Deception aka Sanctum

by Denise Mina

  Lara Orr hove into view wearing a nightie, a dressing gown to match Stevie’s, and a pair of low navy blue court shoes with fluffy yellow socks inside them. She’s petite, nervously thin, and unattractive. Her eyes are so small they make her seem almost inbred.

  “Wit’s he doing here?” she snapped unpleasantly.

  “I brought him in for a cup of tea.”

  “Look at the mess you’ve made of the place,” she said, making it sound as if he’d done it all that evening. “I’m ashamed to have people in and you’re bringing folk in here…” She glanced at me, sphincter-mouthed. “It’s twelve at night. And we don’t even know him. Ye shouldnae invite folk in.”

  “Lara, shut it. Away and make some tea,” said Stevie, affectionately.

  “Naw,” said Lara, looking me up and down and relaxing slightly. “You make some tea.”

  “It was me invited him in. You make the tea.”

  Lara was looking at my coat, and I could tell she liked it. I was expecting her to leave the room to make tea, but she clopped across to the sideboard and turned on a kettle that was sitting there. Stevie saw me staring open-mouthed at the arrangement.

  “I’m doing up the kitchen as well,” he explained, inviting me to sit on the sofa.

  How extraordinary. I didn’t want to sit on anything in my nice new coat, so I used the excuse of there being only two places on the settee and, lifting my coat at the back, balanced myself on the arm.

  “I don’t like living like this,” snapped Lara at me.

  “Neither of us likes it,” retorted Stevie.

  “Wasn’t me that done it,” said Lara.

  Stevie shrugged. “It’s just temporary,” he said.

  “It’s been temporary for nearly two years.”

  He swiveled around. “Lara,” he implored. “You’re nipping my fucking head. Give us peace.”

  She raised her voice. “You give me peace,” she shouted.

  Stevie laughed softly and turned back to me, spreading his hands in an appeal for reason. “She could start a fight in an empty house,” he said. If anyone had done that to my house, I’d have slapped them from sunup to sundown.

  Lara busied herself at the sideboard, making us each a mug of tea. She asked me if I wanted sugar, and when I said yes, she shook some into the cup from a paper packet, stirring it with a suspiciously dun teaspoon. I think it was filthy but couldn’t see it across the room. Lara saw me looking concerned and used her body to block my view. She gave us both disgusting, cloudy-looking tea in stained cups, and Stevie fell on his, sipping it with great relish as though it were a delicate soup. I wasn’t about to drink mine. For an amuse-gueule, Lara opened a green bag of crisps and took out a handful for herself before handing them to me. She was still eating when she lit up a Rothmans from a packet in her dressing-gown pocket. I took out my Marlboros and offered them around. Stevie took one and put it behind his ear (for later, he explained). I sat the tea on the floor and pretended to be concerned with picking bits out of my handful of crisps and smoking. I found Lara a bit frightening. I didn’t want her having a go at me.

  “I hear they found Donna’s body,” she said, smoking through a mouthful of cheese and onion. She opened her mouth to masticate, and smoke clung to the crisps, a wet landscape of smoldering rubble.

  I nodded. “Yeah. Sad. Sorry, do you hate her?”

  “No,” said Lara genuinely. “We weren’t friends. I never met her, but I was pleased that she took him off my hands.”

  “I knew her,” smiled Stevie, sitting to attention. “I’ve got nice pictures of her.”

  I looked at Lara. “But I thought you were divorced from Gow long before she came on the scene?”

  “Oh, aye. I divorced him, so he was going to kill me. He used to phone me and write letters. He was always talking to Stevie about what he’d do if he caught me.” Stevie nodded helpfully. “I didn’t get any peace until she came along.”

  “That’s why we’ve never told anyone we were together,” said Stevie. “He’d have killed her if he got out.”

  “Do you really believe he was capable of killing anyone?”

  “Listen,” said Lara with conviction. “Never you mind what the courts say. He killed those women.”

  “So you’re not sad that he’s dead?”

  “No. I’m pleased,” said Lara Orr. “When he was out, I had to go and stay in my sister’s trailer in Prestwick to get a sleep. I didn’t feel safe.”

  Stevie patted her knee. “That’s why I saw him before he left for up north,” he said. “I wanted to make sure he went away.”

  “I knew he’d kill Donna.” She sat back smugly, shaking her head. “Didn’t I, Stevie? I said, didn’t I?”

  Stevie nodded, first at her and then at me.

  “But he didn’t kill Donna,” I said tentatively. “The court says that my wife killed her.”

  “Naw.” Lara was certain. “ Not Dr. Susie.” She was talking about it as if it were a soap opera. “If you ask me, he killed Donna and someone else killed him. He was a killer through and through.”

  We sat on the settee and finished the bag of crisps, passing it among us. A freezing mist hung in the room, leeching the heat from the gas fire. I glanced at my watch. It was twelve-thirty-three. If I had been at home, I’d have been up here getting miserable.

  “Do you want to see my pictures of her?”

  Stevie got out a pile of photos from the sideboard and came and stood next to me, handing them to me one at a time, making sure I looked at them before he gave me the next one. They were big publicity shots he’d taken of Donna to sell to magazines. They weren’t good photos, she didn’t look relaxed or pretty, but there were a lot of them, and I realized that Stevie was looking to sell them to me. The way he went about it was clever too: he took out the pile of photos and started flicking through them saying I might like this one better, what about this one, isn’t that nice? Of course this one’s only two quid because it’s a bit blurry. He stood too close to me, his soft womanly thigh tightly against mine so that I’d have agreed to almost anything to get away from the itchy heat gathering between our skins. There were a lot of photos.

  “Where did you get these?” I said, showing I wasn’t being shaken down.

  “I took them,” he said quite proudly. “Donna didn’t agree to using these. She didn’t like herself in these ones.”

  Stevie carried on flipping through: Donna smiling with red eyes; Dragon Donna (little trails of smoke trickling out of her nostrils); Donna outside, her back to a strong wind (the skirt of her coat blown up); Donna at a bus stop with one eye shut and the other rolled back. You could see her teeth in that one, which was unusual.

  “Stevie, why do you think I would want to buy publicity shots of the woman my wife is accused of killing?”

  “For your book,” said Stevie simply.

  I looked at Lara. She shook her head. Stevie nodded and carried on going through the photos.

  “I’m not going to write a book, Stevie. And I’m not going to buy any photos from you, either. If I did you’d only go to the papers with the story.”

  He thought about it for a moment, then came around the other side, sat down on the settee, and looked up at me. “But,” he said, “that’s not much of a story, is it? Man buys photograph?”

  I didn’t want to fight with them, so we sat looking at the photos until we had all finished our cigarettes. Stevie turned to an indoors one of Donna leaning toward the camera across the top of a wooden surface. She was wearing a purple and white tie-dye top that swept down to her cleavage and a gold crucifix dangling between her boobs. She was smiling, pressing her lips tight together the way she always did in photos. It was quite a good picture.

  “What’s that scar there from?” I said, pointing to a pink mark that had caught the light.

  “That’s where she broke her collarbone when she was wee,” said Stevie. “It was a bad break. She was in a cast for months.”

  I laughed but they didn’t. Of
course they didn’t. They never went to medical school. They couldn’t know that you can’t use plaster to set a fractured clavicle. Old MacDonald used the same joke every year: it’s like using an envelope to try to set jelly, he’d say, and the second-years would titter. Nor would Stevie know that a bone breaking through skin wouldn’t leave a perfectly straight, small scar at ninety degrees to the bone. Donna’s scar looked like a deep paper cut, it was so straight. And he wouldn’t know that pink scar tissue is relatively recent.

  He could see how intrigued I was by it. “You take that picture,” said Stevie as I stood to leave.

  “I don’t want it,” I said. He shoved it toward me.

  “Take it, take it,” he insisted, pushing it into my hands.

  I’m sure it was meant kindly. Lara scrunched up her nose and crossed her arms, watching Stevie struggle hard to do the right thing.

  “Okay,” I said. “If you tell anyone I took it, I’ll tell the papers about you two, right? And about the state of your hall.”

  Lara blushed at the thought. Stevie followed me outside. “You’ll write a book about all of this,” he said. “One day. You’re clever.”

  “No,” I said, “I won’t write a book.”

  “Of all of us, you’ll write the book.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  He smiled imploringly. “Just make me nice in it.”

  * * *

  I put the photo of Donna up here, stuck her to the edge of the shelf in front of me. Donna McGovern: curiouser and curiouser.

  chapter thirty-three

  I CAME UP HERE TO WRITE ABOUT NURSERY, BUT AS I WAS SETTLING down in the chair, putting the cup of tea down, etc., I was thinking about evington.doc, and I looked at the first letter Donna sent to Gow. It was sent from Evington Road, Evington, in Leicester, but Donna’s address was not Evington. Her father’s house was in Highfields, and her husband moved out a year before her father died. Two months after his death, she was still living there alone when she wrote to Gow. But why would she need a different correspondence address if she was living alone? She’d lived in North Street all her life and sold the place when she came up here. Susie must have called the file “evington” for some reason, perhaps to highlight the discrepancy?

  I’m drawn to write about nursery. The women there are so nice and supportive, and the herd of wee wild kids reminds me that life goes on whether I want it to or not. I only went because Yeni refused to go back and collect Margie. I begged her and then acted stern but it had no effect whatever. I even tried bribery. I offered her a tenner (cheap, I know, but you don’t want people to know you’ve got money; that’s how you end up with none). She turned her nose up at the note and refused me on the pretext that she had “sjchores.”

  “Yeni, leave them,” I said, slumping to my knees. “For the love of God, return my daughter to me, please.”

  “ Lachlan.” She stood above me, her hands firmly on her hips, speaking as if to a naughty brother. “Jyou cannot hide in this house. These story papers: no one believe that for you.”

  I protested for a bit longer, but I felt she was probably right. I’m an unlikely swinger, having a morbid fear of both indignity and public nudity. It’s not written on my T-shirt, but I think it’s probably clear from the shamed way I carry myself. Anyway, I wore my new coat and walked slowly through the park.

  Before Susie’s arrest, the women at nursery were a bit suspicious of me and kept me out of their warm circle. Now when they see me approach the door, they make a point of waving and catching my eye and saying hello. They don’t even really know anything about me other than I’m being made a monkey of in the papers. If I had walked in there this afternoon carrying a severed head, someone would have come up to me and said, “Poor you.”

  Some mums were gossiping at the top of the steps but stopped when they saw me coming. They said hi, calling me by name, and an unknown hand squeezed my elbow compassionately as I brushed past and went downstairs. Inside everyone smiled at me or waved. Harry’s mum wasn’t there, which was a relief and took the onus off me to make conversation or deal with any kind of situation. The small woman who once had vomit on her back came over and said, “Everyone knows that’s crap,” before scuttling off. I don’t think she should swear in front of the kids so much, but I appreciated the gesture of solidarity.

  Margie had bitten a boy on the tummy, and Mrs. McLaughlin needed to talk to me about it. She explained that Margie’s gums hurt and she doesn’t understand that biting doesn’t feel good to everyone else as well as her. She needs the fact brought home whenever she bites anyone. As she talked, I could see her eyes trail across the shoulder and sleeve of my coat, taking in the quality of the material. I put my hand in my pocket so that the front flapped open and she got a glimpse of the lining. I saw her eyes widen at the shock of pale blue. I love this coat. I wonder what else they’ve got in that shop. Later, when we got home, Margie tried to bite me on the arm.

  * * *

  I’ve been thinking all afternoon about Stevie Ray and Lara Orr. It was eleven-thirty before I worked out that Donna’s body’s being found with Susie’s wedding ring has been a terrible shock, and Lara and Stevie’s romance, another shock, may well be completely unrelated. It feels as though one has something to do with the other because they both have a strong emotional resonance for me. It’s the mental equivalent of mashing two mismatched jigsaw pieces together. I was hoping in some way that one might cancel the other out, like red and white wine on a carpet.

  The ring is a giant, tectonic shock because it makes me think that Susie must be guilty after all. I look at my own ring now and feel sick. I took it off and put it on the shelf up here. The overhead light catches the gold, and the ring winks at me. We know, the ring and I, we know she may have done it. Everyone else in the world recognized it ages ago, dealt with it, accepted it, but not me. Only now, a full three months after she was charged, only now can I see her with a small knife in a dark bothy, the ragged, gaping neck of a family packet of wine gums sticking out of her pocket, leaning over Gow, reaching into his open mouth, his hands swelling up, big and purple enough to be mistaken for gloves.

  Accepting it, just as a possibility, here, in the sanctuary of this secret room, feels strangely comfortable. It feels as though I have known all along that she might have done it and have sprained my brain trying not to admit it. Could all that pain and discomfort have come from my lack of acceptance? I wonder whether Susie could have given Gow her wedding ring as a sign of her loyalty. Then he could have killed Donna and left the ring there and Susie killed him in retaliation?

  If she killed either of them, she’s in the right place. If she did it, then Margie is better off growing up without her, and I’m better off by myself. I’m young enough to start again. I’m not in a bad position to be left alone. I live in a lovely house, I have a beautiful daughter who is healthy and adorable. I have access to a lot of money in my bank accounts- really, a lot of money. I’d never have to work again. I could get full-time child care in the house now and actually get down to some writing. I could buy a laptop, get rid of this machine, which is and always will be her machine, and make this my own study.

  I can feel myself separating off from Susie, pulling away and slowly letting the skin between us split. It hurts. I feel the pull and ripping tug on the unripe scab. There will be a right time to pull away completely, but just now I cannot resist the urge, I pull and bleed, just to see what it will feel like to be Susie-free. It’s a phantom pain, because the Susie I thought I was attached to was never there.

  Box 3 (overspill from 2) Document 15 “College Friends Mourn Gina’s Death,” Evening Times, 5/13/98

  A memorial service was held yesterday for Gina Wilson, victim number two in the second spate of Riverside Ripper murders. College and school friends joined Gina’s family outside St. Michael’s Chapel in Mount Vernon.

  “She was a lovely girl,” said a college friend, “we will all miss her.”

  Gina, 19, had been studyin
g catering at the city’s Central College of Catering and Hospitality Management. She was a popular girl who was active in her local church. She had given up her Easter holidays for the past four years to accompany groups of disabled children on pilgrimage to Lourdes.

  I keep transcribing these things, and I don’t know why I’m doing it. All they do is make me recall portions of our lives that I’ve forgotten.

  Box 3 Document 16 “Crimewatch Gina Offers No New Clues,” Glasgow Herald, 5/15/98

  Despite a reconstruction on the BBC’s Crimewatch program, no new witnesses to Gina Wilson’s movements have come forward. What is known is that Gina Wilson went missing on her way home from a nightclub in the city center after a night out with friends. Gina followed the Broomielaw down to the junction of Union Street looking for a taxi and then disappeared. Both her body and that of the previous victim, Nicola Hall, were found in locations bordering the river.

  Ripperologists have warned that the murders could be following the original pattern of the Riverside Ripper slayings.

  I’m trying to break the habit of coming up here in the middle of the night. There’s no point in poring over the articles if there isn’t going to be an appeal. I need to get back to sleeping properly. I come up here and spend hours smoking and hiding.

  * * *

  I was lying in the dark ten minutes ago, thinking about Susie. It is very dark tonight. It’ll get worse before the winter’s over. In the dank dark, right in front of my face, I saw Susie sitting in her cell, a miniature square of white, so small I had to squint hard to see, and my head began to hurt. She is sitting on her bed, looking at her hands. The light above her is bright, and her face is washed out with the whiteness of it. Susie is thinking about killing herself.