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Synopsis
When a notorious millionaire banker hangs himself, his death attracts no sympathy. The terrible legacy of a lifetime of selfishness is widespread but most acute among those he ought to be protecting: his family.
Meanwhile, in a wealthy suburb of Glasgow, a young woman is found savagely murdered, leaving the community stunned. When Detective Inspector Alex Morrow, heavily pregnant with twins, is called in to investigate, she soon discovers that a tangled web of lies lurks behind the murder. It’s a web that will spiral through Alex’s own home, the local community, and ultimately right back to a swinging rope, hundreds of miles away.
The End of the Wasp Season is an accomplished and compelling audiobook about a family’s power for damage—and redemption.
Release date: September 26, 2011
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Print pages: 400
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The End of the Wasp Season
Denise Mina
A New York Times Book ReviewNotable Crime Book of 2011
Winner of the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award
“Denise Mina is a fantastically talented writer, and The End of the Wasp Season is a thoroughly deserving winner and a great example of tartan noir.… A hugely atmospheric and haunting book.”
—Simon Theakston
“There’s no going wrong with a Mina mystery. Her Glasgow-based books are full of great, conflicted women characters, pitch-perfect dialogue, and serious thoughts about the past’s habit of strangling the present.… It’s Mina’s most diverting book in years.”
—Jeff Giles, Entertainment Weekly
“Like her fellow Scot, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mina relishes combining elements of the uncanny with crisp insights into the various diseases of the human psyche. The End of the Wasp Season is a tale that lingers long after you might wish it could be exorcised.”
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR.org
“Realistically gritty.… Contains the sort of insightful observation that makes Mina’s novels so extraordinarily rich and unpredictable.… There’s greater satisfaction in watching Mina transform this seemingly simple cleaning woman into a complex character, possessed of great depths of feeling.… We know from the start (as the police do not) that fifteen-year-old Thomas is a killer. But Mina observes the boy with such tenderness as he looks for some sign of affection from his criminally neglectful parents that it becomes clear he’s just one more victim of the pitiless world he grew up in.”
—Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review
“This superb story of family, class, love, and redemption is wrapped—or slowly unwrapped—around a complex, intriguing plot.… Mina is at her darkly brilliant best, casting shadows among the few rays of hope.”
—Michele Ross, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A gritty thriller.”
—Parade
“Mina excels at describing the minutiae of police work, inexorably leading to the solution of the crime, as well as the convoluted but exceptionally believable interpersonal dealings of the cops and criminals alike. Read one Mina novel and you’ll be back for more.”
—Bruce Tierney, BookPage
“A stellar follow-up to Still Midnight.… The gulf between social classes and the disintegration of families both inform this memorable police procedural.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A fascinating psychological study that leaves the reader guessing until almost the last page. Mina’s latest is a collection of brilliant character studies, all packaged up nicely in a first-class murder mystery. I can’t wait for more.”
—Tracy Sherlock, Vancouver Sun
“Alex Morrow has to be one of the most authentic [pregnant detectives in popular culture]. Mina’s crime novels always carry literary weight. This one has heft in abundance.… Mina’s plot is masterfully suspenseful, layered with the stories of two other mothers and their children, each connected to the crime.”
—Carole E. Barrowman, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“A tense thriller where spot-on characterization and insight are far more important than blood and gore. Mina is absolutely at the top of her game and this is about as good as crime fiction gets.”
—Mark Billingham, author of Bloodline
“This is more a literary novel than a thriller.… The suspense is in watching Morrow get there, and in the unfolding, expanding aspects of the characters, particularly Kay. The writing is sharp, witty, concise, and colorful. Mina’s Glasgow is an edgy, hard place. But while the novel is often grim, it is not bleak. Like all of Mina’s novels, this one is absorbing and compelling.”
—Lynn Harnett, Seacoast Online
“A tough yet graceful writer, Ms. Mina specializes in female protagonists such as Detective Inspector Alex Morrow, who doesn’t allow the complications of being pregnant with twins get in the way of solving crime.… The End of the Wasp Season is less of a thriller than a psychological crime novel that focuses on the pain of children driven far beyond their capacity to deal with the neurotic adults who control their lives.… You won’t stop reading it.”
—Muriel Dobbin, Washington Times
ONE
The silence startled Sarah from a hundred-fathom sleep. She opened her eyes to the red blink of the digital alarm clock: 16:32.
The yips of small dogs came from one of the gardens downhill, insistent, ricocheting off the ceiling and around the curved room.
Quiet. The radio was off. Sarah routinely left the radio on in the kitchen when she was here, tuned to Radio 4. The conversational coo took the edge off the emptiness. Heard from another room it gave the impression that the house was full of charming, chatty people from Hampshire. Burglars might find that strange in Glasgow but it was plausible in the exclusive village of Thorntonhall. Sarah left strategic lights on too: hall, stairs, anywhere that couldn’t be seen into. She had a talent for making things seem.
Quiet. This was not the burgling hour. The house was at the top of the hill, visible in daylight, especially at this time when neighbors were out in their grounds, critiquing the gardeners’ work or goading fat pedigree dogs around. A thief would have to be very confident or very stupid to break in now.
Exhausted and desperate to sleep, she considered an innocent explanation: either a fuse in the kitchen had blown or the old radio had finally stopped working. Everything in the house was old and needed fixed.
So she decided that the radio had died, smiled and shut her eyes, curling up under the crisp duvet, almost glad to have woken up for the delicious tumble back to sleep.
Her mind slid softly into the dark warm.
A sudden crack of floorboard at the bottom of the stairs. Her eyes snapped open.
She raised her head from the pillow, the better to hear.
A shoe scuffing over carpet, amplified by the stairwell and a hissed two-word instruction. A high voice. A woman’s voice. “Go on.”
Sleep-befuddled, Sarah sat up, imagining her mother on her stairlift, her whirring, inexorable rise to the landing. Her mother, pinch-mouthed and imperious. Her mother wanting answers: why did they fix on that care plan? Why was Sarah never there to bathe her? Why didn’t Cardinal Geoffrey conduct her funeral service?
Nonsense.
She threw the duvet off and swung her feet to the floor, attempted to stand up but her drowsy knees failed her and she toppled back, landing awkwardly on the bed with an undignified bounce.
Exasperated with herself, she realized that she was vulnerable because she was at home. Sarah had been in strange places, scary places and managed to stay alert and calm. She always mapped the fire exits on the way in, arrived in charge and stayed in charge, but here she was defenseless.
But this was different to those stranger rooms because here she was a normal householder. She could call the police, ask them to come and help her.
Relieved, she flopped forwards over her knees, reached into her handbag at the side of the bed. Her nervous fingers fumbled past tissues and receipts and passport to the cold metal back of her iPhone. She pressed the button as she pulled it out and was delighted to see the face light up. She had turned it on as she stood in the aisle of first class, waiting to get off at Glasgow Airport. She didn’t always. Sometimes she left it off for twenty-four hours until she’d had a sleep. Now, using both hands to concentrate on the screen, she unlocked it, selected phone, selected keyboard, jabbed 999 and pressed call just in time to hear movement outside her bedroom door.
It was more of a sensation than a sound, air shifting on the landing. A body brushed the wall by the door, low down, as startling as cold fingers to the small of a bare back.
She shoved the iPhone into a little cave in the duvet and stood up.
The door moaned softly as it fell open.
It was not the ghost of her mother but two teenage boys, gawky, awkward. They wore baggy black jogging trousers and matching T-shirts, inside out, the seams showing all the way down the legs, along the arms. They wore the same black trainers too. The strange uniform made them look like the members of a cult.
Tentative at first, shuffling, they occupied the doorway. Not desperate but confident, boys on a dare.
She almost laughed with relief. “What are you doing in here?”
One of them was tall, shaven-headed. He couldn’t look at her and squirmed slightly at the sound of her voice, stood sideways in the door, his shoulder out on the landing as if he’d like to leave.
“Look,” she said, “get out of my house. It isn’t empty, this house…”
The other boy had longer hair, black and thick, but he wasn’t tentative. He was angry, standing square to the door frame, looking straight at her, taking in her face.
Sarah knew she wasn’t very pretty but she made the best of herself, was slim, had a good haircut. In a kind light she could be thought attractive. This boy wasn’t finding her so. He was disgusted by her.
The taller one elbowed his friend. The angry boy didn’t break eye contact with her but answered him with the jut of a chin, ordering him into the room. The tall friend flinched, giving a half shake of his head. They continued their conversation in micro-gestures, the angry boy holding her eye, hating her.
“My mother died,” she said, voice fading as it dawned on her that they weren’t surprised to find her here. “I still live—”
“Where’s your kids?” asked the angry boy.
“Kids?”
“You’ve got kids.” He seemed very certain.
“No…,” she said, “I haven’t got kids.”
“Yes, you fucking have.” He glanced around the room as if her children might be hidden under the edge of the duvet, in the armoire, under the bed.
His voice was high, the voice from the stairs, but the accent was what she noticed: not Glaswegian, not west coast at all. It wasn’t even the tempered, indeterminate Scottish of the local kids. He sounded east coast but English: Edinburgh and London maybe. They’d come here, not stumbled across the house, but had traveled here. She suddenly had no idea what this was.
Sarah tried again. “You’re in the wrong house.”
But he looked at her and said firmly, “No, I’m not.”
The money. They must be here for the money. It was the only thing in the house they could have come for. And yet the cash was in the kitchen and this room was through a door, along a corridor, across a hall, upstairs. They had come here looking for her.
A little more confident now, she looked at them afresh. They weren’t getting the money. She’d deny all knowledge if they asked because she’d called the police now, and they would come and take the boys away and question them and she needed to sound innocent.
“Look,” she said, trying to sound reasonable, “you should go. I called the police a minute ago, they’ll be on their way. You could get in a lot of trouble being here.”
The angry boy held her eye as he slid his foot into the room, his toe touching the edge of the yellow Persian carpet, invading the sacred neutral space between them. He saw her bristle with alarm, she saw a spark of empathy on his face before it hardened and he jutted his jaw defiantly. He moved his foot forward again, half an inch, until it lipped over the fringed edge, telling her that he could come over to her, that he would come over.
Irritation shocked her awake and she took charge. “I know what you’re here for,” she said, stepping towards him, waving a hand towards the stairs. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with, you’ve made a mistake—”
“STOP.” The angry boy bared his teeth. “Get fucking back.” He took a firm step towards her, smiling now. His teeth seemed unnaturally dry and that scared her.
Sarah stepped backward to the bed. She could see the corner of the phone peeking out of the duvet. She flexed her fingers, a quickdraw gunfighter rehearsing.
His eyes slipped from her face, snaking across her T, down to her thighs, and he looked away, suddenly repulsed. She had no knickers on, she realized. She had been so tired when she got in that she’d pulled her coat off, dropped her shoes in the hall and tramped up the stairs, shedding her dress and knickers on the bedroom floor. The old T-shirt she slept in only came down to her thighs, barely covering her. She hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours. She was sore. Her mum had died. She deserved to sleep.
She shouted as loud as she could: “GET OUT OF HERE THIS INSTANT!”
The tall friend flinched but the angry boy didn’t even blink. His lower jaw jutted forward as if he’d like to bite her. It was the anger, the tinge of deep-rooted bitterness that she recognized and she suddenly knew his face.
“Who are you?” she said. “I know you.”
The tall boy was thrown by that, afraid, and looked at his angry friend.
“I definitely know you.” She wasn’t sure though: it was a grainy memory, as if he had been on television or in a newspaper. “I’ve seen a photo of you.”
The angry boy’s face pinked in blotches and he spluttered when he spoke. “Photo? You saw a photo?”
She shrugged awkwardly and saw that he was clenching his fists.
He raised one and punched himself hard on his heart. “… showed you a fucking photo of me?”
His voice was cracking on the upper register. The friend jerked his hand across, pulled the fist free from the chest and yanked him backwards. “Stop. Stop, man. Breathe, take a breath.”
Sarah stole a glance at the iPhone, looking for a glow of hope but saw nothing.
The angry boy sputtered still: “Fucking handbag! Fucking get her phone!” He was changing color, paling, looking at the floor by her feet. His friend followed his eye and let go of him, stepping long-legged, colonizing the precious distance in two careless steps. He dropped to a crouch by her feet, shoving a rude hand into her favorite handbag. He was less than a foot from her thigh and Sarah uncrossed her legs, baring herself at him, shocking him into a freeze.
But the angry boy was unmoved by the sight of her. “Squeak, fucking move.”
The crouching boy tore his gaze away, pulled his hand out of the handbag. He was holding a cell phone. It was a brick, the sort of phone a pensioner would have. Red plastic with big buttons, small screen with a picture of a palm tree on it. It did look puzzling up close because the screen didn’t light up—it was a phony phone. Dismayed, Sarah realized that she had forgotten about it. She always forgot about it and she should have used it.
The boy held the phone up over his head to show his friend by the door. The angry boy’s face twitched. “What else is there?”
The crouching boy shoved the brick phone into his pocket and reached into her handbag again. He seemed pleased to find her purse. He stood up, held it up triumphantly.
Sarah almost laughed with relief. “You want money?”
But they were focused on the purse, the tall finder stepping back to his friend, still holding the purse high. They were little more than muggers, stupid kids wearing inside-out clothes and she realized that they were hiding a school logo.
She watched the angry boy yank at the zip on her purse. She knew that nose, the short splay, the wide, round nostrils. She knew it very well. She guessed:
“I know your dad—”
She was right: he hesitated in tugging the zip open so she said it louder, “I know your dad.”
The tall thin boy looked from her to the angry boy, panicked, and she raised her voice: “You’d better get out of here. What do you think he’s going to say when I tell him you’ve broken in?”
A dad. That could be anyone. A sniveling dad, powerful or a pathetic drunk. Maybe Lars had decided he didn’t trust her and wanted it back. Lars. It was Lars’s nose.
“Lars!” she blurted. The angry boy looked hurt.
For a moment she expected him to drop the purse, give it back, apologize, back out. For a moment her blood slowed and she caught her breath. Bitter Lars, hurt, thrashing Lars who despised her but needed her and had never needed anyone. Lars wouldn’t flinch from killing her if it suited him. But it didn’t suit him. Lars hadn’t sent these boys.
The angry boy was looking at her, that self-same deep hurt in his eyes, his lids lowering to hate. He kept looking at her as his rude fingers fumbled inside her purse, scissoring around a couple of big notes and a taxi receipt, drawing them out.
Sarah took her chance and lunged for her iPhone. As she toppled onto her side, her fingers found the cold metal, wrapping hard around it because she knew it was slippery. She held it up, stabbed at the face, it had locked itself while on the call and she tried to slide it open, missing twice:
“POLICE! HELP ME! TWO BOYS ARE IN MY HOME—”
The angry boy was next to her. He grabbed her clenched hand, pulling her upright, easily yanking the smooth phone from her fingers, but Sarah continued to shout at it: “—IN MY BEDROOM. ONE—I KNOW HIM—”
They all froze, looking at the phone, imagining themselves heard, suddenly conscious of an audience in their play. The angry boy was the first to break out of it: slowly he lifted the phone to his ear and listened.
A smirk erupted on his face. He jabbed a finger at the screen, hung up and threw it on the bed.
They stood close together, a tight clump of animosity in the rambling husk of a house.
Behind her the tall boy shuffled a foot, moving close until his breath was hitting her hair. She felt the moisture from it settle on her ear. The angry boy read the desolation on her face and she saw his eyes brim with fury at it.
Behind her shoulder the breathing was getting faster, more shallow.
Once, in a hotel in Dubai, Sarah had met a client and had dinner with him. He was a fat man. She remembered the sadness about him, desperate, distant, and though she tried to make conversation, he remained quiet throughout the meal and drank a good deal, which wouldn’t help. In the lift up to the room she rehearsed her speech: it happens to everyone sometimes, isn’t it just as nice to touch and talk, the next time they could use a pill if he wanted… On the bed, facing down into a pillow as instructed, she heard that same breathing behind her, rapid, suddenly animal, and she turned around to glimpse a flash of metal in his hand. She’d kicked him off the bed, grabbed her clothes and run. She only got away because he was too fat to chase her.
“I’ve got money…,” she said to no one.
“Money?” said the angry boy quietly. “You think this is about money?”
“Then what is it about?” she shouted as loud as she could, hoping it would make them back off. “What the hell are you doing here? This is my fucking house.”
But neither backed away. The angry boy’s eyes met hers.
She was crying now, her hands out in entreaty. “Have I done something to you? I’ll tell, you know, I will.”
He broke eye contact, looked around the room, unconcerned.
Sarah understood abruptly: he wasn’t afraid that she would remember his face because he had come here to kill her. She would never get to leave this house. She would never get out of here.
She couldn’t die here, in a cold, run-down house she had been fighting to escape her whole life, with a bare backside and two insolent kids coming into the room that was once her nursery.
Through a shimmer of tears she saw the space between them, the open door beyond.
Sarah put her head down and ran.
TWO
Kay sat by the window, looking down at the bowl, smiling at it. It was worth a lot, she was sure. She shouldn’t really be using it as an ashtray. If she took it on the Antiques Roadshow she would be the last one on, the high value surprise that drew a gasp from the crowd when the expert revealed the price at auction, just for insurance purposes.
She sighed and looked out over the gray city. Castlemilk was built on a hillside that afforded a view of the whole of Glasgow. In any other city that view would have been reserved for the rich, the Cathkin hillside would be scattered with big houses and fancy gardens, but not here. She never really understood that. Too far out of the town maybe.
The city looked gray from the window, street lights were starting to blink on, dirty yellow, but maybe it wasn’t the city that was gray. The kitchen window was gray, a sheen of dirt she could never wash off because it was on the outside of the glass on a window that didn’t open far enough. She often looked up to the windows as she hurried up the hill from the bus stop and saw the matte coating on the glass and wondered at windows that could never be washed. Who the fuck thought that was a good idea? On a good day it was an oversight by the planners. On a bad day they hated the would-be residents, thought them filthy and low and beneath having clean windows, begrudged them the greatest view in the whole city.
She tapped the ash from her cigarette, slow, tap-tap-tap, punctuation points in a conversation with an invisible adversary across the table. Two seats, one on either side of the table top. Five of them in the house and table space for two.
She took a deep draw of her cigarette, felt it scratch down her throat and fill her lungs, and smiled to herself, realizing that it was the one. Every day, twenty cigarettes a day, six, maybe seven, draws in each and she only ever enjoyed one of them. One draw out of a hundred and twenty every day. It was a smoking cessation exercise, to show her how little she enjoyed smoking and how pointless it was. It wasn’t working. She just enjoyed that one draw all the more for knowing how rare it was. Tap-tap-tap. She smiled at the ashtray. Tap-tap. A bit of burning red tobacco fell off and she stopped, rolled the tip into a neat little cone around the gilded silver slope.
The doors were hanging off the cupboards, the chipboard worktop swollen with water where the plastic had come off. They’d been promised a new kitchen, had been down to the housing office and picked out the worktop and doors from a choice of three, but that was months ago.
Kay heard a bedroom door open in the hall. Marie stepped over to the kitchen, looking away from Kay, as if she happened to be passing. At thirteen, Marie was so self-conscious she was almost housebound. She was wearing yet more nail varnish, blue this time, and a matching hair band. Her cheeks shone, pink circles on her chubby face.
“Have you got make-up on, pet?”
Marie was suddenly, inexplicably embarrassed. “Shut up.” And she stormed back into her bedroom.
Kay bit her lip to stop herself laughing. Marie once cried with shame because Kay said she liked Ribena in front of a boy from her class.
“Darlin’,” she shouted, “we’ve crisps.”
Marie hesitated, strode back across the hall with her head down, looking away from her mother. Feeling blindly on the worktop she found the multipack somehow, took out a packet of salt and vinegar.
“Like your nail varnish.”
Marie glared at her. “Well, then, I don’t.”
Kay sighed, “Give us a fucking break, Marie. Or my crisps back.”
Marie resisted a laugh, snorting through her nose with a bit of snotty follow-through. Shocked, she touched her wet top lip and looked at her mother accusingly. “For God’s sake.”
She left in a huff, remembering to take the crisps with her.
Kay took another draw. A bad one, sour, sore. One of the ones that made her wish she didn’t smoke.
“Where’s my trainers?” Joe was standing in the doorway, his skinny frame in silhouette. “Is that crisps?”
Without waiting for an answer he padded into the gloomy kitchen, rummaged in the multipack bag and pulled out two packets of cheese and onion.
“ONE!”
He dropped one packet on the counter. “Where’s my trainers?”
“Why don’t you look with your eyes.”
“Because it’s easier to look with my mum.” He opened the packet of crisps, took some out and shoved them into his mouth.
Joe was charming, that was his trouble; he charmed people into doing things for him all the time. Kay didn’t want to encourage it. “Fuck off, I’m having a menopause.”
“Seriously, where’s my trainers?”
She turned back to the filthy window.
“Mum?”
She slumped over the table, defeated. “Where did you take them off?”
“At the door.”
“Have you looked at the door?”
“No. Will I?”
She didn’t answer.
He turned and looked at the laundry bin that sat behind the front door. She kept it there to put in all the shit they dropped. It was clear plastic and she could see the trainers smashed into the side.
He spotted them too, grunted, and padded over to the bin.
He’d be out for hours now. He was that age where standing on a street corner was irresistible, fascinating, the company of his pals hypnotic. Kay remembered that herself. It wasn’t even that far in the past, four kids ago, but still not beyond her memory to recall the excitement of it, the pull of it. Hormones. Now she had four kids, all steps and stairs, all of them hitting their teens at the same time. They were all bouncing off the walls.
“Hey,” Joe called to her from the hall. She looked and found him sitting on the floor, pulling his trainers on, legs sprawled.
“What?”
“You look fed up sitting there in the dark.”
Blindsided by his charm yet again, she brightened. “I’m all right, son. Just chilling.”
“Sure? I’ll bring you in a bag of chips if ye like.”
“Nah, I’m all right.”
She watched him pull his jacket out of the laundry bin. He slipped it on in one of his improbable moments of grace, and opened the front door, stepping out to the yellow gloom on the landing, leaving a puff of cold drafting through the hall.
She liked Joe best. It was wrong to have favorites but she did. They were all teenagers but he was the only one who noticed she had feelings. He tried to cheer her up sometimes.
Kay took another draw. It was getting dark outside the windows but she couldn’t be bothered getting up to put the light on, so she sat in the gathering gloom, enjoying the quiet pause before starting the tea and the next round of chores. Down on the street she heard the noise of boys shouting and running, the leather slap of a football. She imagined an audience of girls clustered to the side of the concrete. Out beyond that she saw the city, the barrier of tall flats in the Gorbals, the bright city center and the jagged tower of the university.
The light from the hall caught the side of the ashtray, the red enamel petals glinting, catching the snake of coiled silver wire that master craftsman’s hands had formed in Moscow. She sighed, savoring the colors. Gustav Klingert—she’d checked the hallmark on the internet; 1880-ish.
Kay sat back to see it better. It was a small bowl, tucked in tight around the rim. The inside was gilded silver, slightly worn so that the watery sheen of the cold silver showed through the warm glow of gold. On the outside the enamel background was yellow, with red flowers and white and blue leaves picked out in wire. A small line of blue dots articulated the rim and base.
She reached forward and touched it with her fingertip, feeling the rims of the twisted wire around the little pools of luminous enamel. It was the red that caught her the most. The red enamel was clear, transparent, like the inside of a fruit jelly. She didn’t even know how to say the name of the style, Ros-tov fin-ift. She liked that it was unpronounceable. It made it feel as if it came from another universe, like Obi-Wan Kenobi.
It was not for the likes of her at all. But the patterns of Russian enameling came from peasant embroidery. Poor women had designed those patterns and the color schemes, they sewed them onto their own tablecloths and the hems of their clothes, working hard in cold, dark houses, pricking their fingers. They were poor women with a deep aching need for beauty to keep them moving through the dark, make them feel alive.
And then, hundreds of years later, jewelers took their designs and made them into expensive things like this bowl, clasps for belts, tea caddies when tea was a luxury, items so expensive the sewing women could never afford them. She was one of those women, those sewing women, sitting in the gloom, and the intricate patterns spoke to her of the beauty to be made from nothing, of the importance of seeing the beauty in things and appreciating it, even through a dirty window.
Kay knew that of all the people who had owned or used or seen this bowl in the last one hundred and thirty years, none of them had loved it as much as she had, stroked it in the long dark nights when she couldn’t sleep, tracing the little coils of silver wire snaking through the pools of brilliant color.
THREE
In the freezing early morning rain Alex Morrow stood by a raw grave, holding the tasseled end of a golden rope.
The fiction of it bothered her. They weren’t lowering him eight feet down with these curtain ties, the real work was being done by the motorized straps under the coffin. But the funeral director had ordered them in hushed tones to take an end of rope each: herself and Danny, a grizzled man who was her dad’s cellmate for years, two cousins, a childhood friend, and one of the funeral directors. They stood around the hole they were putting her father into and went through the charade, while the other funeral guy operated the machine that actually lowered the box into the ground.
When the box reached the bosom of the earth they all looked up for guidance. The funeral director at the graveside dropped his rope into the hole sadly, waiting as th
Winner of the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award
“Denise Mina is a fantastically talented writer, and The End of the Wasp Season is a thoroughly deserving winner and a great example of tartan noir.… A hugely atmospheric and haunting book.”
—Simon Theakston
“There’s no going wrong with a Mina mystery. Her Glasgow-based books are full of great, conflicted women characters, pitch-perfect dialogue, and serious thoughts about the past’s habit of strangling the present.… It’s Mina’s most diverting book in years.”
—Jeff Giles, Entertainment Weekly
“Like her fellow Scot, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mina relishes combining elements of the uncanny with crisp insights into the various diseases of the human psyche. The End of the Wasp Season is a tale that lingers long after you might wish it could be exorcised.”
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR.org
“Realistically gritty.… Contains the sort of insightful observation that makes Mina’s novels so extraordinarily rich and unpredictable.… There’s greater satisfaction in watching Mina transform this seemingly simple cleaning woman into a complex character, possessed of great depths of feeling.… We know from the start (as the police do not) that fifteen-year-old Thomas is a killer. But Mina observes the boy with such tenderness as he looks for some sign of affection from his criminally neglectful parents that it becomes clear he’s just one more victim of the pitiless world he grew up in.”
—Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review
“This superb story of family, class, love, and redemption is wrapped—or slowly unwrapped—around a complex, intriguing plot.… Mina is at her darkly brilliant best, casting shadows among the few rays of hope.”
—Michele Ross, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A gritty thriller.”
—Parade
“Mina excels at describing the minutiae of police work, inexorably leading to the solution of the crime, as well as the convoluted but exceptionally believable interpersonal dealings of the cops and criminals alike. Read one Mina novel and you’ll be back for more.”
—Bruce Tierney, BookPage
“A stellar follow-up to Still Midnight.… The gulf between social classes and the disintegration of families both inform this memorable police procedural.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A fascinating psychological study that leaves the reader guessing until almost the last page. Mina’s latest is a collection of brilliant character studies, all packaged up nicely in a first-class murder mystery. I can’t wait for more.”
—Tracy Sherlock, Vancouver Sun
“Alex Morrow has to be one of the most authentic [pregnant detectives in popular culture]. Mina’s crime novels always carry literary weight. This one has heft in abundance.… Mina’s plot is masterfully suspenseful, layered with the stories of two other mothers and their children, each connected to the crime.”
—Carole E. Barrowman, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“A tense thriller where spot-on characterization and insight are far more important than blood and gore. Mina is absolutely at the top of her game and this is about as good as crime fiction gets.”
—Mark Billingham, author of Bloodline
“This is more a literary novel than a thriller.… The suspense is in watching Morrow get there, and in the unfolding, expanding aspects of the characters, particularly Kay. The writing is sharp, witty, concise, and colorful. Mina’s Glasgow is an edgy, hard place. But while the novel is often grim, it is not bleak. Like all of Mina’s novels, this one is absorbing and compelling.”
—Lynn Harnett, Seacoast Online
“A tough yet graceful writer, Ms. Mina specializes in female protagonists such as Detective Inspector Alex Morrow, who doesn’t allow the complications of being pregnant with twins get in the way of solving crime.… The End of the Wasp Season is less of a thriller than a psychological crime novel that focuses on the pain of children driven far beyond their capacity to deal with the neurotic adults who control their lives.… You won’t stop reading it.”
—Muriel Dobbin, Washington Times
ONE
The silence startled Sarah from a hundred-fathom sleep. She opened her eyes to the red blink of the digital alarm clock: 16:32.
The yips of small dogs came from one of the gardens downhill, insistent, ricocheting off the ceiling and around the curved room.
Quiet. The radio was off. Sarah routinely left the radio on in the kitchen when she was here, tuned to Radio 4. The conversational coo took the edge off the emptiness. Heard from another room it gave the impression that the house was full of charming, chatty people from Hampshire. Burglars might find that strange in Glasgow but it was plausible in the exclusive village of Thorntonhall. Sarah left strategic lights on too: hall, stairs, anywhere that couldn’t be seen into. She had a talent for making things seem.
Quiet. This was not the burgling hour. The house was at the top of the hill, visible in daylight, especially at this time when neighbors were out in their grounds, critiquing the gardeners’ work or goading fat pedigree dogs around. A thief would have to be very confident or very stupid to break in now.
Exhausted and desperate to sleep, she considered an innocent explanation: either a fuse in the kitchen had blown or the old radio had finally stopped working. Everything in the house was old and needed fixed.
So she decided that the radio had died, smiled and shut her eyes, curling up under the crisp duvet, almost glad to have woken up for the delicious tumble back to sleep.
Her mind slid softly into the dark warm.
A sudden crack of floorboard at the bottom of the stairs. Her eyes snapped open.
She raised her head from the pillow, the better to hear.
A shoe scuffing over carpet, amplified by the stairwell and a hissed two-word instruction. A high voice. A woman’s voice. “Go on.”
Sleep-befuddled, Sarah sat up, imagining her mother on her stairlift, her whirring, inexorable rise to the landing. Her mother, pinch-mouthed and imperious. Her mother wanting answers: why did they fix on that care plan? Why was Sarah never there to bathe her? Why didn’t Cardinal Geoffrey conduct her funeral service?
Nonsense.
She threw the duvet off and swung her feet to the floor, attempted to stand up but her drowsy knees failed her and she toppled back, landing awkwardly on the bed with an undignified bounce.
Exasperated with herself, she realized that she was vulnerable because she was at home. Sarah had been in strange places, scary places and managed to stay alert and calm. She always mapped the fire exits on the way in, arrived in charge and stayed in charge, but here she was defenseless.
But this was different to those stranger rooms because here she was a normal householder. She could call the police, ask them to come and help her.
Relieved, she flopped forwards over her knees, reached into her handbag at the side of the bed. Her nervous fingers fumbled past tissues and receipts and passport to the cold metal back of her iPhone. She pressed the button as she pulled it out and was delighted to see the face light up. She had turned it on as she stood in the aisle of first class, waiting to get off at Glasgow Airport. She didn’t always. Sometimes she left it off for twenty-four hours until she’d had a sleep. Now, using both hands to concentrate on the screen, she unlocked it, selected phone, selected keyboard, jabbed 999 and pressed call just in time to hear movement outside her bedroom door.
It was more of a sensation than a sound, air shifting on the landing. A body brushed the wall by the door, low down, as startling as cold fingers to the small of a bare back.
She shoved the iPhone into a little cave in the duvet and stood up.
The door moaned softly as it fell open.
It was not the ghost of her mother but two teenage boys, gawky, awkward. They wore baggy black jogging trousers and matching T-shirts, inside out, the seams showing all the way down the legs, along the arms. They wore the same black trainers too. The strange uniform made them look like the members of a cult.
Tentative at first, shuffling, they occupied the doorway. Not desperate but confident, boys on a dare.
She almost laughed with relief. “What are you doing in here?”
One of them was tall, shaven-headed. He couldn’t look at her and squirmed slightly at the sound of her voice, stood sideways in the door, his shoulder out on the landing as if he’d like to leave.
“Look,” she said, “get out of my house. It isn’t empty, this house…”
The other boy had longer hair, black and thick, but he wasn’t tentative. He was angry, standing square to the door frame, looking straight at her, taking in her face.
Sarah knew she wasn’t very pretty but she made the best of herself, was slim, had a good haircut. In a kind light she could be thought attractive. This boy wasn’t finding her so. He was disgusted by her.
The taller one elbowed his friend. The angry boy didn’t break eye contact with her but answered him with the jut of a chin, ordering him into the room. The tall friend flinched, giving a half shake of his head. They continued their conversation in micro-gestures, the angry boy holding her eye, hating her.
“My mother died,” she said, voice fading as it dawned on her that they weren’t surprised to find her here. “I still live—”
“Where’s your kids?” asked the angry boy.
“Kids?”
“You’ve got kids.” He seemed very certain.
“No…,” she said, “I haven’t got kids.”
“Yes, you fucking have.” He glanced around the room as if her children might be hidden under the edge of the duvet, in the armoire, under the bed.
His voice was high, the voice from the stairs, but the accent was what she noticed: not Glaswegian, not west coast at all. It wasn’t even the tempered, indeterminate Scottish of the local kids. He sounded east coast but English: Edinburgh and London maybe. They’d come here, not stumbled across the house, but had traveled here. She suddenly had no idea what this was.
Sarah tried again. “You’re in the wrong house.”
But he looked at her and said firmly, “No, I’m not.”
The money. They must be here for the money. It was the only thing in the house they could have come for. And yet the cash was in the kitchen and this room was through a door, along a corridor, across a hall, upstairs. They had come here looking for her.
A little more confident now, she looked at them afresh. They weren’t getting the money. She’d deny all knowledge if they asked because she’d called the police now, and they would come and take the boys away and question them and she needed to sound innocent.
“Look,” she said, trying to sound reasonable, “you should go. I called the police a minute ago, they’ll be on their way. You could get in a lot of trouble being here.”
The angry boy held her eye as he slid his foot into the room, his toe touching the edge of the yellow Persian carpet, invading the sacred neutral space between them. He saw her bristle with alarm, she saw a spark of empathy on his face before it hardened and he jutted his jaw defiantly. He moved his foot forward again, half an inch, until it lipped over the fringed edge, telling her that he could come over to her, that he would come over.
Irritation shocked her awake and she took charge. “I know what you’re here for,” she said, stepping towards him, waving a hand towards the stairs. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with, you’ve made a mistake—”
“STOP.” The angry boy bared his teeth. “Get fucking back.” He took a firm step towards her, smiling now. His teeth seemed unnaturally dry and that scared her.
Sarah stepped backward to the bed. She could see the corner of the phone peeking out of the duvet. She flexed her fingers, a quickdraw gunfighter rehearsing.
His eyes slipped from her face, snaking across her T, down to her thighs, and he looked away, suddenly repulsed. She had no knickers on, she realized. She had been so tired when she got in that she’d pulled her coat off, dropped her shoes in the hall and tramped up the stairs, shedding her dress and knickers on the bedroom floor. The old T-shirt she slept in only came down to her thighs, barely covering her. She hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours. She was sore. Her mum had died. She deserved to sleep.
She shouted as loud as she could: “GET OUT OF HERE THIS INSTANT!”
The tall friend flinched but the angry boy didn’t even blink. His lower jaw jutted forward as if he’d like to bite her. It was the anger, the tinge of deep-rooted bitterness that she recognized and she suddenly knew his face.
“Who are you?” she said. “I know you.”
The tall boy was thrown by that, afraid, and looked at his angry friend.
“I definitely know you.” She wasn’t sure though: it was a grainy memory, as if he had been on television or in a newspaper. “I’ve seen a photo of you.”
The angry boy’s face pinked in blotches and he spluttered when he spoke. “Photo? You saw a photo?”
She shrugged awkwardly and saw that he was clenching his fists.
He raised one and punched himself hard on his heart. “… showed you a fucking photo of me?”
His voice was cracking on the upper register. The friend jerked his hand across, pulled the fist free from the chest and yanked him backwards. “Stop. Stop, man. Breathe, take a breath.”
Sarah stole a glance at the iPhone, looking for a glow of hope but saw nothing.
The angry boy sputtered still: “Fucking handbag! Fucking get her phone!” He was changing color, paling, looking at the floor by her feet. His friend followed his eye and let go of him, stepping long-legged, colonizing the precious distance in two careless steps. He dropped to a crouch by her feet, shoving a rude hand into her favorite handbag. He was less than a foot from her thigh and Sarah uncrossed her legs, baring herself at him, shocking him into a freeze.
But the angry boy was unmoved by the sight of her. “Squeak, fucking move.”
The crouching boy tore his gaze away, pulled his hand out of the handbag. He was holding a cell phone. It was a brick, the sort of phone a pensioner would have. Red plastic with big buttons, small screen with a picture of a palm tree on it. It did look puzzling up close because the screen didn’t light up—it was a phony phone. Dismayed, Sarah realized that she had forgotten about it. She always forgot about it and she should have used it.
The boy held the phone up over his head to show his friend by the door. The angry boy’s face twitched. “What else is there?”
The crouching boy shoved the brick phone into his pocket and reached into her handbag again. He seemed pleased to find her purse. He stood up, held it up triumphantly.
Sarah almost laughed with relief. “You want money?”
But they were focused on the purse, the tall finder stepping back to his friend, still holding the purse high. They were little more than muggers, stupid kids wearing inside-out clothes and she realized that they were hiding a school logo.
She watched the angry boy yank at the zip on her purse. She knew that nose, the short splay, the wide, round nostrils. She knew it very well. She guessed:
“I know your dad—”
She was right: he hesitated in tugging the zip open so she said it louder, “I know your dad.”
The tall thin boy looked from her to the angry boy, panicked, and she raised her voice: “You’d better get out of here. What do you think he’s going to say when I tell him you’ve broken in?”
A dad. That could be anyone. A sniveling dad, powerful or a pathetic drunk. Maybe Lars had decided he didn’t trust her and wanted it back. Lars. It was Lars’s nose.
“Lars!” she blurted. The angry boy looked hurt.
For a moment she expected him to drop the purse, give it back, apologize, back out. For a moment her blood slowed and she caught her breath. Bitter Lars, hurt, thrashing Lars who despised her but needed her and had never needed anyone. Lars wouldn’t flinch from killing her if it suited him. But it didn’t suit him. Lars hadn’t sent these boys.
The angry boy was looking at her, that self-same deep hurt in his eyes, his lids lowering to hate. He kept looking at her as his rude fingers fumbled inside her purse, scissoring around a couple of big notes and a taxi receipt, drawing them out.
Sarah took her chance and lunged for her iPhone. As she toppled onto her side, her fingers found the cold metal, wrapping hard around it because she knew it was slippery. She held it up, stabbed at the face, it had locked itself while on the call and she tried to slide it open, missing twice:
“POLICE! HELP ME! TWO BOYS ARE IN MY HOME—”
The angry boy was next to her. He grabbed her clenched hand, pulling her upright, easily yanking the smooth phone from her fingers, but Sarah continued to shout at it: “—IN MY BEDROOM. ONE—I KNOW HIM—”
They all froze, looking at the phone, imagining themselves heard, suddenly conscious of an audience in their play. The angry boy was the first to break out of it: slowly he lifted the phone to his ear and listened.
A smirk erupted on his face. He jabbed a finger at the screen, hung up and threw it on the bed.
They stood close together, a tight clump of animosity in the rambling husk of a house.
Behind her the tall boy shuffled a foot, moving close until his breath was hitting her hair. She felt the moisture from it settle on her ear. The angry boy read the desolation on her face and she saw his eyes brim with fury at it.
Behind her shoulder the breathing was getting faster, more shallow.
Once, in a hotel in Dubai, Sarah had met a client and had dinner with him. He was a fat man. She remembered the sadness about him, desperate, distant, and though she tried to make conversation, he remained quiet throughout the meal and drank a good deal, which wouldn’t help. In the lift up to the room she rehearsed her speech: it happens to everyone sometimes, isn’t it just as nice to touch and talk, the next time they could use a pill if he wanted… On the bed, facing down into a pillow as instructed, she heard that same breathing behind her, rapid, suddenly animal, and she turned around to glimpse a flash of metal in his hand. She’d kicked him off the bed, grabbed her clothes and run. She only got away because he was too fat to chase her.
“I’ve got money…,” she said to no one.
“Money?” said the angry boy quietly. “You think this is about money?”
“Then what is it about?” she shouted as loud as she could, hoping it would make them back off. “What the hell are you doing here? This is my fucking house.”
But neither backed away. The angry boy’s eyes met hers.
She was crying now, her hands out in entreaty. “Have I done something to you? I’ll tell, you know, I will.”
He broke eye contact, looked around the room, unconcerned.
Sarah understood abruptly: he wasn’t afraid that she would remember his face because he had come here to kill her. She would never get to leave this house. She would never get out of here.
She couldn’t die here, in a cold, run-down house she had been fighting to escape her whole life, with a bare backside and two insolent kids coming into the room that was once her nursery.
Through a shimmer of tears she saw the space between them, the open door beyond.
Sarah put her head down and ran.
TWO
Kay sat by the window, looking down at the bowl, smiling at it. It was worth a lot, she was sure. She shouldn’t really be using it as an ashtray. If she took it on the Antiques Roadshow she would be the last one on, the high value surprise that drew a gasp from the crowd when the expert revealed the price at auction, just for insurance purposes.
She sighed and looked out over the gray city. Castlemilk was built on a hillside that afforded a view of the whole of Glasgow. In any other city that view would have been reserved for the rich, the Cathkin hillside would be scattered with big houses and fancy gardens, but not here. She never really understood that. Too far out of the town maybe.
The city looked gray from the window, street lights were starting to blink on, dirty yellow, but maybe it wasn’t the city that was gray. The kitchen window was gray, a sheen of dirt she could never wash off because it was on the outside of the glass on a window that didn’t open far enough. She often looked up to the windows as she hurried up the hill from the bus stop and saw the matte coating on the glass and wondered at windows that could never be washed. Who the fuck thought that was a good idea? On a good day it was an oversight by the planners. On a bad day they hated the would-be residents, thought them filthy and low and beneath having clean windows, begrudged them the greatest view in the whole city.
She tapped the ash from her cigarette, slow, tap-tap-tap, punctuation points in a conversation with an invisible adversary across the table. Two seats, one on either side of the table top. Five of them in the house and table space for two.
She took a deep draw of her cigarette, felt it scratch down her throat and fill her lungs, and smiled to herself, realizing that it was the one. Every day, twenty cigarettes a day, six, maybe seven, draws in each and she only ever enjoyed one of them. One draw out of a hundred and twenty every day. It was a smoking cessation exercise, to show her how little she enjoyed smoking and how pointless it was. It wasn’t working. She just enjoyed that one draw all the more for knowing how rare it was. Tap-tap-tap. She smiled at the ashtray. Tap-tap. A bit of burning red tobacco fell off and she stopped, rolled the tip into a neat little cone around the gilded silver slope.
The doors were hanging off the cupboards, the chipboard worktop swollen with water where the plastic had come off. They’d been promised a new kitchen, had been down to the housing office and picked out the worktop and doors from a choice of three, but that was months ago.
Kay heard a bedroom door open in the hall. Marie stepped over to the kitchen, looking away from Kay, as if she happened to be passing. At thirteen, Marie was so self-conscious she was almost housebound. She was wearing yet more nail varnish, blue this time, and a matching hair band. Her cheeks shone, pink circles on her chubby face.
“Have you got make-up on, pet?”
Marie was suddenly, inexplicably embarrassed. “Shut up.” And she stormed back into her bedroom.
Kay bit her lip to stop herself laughing. Marie once cried with shame because Kay said she liked Ribena in front of a boy from her class.
“Darlin’,” she shouted, “we’ve crisps.”
Marie hesitated, strode back across the hall with her head down, looking away from her mother. Feeling blindly on the worktop she found the multipack somehow, took out a packet of salt and vinegar.
“Like your nail varnish.”
Marie glared at her. “Well, then, I don’t.”
Kay sighed, “Give us a fucking break, Marie. Or my crisps back.”
Marie resisted a laugh, snorting through her nose with a bit of snotty follow-through. Shocked, she touched her wet top lip and looked at her mother accusingly. “For God’s sake.”
She left in a huff, remembering to take the crisps with her.
Kay took another draw. A bad one, sour, sore. One of the ones that made her wish she didn’t smoke.
“Where’s my trainers?” Joe was standing in the doorway, his skinny frame in silhouette. “Is that crisps?”
Without waiting for an answer he padded into the gloomy kitchen, rummaged in the multipack bag and pulled out two packets of cheese and onion.
“ONE!”
He dropped one packet on the counter. “Where’s my trainers?”
“Why don’t you look with your eyes.”
“Because it’s easier to look with my mum.” He opened the packet of crisps, took some out and shoved them into his mouth.
Joe was charming, that was his trouble; he charmed people into doing things for him all the time. Kay didn’t want to encourage it. “Fuck off, I’m having a menopause.”
“Seriously, where’s my trainers?”
She turned back to the filthy window.
“Mum?”
She slumped over the table, defeated. “Where did you take them off?”
“At the door.”
“Have you looked at the door?”
“No. Will I?”
She didn’t answer.
He turned and looked at the laundry bin that sat behind the front door. She kept it there to put in all the shit they dropped. It was clear plastic and she could see the trainers smashed into the side.
He spotted them too, grunted, and padded over to the bin.
He’d be out for hours now. He was that age where standing on a street corner was irresistible, fascinating, the company of his pals hypnotic. Kay remembered that herself. It wasn’t even that far in the past, four kids ago, but still not beyond her memory to recall the excitement of it, the pull of it. Hormones. Now she had four kids, all steps and stairs, all of them hitting their teens at the same time. They were all bouncing off the walls.
“Hey,” Joe called to her from the hall. She looked and found him sitting on the floor, pulling his trainers on, legs sprawled.
“What?”
“You look fed up sitting there in the dark.”
Blindsided by his charm yet again, she brightened. “I’m all right, son. Just chilling.”
“Sure? I’ll bring you in a bag of chips if ye like.”
“Nah, I’m all right.”
She watched him pull his jacket out of the laundry bin. He slipped it on in one of his improbable moments of grace, and opened the front door, stepping out to the yellow gloom on the landing, leaving a puff of cold drafting through the hall.
She liked Joe best. It was wrong to have favorites but she did. They were all teenagers but he was the only one who noticed she had feelings. He tried to cheer her up sometimes.
Kay took another draw. It was getting dark outside the windows but she couldn’t be bothered getting up to put the light on, so she sat in the gathering gloom, enjoying the quiet pause before starting the tea and the next round of chores. Down on the street she heard the noise of boys shouting and running, the leather slap of a football. She imagined an audience of girls clustered to the side of the concrete. Out beyond that she saw the city, the barrier of tall flats in the Gorbals, the bright city center and the jagged tower of the university.
The light from the hall caught the side of the ashtray, the red enamel petals glinting, catching the snake of coiled silver wire that master craftsman’s hands had formed in Moscow. She sighed, savoring the colors. Gustav Klingert—she’d checked the hallmark on the internet; 1880-ish.
Kay sat back to see it better. It was a small bowl, tucked in tight around the rim. The inside was gilded silver, slightly worn so that the watery sheen of the cold silver showed through the warm glow of gold. On the outside the enamel background was yellow, with red flowers and white and blue leaves picked out in wire. A small line of blue dots articulated the rim and base.
She reached forward and touched it with her fingertip, feeling the rims of the twisted wire around the little pools of luminous enamel. It was the red that caught her the most. The red enamel was clear, transparent, like the inside of a fruit jelly. She didn’t even know how to say the name of the style, Ros-tov fin-ift. She liked that it was unpronounceable. It made it feel as if it came from another universe, like Obi-Wan Kenobi.
It was not for the likes of her at all. But the patterns of Russian enameling came from peasant embroidery. Poor women had designed those patterns and the color schemes, they sewed them onto their own tablecloths and the hems of their clothes, working hard in cold, dark houses, pricking their fingers. They were poor women with a deep aching need for beauty to keep them moving through the dark, make them feel alive.
And then, hundreds of years later, jewelers took their designs and made them into expensive things like this bowl, clasps for belts, tea caddies when tea was a luxury, items so expensive the sewing women could never afford them. She was one of those women, those sewing women, sitting in the gloom, and the intricate patterns spoke to her of the beauty to be made from nothing, of the importance of seeing the beauty in things and appreciating it, even through a dirty window.
Kay knew that of all the people who had owned or used or seen this bowl in the last one hundred and thirty years, none of them had loved it as much as she had, stroked it in the long dark nights when she couldn’t sleep, tracing the little coils of silver wire snaking through the pools of brilliant color.
THREE
In the freezing early morning rain Alex Morrow stood by a raw grave, holding the tasseled end of a golden rope.
The fiction of it bothered her. They weren’t lowering him eight feet down with these curtain ties, the real work was being done by the motorized straps under the coffin. But the funeral director had ordered them in hushed tones to take an end of rope each: herself and Danny, a grizzled man who was her dad’s cellmate for years, two cousins, a childhood friend, and one of the funeral directors. They stood around the hole they were putting her father into and went through the charade, while the other funeral guy operated the machine that actually lowered the box into the ground.
When the box reached the bosom of the earth they all looked up for guidance. The funeral director at the graveside dropped his rope into the hole sadly, waiting as th
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The End of the Wasp Season
Denise Mina
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