He did and was glad to.

She stepped down the corridor and found Bannerman’s door half open. He was talking to someone, yeah-yeahing. She knocked and walked in and found him on the phone, agreeing with someone. He eyed the chair in front of him and she took it, waiting while he finished, looking around his desk.

When they shared an office he had the desk laid out in ham-handed messages, loudly advertising The-kinda-guy-I-am. Morrow didn’t believe any of them. She found it interesting to read though, to hone her skill at looking behind the stated to the obvious. Bannerman didn’t eat health bars for lunch because he was health conscious but because he was afraid of getting fat. She wasn’t taken in by the surfboard paperweight either: he didn’t enjoy an outdoor life of adventure but an occasional sunbed. She hated him because she saw him trying to stand out from the tone of the force, knowing he could afford to because he was so intensely of it; his father was a police officer, he knew the game inside out.

Promoted, Bannerman wasn’t concerned with appearing anything but in charge.

He hung up the phone. “I’m taking this investigation over a bit, Morrow,” he said without apology. “Because of the money. It’s a worry, not just that it’s there and there’s so much, but because it’s in euros.”

Another lie. The money was part of it but he wanted more than the glory. He was up to something else. “Have they checked it for traces of drugs?” she asked.

“Yeah: it hasn’t got any traces on it. Little or nothing. An unusual amount of nothing, these seem to be straight from the bank. Which bank we’re not sure yet, they’re not sequential. We’re checking for large withdrawals of euros in this country but they could be from anywhere.”

“My guess is New York.”

“Yeah, there’s enough floating about over there for that to be feasible.”

She didn’t know how to broach the fact that the men wouldn’t work for him. “Sir: morale. They’re competing to see who can be most useless—it’s not supposed to be like this.”

Bannerman checked behind her and dipped his voice. “I know. I’ve noticed. I’m coming in tomorrow morning to give them an earful.”

“No, please—”

“Morale is my job as much as yours. If they can’t bring it with them I’ll have to use the heavy hand.”

The heavy hand: a boss phrase, as if the men could be slapped enthusiastic. These men were older, more confident, not straight out of Tulliallan. “They’re not that kind of crew, sir.”

“I don’t want Harris taking on too much.” And here it was, his downcast eyes, signaling the significance. “Why don’t you use Wilder a bit more?”

“Because he’s a dick.”

He gave her a look, a warning. “You going home?”

“Trying to.” She gathered her things together. “I think Sarah Erroll gave the impression that she was a daft Sloane but was actually double wide. We interviewed her lawyer and she’d—”

“I know, I was watching.”

She stopped and looked at him. He really was taking over and there was nothing she could do about it. “OK,” she said testily. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Good night.”

She allowed herself a small curse at him under the click of the door.

Routher was outside in the corridor again and she turned her venom on him. “Are you planning to hang about the corridor all night, Routher?”

Startled by the strength of her annoyance he spluttered, “No, I’m…I’m waiting on you. Prelims are on your desk and McCarthy’s been looking at her phone. She was an escort.”

“Oh, shite.” Morrow stepped over to her office and opened the door, swinging her bag in, bowling it to her desk. “Come on.”

Mark McCarthy had the face of an underweight hemophiliac. He was the unhealthiest-looking specimen Morrow had ever encountered in the force. She was always amazed that he hadn’t been seconded by the drug squad for undercover work.

He smiled up as she approached his desk. “Got some good stuff, boss. These phones have got your whole life on them.”

She pulled a chair over and sat down. “Give us it.”

“Okayyyyy.” He pulled the phone out of the plastic productions bag, the black dust from the fingerprint search sticking to his fingertips. “First off, we got prints on the face of it and they’re not hers. They’re good ’uns as well.”

“Anyone with a record?”

“No matches so far.”

“Fuck,” said Morrow with more force than she meant to. What she really wanted was a home address of someone with previous in the same sort of crime so she could go home right now.

McCarthy looked hurt. “It’s still good though, eh?”

“Oh yeah, yeah, what else?”

“The last call made was 999. This is what they sent us.”

He had set it up to impress her: he shook the mouse back and forth and his computer screen opened to an audio file. He selected “copy” from the menu, dragged it to the memory stick, let it download and clicked the stick out, handing it to her. After all the pronounced disinterest of the day Morrow was quite touched.

“Can you hear Sarah on it?”

“Yeah. Also…” McCarthy clicked up a list of emails, each headed with the sender’s name. Most of them were from Scott and headed either “Glenarvon” or “Settlement of Estate” but as he scrolled down a series of older emails appeared, all from “Sabine.” “See how the messages are headed ‘Re:…’? That means they came from another email account. And they’re all the same sort of thing.”

McCarthy opened one. P would be in London on business, had heard about her from a friend. He knew the score and the prices and hoped they could get together for some fun. He gave his hotel and a phone number. It was an internet hook-up.

“Did she reply?” asked Morrow.

“No. If there’s a wee arrow at the side,” he shut the email and went back to the listings, “that arrow tells you it’s been replied to. These don’t have one. She stopped replying about two months ago.”

“When her mum died,” Morrow said. “And she stopped having to pay for the carers. Her mum had around-the-clock care in her house. It’s very expensive.”

McCarthy nodded, but she could tell he was realizing it for the first time. She didn’t care whether he knew or not, she just wanted him to mention it to the other men in passing.

“This phone got a camera?”

“Yup.” He went back to the main menu and selected the pictures file. “It’s an old iPhone though. She must have been an early adopter: tiny memory, holds about a hundred photos, tops. We’re looking through her laptop,” he pointed to a tiny silver notebook on another desk, “but she’s got passwords for everything and they’re all different.”

There were eighty-seven pictures on the phone. Some were of people but many were of odd items. They opened them and could see that they were Yellow Pages listing for roofers and septic tank engineers, photographed presumably so she didn’t have to jot numbers down. The rest were recent. Many were of New York street scenes, the park, badly framed images of other passengers on a sunny-day boat ride off Manhattan.

“Was she downloading the photos regularly?”

“Yeah, far as we can tell.”

“I never remember to download. My phone’s polluted with old photos.” She frowned at the phone. It seemed strange.

“Show me the dates on the New York ones.”

McCarthy moved the mouse over them and the dates came up. They were taken within the past week. “They’re all new.”

Morrow chewed her lip and looked at it. “She’d been there seven times in the past year. Doesn’t it seem strange to be thrilled enough to take photos? It’s like she’s pretending to be a tourist.”

“Maybe she was a tourist.”

“But she’d been there seven times in eleven months. Who still takes photos like that after the seventh time?”

“She was doing touristy things when she was there, for definite. She was going to museums and that.” He pointed over to the suitcase on an exhibits table. “She’s bought a museum catalogue. Must have really enjoyed it because the book weighs a ton. Tripled the weight of her luggage.”

Morrow looked over at the small white suitcase from the hall. It lay unzipped and open next to the contents: a small pile of neatly folded clothes and a transparent toilet bag. A massive cellophane-wrapped book sat by it.

She stood up and walked over to the table, looking down at the contents of the suitcase.

The huge pale green catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art was still sealed in cellophane, the receipt sellotaped onto it. The purchase dates were right for her last trip. Also in the case were a change of underwear, a blue version of the pink lacy camiknickers they had found in the house, a silver dress, a toilet bag with all the creams and lotions transferred into flight-friendly small bottles and gathered in a transparent plastic ziplock bag. She’d been on the pill.

There were no traces of an individual in the suitcase. No home address in case it got lost, no photos or magazines she was in the middle of reading, no notes-to-self or old tickets, nothing extraneous.

Morrow looked at the catalogue. She tried to pick it up with one hand. It was so heavy that it strained her wrist. She took hold of the suitcase lid and shut it, looked, opened it again, put the catalogue in and shut it again. The catalogue took up almost half of the case. She took it out again and sat it on the table, looking at it. There was something wrong with it, the cellophane was slightly loose and the seams inconsistent, wavering.

She took out her car keys and caught the edge of the plastic, scratching at it to start a rip and pulling it off. She used the edge of the key to flip the book open.

Morrow smiled. Inside, off center, in among black-and-white photographs of tatty cubist collages, someone had cut a perfect bed for the fat brick of crisp purple five-hundred-euro notes wrapped in two elastic bands. Sarah could have taken the same catalogue through time after time, rewrapping it, buying a new one for the receipt with the right date. And it explained why she checked it in. If she’d taken it through hand luggage the catalogue would look new to the naked eye but the security X-ray would show a gray rectangle and the inconsistency in the paper. The photos of New York were part of her cover as a gallery-visiting tourist.

McCarthy was standing across the table from her, staring down at the money, hypnotized. Routher came over too and a young DC stood up at his desk, standing on tiptoes to see.

Morrow looked around at them, at their mouths hanging open, eyes locked on the money but their minds far away, in bookies, in car showrooms, wherever their yen took them.

The night shift was fractured after that: McCarthy and Routher had to guard the cash until the armored van driver could be roused from his bed. Bannerman insisted on taking the catalogue over to the lab himself for processing, even though traces of anything relevant to the murder investigation seemed unlikely. Morrow was left alone in her office looking through the files from the phone.

In among the photos she found three of a man, a silver-haired man, and made a note to herself to check whether his photo was in Glenarvon somewhere. The older photographs were of Sarah’s mother, a tiny tortoise of a woman wearing out-of-date dresses that had belonged to her in a heftier time. The later ones showed her peering at the camera, cross, wearing brand-new nightclothes in pale blue and powder pink, blankets over her knees, in the armchair in the kitchen, in her bed, by a window. The photographs were very tender. Sarah had crouched to take them at her mother’s eye level and the light was soft in all of them. Kay was in the background of some of the kitchen photos, smiling over her shoulder at the late Mrs. Erroll, looking plump and motherly. Morrow touched Kay’s face on the screen and smiled to herself.

The emails on Sarah’s phone nearly all concerned the house. Scott seemed determined to write to her about every detail of the sale and the estate settlement, doubtless charging every time. The emails were so overwritten and obsequious he sounded kickable. She could well imagine the level of deference would make Sarah despise him, feel a certain glee about tricking him.

Many of the other emails were addressed to Sabine, arrangements to meet up in specific hotels at very specific times, promises of hearty fun but ambiguous as to the exact nature of it. It was a disaster that she’d done that. Cops had little sympathy for sex workers, however many courses they were sent on. They were too much trouble, too chaotic, magnets for nutters. The only way most cops could summon up sympathy was to frame them as children who’d been tricked into it, call them “girls” and “boys.” Or else they made it an accident of addiction: they did it for drugs, because of drugs, needed drugs to do it. Either way they couldn’t help themselves. Sex workers, in the habit of telling people what they wanted to hear, always agreed. Few did it for the money, she’d noticed. Few admitted it was an economic option.

Morrow covered her face and thought of Sarah on the stairs. At some point she must have known what was happening, and the job would have made that moment of realization even more appalling. Sex workers blamed themselves, however appalling a crime against them. Half the battle when taking a rape report or the details of a brutal assault was getting them to admit that they had been a victim. They needed the illusion of control. Morrow rubbed her stomach. They all needed that. She imagined Sarah lying on her back as a foot came towards her face and her last conscious thought being a personal reproach.