Deception aka Sanctum

by Denise Mina

The body of his new wife, Donna McGovern, still has not been found, although her blood was identified from a sample in the couple’s white Golf Polo car. Strathclyde Police say that they would be willing to prosecute for Miss McGovern’s death if Dr. Harriot is acquitted on the present charges. A spokesman stated yesterday:

  “During the summer months the hills of Sutherland are busy with walkers and we would ask people to keep alert and watch out for anything unusual.”

  We’ve got this to look forward to all next summer. And every following summer if they don’t find Donna this time around. Every time they find the decomposed body of some poor depressed soul who has staggered off to the Highlands to die, Margie will have the whole story thrown back in her face. It’s not an uncommon occurrence either. Last year, before I was interested in such things, I remember they found the remains of a young French guy who had walked off into the hills with no ID and the labels cut out of his clothing. It was a suicide. He’d left a note in a hostel. He just wanted to melt back into the land, he said. In the same month they also found a woman from London who’d died of starvation while camping next to a loch. Apparently she was vegan and was giving airianism a go.

  The coverage in the broadsheets isn’t much better. An intellectual phony has written three pages in a review section about the significance of Gow’s dying in Cape Wrath. Just because it has the potential to be a metaphor doesn’t give it meaning. He can’t have listened to a word of the trial, because Susie didn’t choose the venue; Gow went to Cape Wrath and she followed him. He talks about Gow’s head injuries, saying maybe all psychiatrists want to bash their patients’ brains in, smash the organ that offends.

  I can’t answer the phone. Mum called from Spain and left a message asking how we got on and saying she was worried. I heard Dad clearing his throat over and over in the background, like a phlegm-powered car revving at the lights. He coughs like that to signal distress. I can’t stand it when he’s upset; it makes me feel so mortal.

  The English papers will have arrived there by now, so they’ll know anyway. It might even be on the news.

  * * *

  I can’t bring myself to speak to anyone. Instead I remind myself of the need to focus on the positive things. I must:

  1. Keep Margie away from the television so she doesn’t see pictures of me or her mother flashed up every two minutes. I don’t want her to remember this. I want it to pass her by for as long as possible because it’s going to be part of her life forever.

  2. Remember to pay bills and keep going.

  3. Get back into a routine. Routine is comfort and as close to normal as we can hope for over the next short while.

  4. Have a purpose. Before, when we discussed the possibility of a guilty verdict (Me: “Oh, my Jingo, that’ll never happen,” followed by hearty laugh. Susie grinning heavenward: “No, darling, of course not. Nothing bad ever happens to young professionals like us,” followed by brittle, tinkling laugh and a little sip of sherry), Fitzgerald asked me to look through all of Susie’s papers and see if I can find anything that might give us grounds for an appeal. We can’t appeal against the sentence because life’s mandatory for murder. We can only appeal against the conviction. We have to show that the evidence was flawed and claim a miscarriage of justice. It’s the only grounds for appeal.

  I’ve already spent forty minutes this evening in Susie’s study sorting through piles of newspaper cuttings and tapes and professional files. I’m going to come up here night after night, and go through every note and paper with microscopic care.

  chapter two

  I FORGOT. I WOKE UP THIS MORNING WITH TIRED EYES AND LINgered in my bed. I pulled the crackling duvet up to my chin, warming my neck against the crisp November air seeping through the window. I heard Yeni and Margie downstairs, la-la-singing the Happy Happy Hippo song together and the high tink of cutlery against crockery as Yeni emptied the dishwasher. I smelled bittersweet coffee brewing on the stove.

  The house yawned and stretched as the heating warmed the wooden floors; beyond the garden wall neighbors backed their cars out of garages, wheels rolling over damp leaves. Then I became conscious of the cold, dead space next to me in the bed.

  For a fleeting, cozy moment I wondered why Susie was up already. I saw her in the kitchen, sipping a mug of coffee and eating an orange. I thought, she’s been up long enough for the sheets to cool down, and then I remembered.

  I couldn’t face breakfast or a shave. I got a mug of coffee, hugged Margie for a bit, and then came straight up here.

  * * *

  I’ve found a box file with Gow’s prison files in it, the ones the hospital sacked Susie for stealing from the office. Sinky Sinclair’s suspicions were right all along. I bet he still wonders about that. Despite being a senior member of staff, she still wasn’t authorized to take them off the grounds. She was adamant that she hadn’t taken them. She lied to me. She was so insistent that she said “fuck” in front of Margie. Now I’ve found them here, five paper files and a computer disk sitting in a box file, on the right of the computer where she could reach them easily.

  There are a number of matters I want to raise when I go to visit Susie:

  1. Why has she never denied having an affair with Gow to me?

  2. Where are the insurance papers for the house?

  3. What in the name of the almighty fucking bollocks was she doing stealing these files and then lying to me about it? Does she think I’m an idiot or something? Does she think I’m going to take an infinite amount of shit from her and still stand by and save face for her? Has she no regard for my dignity? Am I some sort of pointless prick she thinks she can push around?

  I think those three months of us both knocking around the house after Susie had been sacked, before the phone call and her taking off to Cape Wrath, I think they were the happiest of my life. I knew she wasn’t happy; she was forgetful and ratty. She’d lost her wedding ring and was sure she’d left it at Sunnyfields. I bought her another one, a smaller one, which she never wore, and fooled myself into believing that she was adjusting to a new pace of life. I thought she’d get into it, slow the rhythm down. I thought, it’s okay, we’re fine for money, we can spend more time together, just the three of us. I even dared to wonder whether we might have another kid.

  It was during that time that the mist came into the front room. It was July and I’d left the front-room window open when I went to bed. When I came down in the morning, the garden mist was all through the room, a swirling fog at chest level. I walked slowly through it, and the damp cloud closed in around me. As my bare feet came down on the red kilim carpet, they smashed the settled dust of water droplets and left perfect photographic prints. I told Susie when she came down for breakfast, but the mist was gone by then, and she listened but didn’t understand. It felt like a dream sequence, and now I think maybe it was. No one around me was living in the same reality. What sort of self-centered buffoon would mistake a cataclysmic event in his wife’s life for a splendid opportunity to spend quality time together? I’m a fool, a selfish fool. I hadn’t a clue what was going on. Rome was burning and I played Dixie on the spoons.

  * * *

  This study’s a mess. Susie’s left bits of paper everywhere, all over the floor, on the desk, Blu-Tacked to the wall; there are even some on the window. I haven’t been in for a while because she’d taken to locking the door and I didn’t want to pry (another clue I completely missed/rewrote/dressed up as a lady rabbit). There’s a photograph stuck to the glass on the skylight, a picture of Gow and Donna’s wedding, with Blu-Tack smeared angrily over Donna’s face. The light shines through it so it’s a translucent picture of Andrew Gow standing with a headless woman. It’s creepy. I’ll take it down.

  These prison files trouble me intensely. I want to talk to Harvey Tucker, Susie’s colleague from Sunnyfields, to ask him if what he said in court was right, if Susie had been seeing more of Gow than could be justified professionally. I got the feeling he didn’t mean to insinuate that. During
his evidence I looked up at him and he seemed uncomfortable, as if he’d been railroaded into saying things. I’ve got this in my notes:

  PROSECUTION: How would Mr. Gow come to be spending time in Dr. Harriot’s office?

  HARVEY TUCKER: I’m sorry, I don’t understand.

  P: How would any prisoner come to be in the office of a psychiatrist? Can they just walk in and demand to be seen?

  HT: No, of course not. They’d first of all have to approach an officer and ask to see someone. Then the officer would refer them on to the psychiatrist.

  P: [looking incredulously at the jury] Is that the ONLY way? [He raised a hand in a rainbow gesture as he said it. He really was the most awful ham.]

  HT: No, well, we could ask to see them as well.

  P: A psychiatrist can call a prisoner to their office?

  HT: Yes [faltering] within reasonable hours… some prisoners-

  P: [cutting him off] We have submitted into evidence Dr. Harriot’s appointment book for the two months immediately prior to her dismissal. Is four hours in the space of three days a usual amount of time to spend with a prisoner?

  HT: That’s hard to say [looking very shifty].

  P: In this sort of case, where the initial paperwork is done, the risk assessment is done, no one has asked for a new report: would it be usual in such circumstances?

  HT: I don’t think it’s poss-

  P: JUST a yes or no will suffice, Dr. Tucker.

  HT: No.

  P: Not a usual amount of time?

  HT: [quietly] Not usual, no.

  Tucker was very uncomfortable when the prosecution dismissed him, as if he had something else to say.

  Anyway, I phoned him just now but got no answer. I left a message asking him to call back, said it was important. I hope he doesn’t think I blame him or anything. I know Sinky Sinclair was responsible for Susie’s getting sacked, not him, but I don’t care about that either at the moment, I really don’t. I can see how the lawyer got Tucker to say what he did. I’m not in a blaming frame of mind, I just want to ask him about it.

  It’s obvious in hindsight that Susie was going through some huge crisis before she took off for Cape Wrath. Looking back, it’s so clear. At the time I thought she was just being huffy and withdrawn. She was so insistent that she hadn’t taken Gow’s file, even after they sacked her. That was a massive, throbbing, neon-ringed clue. Sunnyfields only has one applicant per post. It’s so hard for them to recruit for forensic psychiatry, they wouldn’t have fired her unless they had absolutely no other option.

  * * *

  Margie’s gone down for her nap, so I’ve come back up here to do a bit more tidying. This is a nice room. I never thought that before. It’s more of a converted closet than a room. It’s warm because it’s at the top of the house, and there’s a wee stereo. The skylight Susie had put in last summer frames the top of next door’s oak tree and stops the room from being suffocating. The plain white walls and the low bookcase keep it airy and fresh. And of course there’s this computer, which I’ve never been allowed to use because I’m a Luddite and might break it. All I need is the word processing to write up the papers as I sift through them for the appeal. I know how to put the machine on and off and I can save the things I’ve written. That’s all I need to do, really.

  Once you’re sitting at the desk, the narrowness of the room and the high sloping ceiling make it feel cozy. It’s only when you’re standing in the doorway, balancing on the shallow top step and looking in at someone else sitting here, asking them when they’re going to come down and spend time with you, that it seems claustrophobic.

  chapter three

  EVERYONE’S IN BED, AND I CAN’T CONCENTRATE ENOUGH TO watch TV. It’s been two full days since the verdict now, and Susie still hasn’t called. I thought she’d want to talk to Margie at least. She may be finding it hard to get through here because our phone hasn’t stopped ringing. There are constant messages from journalists offering money and sympathy. One of them said I should see ratting my wife out as “a kind of justice.” A Mirror journalist called four times today. His name is Alistair Garvie and he’s from London. He keeps saying “ London ” over and over and over, as if it’s a magical place a hick like me would never have heard of.

  Susie has my mobile number, though, so she could phone if she wanted to. I expect she’s on the induction course for convicted prisoners. They send them on a course in the first few days of their sentence, to tell them the rules and so on. Susie says it’s really to keep them busy, so they don’t get the chance to think about killing themselves, because the reality of a long sentence starts to sink in during the first few days.

  We saw an induction group walking across the grass once. The whole valley was swathed in sheets of biting cold rain, and I was in the visiting room with Susie during her brief spell on remand. The pretrial women averted their eyes from the window, as if any contact with the freshly convicted might jinx their chances. I watched them, though, only curious then, not thinking it relevant to me or us. All the women were dressed in blue jogging pants and sweatshirts and walked in a gaggle, topped and tailed by four female officers, as they made their way across to Bravo block for a talk about something. They all looked hard-faced and sad, even the officers. I remember the heavy way they walked, as if they were cosmically disappointed, let down by everything they’d ever seen or done or watched or eaten. They were a poor-looking bunch, not that the remanded women were much better, but at least they had a spark of hope and were allowed to wear their own clothes.

  It’s easier on the eye if prisoners wear their own clothes. Then you can categorize and distinguish and dismiss them from your mind quickly. Tracksuit and no bra: drug-addled loser. Stonewashed jeans and high heels: tart and/or shoplifter. Elegant gray cashmere crew neck, jeans, and soft baby-blue running shoes: wife, keeper of my tender heart, absent verb in my life sentence.

  The induction group wore a blue uniform, which is supposed to strip them of their individuality, but for me, watching through the barred windows, the uniform made them all matter, made them all potential friends and neighbors. Convicted prisoners didn’t seem real to us then. Susie was innocent and she was getting out on bail anyway. Her biggest problem at that time was getting to the bail hearing on the Big Blue Bus.

  The blue security-reinforced minibus starts its morning journey at six-thirty a.m. with a pickup of the accused women, including for a short while my dear wife, from the Vale of Leven, Her Majesty’s Prison. After traveling all over the central beltway picking up single and multiple miscreants hither and thither from any secure holding place, the BBB doubles back on itself and two and a half hours later sheds its load at the Glasgow High and Sheriff Courts. The wheels on the justice bus go round and round and round. As Susie said herself, a three-hour bus drive at six-thirty in the morning would be nightmare enough, without the added burden of ten traveling companions, many hungover or coming off drugs, who are about to meet their families and (not always the worse of the two) their doom.

  A fat woman from Falkirk tried to talk to her. Susie said she swung her big red face over to her and said all men were bad news, kept calling her “my friend.” Her new chum complained that the police had put her into a cell with a sleeping man. Evidently, they were confused as to her gender. Susie did a great impression of her accent. “I says to the polis-man, ‘Fit’s this oen ma chest, well? Them’s tits!’ ”

  Susie was so glad to get bail and be allowed to go home. She went for occasional meetings with Fitzgerald, but other than that we just stayed in. Mostly we sat around and watched TV, and she came down from this study to eat with us. She wouldn’t let me touch her, though, and she didn’t want to talk about any of it. Every time I asked about Gow or Donna or her going off to Durness, her eyes would fill up and she’d say, please, Lachie, please, just till after, be my friend. I am your friend, Susie, but I want to know, I need to know. I’d plead with her, stroking her hand, afraid I was begging. Please, Lachie, please, just leave
it. And then she’d punish me by hiding up here for hours at a time.

  I wish she were downstairs, sleeping, breathing deep and slow, feeding on the air inside our safe, dark house. And in the morning I could take her up a big milky coffee and toast and apricot jam and open the window and let the smell of the garden in.

  Shit shitshitshit shit shitishitshit shit shit.

  * * *

  I can’t think of Susie today without seeing her in the Vale, walking endlessly back and forth across grass in the shitting rain, being forced to sit through disappointing talks, told to expect nothing ever again, and trained in the disappointed walk. Maybe she can’t get to a phone. Maybe they don’t let them phone out when they’re in the induction course.

  * * *

  I’ve got to find something for this appeal. I’ve emptied out two boxes of receipts into a bag and I’ll use them to keep potential appeal papers together.

  * * *

  Box 1. Formal papers: Gow’s prison file, plus all the formal papers from Susie’s trial.

  Box 2. Less formal stuff from plastic bag under this desk: Susie’s collection of newspaper and magazines articles re Donna, the wedding, and Gow, plus video and cassette tapes.

  * * *

  I’m afraid Gow will be on the video and it’ll creep me out, knowing he’s dead and how he died. I’ve hidden the tape under the papers in the box. I will watch it, but not just now.

  Box 1 Document 1 Indictment

  It is hereby charged that you, Susan Louise Emma Harriot, née Wilkens, of 7 Orchard Lane, Dowanhill, on September 26, 1998, did assault Andrew Alfred Gow, then residing at The Firs, Lenzie Road, Kirkintilloch. It is charged that you did stab him in the chest and throat, remove his tongue with knives and pliers or similar instruments at The Bothy, Inshore Loch, Cape Wrath, or elsewhere in Scotland, to his severe injury, and you did murder him.