by Denise Mina
In the center of the static shot is a black plastic armchair with a low seat and wooden arms. Donna is sitting in it, looking nervously to the right of the camera, banging her knees together, a little I-want-to-please-you smile on her heavily made-up face. Her hair is thick, pulled loosely up in a ponytail at the crown.
In front of Donna’s feet, on the floor, there is a long bright rectangle of sunlight. It is coming from a window behind the camera. The shadow from the window is so crisp that the four vertical bars can clearly be seen and I can make out the sharp shadow of someone’s head and torso. (I assume it is Tucker but later realize it is Susie.)
It’s painful to look at Donna, knowing she’s lying dead somewhere, her voluptuous little body decomposing, waiting to be found. She seems so young and plump and ripe. She is dressed in a button-up black polka-dot dress with a scoop neck and a pair of clunky white court shoes. You don’t really get a sense of her personality in static photos, but she is fidgety and shyer than she seemed in interviews. She covers her mouth when she smiles, which is often, and pulls her dark hair over her face. At one stage I can see her pull the edge of her hair toward her mouth as if she’s going to start chewing it like a small girl. Then she remembers that she mustn’t do that and tucks it away. Her skin is very pink.
“Hi, Donna,” says Susie, and I can hear that she’s smiling.
Donna grins back at her. “Hiya.” She lifts her hand in a little wave, feels embarrassed about the gesture, and then covers her mouth and giggles as though she has done something wrong.
“Now,” says Susie, “if at any point you feel uncomfortable with this, we want you to say so, okay?”
Donna nods.
Tucker emphasizes the point. “Yes. Any time you want us to stop filming, we will.”
“’Kay.”
She smiles at him, and I can hear in his voice that he is smiling back as he adds, “All you have to do is say so.”
Tucker is not delineated in the shadow on the floor, and it makes his voice seem disembodied and God-like, coming from nowhere. Donna never really looks at him, either, so I have no real sense of where he is sitting in the room other than behind the camera somewhere. Donna looks at Susie all the time.
“Are you going to ask me personal things?” She has a lisp, and her accent is all over England. One minute she’s from London, the next she’s from Newcastle. I thought she was from Leicester.
“No,” says Susie in a soothing voice, “nothing terribly private.”
“Good. Good. I don’t want to talk about my Andrew, either.” She shivers with excitement. “I can’t wait to meet him.”
“I want to ask you about your attraction to Andrew and what made you write to him in the first place. Then I want to ask you about your feelings. Will that be all right?”
Donna shrugs and pulls her hair over her face. “S’pose.” Her line of sight falls slightly, and I can tell from the moving shadow on the floor that Susie has just sat down. Only the shadow of her head is still visible.
“Okey-dokey,” says Susie jovially, and Donna smiles again. “When did you first hear about Andrew Gow?”
“I saw him in the papers.”
“You saw his photograph?”
“Yeah, the one where he’s got the green jacket on. The one with the beard.” (I realize suddenly that this is how Susie knew which photo Donna had seen of Gow; this is why she wrote “Donna’s first view of G” on it and told the guy in GLT about it. I feel I’m really making sense of things, as if I’m finally breaking the back of the materials in this study.)
“And you liked that picture, did you?”
Donna rubs her leg and glances guiltily at the camera. “Yeah. I thought he looked kind.”
Susie pauses. “You see, not everyone would take that out of that photograph. To a lot of people he might look a bit scary.”
Donna smiles a little. “Not to me.”
“Do you think he wanted to look kind in the photograph?”
Donna thinks about it. “Hmm. No, probably not, really.”
“How do you think he wanted to look?”
She thinks about it, but I can tell she’s a bit bored and doesn’t really care. “Handsome?”
Susie makes a noncommittal noise and moves on. “What was happening in your own life at the time when you saw the photograph?”
“Oh.” Donna flattens the skirt down over her knees and bows her head. “My divorce was just through, and then my dad died.” She laughs unhappily.
“And how did that make you feel?”
“Dunno. Bit sad? Dad was a bastard and hit us from when I was a bairn… so… it wasn’t all bad, and the divorce was good.”
Tucker interjects. “But you looked after your father? You and your husband lived with him?”
Donna points her chin in Tucker’s direction but keeps her eyes down. “Yeah. Then I put him out and stayed on myself.”
“You must have felt some affection for your father, then?”
“Yeah, dunno.” She turns back to Susie, clearly her preferred interviewer. “Where did you get those shoes?”
Susie is thrown. “Oh,” she says. “Um… Shoe Nation, I think.”
Donna grins and nods. “They’re very nice.” She sits forward, leaning out of frame. “I like that color of brown. Have you polished them up or…?”
“No, they’re patent leather. They’re always that shiny.”
Donna sat back, filling in the screen again. She looks at Susie and there is a pause.
Susie has spotted the fact that Donna shifted the subject from her father and moves on. “Where do you see your relationship with Andrew going?”
It would be a loaded question for a woman who was in love with Gow, but Susie’s voice is steady and my heart leaps. I rewind and watch that bit over and over again until the nuances of her voice are completely lost to me. Truthful, not fucking him, and possibly not even loving him. This has been a great couple of days.
Donna shrugs, and Susie rephrases the question. “Have you thought how difficult it would be if you spent your lifetime visiting this prison? You might have to move up here.”
“I’ve already moved here.” I can see their surprised reactions reflected in her face: she smiles and nods. “Yeah,” she says, almost surprised herself, “I’m renting a house in Lenzie.”
(This is a real estate agent’s lie. The house is in Kirkintilloch, not in Lenzie at all. Lenzie is nearby and twice as posh.)
Susie’s voice is incredulous. “But you haven’t even met him yet. Why did you do that?”
“Because I love him,” Donna says. “I know in my heart that Andrew is an innocent man.”
“Didn’t you have friends or family back in Leicester?”
“Nope.” She doesn’t sound sad about it.
“Did you have a job?”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
Donna looks at her lap. “I worked in a health club, at the reception desk.”
“Do you have a job up here now?” asks Tucker.
“Not yet, but I’ll get one.”
“Don’t you think you’ll miss your old job?” he says. “Don’t you think you’ll be lonely?”
“I don’t feel alone when I’m near Andrew.” She looks at Susie defiantly. “I may not be alone for very long, anyway.”
“Hm,” says Susie. “Do you think Andrew’ll get out?”
“I don’t care if he’s in here for the rest of his life. I’ll stand by him.”
“Have you discussed the rapes and murders with him?”
Donna flinches. I think it’s the use of the word “rapes” that offends her more than murders. “Not those things specifically, no. But he has told me that he was set up.”
“And do you believe him?”
“Of course I do. I trust him.”
“You trust him to tell you the truth?”
“Yes.”
“Are you aware that other women write to him and he writes back?”
Donna
flinches again but carries it off with aplomb. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I know that.”
“Are you aware that other women visit him?”
“Yes, that’s only to be expected. I hope that’ll change after we meet.”
“Will you be disappointed if it doesn’t?”
“Aye, I will. Of course I will. I love him.”
Susie pauses and I can hear the noise of paper turning. “Doesn’t it seem very unfair,” she says, “for him to be locked up in here for years? Doesn’t it make you think he might be guilty?”
Donna is wide-eyed. “It is unfair,” she says. “But life’s unfair.”
“Would you strive to make Andrew’s life fair?”
She sits back and nods. “Oh, yeah.”
“Do you participate in politics, then? Are you involved in any other campaigns?”
“No.” Donna curls her lip. “You can only make life fair for you and yours, not for other people. There’s no point, is there? Fighting for people you don’t even know. People you don’t know are bastards and deserve all they get.”
There’s a smirk in Susie’s voice. “But Andrew isn’t bad?”
“Not to me, no. I know him now, you see.”
Susie shuffles some papers. It feels as if she’s looking for the next question. “I think that’s about it, Donna.”
“Have I done all right?”
“You’ve done very well.”
“Will I be allowed to meet him, then?”
“I’m pretty sure you will. Everything seems fine.”
Susie had the final say in whether Donna gets in or not, but she doesn’t let on. A lesser woman would have hinted at it and put Donna in her debt. “You seemed a bit nervous when you came in earlier, I wondered what you were afraid of.” The shadow on the floor is shifting again and Susie is standing up. “I hope it wasn’t us?”
Donna smiles flirtatiously. “Why, are you going to spank me?” For a millisecond an inadvertent smile bubbles up across her face. She catches herself, glances at the camera, looks at the ground, and by the time she looks back at Susie, the thought is suppressed.
I rewind a couple of times to check my impression, but I’m right. Donna said it, and realized she’d made a mistake as soon as it was out. Could it be some sort of S amp;M thing? Maybe she was into Gow’s being a sadist and is pretending to be a naive idiot so she could meet him? She does seem genuine, I have to say, but there is something odd, definitely very, very odd about her.
PROGRAM 2: DOCUMENTARY
The documentary is about people writing letters to Peter Sutcliffe in prison. Having watched it, I can see why Susie kept it. The women, and they are all women, have written to him on a number of pretexts, each one more flimsy than the last.
One woman was going through a bad time herself, so she went to his trial to cheer herself up and fell in love with him. There are at least two grotesquely mismatched junctions in that sentence. Sutcliffe wrote back, and the letters got more frequent, with more and more exclamation marks and love declarations, just like Donna and Gow. Sutcliffe wrote poems for her as well. She did sketches of him sitting in a garden or at the seaside. I suppose it’s the complement of wasting time on each other, really. Eventually she discovered she wasn’t the only woman writing to him and got disillusioned. She felt that he deceived her. She’d given up access to her children for him. What is most startling is her complete unwillingness to take responsibility for her own behavior. She keeps saying he tricked her into trusting him. The man was in a state mental hospital for the criminally insane, a fact which might have served as something of a red flag to more self-protective women.
Next was a happily married woman, all wax jacket, Labradors, and warbling voice, who had seen him in court. She’d done a drawing of him from memory and wanted to visit him to see how accurate it was. She was, without a doubt, the most self-deluding. She couldn’t even admit that her interest in him had a prurient element. Her husband drove her to the hospital once a month for visits and sat outside in the car.
The third woman was very worrying. She was a little old lady who was certain she had served Sutcliffe and another man in a café during the Yorkshire Ripper murders. The other man, Sutcliffe’s friend, had a Sutherland accent that perfectly matched the voice on the bogus tapes sent to the police, the tapes that claimed responsibility and misdirected the investigation for months. Sutcliffe was released to kill again because he had the wrong accent. The old lady wanted Sutcliffe to confess and admit that he had an accomplice. A retired police officer was interviewed and said that it was plausible for two men to have been responsible for the murders. Her husband sat in the background, in a shadow against a wall, like Boo Radley. His face was blank, and he never spoke or moved until she looked at him. She showed off a lot of photographs of them with Sutcliffe. They were hugging him in one, then handing over Easter cards and Christmas presents. She showed off a collection of letters from Sutcliffe that they kept in plastic folders. The woman seemed to have forgotten all about truth and the mystery man by the time she got near to him. She said over and over that he was like a son to her but eventually got annoyed when Sutcliffe wouldn’t admit to having an accomplice and stopped going to see him. She said he had made her trust him and then betrayed her. Exactly how was never made clear.
They had an expert on, and she said that women who form relationships with killers are all lying to themselves and are likely to be motivated by thrill-seeking and, often, a sense of loss. This ties in neatly with all the stuff in the prison-lovers book. I should start reading it again.
PROGRAM 3: HOME MOVIE 2 6/12/98 4:37 P.M.
The camera blanks and starts again. This is another interview, two weeks before Susie got sacked. Susie and Donna are alone this time. The light from the window is sharp on the floor, the shadow from the bars is crisp but shorter, more square-shaped, which means the sun is higher, so it’s a few months nearer midsummer than the first interview. It’s warm in the room too; lazy dust flecks are suspended in the treacly air. Donna is sitting in the chair, wearing a red dress with a scalloped frill around the hem and the V neck. She has the same white shoes on as before, has a matching white handbag leaning against her leg, and is smoking a cigarette. From Susie’s shadow on the floor, I can see that she is smoking, too. The shadow-Susie lifts her hand to her face and exhales on oily gray cloud. I remember when I really smoked. I remember when I smoked as I walked home, smoked through colds, smoked in hot, airless rooms in the summer and made myself sick.
The tone between Donna and Susie has changed since the last interview. Donna is no longer acting like an insipid transsexual. She has her legs crossed and is sitting back, quite comfortable. Here’s the strange thing about it: Donna seems to be completely in control. She is not disempowered and desperate to be looked after by a strong man as the book says she should be. She has an ashtray balanced on the arm of the chair and tap-tap-taps the ash, watching it and smirking, taking longer over the tapping than she needs to, as though she is avoiding looking up.
“Donna, where are you from?”
Susie sounds very annoyed with her. Donna stops tapping, glancing into the camera. “All over the place.” She has lost her lisp. She covers her mouth with her left hand, looking knowingly at Susie over her fingers. Is she showing off that brand-new wedding ring? I look up and I can see Susie’s wedding ring high up on the bookshelf. Behind the hand Donna smiles broadly.
“How do you feel about these murders, Donna?”
Donna shrugs. “Dunno. It’s a shame.”
“Did the police come and see you? Did they come and tell you about them?”
Donna nods and taps her fag. “Aye, they came to ask me where I was when they happened. Me. Can ye imagine?”
Susie takes a puff on her cigarette. The shadow of her exhalation creeps swiftly across the floor toward Donna’s feet; the edge of an urgent white cloud enters the shot from the right and disperses in the oily air. “This last girl, Gina Wilson, she was a catering student.”
“I know,” says Donna, tapping quickly. “I heard about it.”
“She was nineteen and liked line dancing. She lived with her parents.”
“I already know that,” says Donna, nodding and tapping, tapping and nodding. “I said I heard about it.”
“You heard about ‘her,’ Donna. Not ‘it,’ ‘her.’ Did you know she was Catholic? She went to Lourdes every year-”
Donna leans forward in the chair, eyes open, voice raised. “I HEARD ABOUT IT.” She seems to regret her outburst immediately. She throws herself back in the chair, tapping and grinding her jaw. “It’s hard for me too, you know. I have feelings too.”
“Two young girls are murdered and you have feelings too?”
“My husband has been wrongly imprisoned for five years, and it’s only just coming out now. I’m bound to have some feelings about it.”
Susie sighs and a long, thin stream of clear air punctures the swirling shadow of smoke on the floor. “Do you think he’ll get out, Donna?”
Donna glances at her. “What do you mean?”
“Do you think that Andrew, your husband, will be released?”
Donna shakes her head slowly, still keeping her eyes down. “No.”
“How would you feel if he did?”
Donna looks up and a deep, unspoken fear pinches at the corners of her mouth, taints her eyes. “That would be great,” she says unconvincingly.
“Oh, for fucksake, Donna,” snaps Susie, “stop pissing about.”