Read AM02 - The End of the Wasp Season for Free Online

admitted to being ambitious nowadays.
    “Good. When you get promoted over their heads they’ll say it’s because you’re female. You’re smart, that’s against you, so’s being a bird and being English and—well, yeah.”
    The driver pretended not to understand the unspoken but her mouth twisted in a thwarted smile as she pulled on the handbrake. They sat together and watched Harris walk over to the car. His skin was as Scottish as it was possible to be without actually being tartan: white on the brink of blue. He had small eyes, black hair and a ridiculously small mouth that barely met the width of his nostrils.
    “Look,” muttered Morrow, as Harris walked over to the car, “I won’t tell anyone you said that, about being ambitious.”
    “Thanks, boss,” she said quickly.
    “You’re smart though, so you know, keep close and, um…” Morrow was suddenly aware of how short her time was, how soon she would be irrelevant. She wanted to be helpful but had nothing concrete to offer. “I’ll take your ideas and pass them off as my own.”
    She meant it as a stupid joke but the driver thanked her again, their voices overlapping.
    They opened the doors and stepped out at the same time. Morrow was relieved Harris was there so they couldn’t speak to each other anymore.
    “Aye,” Harris frowned at the driver, “you—on the door-to-doors. Specifically: saw anything? Knew the residents here? And whether they’ve been up recently. We need to know whether anything was stolen. Wilder’ll take you.”
    The driver nodded and walked over to DC Wilder lingering by the cars.
    “Who is that?” Morrow asked when the woman was out of earshot.
    Harris looked. “DC Tamsin Leonard.”
    “She smart?”
    Harris grunted noncommittally. Morrow could have slapped him. Since the last round of pay increases DCs were getting a better wage and overtime for every extra minute over their shift. It was a disastrous decision. The men were making more than the DSs and didn’t need to stay on for days at a time until a case was resolved. Now, fingering someone for a promotion would be a betrayal and the smart ones were hiding among the donkeys. But the disenchantment went deeper than that. Bannerman’s rudeness had made it a point of pride among the men to hide their lights, as if being good at their job was helping Bannerman be a prick. The belligerence was bedding in. Morrow felt that she was watching it harden from a habit into the culture of their team.
    She looked up at the roof of the Georgian house, pretending to check the property over, glad of the excuse to arch her back. “Been in?” she asked.
    Harris nodded uncomfortably at the ground. “Hmm…”
    “What?” she said. “Mess?”
    “Bad mess,” he said quietly.
    “Since when?”
    “Last twenty-four hours. Probably yesterday evening.”
    Morrow looked up. The roof tiles were clustered, sitting not quite true. Lumps of dead leaves peeked out over the gutters around the roof. Standing in full view at the side of the house, a septic tank slumped on rusting stilts. On the far corner, above a window, a tiny yellow hexagon housed the alarm, but the plastic was sun faded and the blue lettering no longer legible.
    “This is one of those worth-a-fortune/cost-a-fortune houses, isn’t it?”
    Harris nodded at his notes. “How was your funeral?”
    “It wasn’t mine .”
    “No, I know—”
    “It was my auntie’s.”
    She’d had to lie. She’d already said her father died because she couldn’t bring herself to admit that her son had. Not for a long time. Eventually, she admitted that Gerald dying was the cause of her depression, but she’d still pretended her dad died around the same time. They made her sit for session after pointless session with a counselor in the welfare unit. She did her time, knowing nothing would help and all her bosses would ever see was the time sheet. Her father’s death was one lie she wasn’t prepared to admit to. It freed her, broke