Deception aka Sanctum

by Denise Mina

  I see her being locked in her suicide-watch cell, the guard checking her through the eyepiece. Susie’s sitting quite still on the edge of her bed, listening to the scuffling noises outside the door. She stares at her hands, exaggerating her medicated muddle, her jaw hanging open. From outside the door she hears the scratch of metal on metal as the guard slides the eye-shield down and moves on to check the next cell. They probably don’t do that; it would be too obvious a signal that they had finished looking at the prisoner. They probably can’t hear anything inside, but in the bright box Susie has some physical sign that she is no longer being watched. She suddenly becomes animated, moving too quickly as befits her fruit-fly size and mental excitement. She stands up and hurtles over to the wall, pulls a rope made from knotted bed linen out from her sleeve and loops it over the radiator. The light is bright in the room, and I have to squint once more to see. It’s Susie but not Susie; it looks like her but it isn’t her. She hooks the rope around her neck and grins, a smile so wide it almost splits her face. Her eyes are already dead as she sits down short of the floor, her hair jerks up and down, and she hangs, grinning, on the rope’s end. My head is aching.

  I sat up and did breathing exercises, trying to calm myself down. It’s nonsense, like the monsters Margie thinks are in the toilet, or the ankle-grabbing hairy hand under the bed. And then I lay back down and saw her again.

  The prison would have phoned me to tell me if anything had happened to Susie, but I keep thinking that she may have killed herself just one second ago. They are cutting her down, notifying the doctor, getting the death cert, before they contact me. It would take about thirty minutes to an hour for them to contact me, I think. And then I think, no, she’s still alive, but I’m wishing her dead. I’m wishing her dead because it would make everything less complicated for me. Then I could be a sad rich widower and women would want to save me. I could step back from my sadness by writing about love and the empire, or loss and philosophy. Women would flock to me and men would seek my company. It would be so much less complicated than this peculiarly suburban mess of inching betrayal and small insults. Anything would be better than this.

  In the deep dark night, I know Susie stopped loving me a long time ago. What I took to be familiarity was friendship and boredom. She loved Gow, not me, and she killed him and his wife. With a family pack of wine gums in her pocket, she followed them up north and killed them both.

  She didn’t even do me the honor of divorcing me. She just ignored me. No matter how hard I try not to care about her, I do. But she doesn’t reciprocate. You can’t really fake that sort of disinterest.

  She’s the only person I’m close to, the only person I connect with. I don’t remember being close to anyone before I knew her. Now I find that the island I’ve been rowing toward for seven years was a cloud on the horizon and I’m hopelessly adrift.

  chapter thirty-four

  I’VE JUST OPENED THE MAIL. TWO QUARTERLY STATEMENTS ARrived this morning, one from the high-interest savings account and one from the shares portfolio we have with Mercer. Both statements acknowledge the change of address to c/o Fitzgerald amp; Co. They also document substantial amounts of money being moved out of the accounts exactly one month ago, just after her conviction. Susie’s moving money out of my reach, but she can’t get to the bank. That’s why she’s using all her phonecards to call Fitzgerald. It also explains why Fitzgerald keeps acting as if I’m a filthy upstart. He’s been organizing moves of raw cash and putting it where I can’t touch it.

  It’s the lack of trust that I can’t get over. Susie may have had an affair, could have killed two people, has certainly been convicted, and she’s moving the money away from me. She might be able to move the three Mercer portfolios unilaterally, but she can’t move the money from the Imcras account or the Donaldson ISA funds without my consent. If I divorced her, I could get all of it; I’m looking after Margie, after all. There’s a bit of her old man in her; he was a sneaky, secretive old bugger too. She must have glue for blood.

  * * *

  Among all the papers and articles Susie has amassed up here, she has only two things about Gow’s release: this short article and the picture from the newspaper, the one where Gow and Stevie Ray are holding hands and Donna is lurking in the background. I think Susie was losing the urge to collect things about it by this time. She was at home full-time and she didn’t get as many opportunities to buy the papers.

  Box 3 Document 17 “Ripper Appeal Hearing Set for Wednesday,” Daily Telegraph, 8/31/98

  The Riverside Ripper’s appeal against his conviction for a spate of killings of 1993 is to begin on Wednesday.

  At a preliminary hearing in Glasgow, Andrew Gow’s counsel lodged the outline of its arguments. The Crown Office has had four weeks to respond, and the court will begin to hear the case on September 2.

  What’s the point in my doing this? No one cares. No one doubts the verdict but me.

  chapter thirty-five

  YESTERDAY MORNING, I GOT BORED OF TYPING OUT IRRELEVANT news reports and decided to go and visit 48 Evington Road, Leicester. I told Yeni that I might be away overnight. She agreed to look after Margie, saying she’d take her to the park after nursery and they would have a lovely little day together. Then she poked Margie in the tummy, and Margie threw her big bald square head back and laughed like a sailor.

  I went into the hall and called Glasgow Airport, got put through to British Airways, and booked a ticket on my credit card. The plane was due to take off in three hours. It only takes fifteen minutes to get to the airport, so I took my time getting ready, filling a bag with shaving things and deodorant and a change of shirt.

  I left the car in the long-term lot and went off to kill an hour and ten minutes in the terminal. It was quieter than I expected; there were no long, snaking lines inside; I’m used to long lines for planes to Spain in midsummer. It only took me four minutes to check in because I didn’t have any luggage. Upstairs I decided to take a wander around the shops and found an electronics store. I made straight for the counter at the back. The prices were not good, I know that, but I saw myself tapping out notes for essays and short stories in the sidewalk cafés of Paris and Rome, on Gauguinesque beaches, and I bought myself a laptop. It fits neatly into a small black nylon briefcase and weighs eight and a half pounds.

  Breathless with excitement, I checked through security. I asked the official if the X-ray machine could damage my laptop, and he had to ask his superior. It wouldn’t, they assured me. I walked to the end terminal, taking my time, feeling purposeful and professional. I sat next to the other businessmen and looked worried. I kept checking my watch for no real reason.

  It was a small plane with single seats on the right and a few rows of three on the left. In a fit of bravura I had accepted a window seat and now doubted the wisdom of it. Luckily there were only eight of us onboard, and no one sat next to me. I’m not a very comfortable traveler at the best of times and felt pretty sick as the plane took off. I drank a whiskey, less as a calmer than to treat myself for being so brave. It was a clear day outside, and I could see perfectly how far we had to drop and exactly which rocky outcrop my soft head would squelch on. I spent the next hour doing battle with the laptop instructions manual, just to keep my eyes off the window.

  * * *

  I only bought the laptop to spite Susie over the quarterly statements. The idea was that I’d be able to get all of my impressions down at the time and wouldn’t need to write it all up afterward. What I hadn’t realized is that there would be so much about the machine that was different and that I would need to get the hang of. In the end I wrote diary notes in longhand on bits of paper.

  I realized while I was on the plane that even if I could get the laptop going, I’d feel self-conscious writing in front of other people. I talk to myself, I realize; I say out loud the next line I’m going to write whenever I stop to scratch or pick or take a drink of tea, all of which I do often.

  Anyway, once I get the hang of
the laptop, I’ll give this clumsy machine away. Morris is trapped in the house with fat Evelyn and could use it to work on in the evenings. I’ll delete all these files. I can start again with my writing, now that I’m in the habit and have no duty to anyone else. I’ve been thinking about starting with the Foucault idea, the one about the history lecturer and his mistress.

  I’m going on about the laptop, but I’m sure it will be a good buy in the long run. I’ll be glad to get rid of this one anyway. It reminds me of her. I look down through the buttons on the keyboard and see what I assume are her hairs, flakes from her skin, Susie crumbs.

  * * *

  We had to walk across the tarmac to get into the terminal. East Midlands Airport is really just a giant room with a high ceiling and a drugstore inside. No one checked our bags or anything, which I found surprising. I swept through the arrival gate with my shoulder going into spasm from carrying the laptop a hundred yards and found the taxi stand outside.

  Forty minutes on the M1 later I was checking into the Travel Fast in Leicester town center, principally so that I would have somewhere to leave the bloody laptop while I went about my business. I slid it under the bed, checking that I had the receipt on me. I was half hoping someone would steal it, actually, so I could get the money back on my card, but it was still there when I got back from Evington.

  I’ve never known anything about Leicester. I couldn’t have pointed to it on a map. The only thing I knew about it was that they made crisps there, and I once heard that when Idi Amin expelled all the Asians from Uganda, a large number of refugees settled in Leicester. Apparently Leicester City Council was alarmed at the number of immigrants and took out an ad in a prominent Ugandan newspaper telling people not to come to Leicester, that Asians weren’t welcome in Leicester and would not be given work in Leicester. The Ugandans were running for their lives and weren’t bothered about a warm welcome. They only knew the name of one place in England, and all fled to Leicester as fast as they could and stayed there.

  It’s very flat country. Everything looks new and seems to be built from small red bricks. There were some nice buildings: next to the hotel there was a building with a semicircular portico, but it was overrestored and looked like a mock-up of something old, Disneyland Georgian.

  The Evington area is just outside the town center. It’s beyond an old steel bridge over the railway, up and over a sharp little hill that turns out to be Highfields. Evington is full of teeny-tiny redbrick terrace houses with front doors and two windows, one above the other. The sidewalks run right outside the bottom windows, which means having your eyes drawn into someone else’s front room as you walk down the street. A lot of the front rooms are empty or have the curtains pulled. The inset brickwork is nice: sunny yellow brick fans above the front doors.

  Unfortunately Evington is a slightly run-down student area with a high turnover of residents. Number 48 was on the main road and was taller than the redbrick two-up-two-downs. It was a narrow four-story terrace that, judging from the jungle of buzzers on the door, had been converted into many flats. The front door was set back from the road, behind a bus stop, tucked in the shadow of a small shop selling model-airplane kits and supplies. The building seemed fatally compromised by subsidence, with a lintel above the door angled sharply to the left. The ground-floor window was filthy and blacked out with a poster of the girl from Trainspotting.

  I knocked at the front door and waited but got no answer. Eventually I tried the door and found it open. The hallway was narrow, with a flight of rickety wooden stairs at the far end, lit by a window on the landing. A narrow shelf by the door was spilling over with letters, junk mail, books of coupons from supermarkets, and free newspapers. I knocked at a door on the ground floor and spoke to a bloke wearing a red and green striped rugby shirt. He was eating a bowl of cereal and didn’t seem surprised to find a stranger at his door asking after a missing girl. His name was Mark, and he and his chums had moved in two months ago at the start of the new academic year. They didn’t know any of the last tenants, but they left the place pretty clean. The mail just got chucked into the hall by the postman. He said they delivered letters to this address when they didn’t know where else to send it, or if it was a funny shape, because the door was always open. He said he liked my coat.

  I stood outside the house and pretended to wait for the bus. I showed every person who came past Stevie Ray’s photo of Donna and asked whether they had seen this woman. No one had. A businessman in a pinstripe suit came down from the top-floor flat (I heard him walk down the full length of the wooden staircase). Two students were waiting at the bus stop, and neither of them had ever seen Donna.

  Thinking deductively, I worked out that since Donna smoked, if she had lived here, there would certainly have come a time when she’d need late-night cigarettes. I asked in the local newsagent’s, but they didn’t recognize her. The liquor store didn’t, either. I asked in the local Spar supermarket, and they didn’t know her.

  It is quite possible that Donna never lived there and used the address as a letter drop. She might have counted on walking in and taking a letter addressed to her from Gow. But the question remains: Why couldn’t she get letters at home?

  * * *

  The hotel room was small. There was a two-foot path around the bed and a chair in the corner. Everything was slightly old and a little bit broken. The curtain had come off its track in the middle, just enough to look saggy. The television was hidden inside a cabinet with peeling veneer. In the cupboard below sat a mini-bar (with rust spots around the seal) containing an enticing, sensuous selection of a small beer, a yellow wine, a purple wine, a mini gin, a Coke, nuts, a chocolate bar, crisps. I ordered up a sandwich from room service and while I was waiting for it to arrive, I ate all the food in the mini-bar.

  I put the telly on at the end of the bed and flicked through twenty or so channels. I arrived at a blurry screen with a blue sign in the corner that said the signal was blocked. Behind the blur two women were either fucking or jogging through a very pleasing cake sale; breathless delight met ecstatic groan, to a backing track of a wailing saxophone. I’d have requested it and happily paid, but I was worried a newspaper would find out and tell everyone in Britain I’d had a wank in Leicester, so I sat on the end of the bed in my underpants, listening and eating a dry sandwich. The glamour of travel.

  * * *

  The next morning I awoke early, sweating wildly into the sheets, feeling completely exhausted. The room was overheated, and I fell out of bed, throwing myself at the double glazing, trying to work out the puzzle of the windows and get one open before I suffocated. My breakfast was outside the door with the paper I had requested. I could hear showers and televisions down the hall and the noise of elevators at the far end whirring up and down, giving out a warning “tink” as they landed.

  As I stood under the shower like a limp washrag, I thought about the distance I saw in Susie’s eyes during my visits. She loved someone else. The hours in the office with Donna suddenly made sense, the pictures of her up all over the study, the mole nestling on the back of her neck, the tension between them on the video, it all made perfect sense. I felt like a fucking idiot. I knew two things absolutely and fundamentally:

  1. That the night we went to see Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, Susan had been telling the truth about her buxom friend from the sixth form.

  2. That my wife and Donna McGovern had been having a love affair in which I featured not one jot. I was not a special guest star. I was not invited in as a spectator. I would not come in at the end of the film and satisfy them with my huge cock. Susan loved Donna, not me. She loved her. When she looked at Donna, her mouth watered, her pupils dilated, her heart sang.

  * * *

  I spewed my guts up into the sink. I spewed the last speck of compassion and sympathy out of my rotten gut and flushed it away. I spewed and washed the taste away with chewy toast and bitter coffee. I sat on the side of the bed and felt my penis shrivel back into my body.


  * * *

  I went downstairs, left the laptop behind the desk for safekeeping, and set off for Highfields on foot.

  It was cold and raining, a thin misty rain, and I worried about my coat. Then I thought, fuck her, I’ll buy another one. I walked through an industrial district as nondescript and unremarkable as the town itself, then followed a snaking road past the railway station and over the hill. I asked a woman at a bus stop to direct me to the Highfields address. The woman said that I should be careful up there if I was a stranger, it was quite a rough area.

  Highfields actually has nicer houses than Evington. They are still tiny and crammed up close to each other, but the facades are iridescent because of a glassy-flint pebble dash. It’s odd to go somewhere like that and have someone tell you it’s a rough area. In Glasgow roughness is obvious from the hideous housing and the burned-out cars and rubbish everywhere. I saw a drunk couple sitting in a bare ornamental garden in the middle of a busy roundabout. They were very thin and hanging on to each other, passing a cigarette back and forth. Other than that it seemed a nice place. Donna’s street was littered with children. I heard a bell ring, and they all disappeared around the back of one of the houses.

  I found the door of Donna’s house and knocked. After a while a gray-haired Asian woman came to the door. She wore a nice green sari and did me the favor of looking at the photo, but her vocabulary seemed to consist entirely of the word “no.” She kept trying to push the door shut while I was talking. Eventually I gave up trying and let her shut her door, rude cow. The woman next door had been listening through the wall, I think. I knocked, and my hand was barely back at my side when she opened the door and looked at the photo of Donna. The lady nodded. She was tiny, very dark-skinned, and had a thick accent.