Deception aka Sanctum

by Denise Mina

  Lara was born on the south side, the middle daughter in a family of five girls. Her mother was a telephone operator and her father a park keeper. They were not happy times. As she grew up, her ambition was to move out of the family home. She got her wish at sixteen. She was sent to live with an aunt in Liverpool while she studied hairdressing. It was in Liverpool that she met Andrew Gow. It was an August night in the Taboo nightclub; Lara was with some girls from her hairdressing school; Gow was alone. They got to chatting because they were both Glaswegian and one month later Lara and Andrew were engaged. After Laura had a fallout with her aunt, Andrew brought her home and they stayed with his family, sleeping on the floor of his young sister’s house until the council allocated them a flat of their own. They were married in the spring of 1991, two years before the first riverside murder.

  “I didn’t know he was a monster,” says Lara, looking out the window. “He was always gentle with me. He was kind to me.”

  I ask her about the story she sold to the Mirror, about Gow dressing her up as a prostitute for rough sex games. Lara looks sick, curls a tress of bleached hair around her finger, and says she was afraid of him. This means that Gow was simultaneously gentle and kind and frightening. It’s hard to know which is true. Both sentiments seem quite genuine.

  She’s divorcing him, she says, at some point in the future, perhaps when the financial value of being his wife is mitigated by the passage of time. She is alone now. Having fallen out with her family and her husband, she’s sorry to say that Gow will be keeping Stevie Ray as his manager, so she will have to cope with being his ex-wife alone. I suggest that she might get a better agent.

  “There is no one better,” she says. “Stevie knows how to do it all.”

  Donagh never got to interview Stevie Ray and went on about it later in the radio series. Ray kept charging him money and then not turning up. Donagh titled the series after him, something about Stevie Ray-“Good-bye, Stevie Ray” or “Tell Stevie Ray Hello” or something like that.

  It occurs to me that Stevie Ray might be interesting to talk to. He was in contact with Gow and Donna right up until the end. Susie has a photo up on the wall here, taken on the steps of the court on the day of Gow’s appeal. It was on the front page of the tabloids. Stevie is holding Gow’s hand up in the air like a triumphant boxer, and they are both grinning maniacally. Gow has those white children’s sunglasses on. He seemed to wear them all the time. Donna was camera shy suddenly and is lurking in the background. Stevie Ray might even know something about the phone call from Durness.

  I didn’t get to know Stevie during Susie’s trial, but I don’t think I’m being presumptuous in saying that he understood what I was going through; after all, he’d watched someone he was close to go on trial for horrible crimes. We spoke only once: we were waiting to get back into the court after lunch and he was crying. As I remember the incident now, it doesn’t seem at all strange or alarming to me that he was crying, so it must have been around the time that the prosecution brought evidence about the extent of Gow’s injuries. Stevie Ray was standing next to me, crying silently. I remember little silver trails of snot on the backs of his hands catching the light in the dark corridor. I said, “Sorry, pal,” and handed him a disposable tissue out of a packet.

  He took it between two fingers, nodded sadly, and, without looking up, said, “Sure, sure,” and moved away. I’m sure he’d talk to me.

  I don’t know why I keep coming up here to write this rubbish down. I find myself tramping up here night after night, my eyes smarting and wanting to sleep, and still I pass the door to the bedroom and come up here. I’ve always wanted to write, but not all this rubbish about feelings; I want to write clever things about the death of empire, about big theories and themes that will win me the respect of Martin Amis and get me into Soho House. Writing this stuff down has become a sick compulsion, and the only reason I can find for it is that, like a petulant child, I want to have my say. I’m presenting a defense to an absent audience and I haven’t even done anything wrong.

  It’s the diarist’s dilemma: if no one’s ever going to see it, there’s no real reason to bother writing it, spell-checking it, or taking time over the grammar and phrasing. Why not just think thoughts? If there is a secret desire to be read, does that make what I’m writing any less honest? Who are these literary pyrotechnics meant for? If I knew for sure that no one would ever see these pages, I think I would write differently. I’m going to try to be completely honest, bare.

  Still, without knowing what my motive is, the function all of this writing serves is clear: while I’m writing down every small thing, I don’t need to participate fully in my life, which, at the moment, is pretty shitty.

  * * *

  I’ve just found this. I was opening the lowest drawer on the desk and it got stuck. I tugged and tugged and heard the rustle of something falling from the underside of the drawer into the well underneath. I had to take all of the drawers out to get my hand in there. It had been stuck to the bottom with a big lump of Blu-Tack.

  It’s handwritten, but it’s definitely by Donna; the grammar’s all wrong and there are no commas.

  Box? (not sure which to file this under yet) Document 1

  DURNESS HOTEL

  Keoldale

  PROP: MR. W. PASCALE

  Susie-

  he is taking me to the broken little cottage above

  Loch Inshore. Im scared of him.

  Come please please come please

  Donna

  My first thought was that I should go to Fitzgerald’s house with it and wait for him to get up in the morning. Finally, this is something we can use for an appeal. But then I stopped: Susie had this letter all along and never gave it to Fitzgerald herself. Why? I can understand that she might have been confident she’d get off- I was confident she’d get off- but she could have told him about it since. She could have told me about it since. If she was worried that she’d get into trouble for withholding it, she could have told me and I’d have claimed I’d hidden it or something. I’d do six months in prison for contempt if it meant she’d get out. I would. I’d do that for her.

  This letter might be what she and Fitzgerald spent all the phonecard money during the first week talking about.

  I know I should take some sort of urgent action, but I don’t know what to do for the best. What if she’s been telling the truth all along?

  chapter twenty-one

  Stevie Ray, 14 Hamilton Drive, Priesthill 876 2454: 10:30 a.m. Greggs the Baker’s.

  INTRIGUED BY MY FIND, I GOT INTO THE CAR LAST NIGHT AND drove out to Kirkintilloch. I wanted to take a look at the house Donna lived in while she stayed in Glasgow. It has been pictured in the papers often enough, but I wanted to look for myself. I can’t stop thinking about Susie since I found the note.

  Donna’s old house is off a fairly busy road, but you’d have to be looking to find it. She rented it when she first moved up here from Leicester and Gow lived here with her for a week when he was released, before they took off up north.

  The night sky was cold and clear when I went out there; the moon lit the countryside as brightly as a forty-watt bulb. The house is on a patch of flat land outside the town, and a mile away, straight across fields and grass, the massive Campsie Fells rise suddenly like a mammoth back wall to the valley. The one thing you really notice is how remote the house is from anywhere. I wouldn’t have expected a twenty-three-year-old to want that sort of isolated place.

  It’s squat, like our house, but only one story high, with two attic rooms. It’s whitewashed and peeling, with small, deep, inset windows. It seemed empty. Overgrown bushes in the front garden make the house look ramshackle, and big bushy weeds have sprung up on the drive. A few dead bunches of flowers were perched against the front door, presumably left there by locals to commemorate Donna, or perhaps even Gow. I peered into the dark windows and saw dull, brown furniture, an armchair, a small sideboard, a table and chairs, but no personal effects. The win
dows felt cold, so there was no heating on a timer coming on to cozy the house for the residents’ return. There were no signs of life at all.

  I stood, trying to imagine Donna pulling up alone in her little Golf Polo, taking the keys from the real estate agent, excitedly unpacking her luggage from the trunk. I imagined her living there, shopping, coming back dreamy-eyed from visits to Sunnyfields, returning alone to a cold house after her prison wedding. Next to the house, across a small pathway to the garden at the back, sat a crumbling garage with wooden doors. I had been sure the house was uninhabited, but as I walked down the lane at the side, I heard an intermittent high-pitched whirr. I froze. It was coming from inside the garage. I listened for a while, approaching the doors, before I realized it was a deep freezer coming on and off. Someone probably was living there. Guilty and ashamed, I tiptoed back to the main road and my own car.

  As I drove home, I tried to imagine the Cape Wrath scene again with the letter in it. Susie gets a phone call early in the day, Donna asks for help, and she sets off up north (leave out the lie to me about nipping to the shops because that just distracts my attention). Susie drives for about eight hours, morning to early evening, stopping to fill up the tank, seeming happy when she does. She drives through rain and sunshine, through high winds and deep valleys, and gets to the Kyle of Durness and the hotel, where Mrs. Pascal gives her the letter. Donna asks her to come to the bothy. She sounds helpless in the letter (I know it by heart now)- he is taking me- and desperate- please please come. Without phoning anyone for help (which I don’t understand), Susie goes to Donna, not covering her tracks, not hiding; she goes alone in the ferry across the kyle at dusk, unafraid. Three hours later she is back across the kyle (the tide was out and she walked across the sands; her driving shoes were covered in sand). She is standing in the hotel bar, again not hiding, drinking to stem the shakes, unaware that Officer McCallum has already received the call and found Gow with his hands bound, his tongue pulled out and cut off at the root, left to drown in his own blood. He must have known he was going to die from the moment they tied him up. He must have lain on his side and felt the blood pulse from his mouth, warm and wet under his cheek. He must have looked at someone’s shoes and known he was dying. When I imagine his fate in detail, it doesn’t seem to matter that he did such awful things to other people. Officer McCallum had time for a good hurl out the back before calling his pals and telling them to go and pick Susie up from the hotel bar.

  Only a local knew where the phone box was, they said, and Fitzgerald didn’t challenge it. I’ve been looking at it on the map, and the phone box is on the B-road into Durness; you’d know it was there, unless you’d been helicoptered in.

  * * *

  Finding the hotel letter has spurred me on: I’m determined to be more focused about this whole thing. I’m going to sort this out, even if Susie hasn’t the brains or will to survive. I’m going to search this room methodically. I’m working counterclockwise around the walls, starting from the door.

  My first find is a paper bag tucked under the leg of the bookcase, behind an envelope of credit-card bills. The open end of the bag had been folded over so that the things inside were held snugly. It’s a small white bag, like the bag a birthday card might be put in when you get it from the shop. I’ll put it into Box 2, which is getting quite full.

  Box 2 Document 8 Contents of Paper Bag

  There is a carefully cut out “news in brief” paragraph about Donna and Gow’s wedding and three photographs, all the same size, all of the wedding. I know that Susie took them herself. The prints have the matt finish and white borders that she always asks for at Snipper Snaps, and I can tell that she was using our camera because she never zooms in properly.

  She didn’t tell me she was at Donna and Gow’s wedding, a fact that haunts me now.

  According to the press cutting, the wedding took place on a Tuesday in April this year. I’ve been trying to work out what we would have been doing, what happened on Tuesday nights at that time. Nothing. I looked up the television listings for that time in an old Sunday supplement Susie had up here. Nothing special at all. None of the dramas during the week seemed familiar, none of the soap story lines rang a bell, and then I realized why: Margie was teething and wasn’t sleeping for longer than five hours at a time. Susie was working, so I’d taken over nights. I was spaced out, just coping from one screaming fit to the next. It was after Saskia left and before Yeni arrived.

  Susie would come home from work, drop her bag by the chair in the hall, take off her coat, and hang it up in the closet. She’d kick off her shoes and come into the sitting room. I’d ask her how her day was. Fine, yeah, okay. No, nothing much really. If Margie was awake, Susie’d put the telly on for the news. It wasn’t really for the news, I knew that, it was for an excuse not to talk to anyone for an hour or so, but that was okay, I understood.

  Margie and I lived in the sitting room in those days. I kept all of her toys in the big storage box on the parquet floor under the window. It was a mild winter, just a week or so of really cold, head-down weather. I remember buds on the branches outside the sitting room in the first week of January. I remember birds’ nests in the bare trees, like tangles in fine hair, gradually being covered by foliage. It was Margie’s first-ever spring. The view from those windows was my world in those days. I used to do the ironing with the telly on and feed Margie in the kitchen by the door, where the laminate flooring is. I was proud of how efficient I was with her. I’ve never felt closer to anyone. We’d sit next to each other on the settee when the lunchtime news came on and I’d say, “What do you think about that, Margie-Pargie?” And she’d look up at me and smile. It was just because I was talking to her, I know that, but her smile made my heart swell and synapses zing. She was mine. I loved her and each unrecapturable moment. She was mine alone. The minute she went to nursery it all changed. She has her own social life now, and our relationship has never been quite the same, it can’t be. Yeni arrived soon after.

  PHOTO ONE

  The first photograph is informal and cut in far too close. Donna is getting ready for the wedding, checking her makeup in the reflection on a brass plaque commemorating Princess Anne doing something at the prison in 1976. It’s a good photo actually, technically very competent. Donna’s putting lipstick on, using the brass as a mirror, looking down at her lips as she does it. Her eyelashes are long and hide her eyes. Her hair is pulled up at the back, and the willowy hairs at the nape of her neck are visible. Her neck is incredibly white; a small black mole nestles off-center between the two ligaments. The skin on her neck is soft, powder-soft, and fringed by the smallest hairs, like Margie’s baby hair. When I think of Margie’s newborn head, I can almost feel my fingertips running over it, the duckling softness of it. It was so soft I never knew for sure that I was touching anything at all until I looked at my hand.

  I sat looking at the photo for a while, and then I realized that it’s a very telling picture. The reflection is so clear you can see red dots on the soft skin under her eyebrows where she’s overplucked them. You can see where her makeup stops on her neck and how thick her mascara is. She worked hard at it, Donna. I can’t imagine what Susie would have made of her, this brassy doll, permed and over-made-up. She never talked about her to me.

  Donna doesn’t seem aware that she is being photographed, but she would be able to see Susie’s reflection on the brass plaque. It’s as if she knows Susie’s watching, aware of eyes on her, but acting casual. It seems so knowing, this movie-star calm: she’s saying you can look at me but I won’t acknowledge you, I won’t react. Mind you, with a cleavage like that and the low-cut tops she wore, she must have been aware of eyes moving over her all the time. She’d have to be oblivious to dress like that.

  The photo’s so close in on her that if you didn’t know about Susie’s trouble with the zoom, it might seem creepily intimate. It’s hard not to interpret the picture as Susie sneaking up on Donna to batter her to death.

  PHOTO TWO<
br />
  The second picture is Donna and Gow together. He is wearing a crumpled gray suit with big shoulder pads, curling lapel-tips, a white shirt, and dirty sneakers. I recognize it from the old pictures of him being bundled into the prison vans: it’s the suit he wore for his trial. Donna is wearing a white jacket and matching skirt, red court shoes, and two red roses in her jet black hair. She has nothing on under the jacket, and nearly two inches of cleavage is on display. She doesn’t look saggy or tired, not like an old tart or anything, just busty.

  They’re standing against a wall, in front of a blue poster with a big white question mark. Gow is looking at the camera, his head tipped backward slightly because he’s grinning so widely. His big banana hand is wrapped around her slim upper arm, pressing hard, gathering the white material. It looks as if he might have said something rude. Donna is looking down at her feet. She looks nervous and out of her depth, and it makes you worry for her, it really does.

  The picture is very badly lit, which is typical of Susie’s photography. White light spills in from the side, from another camera flash.

  PHOTO THREE

  This must be the official photograph, a copy of the one she had stuck to the skylight and Blu-Tacked over. He is holding her tiny hand in his big hand, and he is smiling but she isn’t. She’s looking at her hand and seems alarmed. She said in interviews at the time that she wasn’t afraid he’d hurt her, that she knew he’d never hurt her. But she didn’t think he’d ever get out.

  * * *