Deception aka Sanctum

by Denise Mina

  Mum stroked my hair and looked accusingly at Trisha. Trisha smiled and muttered, “So kind.” The irony of this sort of comfort is completely lost on both of them. They have nary a care that their support has resulted in my being put out of my bed.

  Margie is loving it, though. They held her, one at a time, and fed her, cooing and gasping at her every move. It is lovely to see her through fresh eyes, because I forget how enchanting she is. The proportions of her facial features are perfect really, and she’s very clever. She plays little jokes, hiding things and so on, and her singing and talking is very advanced. She chats away all the time, to toys and walls and floors and shoes and the telly. She tries to boss everyone around, getting us to sit in chosen seats, hold a particular doll, eat things, and she claps her hands with pleasure whenever we do her bidding.

  I was hoping with everyone here that Yeni might get a few days to herself, but Mum and Dad insisted that she join us for afternoon tea and quizzed her in pidgin Spanish. Having gone to the trouble of bastardizing her language, they were quite indignant to find the discourtesy unreciprocated. Yeni apologized in Spanish and reacted to their stonewalling by blushing and wobbling her head from side to side. Then she sloped off to hide in her room. She really must not leave.

  I said I was going to the loo and went up to her room to see if she was okay. She was sitting on the end of her single bed, looking at the pictures in a book about the Romans. She had wound up the noisy little circus clock that Susie had as a child, the one with the seal balancing the ball on his nose. The anxious, tinny tick-tock bounced from wall to wall, making her seem like a child waiting out her time in detention. I gave her a quizzical thumbs-up. She raised a limp thumb back and stretched her lips across her teeth. I made a wait gesture and brought the portable television through from my room. I sat it on the chest of drawers at the end of her bed and plugged it in. I pointed at my watch. “Friends,” I said, and her big fat face lit up.

  “Friends?”

  “Yes,” I said and turned it on, fiddling with the aerial until I found good reception. Mum called me, and as I went to open the door and go back downstairs, Yeni darted from the bed and caught my arm, turning me around. She gave me the toothiest, cheesy grin and a big, affirmative thumbs-up. We both giggled behind our hands as Mum called again, and I dragged my heavy feet back downstairs to the unwelcome support and comfort of my family.

  * * *

  I got a locksmith to come this morning before Mum and Dad arrived and install a Yale on this door. It makes the room feel so much more private. When I came back up after tea and heard the firm lock slide shut, I found myself smiling and looking around, rubbing my hands, secure in the knowledge that I was up in my high attic room, alone.

  Susie’ll be pleased when she does get out. I’ll give her both keys and let her get on with it.

  * * *

  Harvey Tucker had the cheek to phone and leave a message reminding me to look out for that file for him. I found it on the disk with the Gow files from Sunnyfields. It’s a table of the people who contacted Gow, dates of when they did, and notes of whether they came to visit or not. I can see from the top left-hand corner of the document that the table has been made up by both Tucker and Susie, so he’s not lying. He did do some of the work. I’m reluctant to hand it over, though. I can’t bring myself to admit Susie really did take the files, and I don’t want to contribute to anything else being published about Gow. Susie must have had a reason for erasing all the other copies: she obviously didn’t want Tucker to get ahold of it.

  Donna McGovern’s name is in there. It says she contacted him (“2/2/98 letter, romantic content, photograph encl.”). Then the first visit (“Scottish Prison Department approval for visit. Gow approval for visit”) and a flood of letters, one a day, until the file entries stop abruptly around the time Susie got the bump. A rush of letters from strangers accompanied Gow’s wedding, presumably people wishing him well or ill or just freaks who had seen him in the paper. The most worrying correspondent is the one who wrote fifty-three times in two years (all “sexual content”) and was knocked back for a visit every time, often by Gow himself. But that was a man, a Mr. Thomas Wexler whose address is given as 221 Grape Street, Bristol. I like knowing that. I may go to Bristol one day, and I wouldn’t want to run into Mr. Wexler without knowing that about him.

  I’ve started reading that “Lovers in Prison” book that I found up here. It’s a collection of case histories of women who fell in love with murderers in America. Initially I thought I was reading about Donna, but after meeting Harvey Tucker, the book takes on a whole new complexion. It’s interesting in a human-interest-story kind of way, but there aren’t a lot of surprises in it. Apparently, if you want to fall in love with a convicted murderer, it helps if you’re a fool and find it easy to lie to yourself.

  The chapter I finished last night, before I fell asleep on the couch (at four-ten a.m.), said that generally the women are dissatisfied and disillusioned with their lives and see it as their last chance to attach themselves to “someone powerful.” Which means that Susie didn’t see herself as being attached to someone powerful and was trying to bridge the gap. Can every fucking thing in this unholy mess be down to my failings? I was interested to note that being Catholic, whether practicing or not, is also a predictive factor. I wonder why? Could it be the emphasis on redemption or just the ability to believe a lot of improbable shite? It’s interesting, because Donna was Catholic but Susie isn’t.

  Box 2 Document 3 “Serial Beast Kills Prostitute,” 10/3/93

  This is the newspaper article Gow’s tongue was found sitting on in the corner of the bothy. Susie downloaded a copy of it from Stevie Ray’s “Gow- Hard As Nails” website. The download is dated months before he was released, which just goes to prove that she didn’t have a copy to start with and so can’t possibly be the killer.

  I’ve heard the website mentioned on TV, when Stevie Ray was doing his tour of the chat shows. Susie’s printed a lot of articles from it, but they’re all poor-quality. In some of them the printed text is illegibly tiny. Some have titles or paragraphs chopped in half. Nearly all of them favor the photographs over the text, even though they all use the same famous picture. Gow is standing with his shoulders hunched, fists together, elbows out to the side, pumping himself up like an end-of-pier muscle man. He has shaved the word “Growl” into his chest, although it seems to read “Groul” because his body hair is quite straight. He’s wearing a pair of children’s white plastic sunglasses. It disturbs me that they’re children’s glasses; the shaded eyepieces are much too small for his big face, and the little white legs splay out at the side of his head. But perhaps it’s only me who thinks that’s creepy: I saw a middle-aged man riding a child’s red bicycle down Dumbarton Road the other day and found it sickening, watching his old knees smash up against his chest as he tried to beat a red light.

  The prosecution read this article out in court, so I’ve heard it before. I don’t think there’s anything special in it, but it was an original cutting and was five years old when the police found it, so it must have meant something to whoever left it there with Gow’s tongue on top. They’d hung on to it for long enough.

  Two pictures: police tape strung around weak-looking trees on an industrial skyline and a photo of Robbie Coltrane looking moody.

  Police are hunting for a serial killer after a fifth body was found yesterday, strangled and dumped on waste ground in Govan. Police say that the murder fits the profile of the Riverside Ripper. The murdered woman is believed to have been a prostitute working in the Anderston area of Glasgow. All the victims have been prostitutes so far; all have been strangled and mutilated with a knife.

  Actually, they weren’t strangled. Everyone now knows that they were stabbed and had their tongues cut out, so that they bled to death. This strangling stuff must have been fed to the papers at the time to put off crank confessors.

  A police spokesman called for calm and asked the public to come forward with
any information they might have about a man behaving suspiciously in the Broomielaw area between the hours of twelve midnight and four on Friday morning. Women are being cautioned not to walk home after dark.

  Top Criminal Psychologist Dr. Joe Fennie, who was the basis for TV’s Cracker, starring Robbie Coltrane, talked exclusively to our reporter. “This man will kill and kill until he is caught,” stated Fennie. “He will give in to his sick compulsion until we stop him.”

  Previous victims include Alice Thomson, 33, Martine Pashtan, 24, Karen Dempsey, 21, and teenager Lizzie MacCorronah, 19. Lizzie, whose body was the first to be found, left behind three children now being raised by her mother.

  Women’s groups are calling for greater action, claiming that police protection is inadequate.

  Joe Fennie was in the news a lot at the time. He was being quoted by every paper on every case that came up in Scotland. He’d been at Sunnyfields for a few years in the eighties, so he knew all that crowd. I heard he went to work in a special facility for sex offenders down in Surrey before coming home in disgrace for some minor infraction. Susie doesn’t know him, but his appearance in the press always elicited a big eye-roll and muttering. We met him at a wedding in Carlisle four years ago. He has very bad skin and a squint. Susie says that’s why they always use a picture of Robbie Coltrane.

  I can’t see what is special about this article or why the person who murdered Gow would choose it above all the rest of the coverage. It might not be special, it could just be a random article about his case, or it might be that the woman whose body was found in the article was important.

  I’m sure the police have already done all this stuff and done it better than I can. I should concentrate on the stuff only I know. I keep going back to the morning of the phone call from Cape Wrath, pulling it apart, pressing my eye so close to the details that they distort and I can’t remember if I’m remembering them or filling spaces between the events. I’ve worked out the following so far.

  It was a Friday morning in September. Susie was in the house and not having a lie-in. I was busy feeding Margie in the kitchen. The phone rang twice, she picked up, listened. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. She turned away from me, facing down the hall so I couldn’t hear what she was saying. When she picked up she must have heard someone speak, and they must have said “Hello” or “Listen” or “Help,” because if they had introduced themselves (said “Hi, it’s Donna McGovern” or “Hi, it’s Andrew Gow”), she wouldn’t then have said “Oh, it’s you.” It makes no sense to say “Oh, it’s you” to an introduction. So, given that there was no introduction, she must have recognized the voice. She’d have to know it quite well to recognize a voice from such a short greeting.

  After the call she came into the kitchen and beamed at me. It was, I realized later, the first time I had seen her smile in months.

  “Can I take the car, Lachie? I just want to nip out to the shops.”

  I said, yeah, sure, honey, I don’t need it. She kissed my forehead and called me her darling. Good-bye, my darling. Something like that. See you soon. She knew that she was going all the way to Durness. She was setting off for an eight-hour drive, yet she took just her purse, threw her green leather coat casually across her arm, and told me she was nipping out to the shops.

  * * *

  I’ve been going through the boxes again.

  Box 2 Document 4 News in Brief, a broadsheet, 12/19/93

  A man was charged with the murders of five Glasgow prostitutes this morning. Police report that after being stopped for cruising, Andrew Gow, 28, spontaneously confessed to the murders of Elizabeth MacCorronah, 19, Karen Dempsey, 21, Martine Pashtan, 24, Alice Thomson, 33, and Mary-Ann Roberts, 41. Strathclyde Police Service issued a statement stating that the investigation was still on-going.

  That means Mary-Ann Roberts was the one found in the tongue article.

  Box 1 Document 4 Social Background Report 1994

  Strathclyde Social Work Department

  India House, G1

  Name: Andrew Gow DOB 6/23/65

  Religion: N/K

  Address: 3582 Cumbernauld Avenue, Cumbernauld

  Occupation: Minicab driver

  Marital status: Married

  Is to appear on Monday, March 2, 1994, at Glasgow High Court in connection with the offense of murder.

  * * *

  This report was compiled from one interview with Gow.

  HOME CIRCUMSTANCES

  Before he was arrested Mr. Gow was living with his wife, Lara Orr, at 3582 Cumbernauld Avenue, Cumbernauld. They have no children. Ms. Orr is a shop assistant. Their house is in one of the nicer areas of Cumbernauld, and records show that it is furnished and maintained to a high degree.

  PERSONAL HISTORY

  Gow was born and educated in Bridgeton, Glasgow. His mother and father separated when he was eight, and his father is now deceased. Mr. Gow no longer has contact with his mother. The second of four children, he has three sisters and reports that he has no contact with them either, having split from his family over his marriage to Ms. Orr. His family does not like her.

  Gow enjoyed school until the fifth year. He states that he had many friends there and was extremely popular. His arrests for theft followed his falling in with a bad crowd. He claims he was shoplifting to show off to them. The police stopped him and he confessed to the crimes. The car theft occurred near his home. Again he confessed and was given and served a one-month custodial sentence.

  The breach of the peace offense was committed while drunk. Gow reports that he had too much to drink on the way home from his work on Christmas Eve and started shouting at a bus driver who tried to eject him. The drunk and disorderly offense related to the same incident. He had not been charged with any offense for three years before his arrest.

  Gow informs me that he has always enjoyed good health, never having suffered from any serious mental or physical illness.

  He was employed as a minicab driver at the time of the offenses charged.

  CONCLUSION

  During his period in custody, he has been visited regularly by Ms. Orr. Neither his mother nor his sisters have visited him, although his youngest sister, Alison, has written to him three times. Mr. Gow states that he does not wish contact with his sister and will not be replying to her.

  At school he was thought clever enough to sit five GCSEs but failed them all. He claims his sisters would not leave him alone to study and his mother made him take care of his sisters at this time and that is why he failed.

  Gow tells me that Ms. Orr intends to continue with their relationship no matter the outcome of the trial.

  Thomas H. Granger

  Social Worker

  THG 3/21/94 (AndrewGow)

  Box 1 Document 5 Letter re Donna

  Scottish Prison Department

  From S. Jackson

  Supervisor

  H-Hall

  Sunnyfields State Mental Hospital

  Lanarkshire

  March 21, 1998

  To: Dr. Susan Harriot

  SPD Psychiatric Services

  Sunnyfields

  ANDREW GOW (30757): REQUEST TO MARRY

  Mr. Gow has lodged a formal request to marry Miss Donna McGovern. I have spoken to Mr. Gow, who informs me that he does intend to marry Ms. McGovern. He informs me that the intended date would be sometime in April. Please conduct an interview with Ms. McGovern to determine her intentions.

  Yours sincerely

  S. Jackson

  Supervisor

  What is Susie so wound up about? There’s nothing in these papers that’s especially confidential. I’ve been checking through the files on the computer all morning, and they’re all like these, all straightforward notes about different cases, a couple of book reviews, and some sketched-out ideas for professional articles like the table of correspondents.

  I still haven’t watched that video and can’t now that the house is full of people. I don’t mind getting upset in this study, where I can be alone.
I wish they’d go. I don’t know if I can hold it together for much longer, and I don’t want to frighten my mum. I hope they aren’t planning to stay until after the sentencing, which could be weeks away.

  I can’t understand why Susie wants me out of here. Why would she object to my finding material for her appeal? It’s as if she’d be happier stuck in there with her privacy intact than out here with me, facing up to whatever problems we have. I know we do have problems; I’m not brushing over them. I’m just saying they don’t need to be as big as she makes them.

  Supposing, just for argument’s sake, that Susie was in love with Gow and was jealous of Donna, supposing all of that, I still don’t think she’d kill them. She’s sensible, a problem-solver, and killing both of them wouldn’t advance her cause in any way. Surely a guilty woman wouldn’t hang around in the bar at a nearby hotel after committing a double murder? And who phoned the police? The “helpful local” theory the prosecution came up with didn’t sound at all plausible to me.

  But then what the hell do I know? Maybe Susie wasn’t acting rationally. Maybe she’d tried everything else she could possibly think of and was at the end of her tether. She made a lot of bad decisions around that time. She gave that interview, which was contrary to all of her interests. Still, it’s a leap from bad decisions to committing two murders.

  If she was truly in love with Gow, I think it might break me.

  chapter fifteen

  I’VE BEEN OUT ON MY OWN FOR A COUPLE OF HOURS, AND THE break has done me good. I think having everyone here has been more of a strain than I’d like to admit. It’s hard falling asleep on the sofa. Almost as soon as I managed it, Trisha got up and clattered around the kitchen, banging plates together, trying to make herself useful. Mum heard it somehow and rushed downstairs, determined not to be last up, and before I knew what had happened, I was sitting at the breakfast table arbitrating their conversation.