Deception aka Sanctum

by Denise Mina

  * * *

  I rewound the Dictaphone tape and sat looking at the picture of Gow, and I suddenly understood what Susie was laughing about. I started laughing myself. I felt so much affection for her and her bizarre take on everything that I ended up crying and laughing at the same time. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t catch my breath or keep the noise down in case Yeni heard me. I was sobbing and laughing and coughing for about ten minutes.

  I managed to clean my face up before I went downstairs. Yeni had put Margie to bed, thank God, and she didn’t see the mess I was in. Margie hasn’t asked for her mummy once since the conviction. I don’t think Yeni has told her that Susie isn’t coming back, she just seems to know.

  Before we left for court on the morning of the verdict, Susie sat in the hall for ten minutes and just held Margie, smelling her hair and watching her move, as if she were trying to absorb her, memorize the sensation of her. Margie didn’t want to be on her lap. She squirmed and tried to get off, but Susie just held on, rubbing as much of her face as she could into her soft skin and hair, stroking her tiny ears with her lips. Sometimes, when she’s holding Margie, she gets this beatific look on her face as if nothing can hurt her because she has her baby. She never looks like that because I’m there.

  I finally phoned Mum. Her voice was high and panicked, and she said she was on the verge of calling the police to come over to the house and check on me. I asked her why on earth she would do that. She fluffed her reply but basically seems to think I might try to kill myself and Margie. I told her not to be stupid: if I kill myself, who’ll organize the papers for the appeal? Then I realized how depressed and subordinate this made me sound. She wants to come over and visit. I said she could if she liked but it’s unnecessary. I have a lot of support, and Susie will be home just as soon as this gets sorted out. Mum didn’t sound convinced but promised not to book a flight just yet. She said she didn’t mind that other people would read about us in the papers; what was important was my health and Margie and Susie. As long as we all had our health, it didn’t matter what other people heard about our family troubles. Everyone had problems, and our family need be no different. I think Mum and Dad’ve talked about this a lot and this is the line they’ve come up with.

  Dad came on and struggled to clear his throat for five minutes. Eventually he said he was sorry about what had happened. I accepted his condolences. He said they didn’t care about other people hearing about my problems (suddenly they’re my problems); what mattered was that we were all healthy. The devil-may-care posture was wearing thin.

  He said, “They can’t take your health away from you, can they?”

  I said, “Well, they can if they shoot you in the face,” which, far from sounding chipper and cavalier, only confused and frightened him. I hope he doesn’t repeat the comment to Mum; it would scare her as well. It’s imperative that they don’t come here.

  Dad kept saying never mind, never mind, things will buck up. I suspect he always thought Susie was a bit racy because of the money and is glad to see the back of her. He actually said, “Chin up.” What happens to expats in Spain? He was a GP in Ayr for fifty years, and suddenly he starts talking like a regimental sergeant major, all Colman’s mustard and fucking Bovril. They ended a discussion about my wife’s murder conviction by asking me to send them water biscuits. I felt like shitting in a box and sending it registered.

  * * *

  I keep thinking about Cape Wrath. There have been a lot of different versions printed in the papers. The articles reproduce a map of the cape with the red Ministry of Defense training area warnings saying DANGER AREA all over them. It’s very dramatic.

  My version of Cape Wrath is different from the others because it doesn’t start with a long drive or a beautiful, dark-haired psychiatrist walking into a small hotel. Mine starts with Margie eating breakfast and an early-morning phone call: it was a Friday morning in late September. Susie answered the phone in the hall, said, “Oh, it’s you,” and turned away so I couldn’t hear what she was saying. In the police’s version it was Gow on the phone, telling Susie where he was, perhaps inviting her there. In the Susie version it was Donna asking for help. In the Lachie version Susie hung up, came into the kitchen, and told me she was popping over to the supermarket, back soon. Bye, Susie. Bye, Lachie darling, and the door shut behind her. She drove for eight hours to the very north coast of Scotland and the pretty little hotel on the beautiful banks of the Kyle of Durness. She walked straight into the lobby and told the owner’s wife, a Mrs. Zoe Pascal, who she was and who she was looking for- not exactly the behavior of a woman who was sneaking about or intent on committing two murders. The woman handed her a sealed letter. Again Susie said it was from Donna; again the police said it was from Gow, but there’s no dispute about what it said. It must have mentioned Loch Inshore and the hut because, without even stopping for a cup of tea, Susie took the ferryboat across the kyle. (It is literally a ferry boat. It isn’t a ship or a steamer. It’s a wee man with a boat who rows foot passengers across.) Susie was alone, not agitated but quite serious. She got off on the far bank, pulled her green leather coat closed, and walked off into the dusk. Three hours later she was back in the hotel bar. She was standing at the bar, drinking whiskey and looking disheveled when the police came to arrest her. His blood was all over her shoes. She was holding the glass with two hands, said Mrs. Pascal, because she was shaking too much to drink with one.

  * * *

  I can’t sleep again. I’ve been lying in bed for two and half hours, and I keep getting rushes of adrenaline that make me want to sit up and start punching. I sat in a hot bath, breathing deeply, and drank a hot toddy, but when I lay down again, I wished I could go for a mad, high-kneed run around the garden. Tasks and their possible permutations keep coming into my mind when I lie down. I feel as if I’m trying to remembering things, things that will slip out of my mind if I don’t wake up and write them down immediately. There are bits of paper all over the house with pointless things like “shop- get veg,” “Phone Fitzg. re times,” “clothing- ENOUGH?” Sometimes I can’t remember what these important notes mean the next day. More often I can remember and they don’t matter. I think I’m hoping that I will stumble across the single shred of relevant information that will make sense of the whole episode. Maybe that’s what I’m doing up here in the middle of the night.

  I press the button and Susie’s voice fills the room.

  “No, Donna hadn’t met him before. She saw him in the paper and fell in love with his picture. [Mad laugh.]

  “Gow is an interesting character. Like many serial killers, he was very taken with his press coverage. He remembered the names of journalists who had written about him, imputed an admiring relationship between them. He actually referred to them as ‘my fans.’… No, he didn’t like all the coverage, sometimes he’d get very angry. He was terribly angry with his ex-wife, Lara Orr, but that all stopped when Donna came along.”

  The interviewer interrupts her. He tells her a quick story, which I can’t hear, about a friend called Harold, I think, and then asks her a question.

  “Yeah, lots of people do visit. Gow comes over quite well. It’s the set-up that gives him the edge. You see, he’s very confident, self-assured in the way that only people with no self-doubt or insight can be, and meeting that sort of certainty can feel quite intoxicating. A lot of sensible people came under his spell.”

  He asks another question, and Susie’s answer is adamant:

  “He is, yeah. He’s insistent that he’s innocent, even though he confessed in the first place and then pled guilty at the trial… He claims innocence to make himself more likeable. Think about it: if he admitted he was guilty, he wouldn’t get the sort of coverage he does, would he? Ian Brady doesn’t get that sort of coverage. Sutcliffe doesn’t get it. Just Gow. And the fact that he can claim innocence in the face of all that evidence may mean that he’s more psychopathic than either of them.

  “That’s what psychopaths do: they tell
you what they think you want to hear. If you want them innocent, they’ll be innocent; if you want them guilty, they’ll tell you that. Their purpose is to get under the skin of whoever they’re near, to control them. The main variant with psychopaths is how bright they are, how capable they are of making the lies consistent. It’s as close as they get to emotional contact with other human beings.

  “If you look at the past three years’ articles about Gow, you can see that. In one year alone he has declared himself a born-again Christian, a Seventh Day Adventist, and last year he became a Muslim by changing his surname to Ali and refusing to eat bacon.”

  The interviewer guffaws. Susie doesn’t. She doesn’t think it’s at all funny and tries to continue talking over him.

  “You see, he was being visited by a number of people with different religious convictions, and he joined anyone who came to see him. It may seem funny to you, but it actually reflects a very dangerous trait. He isn’t trying to please these people. He’s getting a hold over them. The Seventh Day Adventist was an extremely vulnerable man. His son had killed himself, and he wasn’t converted. To the man, that meant his son was going to hell, and Gow used that belief to torture him. He was prepared to make that sort of investment in controlling people for his own amusement.”

  The interviewer has stopped laughing. He sounds disappointed and offended, as if she has insulted his favorite comedian or something. He asks a question, and I realize that he’s goading her. This interview took place two months before Cape Wrath. It’s his first-ever interview, and he’s already guessed what eluded me for a year: that Susie has strong feelings about Andrew Gow. Now she’s talking quickly and defensively.

  “Not my skin. No, he didn’t… That’s my job, giving nothing away. The purpose of what I do is objective assessment… Well, it’s important for Donna’s safety. I’ve told her, but she won’t listen to me. He’ll hurt her, of course he will, that’s what he does. I don’t know if any appeals court could possibly refuse him now, after that poor student’s murder. That’s exactly why I’m giving this interview: I want people to know Donna isn’t safe. I want people to watch out for her when he gets out.”

  Even I know that this last bit is a piss-poor excuse for committing professional suicide. Donna wouldn’t read GLT, and I don’t suppose her friends would either. They didn’t print that comment. I expect the mag’s lawyers combed it out. It must have been sub judice at the time.

  “If Donna was a friend of yours, you’d be afraid for her, wouldn’t you? It’s not surprising she was attracted to him. Psychopaths are often compelling, as are celebrities, and Gow was both… No, I’m not saying all celebrities are psychopaths. There are parallels, but I’m not saying it’s the same thing. Celebrities give us an instant connection because we have prior information about them, while psychopaths can anticipate things familiar to you and mimic them back so that they seem familiar… They have little conception of other people as fully sentient beings, have a limited capacity to empathize. They think of other people as objects to be used and moved about.”

  Susie takes a drink while the interviewer asks something. I can hear him saying “Gow.”

  “No, look, I can’t talk about the murders or Gow’s history. You can get that information yourself, anyway. I have to be careful what I say, especially now that the appeal is coming up.

  “You shouldn’t make him out to be a hero, you know. Serial killers’re not heroes to the police or the families of their victims. They’re inadequates worshiped by inadequates. D’you know what he did to those women? I read once that the people who buy the records by American gangster rappers are generally middle-class white teenagers. Same thing. That luxury of distance.”

  The interviewer’s talking, coaxing Susie, and her voice gets closer. I think she’s looking at the Dictaphone. “No. No, I’m not afraid of Gow. He won’t come for me.” They made a lot of this phrase in the court case: whether Susie meant he won’t come for me, in other words, I’ll come for him, or whether she just meant he wouldn’t come. I’m glad they only had the printed interview to go on. From the intonation on the tape it definitely sounds like she’s hinting that she’ll get him.

  * * *

  There are books on her shelves up here, professional and sociology books and a couple specifically about women falling in love with prisoners and killers. The spines are broken and the top corners of the pages are dirty where Susie’s been doing that disgusting thing she does when she reads: cleaning gunk out of her nails on the top corner of the page.

  She’s sought these books out and taken her time reading them. She hasn’t opened them on the table and run her finger down the margins, paring out the relevant information for a work-related article or argument. She has luxuriated over the contents, which means that she probably read them in here, in this room. I’ve seen her reading in here, she sits sideways at her desk and opens the bottom desk drawer to rest her feet on, her mouth sitting slightly open, inner lips moist, drawing her nails slowly, one by one, over the corner of the page. I asked her once, huffily and pointlessly, because the answer’s obvious, why couldn’t she read downstairs? She said the light up here was perfect, and she’s right. The window is just overhead and the branches of the overhanging tree diffuse the directional light, even now that most of the leaves are gone.

  She read a lot up here, and yet we never talked about books. I never asked her what she was reading, but she didn’t bring it up either. I have a vague memory of asking her about a book by someone we both knew at university. She said it was good, not a comprehensive look at treatments, but it had a thorough literature search at the beginning. It’s no wonder I didn’t ask again.

  It makes me speculate, though: what else did she think about a lot and never mention? I wish her here. Suddenly I want ten clear, clean minutes to talk without the baggage of the past few months, few years actually, from before Margie was born. I want to ask her what she thinks about all sorts of things, as if we were first going out together and I was still listening to her.

  I spent so much time with Susie ignoring her. What must she have seen when she looked at me? A fat guy with a weird haircut who doesn’t want to do anything but read obscure novels and pester the garden.

  We should have done things together instead of pissing the time away. We should have talked more, done stuff, sat with the television and the radio off and taken the time to look at each other. After we moved in together, so much of our time was spent simply stumbling along, thinking forward or sideways or about cars and clothes and furniture and pensions and Margie. We haven’t even been on a proper holiday together, and I can’t blame anyone but myself. We kept going to my parents’ in Marbella and having a fraught time, whispering in hot rooms about annoying incidents and having quiet sex, never really being off duty.

  Susie resented using her holidays to visit them. How would I like it, she used to ask, if she made me spend all my time off at her parents’? My excuse was we needed to see them as a family, but I could have gone there on my own. The truth is I wanted her there as a buffer. She said often, right from the very beginning, that she wouldn’t be one of those wives, that she refused to be the point of emotional contact between me and my parents. “It’s not my job,” she said. “Do it yourself.”

  She was right of course, but I still found myself putting her on the phone, asking her to speak to them about specifics or comfort Mum about flat-roof leakage. I shouldn’t have used our holidays like that. I should have taken her to Mexico and the Maldives, like she wanted.

  She should be here with me. My yearning for her is so strong that it feels as if all the panels of our fractured picture will inevitably slide back to true and we’ll be as we were before.

  In my head I run through the last ten minutes of a cheesy film about a couple chasing each other on the beach, barbecuing fish, horseback riding, etc., and then I remember it’s Susie. I snort, thinking about it; imagine her, slathered in sunscreen, turning to me and saying, “This beach is chem
ically unsafe.”

  chapter six

  IT’S COLDER TODAY. I MIGHT NEED TO BRING A HEATER UP HERE. My feet are quite warm, but the top of my head gets cold. I think all the heat rises from the house and gets sucked sideways, out through the attic space next door. I’d like to insulate this room for Susie coming home, paint it maybe, and buy her a new computer and not say anything so she comes up here and gets a nice surprise. I could convert the whole loft area and give her a really big office. We don’t keep that much stuff in there, just Margie’s baby clothes and the LPs and some suitcases that were here when we moved in. I’d like a building project, something big, as a sign of good faith that she will come home. I think it would cheer me up. But, then, she probably doesn’t want a big office. The claustrophobic feel of this little room, squashed in next to the chimney stack, has an intense privacy about it. If anyone else were in here, they’d be standing indecently close to me. It’s like a physical incarnation of personal space. The nights are coming earlier and earlier, and as the skylight deadens, the slow black oak waves softly in silhouette, reminding me that there is an outside to this small, tall room. In case I forget.

  I find myself craving this study when I’m downstairs coping and feeling tired and worn and put upon. It’s not just the room, though, it’s because of the Dictaphone tape as well. I’ve been looking forward to getting back to it all day. It’s as if Susie’s up here waiting for me to come to see her. It makes me feel as if I only need to die of love and sorrow until eight o’clock in the evening. Then I can leave Yeni to deal with Margie’s final, stalling requests for water and come up here to the virtual woman in the attic.