AM02 - The End of the Wasp Season (24 page)

“Danny’s in here.” Crystyl held her hand up to a door on the same wall as the lift and Kay walked over to it. It was open a little so she pushed and the woman hurried over, hobbled by the heels, making a big deal of it.

“I’ll tell him—”

Kay held her hand up. “I’m fine, hen.” She stepped into the room to get away from whatever the fuck was going on with her.

It was a low room, a den. Startling halogen lights were punched into the ceiling. The carpet was thick, the walls clad in pine shelves with a big mirrored bar inset into one. The biggest telly she had ever seen took up the far wall. The footballers on it looked life size.

Danny McGrath had not aged. He had not spent long nights nursing temperature spikes that came to nothing, or stayed up sewing last-minute costumes for school concerts. He had never worked double shifts back to back, the first to pay for child care, the second for rent money. He had done none of these things. He had pleased himself and worked to get the things that he wanted, like the big telly he was sitting in front of now, like the leather recliner armchair he was lying on. The expensive bottles of drink, all of them full, glittering on the glass shelves behind him. He looked young and fresh and rested.

He sat his chair upright when he saw her and used the remote to pause the football match he was watching. He didn’t bother standing up and didn’t invite her to sit down. He wasn’t expecting this to take long.

“Kay, hen, how are you?”

She kept her hands in her pockets and nodded around the room at all his things. “Nice.” But Kay had a good eye and knew the furniture was vulgar and factory made and wouldn’t last.

“What can I do for ye?”

It was a mistake, she was making a mistake. She held her breath.

She looked at the far wall and said what she had rehearsed in her head on the bus over here: “I need to ask you a favor.”

They looked at each other. Danny nodded. “What is it?”

“Your sister,” she said, looking at the moonlight whiteness of the belly peeking out from under his T-shirt, “I need you to speak to her. She wants my boys for something and they’re good boys, they didn’t do anything.”

Danny cleared his throat. “I don’t see Alex.”

“She wants them for a murder. They didn’t do it.”

“Kay, hen, I don’t see her. I leave her alone, she body-swerves me.”

But Kay was tearful. She was stupid to have come here. She was panicking and being stupid. “You’d think with her expecting…” She began to cry. She’d have hidden it better if she’d been in front of someone she respected.

Danny watched her cry. “She’s pregnant again?”

“Twins.”

“I never noticed…”

“She’s showing already.”

His eyes flickered towards the television. “Ah, well, she’d a coat on.”

“You’re not going to say anything to her, are you?”

Danny tutted, shifted his backside in the leather chair. “Alex is nothing to do with me. If I could help I would. If there’s anything else I can do…I’ll pay for lawyers if they charge them, how about that?”

Kay managed a deep breath. Beneath her feet the thick carpet creaked as the fibers shifted. Kay wanted to get out of here. She had never asked Danny for anything and it was a mistake to come here now.

“OK.” She stepped back towards the door.

“Sixteen?”

Kay caught her breath. “Eh?”

“Sixteen, is he?”

She had her hand on the door. “Who’s this?”

“Joseph. Is he sixteen?”

She turned square to him. “Yeah, Joe’s sixteen.”

They looked at each other. Danny’s eyebrows rose slowly.

Kay tutted. “Don’t flatter yourself, Danny, Joe’s good-looking.”

But Danny wasn’t to be put off. She’d never told him but somehow he knew Joe was his. He looked away from her, cleared his throat. “What sort of a boy is he?”

He was thinking about JJ. Kay suddenly saw him properly. His eyes were red-rimmed, his paunch was settled, his ankles looked a bit swollen. Danny: 45–60.

Kay stepped towards him and cupped his cheek in her hand, startling him, and she said, “Danny, Joe’s a lovely, lovely guy,” and she held his face in both her hands as he fought off a crying pang like a child.

Embarrassed, he stood up, brushed her hands off and turned away, drying his face on his sleeve, sniffing.

“Pet,” said Kay. “Pet?”

He couldn’t turn back to her. “Wha?”

“I shouldn’t have come here.”

“No. I’m fine.”

She opened the door, wanting to get out before he got it together but he was by her side. He was holding a chunk of twenty-quid notes, trying to press them into her hand.

Kay looked at the money, keeping her hands in her pockets. “Stay away from us,” she said, and left.

They ate their sandwiches in Bannerman’s office and she talked him through the Walnut interviews. He wasn’t listening. She stopped short of telling him about the party, feeling it was too personal to Sarah to tell someone who plainly didn’t care. He was waiting until she was finished so that he could talk through his theory. He was excited by it, she could see that it had come to him as a realization and he was glad of it. Bannerman didn’t want to get stuck in the endless gathering of information and getting nowhere and his theory was their means of escaping that fate. It seemed very unlikely to Morrow.

What Bannerman was suggesting had happened was this: the Murray boys had broken into Glenarvon through the kitchen window, possibly at their mother’s instruction. Breaking in would make it look as though it had nothing to do with her, since she had a key. Once in the kitchen they left no prints until they climbed the stairs to Sarah Erroll’s bedroom and Frankie, the younger one, broke off and went to the bathroom. He touched the toilet seat lid with his thumb, leaving a perfect print. They then committed the crime and threw their clothes away on the way home. Unable to find the money, they left with nothing but an ashtray and a watch. The silver eggcup had been discarded as the proceeds of a theft now because it wasn’t silver, but electroplated, and had been on top of the cupboard for years.

Morrow shook her head, “Saying they broke in to make it look as if they didn’t have the key sounds a bit convoluted. Maybe whoever did it just didn’t have a key?”

“But it would make us think they didn’t when they did.”

“That’s a bit sophisticated for robbers who lost it and kicked her head in, don’t you think?”

“And then they panicked and grabbed the watch and the bowl.”

“Again, a bit sophisticated. They put the watch in a sock under their mother’s bed and use the bowl as an ashtray.”

He could see she wasn’t buying it. “She said they hadn’t been there.” He slid a photograph of a fingerprint over to her. “We found Frankie’s print on the toilet seat.”

“But nowhere else?”

“Nowhere. Wearing gloves?”

“Why would you wear gloves and take them off at the loo?”

Bannerman had been preparing this, she could tell by his smirk. He reached his hand forward, palm down, thumb opposing, and mimed lifting a toilet seat up to the wall. He raised his eyebrows. “Having a pee. Break in, very excited, need to go…”

“Not a pee,” she said, sounding vague because she was thinking. Harris would have known what she meant by that but it wasn’t obvious to Bannerman. Burglars and home intruders often voided their bowels in a house, often in strange places like the living room floor or in a kitchen. Adrenaline made everything move, speeded up the small intestine. Usually they got in and the wave of excitement passed and they found they couldn’t walk for needing the toilet, couldn’t even get to the bathroom. It wasn’t, as many victims thought, a statement of disrespect or defiance. It wasn’t a statement at all, just a biological imperative. It seemed unlikely that they would urinate in a loo and then flush it away, nice and tidy, and put gloves back on and then carry on to commit a murder. They’d found prints on the phone anyway. They weren’t Frankie’s. He’d have said if they were.

She looked down at the photograph of the print on the white plastic. It was verifiably Frankie’s thumbprint: the fingerprint analysis stapled to the back had sixty points of identity and it was only a cursory examination.

Bannerman added, “She says on film that her boys have never been to that house.”

He was right, Kay had said that, but it was a hell of a big case to base on a single fingerprint.

“Shirley McKie,” said Morrow quietly. He looked at her as if she had threatened to kick his balls.

“I’m just saying,” she said, “it’s just one print, we don’t want to bring that up again.”

The DC Shirley McKie case was a police horror story. The Strathclyde Detective Constable’s thumbprint was found at a murder scene that she had never been to. It wouldn’t have mattered but forensic evidence against the murder suspect consisted of a single fingerprint at the scene as well. His conviction was overturned and McKie’s disputed suspension had thrown the service into a tail spin: if they didn’t prove she was lying and had been there then all fingerprint evidence over the past forty years would have been open to question, opening up a huge number of cases for retrial. It was ignominious, but the bosses decided to eat their own. Then Shirley McKie got a lawyer and won the case anyway. Everyone was waiting for the second shoe to fall.

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.