Deception aka Sanctum

by Denise Mina

  She patted me on the shoulder and looked over at Mum and said something like, “You’ll sleep now that I’m unselfish enough to leave.” Margie ran over and kissed her knees as she pulled her coat on. Mum and Dad stood in the living room like guilty children waiting to be told off, half watching her.

  Trisha turned to address them, “Good-bye, Margery. I hope you have a safe journey home,” she said, not only taking the high ground but building a small, sustainable, eco-friendly resort there. “Good-bye, Ian.”

  It would have been a splendidly dramatic exit if the taxi hadn’t taken forty minutes to arrive. We had to call three times to find out where they were.

  * * *

  When she had gone, Mum said that since there was a spare room now, there was no need for them to leave, but Dad cleared his throat sharply, and she spontaneously changed her mind. He’s so rarely insistent that it’s compelling when he is. They phoned the airline and changed their return flights to the next day. At Dad’s insistence, they booked into a bed-and-breakfast for the night. Mum went upstairs to pack and left me and Dad alone. I offered to come and get them the next day and take them to the airport, but he said no, they could manage perfectly well on their own and I should have a quiet evening and try to sleep. We were standing in the living room, facing each other, and he reached out to me, almost showing affection, but chickened out at the last minute and slap-patted my shoulder, muttering, “Well done.” I appreciated it, I really did.

  He offered to get me a prescription for some sleeping pills, but I said I’d rather do it naturally. He chuckled indulgently as if I were opting for primal-scream therapy instead of taking an aspirin. I’m always amazed at how prescription-happy that generation was. I suppose if they now admitted it’s wrong, they’d have to own up to turning half their patients into drooling addicts.

  I insisted that they allow me to drive them over to the bed-and-breakfast. I had to drop Margie off at nursery at the same time, so after an infinity of packing, dressing, and general organizing, we all bundled into the car. Margie started singing the noises-in-our-car song- parp parp peep peep- and I felt my heart swell in elation. I was going to be alone, actually alone, very, very soon. I joined in, singing the choruses, perhaps a little too joyfully. When I caught Mum’s eye in the rearview mirror, she looked terribly hurt. I apologized.

  She sniffed and looked out of the window. “In front of her…” she said, or something upsetting like that. I pretended not to hear.

  My attention was elsewhere: Mum and Dad were leaving. I was going home to be alone for the first time in over a week, and I had arranged for Yeni to pick Margie up at lunchtime so that I could sleep. I was days ahead of myself. Margie ran in to nursery, kicking her little legs up behind herself, working her fisted hands at her sides, all her gestures expressive of her absolute determination to enjoy the day. She stopped inside the door, scanning the horizon for the jolliest children as I pulled her coat off, and then lolloped off across the room toward a ginger-haired boy. The mums were sweet to me. Gathering around, they said they’d seen me in the paper but not to worry. I know I looked nice in the paper because they were all either smiling at me or trying not to smile. One woman got flustered and pointedly ignored me. Harry’s little blond mum was on the other side of the room, and then suddenly she was standing at my shoulder, slightly behind me, behaving like a politician’s supplicant wife on the campaign trial.

  I don’t understand why she is selling herself so hard. She has perpetually untidy thin hair, which looks as if she has just got out of bed. Her eyes are small and green, the smallness being a positive benefit in one’s midthirties, in the sense that small eyes age better than big eyes. The divorcée’s tinge of bitterness and regret that infuses her conversation doesn’t show on her face. Her lips are swollen and red, as if she’s been eating all the red candies in the box and needs admonishing. Even the way she stands is profoundly sexy, with her butt sticking out, emphasizing her chest. She flirts with me, with glances and looks and the way she turns away and then back toward me. It flatters me so much I get quite flustered. Until today I comforted myself with the thought that she was probably a vacuous idiot, but now I know she isn’t. I’m quite taken with her.

  I only realized Harry’s mum was there because the mum who was talking to me glanced behind my shoulder a couple of times, as though addressing my partner. She was standing so far back that I had to turn a full 180 degrees (away from everyone else) to see her. She was wearing a low-cut green sweater with a silver stick on a chain that sort of pointed down into her cleavage. Our eyes locked, and I nodded hello just as a hush descended over the room behind me. Even the babies were momentarily quiet. Everyone in the room stared at the kitchen door and sort of gasped under their collective breath.

  I turned to see the young woman assistant standing in the middle of the room. She was so brown she could have been working on a sugar plantation in the Caribbean for a month. Her eyes were an eerie blue, her dark skin, her white-bleached hair making her look like a photographic negative. Aside from dramatically increasing her risk of developing a melanoma, she’ll ruin her skin using a sunlamp that much, and she’s only young. Aware of the effect she was having, she drew herself up. She actually seemed quite pleased with herself.

  “Good God,” I muttered. “She shouldn’t do that.”

  “She can’t help herself,” whispered Harry’s mum. “She’s tanorexic.”

  It was so unexpected, I laughed out loud, even though it was obvious who we’d been talking about. I couldn’t stop myself. It would have been even more rude to stare straight at the girl and laugh, so I turned my shoulders to Harry’s mum. She laughed back and fingered her necklace.

  I pointed at her. “Funny lady,” I said, and blushed. I sounded like a horrible old creep, but she didn’t seem offended. She smiled coyly and ran the tip of her index finger up and down the silver drop pendant on her necklace in a way that made me think fondly of my knob.

  * * *

  Back in the car, the atmosphere was thunderous. It had turned into a wet, gray day. Dad had booked a B amp;B somewhere in Paisley because it was quite near the airport but outside the two-mile rip-off radius. Unfortunately neither of us was familiar with that area. We couldn’t find the right street and ended up stuck in a grubby one-way system of streets near the city center. The rain washed across the windshield, and we couldn’t read the street signs. Big red sandstone terraces sat back from the pavement just far enough to make the house numbers unreadable. The streets were short and litter-lined. Mum barked from the backseat that no way on God’s green earth was she staying the night here.

  Every time I felt my blood pressure climb, I thought of Harry’s mum’s joke and smiled. I wish I’d said something debonair and charming back. I couldn’t think of anything, so I imagined myself laughing comfortably and brushing my fingers down the back of her arm and sliding away across the room, leaving a trail of aftershave.

  We finally found the place. I parked illegally and carried their suitcases upstairs as Dad signed in. It was a nice spacious room with a big window and tea-making facilities. As I was leaving, I weakened and invited them back over for dinner this evening. Mum breathed in to speak but Dad coughed and she said no. We left it on an uncomfortable note. Mum kissed me grudgingly, sighed tremulously (twice, in case I hadn’t heard the first one). Dad gestured to me to get out of the room before she started a scene, so I did. She never used to be this self-indulgent. Dad feeds it in a way. I think he quite enjoys the drama of it since he’s retired.

  I shed all sense of worrying about them as I left Paisley and hit the motorway for Glasgow. I came straight home and took a long, hot bath in my house, leaving the bathroom door open. I got out and walked, gloriously, balls-swingingly naked to the bedroom, where I pulled on a pair of underpants and slid into a big cream-puff bed.

  I slept like a barbiturate-sodden housewife, waking up at four o’clock this afternoon. The sun was already setting outside the window. Margie was stand
ing at the end of my bed, drinking from a cup and staring at me. She grinned when she saw my eyes open. Blood red Kool-Aid spilled from the sides of her mouth (I’ve asked Yeni not to give her that stuff). As if she knew that peace had come to our house, Margie climbed up on the bed and lay down, spooning me. I wrapped my arms around her, crossing my hands on her chest, tucking my fingers into her damp little armpits, feeling her heartbeat on my thumbs.

  In moments of perfect clarity, when I’m not tired or upset or worried, I know that Margie eclipses her mum and me, that her life and health matter more than the respect of my peers, the history of literature, my financial security. Everything I loved was there at once, every precious thing. She wriggled her tiny bum backward into my chest, bending forward and sticking her legs out. My darling, all-encompassing comma.

  chapter twenty

  THIS IS THE FIRST OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON GOW’S CASE BY Fergus Donagh. Later on the articles were published as a book, and he read them out himself on the radio; I remember it being on. His voice was very ponderous and slow, but it was an interesting series because he spoke to people who were central to the story but peripheral to the court case and tended to be ignored. He interviewed most of the victims’ families, and Lara Orr as well. Susie has most of the articles. I don’t think there’s any point in my transcribing them all. They’re pretty samey, more or less descriptions of the interviewees’ poverty-ridden circumstances interspersed with heavy hints about how melancholy Donagh feels about the murders and how grim the world looks to his sensitive yet manly and unafraid Irish soul. His writing is a bit florid for my tastes.

  Box 2 Document 6 Article by Fergus Donagh, Guardian, 3/16/94

  Karen Dempsey is one of the least important people in the Andrew Gow story. Karen was raped and mutilated, her tongue was cut out, she was dowsed in bleach and left to die by a stinking river. It is a telling indictment that in a word search of the last four weeks, the five leading British newspapers have mentioned her name 17 times. Andrew Gow’s name has been printed 203 times. Lara Orr Gow, Gow’s wife, has been named 97 times.

  Karen was twenty-one years old. Last week a box of evidence relating to her death was returned to the police, unopened by the courts. There will be no trial. Gow has pleaded guilty to the charges and has been convicted. He will be sentenced next week. The box held the clothes Karen was found dead in: the thin shirt, short skirt, and flimsy silver bomber jacket, ripped at the pocket. An officer on the case told me that the sole of her high heels was worn down on one side, the result of her lopsided walk. She had a hip operation when she was a baby, and the other girls nicknamed her Hop-along. She had done a lot of walking in those shoes.

  Karen worked as a prostitute in Anderston. It is a derelict area by the waterfront with many dark doorways for illicit trysts. She was last seen approaching a man in a baseball cap at the corner. The streetlights are all overhead, and the CCTV did not capture his face. She should have been home that night. She had promised to baby-sit for a friend, but a sick child occasioned a cancellation. If the baby had been well, she would have stayed in. If she had stayed in, she would still be alive today.

  Unusual for the area, Karen had no children herself. Friends have told reporters that Karen began prostituting herself to support her ailing mother, but it seems more likely that she did it to get money for drink and drugs. She was well known on the club scene but had stopped going out recently after a fight with a young woman. The police were called to the fight, but Karen and the other girl had left by the time they arrived. Had they arrested her, she might still be alive today.

  Fate created a plethora of chances for Karen to escape Andrew Gow, but she didn’t take them.

  Approaching Karen’s home on this cold winter morning, I found the next-door tenement block burned out, sheets of gray fiberboard nailed over the windows, and the open stairwell scarred with gang graffiti. It is an unsafe area in a bleak corner of the world.

  Karen grew up and lived her short life in Lambhill. This, one of the roughest council estates in Britain, has a per capita rate of burglary and muggings three times the national average. Council houses bought in the eighties are now selling for a fraction of their original valuation. It’s an all-too-familiar story, a tale of disempowered, marginalized families surviving in an economy determined to ignore them.

  Veronica Dempsey, Karen’s mother, opens the front door to her dark flat. She ushers me in, anxious that the neighbors don’t see me. Shame enough, says Dempsey, to have had a daughter killed while on the game, but to be seen talking to journalists about her would be much worse.

  Hers is a poor house, neither clean nor proud. The hall has no carpet, just bare hardboard streaked black with trips from room to room. In the spare kitchen, a whitish mist I mistake for net curtains turns out to be dirt on the windows.

  Dempsey is a stocky woman, looking much older than her thirty-six years. Despite a heart condition, she chain-smokes Kensas Club. The fingers on her right hand are tobacco-stained. Karen was conceived when Veronica was only fourteen, but she is at pains to point out that she didn’t give birth until she was fifteen. Her parents put her out of the house and the child’s father moved away, but Veronica refused to give up her untimely daughter. She kept her child and did her best to bring the baby up decently. Veronica has never worked herself and knows few who have.

  I’m the only one Dempsey has spoken to, she wants me to know that. She promises that she won’t speak to the other papers. It is only at the end of our conversation that I realize Dempsey expects to get paid. She doesn’t know that it is customary to negotiate payment in advance of giving an interview. I tell her I’m from a broadsheet and we don’t tend to pay people for stories. She doesn’t know what a broadsheet is, she says. All she knows is that Karen was all she had and now Karen is dead.

  Veronica Dempsey is typical of the Riverside Ripper families. Hopeless people at the bottom of the social scale striving to make sense of a brutality that is beyond them. Their families are poor and helpless, neither able to organize nor well-resourced enough to take on the powers that be.

  Now that the trial is over and Gow has been convicted, an army of questions remains unanswered. How could Gow cruise the same small group of women in an area the size of Regent’s Park, kill five, and only be caught because he confessed? Why was a multiphasic task force not set up until after the third death? Why did no one in the NCSOD claim jurisdiction over the series of crimes? Where is the companion who helped him with the first and third murders?

  The DNA evidence was not foolproof: the semen samples from the bodies were badly compromised by the bleaching. Other than that, all the evidence the police had against Gow was the blood in his car and his lack of an alibi. Why didn’t his defense argue that Gow, while admittedly a rapist and possibly the driver, was not the killer? It hardly feels like justice at all.

  Alice Thompson’s name has not even reached seventeen hits in the coverage. She has been mentioned only twelve times because her family refused to release a photograph to the press. Her two sons are thirteen and fourteen now. They came to the court with their father and sat next to him. Their father was drunk and shouted abuse at Lara Orr in the lobby of the court. He hadn’t lived with Alice Thomson for six years. The boys hadn’t seen her for three.

  Elizabeth MacCorronah was a registered heroin addict. Her husband, also an addict, had been killed in a house fire two years before. Her three children were in care at the time of her murder. No one from her family came to the trial. Martine Pashtan’s husband moved back to Birmingham, taking with him their son, now a year old. Mary-Ann Roberts was forty-one years old and the most experienced of the women. She left no one.

  This series of articles is depressing, but I think they’re meant to be. Excused as a cry for justice and a forum for pointing out the inadequacies in the police handling of the case, they’re really designed to give the middle classes a frisson of terror at the missing social safety net. I heard Donagh argue on a radio-show debate that
he wasn’t cashing in by writing these articles. He was moved to pursue the case because none of the victims’ families were able to demand answers or to comment on the quality of the police investigation. He got a big round of applause, and I think he was right. These victims won’t be celebrated; they won’t be remembered as anything other than a footnote in a true-crime book. Not for them the self-named foundations doing good or ardent family campaigns advocating a cosmetic reform to some small point of law. Grief-stricken campaigning families used to mystify me, but they make perfect sense now. If I could think of anything to campaign about, I’d love to set one up for Susie. I could pour my energies into it, meet new friends through it, work really hard at wrestling order from a chaotic universe.

  Donagh makes you feel sorry for Veronica Dempsey, but still, there does come a point where you have to admit it: you need to be pretty thick not to know what a broadsheet is at thirty-six.

  The description of Lara Orr in his last article is genuinely touching. The poor woman isn’t very bright and doesn’t know how to present herself. She seems not likable, exactly, but certainly very innocent.

  Box 2 Document 7 Article by Fergus Donagh, Guardian, 3/23/95

  Lara Orr sips her cup of tea and looks out the steamed-up café window. The shadows under her eyes show the recent strain, and her roots need doing. It took twelve phone calls to arrange this meeting. Her friend Stevie Ray fields all phone calls and controls access to her husband. Stevie, she says, has been looking after both of them. He has given up his job at the minicab firm where he met Gow and is dedicating himself full-time to managing Gow’s career as a serial killer and celebrity. Of the £1,000 he is charging me to interview Lara Orr, she will get £750 and Stevie Ray will get £250, twenty-five percent of the final deal. Lara isn’t worldly enough to know that Stevie’s cut is far too high and Stevie isn’t smart enough to make it a proviso that I don’t mention the money in this article. It’s a case of the blind managing the blind.