AM02 - The End of the Wasp Season (17 page)

Thomas couldn’t meet her eye but nodded.

“Was she coming to my school?”

“Yeah.”

She looked at the oak again, gave a little choking gasp of indignation. “Prick!” She looked at Thomas. He’d been there already, that black lake, and it had taken him bad places. He didn’t want to go back.

“They didn’t like me at school,” she whispered. “Wasn’t top dog at all. Lot of those girls were bitches…” Her voice faded. In a sudden change of mood, she grinned and flipped onto her knees, looking at the oak tree with Thomas. “I saw the newspaper,” she said. “Him hanging there like an idiot.”

Thomas looked at the tree. Poor tree. “It’s nice to have you home,” he said, blushing because he meant it so much.

Ella smirked at the window.

“The crying in the car, was that for Moira’s benefit?”

She looked around a bit and shrugged, as if she’d been caught in a lie. “Picture was taken from Nanny Mary’s room, wasn’t it?”

He nodded, though rightly he shouldn’t know what the view was from there. She smirked. “You were fucking her, weren’t you?”

“Shut up.”

“Just asking.” She looked sly.

“Hey,” he said, “let’s go and walk about on the lawn.”

Her jaw dropped. Thomas monkeyed her, taking the piss. “Oh-my-GOD,” he said in a big doomsayer voice, “don’t-go-on-the-lawn.”

Ella giggled and did it back. “Stay-off-the-fucking-lawn.”

“The-lawn, the-lawn.” He dropped his voice: “Hey, we went in the freezer room last night and got some mini pizzas and Moira made them for dinner.”

Ella jolted back and stared at him.

He grinned. “Mini pizzas. We ate them in the kitchen. I had a beer.”

She held her thumb and finger together to make a small circle. “
Mini
pizzas? Like mini burger canapés at a party?”

“No.” He held both hands up and made a bigger circle. “Cruder than that. Actual supermarket mini pizzas. Moira made them in the oven.”

Ella looked out of the window and disbelief rippled across her face. “Where is the freezer room?”

“Under the kitchen.”

“Wow.” She nodded, taking it in, understanding a little, he hoped, of the joy there was in this new life, out of the shadow of Lars.

She gasped suddenly and held her hand out for his, even though he was behind the sofa. “Come on,” she said excitedly, being another person, someone in a movie, someone breathy, Helena Bonham Carter, probably. Or Keira Knightley.

Thomas looked at her hand distastefully. “Fuck off, Ella.”

She didn’t start a fight with him, she just dropped her hand and said, “Come on, though, let’s go and run the length of the fucking lawn.”

Thomas looked out of the window at the sea of vibrant forbidden green.

Moira had had enough. She was at her window smoking a cigarette, mid-morning, which she never did, even in the dark days, smoking, fretting about the children being home all the time and talking all the time and having incessant needs. Ella was just managing. They were so noisy. When they moved to a smaller house they’d have friends over and she wouldn’t even be able to pay for much help to look after them. She’d have to cook for them and mini pizzas wouldn’t do every night.

She was smoking and worrying when she heard the commotion at the front door below her window, steps, shouting. She leaned forward to see what on earth it was but the front of the house was hidden under the window ledge. It wasn’t until Ella and Thomas appeared on the driveway that she saw them. They were running, Ella breaking into little leaping skips sometimes, her heavy woolen school skirt swirling around her bare legs.

They ran over to the lawn and stopped at the edge, Ella dipping her toe into the grass as if she was testing the temperature in a swimming pool, and then they were on their marks–get set–go!—they bolted down the lawn, laughing loud to each other, their paths weaving away and together, away and together. Moira watched until they disappeared over the steep drop and came back up again, puffing but still smiling.

They walked over to the oak and found the branch that Lars had hanged himself from, each of them standing under it, taking turns. Thomas reached up to touch it, jumping the last two inches, slapping the rope-raw branch.

Ella looked so young and small. She was looking at nothing, staring straight towards the house, a big blank grin on her face and Moira began to cry.

The lobby in London Road Station was drafty. The floor was tiled brown, lined by chairs screwed to the floor, all of them overlooked by a two-way mirror. As if to provide an illuminating counterpoint to the bitter welcome, an absurd, life-sized cut-out of a smiling female officer stood to the side.

This morning the chairs were occupied by a group of women, and every one of them was pissed off. By the time Morrow passed through on the way to the interview rooms they had formed a committee to air their complaints: one of them stood up when Morrow came out of the CID wing. The other women watched expectantly as she anticipated Morrow’s trajectory and stamped over, blocking her path.

“Hey, you. You in charge here?”

Hands on ample hips, she tipped her head back, looking down at Morrow, ready for a fight. She was very round in the middle, wearing a gaudy purple top over black trousers. Her hair was short, dyed a shade of burgundy that didn’t flatter her yellow face.

“Are ye? You in charge?” She was looking for a fight.

Morrow wouldn’t have fought her with ten cadets and a stab vest on. “Do I look as if I’m in charge?”

She examined Morrow, saw that she was pregnant and feeling it. “We’ve all been called in here at the same time—”

Morrow interrupted. “You understand that this is a murder inquiry?”

She craned into Morrow’s face. “And are you getting that we’re all missing our work to sit about here, waiting on you?”

The chorus of women watched, nodding.

“OK.” Morrow stepped around her and spoke to the women, “You’ll all be seen in good time.”

But the purple woman felt she was winning and it made her confident enough to step in front of her again. “What does
that
mean?”

“What does
what
mean?”

“‘In good time,’ what does
that
mean?” She leaned in, determined not to be put off in front of the others.

Morrow saw the light shift behind the two-way mirror. The duty sergeant was behind there. If the woman looked like raising a hand over an officer, he would be out in a heartbeat, glad of the excuse.

Morrow didn’t have time for a scuffle, or to fill out the forms for ancillary charges. A little overconfident from the triumph of the morning briefing, she held a hand up at the mirror, telling the sergeant not to come out. She sensed that the gathered women didn’t really want to leave, so much as have something concrete to do; she walked straight over and addressed them directly:

“Right, ladies,” she said, and she saw them note that her accent echoed theirs. “Here’s the deal: Sarah Erroll was killed the day before yesterday—”

“We know that already,” said a woman from the back.

“What you don’t know is how she was killed.” She looked around them, let them imagine it. “Now, I can’t tell you that but what I can tell you is this: we have got to find this person and we have got to do it quickly.”

“Are we getting paid?” It was the purple woman, coming up behind, trying to reassert her authority.

Morrow was indignant. “For finding a murderer?”

“She’s right enough, Anne Marie,” another woman called to the purple leader from the sidelines. She looked at Morrow. “But see, we’ve never even been spoke to. Just told to get in here. And we’re all missing work and we were all asked to come at the same time. You can’t interview us at the same time.”

“OK, right.” Morrow nodded at the ground. “Right. We’re going to try and get you all seen before lunchtime. There’s a takeaway café two blocks down.” She pointed out the door and to the right. “You’re welcome to send one or two of you for teas.”

Some nodded, some murmured. Purple Anne Marie slunk towards her seat, defeated. “Aye, you,” Morrow pointed at her, “don’t you order anything, ’cause I’m taking you first.”

Anne Marie had worked for Mrs. Erroll for less than three weeks. The money was good, make no mistake about that, she liked the money well enough, but the old lady was a lot more disabled than she had been told by the agency and the daughter never took to Anne Marie at all.

She told Morrow and Leonard this with a degree of disbelief, while reaching down the neck of her top, into her sleeve and yanking a stray bra strap back up to her shoulder.

During the three summer weeks Anne Marie was there, Sarah Erroll went away twice, once to New York and once to London. She never had any friends over. No one called her on the house phone or left a message.

“What sort of person was she?”

Anne Marie shrugged. “Well, I didn’t like her.”

“Why not?”

“Thought she was a bit wet. Bit vague.” She wobbled her head. “Head in the clouds.”

“In what way?”

“In what way what?”

“How did she have her head in the clouds? Did she have ambitions or talk about what she wanted to do with her life?”

“Nah.”

“How did she seem wet?”

“Well, when I got the sack I went to her and said, ‘Look, that’s not right, I gave up a job to take this one and now she’s saying I’m out on my ear—’”

“Wait, who’s she? Who sacked you?”

“Her. The other one. Said I was lazy and I’d been sitting on the bed when she came in and said Mrs. Erroll needed changed, but I was just—”

“Who’s the other one?”

“That Kay Murray.” She screwed her face up. “Her.”

“Kay Murray sacked you?”

“Well, she never actually sacked me. She just kind of trapped me. She made us a cup of tea and said, ‘Oh, I can see you’re not happy here.’ ” Anne Marie was waving her arms about and making an angry face, as if Kay had been unreasonable, when she sounded perfectly measured. “And I’m like, ‘well, I’m not’ and she’s like ‘well, maybe another position would suit you better and you’ve said about the traveling and that’ and I’m like ‘well, if you could pay my travel—’ ”

“Yeah.” Morrow cut her off. “So you went to see Sarah about it and what did she say?”

“Kay’s the one who decides.”

Morrow was surprised by how much power Kay’d had. She wasn’t trained as far as she could tell and she’d specifically said that she wasn’t close to Sarah.

“Did you have a key?”

“No. Kay Murray let us in and out. She had a key.”

“Who else had one?”

“No one. Just Kay Murray.”

“So Kay and Sarah were close then?”

“No. Just Kay and the mum, Mrs. Erroll.”

“Joy Erroll?”

“Aye.”

Leonard chipped in, “I thought she had Alzheimer’s?”

“She did. Doesn’t mean ye cannae have pals though, eh?” She gave Leonard a superior look.

“How were they pals?”

“The mother lit up at the sight of her. Loved her. Cried when she left for the night. Couldn’t remember her own name but she knew when Kay Murray wasn’t in the house.” She twisted her lips in a bitter little smirk. “Nice for us, if you’re the one left looking after her, eh?”

“Do you remember the big square hallway just inside the porch?”

“Yes.”

“What was in the hallway when you were there?”

“Just that big black cupboard. Like something out of a horror movie. Big knobs on it, hanging down.”

“Big…” Morrow nodded, prompting her to describe it.

Anne Marie nodded. “Big, aye.” Seeing that Morrow was looking for more she added helpfully, “Cupboard…”

The next woman had worked there for five months until her granddaughter had a baby and she had to give up working to stay home and look after it. The baby was premature and the new mother had postnatal depression. She nodded at Morrow’s stomach. “You know how it is.”

She was small and fit and fantastically messy. Even the three buttons on the side of one of her boots were done up wrong. She was wearing a black T-shirt with a gold ABBA logo and the left shoulder was faded to gray. Morrow smiled when she realized that it was washed-out baby sick.

The woman remembered the black cupboard and said it was a dresser, at least ten feet high, which was wrong. They measured the height of the mark left on the wall and it was seven feet. She didn’t know what had happened to it. Sarah Erroll was a lovely person and was very good with her mum, even though her mum was quite confused and not always very nice.

“In what way wasn’t she very nice?”

The woman giggled and blushed. “Used a lot of language.”

“Did she?”

The woman pressed her lips together, as if afraid that she herself might suddenly blurt something filthy. “It was the confusion,” she confided in a whisper, “being confused. She spoke like a lady but put dirty words in it. You got some right laughs with her, right enough.”

“Was it a nice house to work in?”

She thought about it for a moment. “It was lovely. I do this job, ye know, and it’s a bit sad sometimes, the way people get treated.”

“But this wasn’t?”

“No. The pay was very good and Kay was her pal, I mean really her pal, and because of that Mrs. Erroll was still treated like a person. I mean, right at the beginning Sarah sat us down and said that the house had always been a happy house and she wanted the people who worked there to be happy too. She said her mum was confused but she still knew when folk were happy or not. She said if I had any complaints or something was worrying me I should speak to Kay about it.”

“Did you have any complaints?”

“No.”

“Was Kay easy to work with?”

“Fine. She was all about the old lady. Dressed her in all her favorite clothes, they didn’t even fit her anymore but she’d do it. She’d find old movies for them to watch together. If Mrs. Erroll was upset she used to tell her she’d just met the Queen and it would cheer her up. They did cooking together and that. Made bread and scones.”

“Kay and Mrs. Erroll liked each other?”

“Oh my God.” She rolled her eyes for emphasis. “Looooved each other.”

Two more of the women had nothing much to say, had stayed for only a few months before they had to leave, one because of the traveling, the other because her back went wonky and she couldn’t lift. Kay kept her on as a cleaner because she liked her but her back condition deteriorated and she couldn’t do that either, then.

Morrow was about to call in another one of the women when Wilder came into the interview room and told her that Jackie Hunter, the head of the carers’ agency, was downstairs.

Jackie Hunter was fifty and looked divorced. Her black bob was streaked with chocolate stripes and so shiny and well conditioned it looked as if she’d stolen it from a younger woman; ditto her magnificently white teeth. She spoke in a soft voice, her accent very definitely Giffnock, resting her hands on her lap, one on top of the other, nodding and listening carefully. Morrow could well imagine her radiating sympathy at clients as they wept, making them feel heard.

Jackie explained that Sarah had come to see her three years ago when her mother first had a minor stroke. Sarah had been working in London, in the City, living with girlfriends from school. She hadn’t realized that her mother was becoming confused. Mrs. Erroll was a proud woman and, like a lot of people with Alzheimer’s, she hid her illness well. Sarah had realized that her mother sounded different on the phone, but thought that she was angry because Sarah had moved to London.

Jackie arranged for Mrs. Erroll to be privately assessed. It was immediately clear that she would need a lot of care and it would be very expensive.

“How did Sarah feel about that?”

“I remember that Sarah was quite upset about it. She said she couldn’t afford it, they had no money left. Either Sarah had to do all the care herself or they sold the house. Mrs. Erroll would never settle anywhere else. Then a few weeks later she contacted me and said could we send people for interview. Someone else had agreed to pay for her care, a relative.”

“Who was the relative?”

“I don’t know. The relative was never mentioned again.” She set her face firmly to neutral.

“How much was it, roughly?”

“Round-the-clock care can cost up to twenty thousand pounds a week, depending on the number of staff and the level of their qualifications.”

“What level was Sarah interviewing for?”

Jackie sat back and crossed her legs carefully, doing the calculations in her head. “Two full-time carers, auxiliaries, and a night auxiliary. That would cost about five thousand pounds a month.”

It tallied with the amounts in the accounts books. “About sixty grand a year?”

Jackie Hunter nodded. “That’s just for the carers. That’s not for equipment or food or for overtime. It’s a heavy, heavy bill. She was working in a bar in the City of London. I think she knew a lot of people with a lot of money…”

Morrow didn’t want to tell her where Sarah Erroll got the money from.

“Did you like Sarah?”

“I didn’t really see her after that. I mostly dealt with Kay Murray.”

Morrow was in the canteen eating the packed lunch Brian had made for her. Ham and cheese on brown bread and an apple. It was busy but she found a seat alone by the window with a couple of pages of notes open in front of her so she could pretend she was reading them if anyone tried to talk to her.

She glanced around. They called it the canteen but it was just a room with drinks machines and tables, used for eating food they brought in themselves. It had been a real canteen once but the kitchen had been shuttered for as long as she’d been here. As well as clumps of uniforms around the tables, some of her own crew were on their piece break. And she noticed them come in, see her and sit well away. The more socially skilled caught her eye, smiled, invited her over, knowing she wouldn’t move, but others were blatantly shifty and couldn’t look at her. Routher stared at his packets of crisps as if he might cry. There was a shift in atmosphere in the department, it felt different. A war was about to break out over Bannerman, and she would have to choose a side. But it was different for her than the others because she was right in the middle of all of them, wouldn’t be here to try to control the outcome and would have to deal with whatever the fall-out was when she got back from her maternity leave. It wasn’t much of a choice: either the men would hate her or the management would.