by Denise Mina
Now that I have remembered last spring, I can hardly bring myself to leave it. Winter gave a death kick and we had a few random days of snow, but apart from that the weather was mild; the season was over before it had begun. I remember clouds of pink cherry blossoms blowing into the garden from next door, fleshy leaves carried on the water-clean smell of springtime. We had Margie, the renovations were done, and Susie had settled back into her job.
And then the murders started again.
chapter twenty-two
STEVIE RAY IS A BAD MAN, A SELFISH MAN WHO MAKES MONEY BY cashing in on the misery of others, but after meeting him it’s hard to believe he actually means any harm to anyone. He is small and balding in a messy way, not a straightforward receding hairline. He has a brown hairy button on his forehead and thin wisps all over the top. He’s short and fat as well and ties his raincoat belt in a knot at his swollen waist, which makes it look worse. He’s simultaneously repellent and sympathetic. It’s like he’s got his charisma on backward.
I’d dropped Margie off at nursery, more of which later, and was sitting in Greggs waiting for him. I was about ten minutes early, so I ordered a fudge doughnut and a cup of tea (the coffee’s terrible there). I was peeling the frosting off the cake when I heard a commotion at the door. Stevie Ray was a-coming. He’d got tangled up in a pram at the door and was trying to apologize, bow obsequiously, and extricate himself all at the same time. He almost tipped the child out, and the mother became so angry she started hitting him with a full Co-op bag. Things like that must happen everywhere he goes, because he didn’t even mention it when he sat down opposite me. He just flattened a hand over his bald head as if he still had hair.
“Foof,” he said. “It’s windy.”
He ordered tea and a prawn and mayonnaise roll and chattered away about stuff, how bad everything was for him and how much he needed a break. If I hadn’t told him beforehand that I would only buy him lunch and pay his bus fare, I’d have thought he was working up to asking to borrow money from me.
“I owe everyone,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “I owe the car company, credit cards, the bank is after me, and I’ve got nothing coming in now, because of your missus.” He looked up at me.
“I’m not going to pay you, Stevie,” I said. “I know for a fact that my wife is innocent, and anyway, I haven’t got any money.”
He relaxed a bit. I think it was almost a relief to him not to have to try to chisel me. “You broke, too?” he asked.
“Lawyers don’t come cheap,” I said, thinking of our one and a half mil carefully tucked away. “So go easy on the tea.”
After five minutes with Stevie I felt focused and go-getterish. It’s as though he can’t do status games and comes ready-capitulated. I bet that’s why Gow wanted him to manage his affairs, so he could see him often and patronize him. But then, the thing to remember with Stevie Ray is that with no skills whatever, he made a nice living off the back of Gow. He’s not a stupid man, and that’s something to bear in mind. He filled in every conversational pause with a story about how much he’d lost to the car company, how much work he needed done on his house, how everyone thought he was rich. He was being so unchallenging it actually made me feel suspicious. The roll arrived and he took a massive bite and tried to talk about his troubles through milky lumps of bread.
I interrupted him and told him I wanted to talk about my wife. That shut him up.
I took out the notebook I’d written the questions in. I knew I’d crap out if I didn’t have them written down, knew I’d end up asking how he was and finally if he needed any money. I asked the first question and wrote down notes of what he was saying to busy myself, so I didn’t have to look at him while he answered.
Yes, he said, Gow did talk about Susie. He said she was a lovely lady and had been very helpful in getting Donna in to see him. She had okayed their first visit and was kind to Donna. He paused, finishing off his sandwich, and when I looked up, he was watching my face and all but asked me if he was doing it right. He was saying what he thought I wanted to hear.
“Look, Stevie,” I said, “I want you to tell me the truth. I don’t want you to dress it up.”
Stevie smiled uncomfortably and chewed a hangnail, staring at the table.
“I know Gow didn’t talk like that,” I said.
“Can I have an éclair?”
“As long as you stop lying to me.”
He ordered an éclair. The prawn and mayonnaise roll was the most expensive one on the menu, and the éclair was eighty pence. I think he’d checked it out beforehand to make sure he got good value.
Yeah, Gow did talk about Susie. Stevie glanced at my notebook, looked away, sipped his tea, and then smiled as if he was going to be sick. Gow wasn’t nice about women generally. He said things, pretty bad things, actually. Stevie didn’t agree with them, oh no, he doesn’t think about women that way, but, well, ye know how men are together. His cake arrived and he took a bite.
I laughed and jollied him along. We don’t mean it, I said. Stevie jumped on that, agreeing through a mouthful of pastry; no, nothing means anything, it’s just guys talking, like, you know how guys are. This gave me reason to surmise that Gow had said sexual things about Susie, definitely, but Stevie wasn’t about to tell me what they were. I wrote “JUST GUY STUFF” in the notebook so he could read it upside down.
He took another bite of his éclair and frowned at the page, taking about a minute to read the three complex words. Some of the cream had squished out of the side of the cake and got stuck to his chin. In the ensuing conversation it began to look more and more like a big lump of dried cum.
I saw him mouth the words “just guy stuff” and relax. “Gow said he fancied her, ye know, thought she was good-looking. A nice person and such.”
“Look, Stevie, you can tell me what he said, I won’t be offended.” He looked unsure, so I added, “Susan and I have been living separate lives for a few years now.” He still looked confused, so I spelled it out for him. I said I’d been seeing other people and Susie was free to do the same.
Stevie nodded nervously and took another bite. He kept his mouth open as his molars ground the pastry and cream and chocolate together, his tongue pushing the pale lumpy shit forward in his mouth in a rolling bovine rhythm. “Whose idea was that?” he asked.
“It was hers,” I said, acting resentful, making it okay for him to start in on her.
“And whose is the kiddie, then?” I almost leaped across the table. I was prepared to lie to him and make myself a passive, cheated-on husband, but I’d die rather than denounce Margie.
“Mine,” I said firmly, “she’s mine.”
Anyway, the fib worked. Gow talked about Susie a lot. He thought she had lovely tits. Stevie looked up at me and waited for me to punch him. When I didn’t hit him or seem annoyed, he carried on, increasingly astonished by my passivity. Gow’d wanted to fuck her when he first came into the hospital. He thought she was an uppity cow who needed bringing down a peg or two. Gow liked quiet women. Susie wasn’t his usual type, but he did like to tame women. He wanted to make them beg for it and then give it to them. He talked about them begging a lot. Stevie snickered when he reported this, as if he had experience of this scenario, as if any woman had ever begged Stevie to do anything but fuck off. He leaned across the table, lowering his voice. The cream/cum was still stuck to his chin and made him look like a porno gimp. Gow told him about this one time when he met a woman in a bar and she looked like a model but with great tits, right? She took him into the ladies’ room. “I use the term loosely,” he said smugly, obviously repeating a line of Gow’s.
I couldn’t stand him to be confident for a second longer, so I interrupted him to ask whether he was indicating a future intention to use the term “loosely” or whether he was using the term “ladies” in a reckless and all-inclusive manner?
He didn’t understand and got flustered, so I repeated myself in a different way. The last one, he meant the last one. Anyway, this twat took him
into the toilet in a pub and lifted her skirt and she had on stockings, garter belt, split crotch, the lot. Stevie went on about all the stuff she did and how she loved it and rubbed her tits on the dirty mirror, etc., etc. It was a jazz-mag story, obviously made up by Gow, either because he was an unimaginative fantasist or to take the piss out of Stevie Ray. Stevie believed it anyway. He went pink telling me about it; I’m sure he had a semi, it took him ages to sit back.
I said I’d heard that a lot of women wrote to Gow in prison.
Stevie nodded. “Yeah,” he said, licking his fingertips lasciviously. “ Lot of women sent in nude pics of themselves. A lot of them were done in, baggy tits and faces like buckets, but Andy used to say this about them: he’d say, ‘It’s just a hole, isn’t it?’ ”
It’s just a hole. I didn’t know what to say. I nodded in shock and offered to get him another éclair. He said no but he’d take a strawberry tart instead. He ate it with gusto, getting jam on the corner of his lips. I couldn’t stop looking at the wreckage of his mouth and chin and thinking menses/cum, cum/menses.
I asked about Susie again, and he paused.
“I’ll tell you what he told me. Right?”
I nodded.
“This isn’t me saying this, he told me this, right?”
I knew it had to be pretty bad, but when I heard what he had to say, I wanted to laugh. It got more and more difficult not to laugh as the conversation wore on. I knew then that she had never touched him, that she might have been in love with him, but my wife, my darling Susie, never ever had sex with Andrew Gow.
Gow told Stevie that Susie sucked him off in the office once. It was when she first came to Sunnyfields, back in ’94. She walked right around the desk and did it. I managed to keep a straight face. Stevie was watching me carefully. I nodded and he carried on with the description. I wanted him to go on and say something else, more balm for my bitter heart. And he did as well.
It was rubbish, a series of schoolboy lies about a woman Gow’d never even touched, and I knew it. Gow saying that Susie had sucked him off once was probably intended to make it believable, but if she’d done it once, he’d have said she did it six times. And she’d never do it in the office. She might have sucked off a stranger, maybe even a dangerous stranger, but she wouldn’t have done it in her office in ’94. She was far too ambitious. Then Stevie handed me the big prize.
He said that Susie’d taken it up the arse for Gow because she didn’t want to get pregnant. She knew about these things, being a doctor. I almost clapped my hands with glee. Susie wouldn’t have worried about getting pregnant because she would have used a condom, she wasn’t into anal, and she’d never have anal sex with a man who was arrested cruising a red-light district. The HIV risk factors in that scenario are worse than throwing yourself into the stick bin at a needle exchange. Stevie was in full flow now. It was as if he was so pleased I hadn’t punched him that he couldn’t stop himself. I sat back and let him pad the story out, where they did it and how often, once in this closet, once in that room. Susie asked Gow to take off her “panties,” another jazz-mag term. I actually got bored listening to him. I got some money out and held up the bill for the waitress, and the reader’s-letter recitation tailed off.
“Is that all you want to know, then?” he asked.
I said yeah, thanks for coming, hope you enjoyed the pastries. He did, he did, did I have my car with me? He wanted a lift. I said yeah, but I was in a hurry, sorry. Did he see a lot of Gow and Donna after he got out? Well, he said, they went up north a week after his release. Stevie brought Chinese food over to Donna’s house in Kirki the night before they left. Whose idea was it to go up north? Donna’s, he said. She really wanted to go. Gow couldn’t stay in Glasgow really, too many guys wanting a piece of him. Couldn’t even go out to a pub for a drink, but it was Donna’s dream to live up there. She’d booked the hotel, and they were going to go and look for a house and jobs in Sutherland. I said it wasn’t a very good plan. There was no work in Sutherland, and the seasonal waitressing jobs would all be gone in September, but Stevie just shrugged. Did Donna know anyone there? No. Had she been there before? No, but she’d seen pictures.
I said I wanted to ask him one more thing: Where was Lara Orr, and how could I get hold of her? He wiped his face as if he’d just realized he was covered in food.
“I’ve not seen her for ages,” he said. “No one has. She’s probably gone back to Liverpool.”
Never mind, I said, and, once we were outside, thanks for coming to see me. Stevie flattened his hand over his bald head again, looked as if he was about to ask for money, but stopped. He nodded to himself and walked away, pulling his collar up, even though it wasn’t windy anymore and it wasn’t raining.
I felt great as I drove back to nursery. Susie hadn’t slept with Gow. She might have been madly in love with him, the twisted little prick may even have been the love of her life, but they didn’t have sex in prison, I was certain of it. And she’d been sacked before his appeal and was at home the whole time after he got out, so it didn’t happen then.
I’m going to visit Susie in a few days and I’m actually quite excited. I’m going to ask about the hotel letter and about Gow. I hope she appreciates the trouble I’m going to. I’ve spent hours up here working on this.
* * *
But I was going to write about nursery. I had taken Margie there this morning with a light heart and slight tingle in my loins. I wondered if Harry’s mum would be there, and, sure enough, she was wearing a gravitationally impossible low-cut top. I think it was actually a low back and she’d put it on the wrong way around by mistake. She must have gotten dressed in the dark. It is dark until about eight-thirty, give or take, and she has got three boys to get dressed and fed. The straps of her white bra were showing, and she kept having to yank the top down, showing the tops of the cups.
She didn’t come over but gave me the eye, which I liked because she’d been so full on before, and not coming over suggested a little reticence. I went over and said something inoffensive like, “Hi, how are you today?” She laughed loudly, covering her mouth and pulling her top down at the hem.
What was she laughing at? Was she laughing at me? She seemed quite nervous, so I tried to diffuse the situation by saying, “Calm down,” and she laughed again and said she didn’t know what I meant. I just backed away and left, waving good-bye to Margie on the way out. She was rubbing the blackboard with a dolly’s legs and ignored me.
I felt ridiculous when I got outside. What was the woman laughing about? Have I managed, in among all my other failures, to be bad at flirting, too? Maybe she was just nervous? She seems desperate. There’s something of the bunny-boiler about her: a slight craziness around the eyes.
If Susie doesn’t get out or for some other reason our marriage splits up, I’ll be back on the dating scene. I don’t know if I could stand all that guessing what people mean and getting knocked back and putting your emotional equilibrium in the hands of another person. In marriage at least there’s an understanding that you can’t just get dumped out of hand, that they definitely did like you once. It might have been long, long ago in a galaxy far away, but they definitely found you attractive and interesting at some point in the interaction.
I’m sure not all women are like Harry’s mum; it must just be some of them. But what if all the ones who aren’t like that are still married and only the ones like Harry’s mum are back out on the range? What a depressing thought. I think I’d rather stay single than try to negotiate all that crap again. I don’t want an intense face-to-face relationship. I want someone I can take for granted; someone I can not reply to when they call me from the other room. The older I get, the less often I meet new people that I can stand the sight of.
Anyway, after my encounter with Stevie Ray and his jazz-mag visage, I drove back to nursery to get Margie. One of the babies had been sick, and the heat was turned up high, so the whole room stank to high heaven of hot sour milk. Harry’s mum was there agai
n, hanging about near the toy cupboard, wearing a different T-shirt. She came toward me through the sour fog. As she approached, I could see her getting angry, and she said, “Don’t look at me like that.” I explained that I was wrinkling my nose at the milk smell, not at her, but she stayed annoyed and demanded to know how I was. I said I was fine, sorry, sorry. How was she? How were the boys getting along? Yes, nursery was super for them. She paused and whispered she’d like to call me, she had my number from the birthday party list. I said that would be nice, please do, and she tugged at the hem of her top, pulling it down and in.
She’s gorgeous.
chapter twenty-three
YESTERDAY I FINISHED WRITING UP STEVIE RAY AT ELEVEN-THIRTY and went downstairs to watch telly. Feeling pretty smug, I remembered the video in Box 2. Yeni and Margie were in bed. I decided to watch it.
I sat on the settee, watching the TV with one eye, remote ready to hand in case I needed to turn it off quickly. The index showed that there were three items on it: a bit of home video followed by a one-hour documentary shown on Channel Four in February and then another portion of home video buried deep at the end of the tape, hidden beyond seventeen minutes of white noise and snow. If we didn’t have the indexing facility on the tape player, you’d never watch to the end. The dates on the index show that the documentary was aired on television a good month before the last bit of home video. I wasn’t sure which of them was relevant at first, but actually they’re all relevant and tie into the research she’d started with Harvey Tucker.
Box 2 Document 9 Videotape
PROGRAM 1: HOME MOVIE 1 3/1/98 3:18 P.M.
As it started, the image of a gray little office was tugged down the screen in jagged horizontal lines. Finally it resolved itself and, offscreen, Harvey Tucker says, “Brilliant.”
I made extensive notes as I watched.
The room looks small and ugly. There is a shelf of books on the far wall above a metal desk. I can’t actually read the titles, but I recognize the spines of some of the books and can see Susie’s sports bag under the desk. This is her office, but I’ve never seen inside because she works in a secure institution. It is small and gray and low. Susie taped interviews with some of her patients, I remember. She brought the prison’s camcorder home to film Margie’s first Christmas. On one of the bookshelves, up high near the top of the wall, a tiny bright glint catches my eye. It is her wedding ring. The design we got was quite chunky, and she takes it off to work, just like I do when I’m typing things up here. That’s how she lost it. She told security she went to put it back on again after typing a report and found it gone.