Free AM02 - The End of the Wasp Season by Denise Mina Page A

ask.”
    Morrow shook her head and looked closer.
    Both sets of soles had the same pattern on them: three circles on the pressure points and straight stripes leading towards them. “Can we trace those soles?”
    Harris didn’t seem convinced. “We can ask in shoe shops.”
    “Let’s see the cash.”
    He led her past the body, turning away from the main hall, taking her through a small door and down a step to the kitchen. A cast-iron cooking range sat in a chimney breast. The room was cold because the walls and roof were solid concrete and the back window long and wide, looking out onto a tangle of naked bushes.
    A white-suited scene-of-crime officer was shuffling around, picking fibers off the window sill and the sink and bagging them up. Gobby was parked in a corner, staying out of the way. He greeted her with a silent nod, keeping his eyes steady on the table.
    “Right, Gobby?”
    He didn’t say anything. Gobby didn’t talk much.
    Morrow looked around the kitchen.
    It was a large room, bigger than they would build now but not at all grand. Tired red linoleum covered the floor, rips carefully mended with silver electrical tape. The units were workaday as well: a solid pine dresser, painted white but badly chipped, one of the glass panels mended with the same silver electrical tape: another job for another day. An old-fashioned fridge gave off a hard, high whir. The cooker was unimposing and electric, immaculate but the glass cover slightly dusty. No one cooked in here. The center of the room was occupied by an old teak kitchen table, cup-stained and knife-sliced, a seam across the middle where it could be extended. A smattering of chairs were pushed up tight against it except at the sink side where they had been pulled out.
    Harris gave a dry cough behind her. She turned to see him nodding a gentle warning at a corner of the room.
    She hadn’t seen him there, the man sitting in an armchair by the range, hugging his briefcase and facing into a corner. He was young, in his thirties, but dressed old in a dark pinstripe with a mustard waistcoat and red tie. His body was formless, flattered by the clothes but still portly, and his face was round too, his eyes wide and watchful of her.
    “Hello,” she said.
    He stood up quickly, stepped across to her and held his hand out, leaning hard towards her, as if he was hanging over a cliff and wanted her to pull him up. “Donald Scott.”
    She took his hand and shook it. “DS Alex Morrow. You’ve had a shock.”
    He panted a yes, glancing to the hall, to the table, back to her, pumping her hand, holding tight.
    “You knew the victim?”
    “Yes, yes. Yes.” He considered the question and added, “Yes?”
    “You were her solicitor?”
    “Mmm.” He looked wildly around the kitchen, panting, building up to an outburst of emotion that they didn’t need. Morrow took charge. “OK, we’re going to take you to the station and speak to you there. When you get there I want you to have some biscuits, something with sugar in it, for the shock. Understand?” She wasn’t sure sugar did help with shock but knew that giving people a task did, something to focus on, a small thing to achieve. “Understand?”
    “Yes.” But he was staring over her shoulder to the doorway, afraid they were going to make him go out that way, pass the body again.
    “Out the back,” she told Harris.
    Harris led the man out by the elbow, careful that he didn’t stagger on top of anything important, pulling the back door shut behind him.
    Everyone in the kitchen relaxed, coming out of character. The raw horror of an outsider shamed them into reverence. It was uncomfortable, it reminded them how scarred they all were. Morrow rolled her head back to relieve the tension in her neck. Her shoulders had been creeping up to her ears since she turned the corner and saw the mess at the foot of the stairs.
    She looked around. A window above the sink had been jimmied open crudely, bending the metal outwards at