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

the fastening, and it had been left hanging open. Not a professional job. Not even a careful job. A housebreaker with any experience would attempt to cover the mess and make it look as if the window was shut once they were in. Outside in the overgrown garden, she could see the top of a copper’s head, checking below the window for footprints. It was one of the benefits of having coppers who weren’t seeking promotion: they were brighter than the left-behinds used to be, thought of things before they were told to.
    She took a breath and stood back against the wall, taking in the room and imagining the path of the intruders: through the window, over the metal sink and draining board, clamber down to the ground. If they knew the house they’d go straight to the hallway but the pantry door was ajar, and next to it a door sat open into a shallow utility room with the washing machine, dryer and rusting mangle. Across the room another door sat open into a deep-shelved cupboard full of tins.
    Morrow approached the pantry and stood in front of the doorway. A cold room for keeping food in before the advent of refrigeration. She could feel a bitter draft licking her ankles. The person who lived here would take care to keep that door shut. The intruder had been looking for the door out of the kitchen.
    On the worktop near the cooker an old radio had been unplugged from the wall, a flex dangling over the edge of the worktop, not sitting under the wall socket the way someone who was about to plug it back in might leave it. The radio had been on, they’d turned it off to orientate themselves.
    “Dust that plug,” she said to the SOCO.
    As if aggrieved, she turned to Gobby and demanded, “Where is it, then?”
    He grinned and pointed to the table.
    Morrow looked at it. “Under?”
    “Aye.”
    “Shit.” Morrow looked at the table, planning her route. Her body was changing so quickly every new position was an experiment.
    She asked the SOCO, “Is it all right…?” She put her hand out to the table top, asking if she could lean on it.
    “No, better just…” He held out his own hand and Morrow reluctantly took it, leaned on him heavily as she got down first onto one knee and then onto the other. She couldn’t bend to the side without her ribs digging into the babies: she had to go down on all fours and peer up like a dog asking for a biscuit.
    She didn’t think it could get more humiliating but then Harris came back into the kitchen—she could see his feet behind her.
    At first the beam of light from her torch caught a slab of roughly cut plywood. It was sitting on the two struts of the table legs, balanced there, looking like a shoddy repair job. But she saw something on top of it, sandwiched between the top of the table and the rough wooden plank, pink as a flesh wound.
    “Let’s get that out.”
    She shuffled back up onto her feet as Gobby and Harris stepped forward and bent down, taking an end of the plank each, sliding it out so that Harris could hold one end until Gobby came around and helped him. It was heavy and they worked hard not to tip it or move the money around.
    They sat it on a worktop OK’d by the SOCO and looked at it. Morrow smiled: purple and purple and purple, like a patchwork quilt, the blocks of notes next to each other echoing the pattern over and over.
    The money had been laid out carefully in the middle of the plank. Sarah must have set it out before sliding it under there but Morrow could see that the bundles around the edge were messy, as if Sarah had developed the habit of kneeling down and shoving the bundles in as she got them, fitting them in blind.
    A great purple delicious flurry of money. Morrow realized that her mouth was hanging open, she was salivating. The currency being unfamiliar made it seem infinite, how money looks to a child, and the notes were large, almost the size of a paperback book.
    “You,” she barked at no one in particular, “who’s keeping the book on