AM02 - The End of the Wasp Season Read Online Free PDF Page B

estate house,” said the driver, quietly nodding uphill.
    “The estate?” Morrow sat forward.
    The driver seemed embarrassed suddenly and Morrow had to strain to hear her. “Well, this one, the house we’re going to, it’s the oldest house on the highest position. See how the older houses are further away? All the land would have belonged to this house once. They’ve been selling it off in bits, furthest away, then closer, finally these giant new houses.”
    Morrow looked at the gloomy old mansion, saw what the driver meant. She felt a shivering thrill of realization, saw the village grow up in her mind.
    “How d’you know that?”
    But the driver was reluctant to show her cards. “Just…watch a lot of architecture shows…TV.”
    They craned forward as the car pulled up the steep incline, Morrow eager to be there and re-feel the synaptic twang. This was not the original driveway, she thought, trying to add to the driver’s conclusion, because a horse and carriage couldn’t have taken the sharp ascent. It was a new access to the property, built when the real driveway was sold off for the mansion with the chevron road. She looked at the driver for the first time. She was a new recruit but older, thirties maybe, had a just-out-of-uniform formality to her. She was pretty and dark with a fantastically Persian profile. And she was English.
    Morrow didn’t press her. At the top of the hill the tarmac gave way to gravel, the car losing pull. They came around the front of the house and saw DC Harris, looking worried, standing next to two squad cars and a big forensics van.
    The façade was pleasingly symmetrical and solid, built of gray stone, small windows and a big green front door at the top of a short flight of steps.
    “What style is that then?”
    The driver glanced up. “Georgian.”
    “How can you tell?”
    The driver frowned and looked at the house. She knew the answer, Morrow could tell, and she could see where the reluctance to admit it came from. A broad knowledge of architectural forms wasn’t much of a bonus in the canteen, and being a woman, older and English would already set her miles apart from the rest of them. The force was all about belonging, about them and us.
    The woman blushed a little. “Um, well, everything’s kind of square and the windows are a giveaway. See the three windows on the first floor?” Morrow looked up, saw three small windows equally spaced along the first floor with sash openings. “That’s typical, but it’s late Georgian.” She pointed to the green front door in a square porch, sitting at the top of six steps. “That’s Georgian. You get doors like that in Bath and Dublin. Did you see the oval rooms at the back?”
    “Where?”
    “The middle rooms at the back of the house come out in a semicircle. That’s Georgian. That extension there,” she pointed to a block attached at the side, built in the same stone but with long tall windows in a set of three, “that’s neoclassical. That’s later. Victorian.”
    Morrow looked at her. She was wearing a suit too expensive for someone of her rank. “Where the hell are you from?”
    “Surrey. East Molesey.”
    “What are you doing up here?”
    “My partner got a job up here and I applied. Late recruit.”
    It showed. She wasn’t intimidated by Morrow’s rank, had none of the schoolyard politics about her. “What did you do before?”
    “Had my own business, electronics.”
    Morrow grunted. They were dangerously close to making pleasant conversation. She wondered if “partner” was code for “lesbian partner” or just a common term in Surrey. She didn’t seem butch but then lesbians didn’t anymore. “They treating you OK?”
    She shrugged a shoulder and looked away, blinked. In short no, they weren’t, but she wasn’t letting it get to her and she wasn’t going to tell on them.
    Morrow was impressed. “Good for you. Ambitious?”
    She looked at Morrow, gave a sharp nod, eyes cautious behind. No one