Deception aka Sanctum

by Denise Mina

  It’s so unprofessional, so out of character, that I freeze the tape and rewind to see the buildup. It seems to have come out of nothing. Susie is angry, and she isn’t hiding it. “Do you think you’d be safe with him?”

  “Who’d care?”

  “Donna, you have to learn to take care of yourself. You’re twenty-three. It’s time to grow up.”

  Donna knows she has won a small victory. She looks at Susie and raises her eyebrows twice, like Groucho Marx, and then she glances at the camera, remembering it is there. She lowers her eyes.

  “Where are you from, Donna?”

  “We’ve been through this.”

  “Where did you start out?”

  “ Leicester.”

  “You don’t sound as if you’re from Leicester.”

  Donna looks up, coquettish and innocent. “Is that wrong of me?”

  “What area of Leicester?”

  “Highfields,” she says. “The Highfields area.”

  “Is that near the middle or on the outskirts?”

  It’s obviously a test, to see if she even knows where it is. Donna meets it full on. “Near the middle. Why are you annoyed at me, Suse?”

  Suse? Excuse me, Suse? Suse’s shadow can clearly be seen on the floor. She stands up and stubs her cigarette out in an ashtray. Messy tendrils of shadow spill across the floor like ink in water. She takes one step over to the camera tripod and switches it off.

  * * *

  Afterward I wished I hadn’t watched the video. It’s spoiled my optimistic feeling. Now I feel I have a lot of uncomfortable questions to ask Susie when I see her, only this time I really don’t know what they are.

  chapter twenty-four

  LOOKING OVER ALL OF THE MATERIALS, I’M STRUCK BY HOW MUCH has happened since Donna first wrote to Gow in February. Donna wasn’t bright, but some people are catalysts, and dramatic events follow them wherever they go. Like Morris, whose wife has put him out now- Nurse Julie wasn’t bluffing. Donna was only twenty-three when she first wrote to Gow. She had been divorced and orphaned and was already starting a new life in a strange country. I hadn’t even graduated when I was twenty-three. Donna and Gow married within two months of the first letter; the new Ripper murders started a month after Donna’s first letter; and then Susie got sacked in June for stealing his files. The campaign for Gow’s release had gathered momentum with a number of celebrity endorsements; he was out of prison by September, and he and Donna were both dead by the end of the month. Donna didn’t even live to see her twenty-fourth birthday.

  Box 2 Document 10 News in Brief, Glasgow Herald, 3/6/98

  In a disturbing replay of the Glaswegian Riverside Ripper murders of the early nineties, the body of a young woman was found next to the River Clyde yesterday. The woman, whom police have not yet named, was found dead under the city’s Kingston bridge. A team working on the renovations to the bridge arrived for work yesterday morning to find the woman’s body under a tarpaulin. The police had no comment to make as to a connection with the river murders but would say that the woman was not a prostitute and that there were significant differences between this and the 1993 cases.

  Andrew Gow, the man convicted of the Riverside Ripper murders, recently hit the headlines when he remarried in Sunnyfields State Mental Hospital. He has maintained his innocence since shortly after his conviction. His new wife, Ms. Donna McGovern, was unavailable for comment yesterday.

  I remember these new cases unfolding in the press and on television. I remember us watching the news reports about it. It seems strange, given how significant those events were to become in our lives, but I only really remember two specific conversations about it all.

  One exchange was in the front room. It was spring and the room was bright, the window was wide open and outside the garden was very green and lush. I was ironing, and Margie was in the kitchen with Yeni. The television was on for the news, and Susie was slumped on the settee. We’d had an argument about her smoking in the house. Within a few short months Susie’s position on domestic smoking had shifted from regarding it as a form of child abuse to arguing that it was justified if Margie was out of the room or looking away. We had fought about it, and afterward, when we reached a stalemate, the argument hung between us like a bad smell.

  Have you noticed, I said, trying to be cheery, how they’re using more attractive photographs of Gow on the telly as the campaign for his release gathers momentum?

  She asked me straight out, “Do you think he’s attractive?”

  I laughed and asked her whether she was serious.

  “Yeah, I’m serious.” She pulled herself upright and looked at me with a face like an angry little fist. “Do you think he’s attractive?”

  I put the iron down. I didn’t think he was attractive, but in the old mug shot they used to use on TV, he was scowling, looked very malnourished, and had black bags under his eyes. (He was working nights, she said. Driving the cab. That’s why he looked so tired.) But in the new photos, taken more recently, he was smiling and seemed healthy.

  Susie nodded into her lap and stood up, announced that she was going outside for a smoke, and left me alone to finish her blouses. At the time, I didn’t think Gow’s case was particularly relevant to us. Susie worked at Sunnyfields and knew him, of course, but everyone was talking about the campaign. It was big news.

  I only remember one other specific conversation. We were out for dinner with Evelyn and Morris. I remember it because afterward Susie said she didn’t want to go out with them again, that she didn’t like getting that drunk anymore. It shocked me because I didn’t think you could drop friends you’d made at university. I hadn’t stopped to think what they were like- they were just Morris and Evelyn. But Susie was right: they are a bit seedy. They always remind me of how old we’re getting and how undignified and ugly being pissed in a restaurant is. That night Evelyn needled Morris incessantly, making digs about money or something. They’re not nice company, but the blessing is they both like a drink, so you can get pissed and not listen. I have to admit that they used to make me feel smug because at that time we were happier together than they were, and Susie hadn’t let herself go and get massively fat like Evelyn did after the kids.

  We were all extra pissed because we went to a new restaurant and there was something wrong with the food so they gave us a couple of bottles of free wine. Morris kept asking Susie about Gow and the murders, and Susie insisted that she couldn’t talk about it because of her professional interest. Morris thought her unwillingness to gossip was ridiculous, and they had a heated argument about confidentiality. Morris said that it was just a principle, not a law, and wasn’t meant to be applied absolutely. Susie said it actually was a law and she’d bloody hate to be one of Morris’s patients. He was quite annoyed by that, which is unusual for him, and he insisted that his patients didn’t deserve the level of care he gave them. They were assholes. Anyway, if she was half the psychiatrist she made out she was, she’d have spotted that the guy was innocent before the real murderer started up again.

  Susie leaned across the table. “He is the real murderer.”

  “How d’you know?” said Evelyn. “Really- how d’you know?”

  “For God’s sake,” said Susan quietly. “There was DNA evidence that he did it.”

  “Nah,” said Morris, wagging a smug finger. “The bleach spoiled the sample.”

  “Morris, you’re supposed to be a scientist,” said Susie. “Bleach can kill cells stone dead, but it can’t reconfigure the structure of DNA strands.” (She said something like that. It was actually a neater summation of the scientific impossibility in six words or less.)

  “Bullshit!” shouted Morris, who really was very drunk. “He’s an innocent man. We should let the guy out so’s he can bang his new missus.”

  But Susie was leaning over her plate. “He is a killer.” A vein stood out on her temple, and I knew she was absolutely furious. None of us, myself included, knew whether she was really certain of his guilt o
r indignant about the slur on her professional reputation.

  Morris, never a man to sit back from a fight with a woman, topped up her glass. “Oh, yeah? Why would someone kill this new lot then?”

  “Well, obviously someone wants him out,” said Susie.

  Morris snorted. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “So,” said Evelyn, filling her wineglass. “Do you think it’s- what’s her name- Maria?”

  “Donna. Her name’s Donna, and no, it’s not her.”

  “’Cause that would be quite romantic,” slurred Evelyn. “In a sick way.”

  “He cuts their tongues out,” Susie said flatly. “He rapes them and cuts their tongues out and douses their wounds in bleach and leaves them to bleed to death. Is that romantic?”

  It would have been the start of a big scene if we’d been sober, but, too liberally lubricated, the conversation jolted onto another track.

  Although those are the only two conversations I remember in detail, when I look back over the whole spread of things Susie said at the time, I know she was sure of two things: that Gow’d committed the original murders, and whoever was killing the new lot of women wanted him out of prison. She was probably right, because the murders stopped as soon as Gow was released.

  * * *

  I hunted about in the boxes and found this Fergus Donagh article from the same time. This article isn’t as good as the previous series of articles. The Guardian prints photos of their featured writers, little disembodied heads next to their articles, and Donagh has ballooned since the ’94 series. He has that bug-eyed look of a drunk whose liver is about to explode. Come to think of it, I never see his byline anymore.

  Box 2 Document 11 Article by Fergus Donagh, “The Revival of the Riverside Ripper,” Guardian 4/29/98

  It is cold as I stand by the river. A damp wind picks up and blows my hair around. My ears are numb. The gawkers are gathered beyond the police tape, breathing in the rank smell of bleach, hoping for a glimpse of the raised platform where the girl’s mutilated body was found. We are standing under the Kingston bridge, a motorway overpass built in the seventies…

  Well, that’s wrong, for a start.

  and already crumbling. The workmen were adding support to the two giant pillars on either side of the river. On the one hundredth day of the job, they came to work and found the murdered body of a teenage girl immolated on the raised platform.

  The talk in the crowd is of the ’93 murders, secondhand tales of women who narrowly escaped Gow’s hand, of the people who knew him, were at school with him, danced with him, sold him his daily newspaper. They swear it couldn’t have been him. Everyone has always known he was innocent. Even the people who brayed at his wife outside the court knew that he was innocent. We should let him go.

  The police are certain it’s a copycat killing. The official line is that Gow is guilty and this is a one-off by someone who has read a lot about it. But Glasgow is a tight-knit community, and gossip spreads quickly. Aspects of the original crimes have been reproduced perfectly. There are rumors of a DNA match with the original sample.

  QC Alistair Swindon has strong feelings about the way the original investigation was conducted. Gow was a habitual confessor, although admittedly for very minor crimes. Swindon argues that apart from his confession, the sole piece of evidence to link him to the crimes was the presence of blood matching the victims in the back of his cab. He had no history of violence, and the DNA sample used was too degraded to give a reliable match.

  Swindon has been arguing for an appeal for several years, and as one of Scotland ’s most prominent human rights advocates, his voice carries a lot of weight. “Convictions based on confessions alone are rarely watertight, and this holds particularly true for high-profile cases when the police are under pressure to get a conviction.”

  A blond man, Swindon has been a member of the Commission…

  “A blond man”? This is rubbish. Donagh is jumping about all over the place. The germ of the article is that the conviction was a bit dubious and some people thought Gow should get an appeal. Donagh managed to drag it out for two pages with a supplementary column on page thirteen.

  The article is accompanied by a moody twilight photograph of the underside of the Kingston bridge looking from the north to the south bank. The bridge’s giant supporting strut is in the foreground, echoed on the far bank by the other leg, and a concrete ribbon is strung between the two. On the south bank the red and yellow neon lights of the entertainment complex cut through the gray evening. Susie and I used to go to the movies there. We liked it because it had a huge parking lot right outside the cinema doors and a Häagen-Dazs store. The last time we went there together was very subdued. Susie had just been sacked, and I bought her a big ice cream as a surprise while she was away at the toilet. She acted pleased, but she didn’t want it. She nibbled at it until the lights went down and then sat the cup under her chair. I only know because she knocked it over on the way out, splashing gooey pink melt on her shoes. I don’t even remember what film we saw, although I do remember coming home across the Kingston bridge, driving through the dark into the high glittering heart of the city and wondering if the area below the bridge was still cordoned off. They’d found the second body by then. Poor Gina Wilson. No one will ever forget her name.

  I miss Susie now. Since seeing Stevie Ray I’ve been thinking about her fondly again and wishing she was here with me, in our bed, making tea, padding around upstairs and coming down to watch the news. The hotel letter probably means more to me than it would to an appeals court. Maybe she’s already told Fitzgerald about it and he said it didn’t matter, leave it, forget it.

  I’m going to see her the day after next, and it feels like a date. I haven’t been eating as much in the past couple of days and feel quite slim. I’m going to go and get my hair cut tomorrow, short at the sides. I might even buy something new to wear.

  chapter twenty-five

  IT’S FOUR-FORTY-FIVE AND IT’S ALREADY DARK OUTSIDE.

  Last night I got a phone call from an unnamed newspaper, wanting to know about Dr. Susie and my swinging marriage. I hadn’t a clue what they were talking about. They told me that Stevie Ray, true to bastard form, had sold the story of our sex-mad marriage to the paper and they wanted my comments. Could I tell them the name of the woman I’ve been having an affair with for several years? I told them to fuck off and hung up, which was probably the worst thing I could have done, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I immediately realized that I should have been nicer and said Stevie Ray got the wrong end of the stick. I tried to call the journalist back but I didn’t have his name or even the name of the paper. I dialed the last-caller ID code, but it said that the caller had withheld the number, a message that usually means they’ve come through a switchboard. I couldn’t very well phone all the newspapers and ask which one was about to expose me.

  I lay in bed wide awake, imagining Susie seeing the newspaper in prison and crying; imagining Margie as a grown-up coming across a copy of the paper and throwing it aside in disgust. First thing this morning I phoned Fitzgerald, livid, and asked about suing. He sighed, sounding uninterested, and said was there a grain of truth in it? I said no, there wasn’t. It was a complete fabrication and they’d misunderstood something I said to someone. He sounded quite skeptical and hemmed and hawed and said, well, if you said it in any context they can publish it. To be honest, the smart thing to do is let it go. I should only sue if I wanted to (a) bankrupt myself and (b) have the allegations reprinted again and again in the papers for the next three years.

  I mentioned the Durness phone-box thing and said I’d been thinking about getting a file together for the appeal about the press coverage and he said no, the papers have lawyers working for them and have to screen the articles before they’re published. So forget it. I didn’t want to mention the Donna letter in case Susie has already talked to him about it. I don’t want him thinking she doesn’t tell me things.

  Changing the subject with hop
e-crushing swiftness, Fitzgerald told me that the reports are all in and Susie’s sentencing hearing has been moved forward to five days’ time.

  * * *

  Susie will see the newspaper article. I know she will. Some bastard will show it to her and she’ll phone here, angry and wanting an explanation. It could cloud her appeal. It’ll certainly cloud the coverage of her appeal. What the hell can I say to her? That I’m tramping around making us vulnerable to people like Stevie Ray because I didn’t believe her? Although, subsequent to digging about in her private papers, I think she’s probably not a complete and utter liar. If the article isn’t in the papers tomorrow morning before I go to visit, I could try to explain preemptively. I could set the ground.

  I shook all the way through my haircut. Afterward I went for a run. I ran for about six miles, until my knee hurt, long after my lungs began to smart. I was trying to tire myself out, aiming for ten consecutive minutes when I’m not absolutely furious. I bought some of those marzipan bars to bribe myself through the morning. I’ve eaten three of them already and I feel sick. I’ve had to hide the others from myself in the fridge.

  This from an overlooked C-drive file titled C:/misc/evington.doc. I wouldn’t have bothered with it because I thought you could only keep documents in the “My Documents” file, but I’d left the mouse pointer resting on it while I had a sip of tea and a blue box popped up on the screen that said

  Author: Dr. Susie Harriot

  Title: She called from Durness and I had to go. It’s over. Sh

  I opened the file and here it is, cut and pasted in its entirety:

  She called from Durness and I had to go. It’s over. She shouldn’t have called me. There are loads of people she could have called who were nearer. She should have called the police, or I should have called them, because who the hell am I to think I can make anything all right for anyone? I thought it was my big chance and I could talk to Andrew. I know he respected me and would be surprised and pleased to see me. She said he was in a highly volatile state and had hit her several times. I knew he would need help, that it would be a shock being released just like that after five years without any training for freedom or help or support.