Deception aka Sanctum

by Denise Mina

  She kept me on the doorstep, but I could see that the house behind her was immaculately clean. There was something lovely cooking; it smelled like seed cake. I didn’t know if she’d feel comfortable talking to a man, but I tried to make myself less threatening by saying I was looking for a friend of my daughter’s. Without getting the photo out, I asked about the McGoverns from next door.

  “Yeees, that’s right. Yeees.” She drew the word out, opening her mouth wider as she got to the end. “Yeees. They did live here for many years, left not so long ago. Last year. I live here for thirty years. Yees, all married life. He died. The man, father? Yeees. Died. Very, very sad. Not nice man. Not happy family. Husband left. Shouting.”

  She put a hand behind her ear to show she had been listening through the wall. “Donna nice girl, yees, good girl, work hard for family. Modest girl. Good for family.” It didn’t sound like blousy, over-made-up Donna at all.

  I told her that the current owner hadn’t been all that keen to talk to me, and she sucked her teeth in a way that suggested she didn’t altogether approve. “Cheeky old dog,” she whispered, and we had a little laugh together.

  “I heard,” the woman said, hand on her heart, “that Donna is dead.” She opened her hand heavenward, flicking the fingers out to show that Donna was gone like a seed from a pod.

  I nodded. “It’s very sad. She was very young.”

  “Good girl. She sold house when father died, took money, and they went away. Traveling, you know.”

  “They went away?”

  “Donna and friend. Girl who stay there for while. I didn’t see. Donna I know all her life.”

  “Were you here when she broke her collarbone?”

  I could see the memory coming back to her. She smiled warmly and nodded. “Yees, fell off bike. Very sore.” She pointed to a pavement curb farther up and opened her eyes wide. “OUCH!” she said, and we had another little laugh together.

  “What did the doctors do for her when she broke it?”

  “Bandage.” She gestured to both shoulders, making the shape of a figure-eight belt. No plaster. Donna had broken her collarbone after all, but by falling off her bike and not at the hand of her father, as she’d told Susie.

  Suddenly the woman started saying something that I had trouble making sense of. When I looked up, I saw that she was talking Urdu or something to a young woman behind me in the street. They nodded solemnly to each other, and the passer-by glanced at my legs as she moved off along the pavement. They were obviously talking about me, but the woman didn’t feel the need to explain herself.

  She leaned out the door and looked down the street, then stood straight again. I took the photo out of my pocket and showed it to her.

  “Who that in photo? Who girl? Your daughter?”

  chapter thirty-six

  I MADE THESE NOTES ON THE PLANE ON THE WAY HOME.

  FACTS

  1. Donna McGovern lived in Leicester and grew up there. She lived with her father, who died, and she broke her collarbone when she was small.

  2. A body was discovered recently that matched the dental records and medical history of the real Donna McGovern, whose blood was found in the Golf Polo.

  Conclusion: Donna McGovern is dead.

  * * *

  The woman Susan has been dealing with was not Donna McGovern. I will now refer to her as Donna II.

  FACTS ABOUT DONNA II

  1. She knew Donna McGovern, well enough to know that she had broken her collarbone when she was little.

  2. Someone set off from Leicester with Donna I in the white Golf Polo, but only Donna II ever made it to that house in Kirkintilloch.

  3. Donna I’s body was apparently only recently dead, but she can’t have been kept as a prisoner in Kirki. Journalists were hanging around the house. Anyone could have found her. Could she have been killed in the Golf on the way up and stored in the humming deep freezer in the garage? As long as she was eventually deposited somewhere obscure enough and allowed to defrost properly, there would be no evidence of freezing at the cellular level unless she was defrosted and refrozen several times. It would explain Donna’s renting such an isolated cottage: she’d need somewhere private with a big deep freeze.

  Conclusion: Donna II is probably not dead.

  * * *

  Having considered this list for most of the journey, I can now draw up the following list of important questions:

  * * *

  1. This woman passed herself off as Donna to meet Gow. Why would it be necessary to complicate it and pass herself off as someone living to get in? Why not go as a nonexistent person?

  2. Who the fuck is she?

  * * *

  Did Susie know Donna II wasn’t Donna? I think she had an idea that something didn’t add up, judging from the video interview of Donna, the Evington title for her account of Cape Wrath, and the fact that she suspected Donna of the murders. But she didn’t tell anyone or hand over the hotel letter.

  And why did Donna II need to pass herself off as someone else? She must have known that she, as herself, wouldn’t get through the security checks to see Gow. She needed a plausible, real identity that would stand up to scrutiny: when she met Donna I in Leicester, she must have known she would fit the profile. I imagine Donna I with downcast eyes and work-sore hands. For an Asian woman with a house that clean to say she was a good, modest girl, she must have been madly passive. And along comes Donna II and takes her firmly by the hand, introducing her to a whole new world of sensuality and control, until she pulls over in the car on the way to Scotland and kills her, the downcast eyes wild with fright and confusion, the work-sore hands scrabbling at a handle, at a seat, fighting back for once, and losing. During their time together, did Susie give Donna her wedding ring as a sign of loyalty and cover up by claiming it had been stolen? Susie said it was over in evington.doc. Perhaps Donna and Gow got it together and went up north. Donna called and Susie went for her, and maybe one more rejection drove Susie to kill.

  It’s the audacity of Donna II that astonishes me. She gave interview after interview to the papers and charged a fortune, had her photo taken a hundred times. Donna II always covered her teeth. She covered her teeth when she smiled in the video, and she didn’t let Stevie Ray use photos where her teeth showed. She did that because she knew there must be no photographic record to compare with the body when it was eventually found. How much foresight and presence of mind must it take to always remember to cover your teeth? She had planned this months ahead, at least from the first videotaped interview, perhaps from the first untraceable letter to the discovery of Donna’s body.

  She must have had a lot of nerve. She stood in front of the press, asking them to look at her, demanding their attention, charging money. There couldn’t be a better way to avoid examination.

  There is a lesson there for me, and it’s a startling one. If I gave one interview to a paper and said nothing interesting, no one would bother me again. More important, they’d stop watching me.

  I could go abroad. I could do what I like.

  chapter thirty-seven

  IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON WHEN I GOT BACK FROM LEICESTER. I sent Yeni over to the deli to buy us a late lunch, and she spent the entire twenty-quid note I had given her. She came back with twenty-three pence change and a bag of perishable groceries that needed to be eaten more or less right this very minute: dolmas and taramosalata, which she claimed came from Spain.

  “No, Yeni,” I said. “That’s from Greece.”

  “Sí,” she said nodding. “In Spain. Is very good.”

  She had also bought a half-bottle of wine, a packet of Nabisco Grahams for four pounds fifty (!), some fresh smoked haddock soup, a very heavy loaf of brown bread, and two slices of chocolate tart.

  We heated up the soup in the microwave, and she broke crackers into it and served it with bread and taramosalata. It’s the most expensive bowl of soup I’ve ever had, but it was nice. Not a tenner nice, but still nice. She poured us both a glass of wine,
and we sat down opposite each other at the kitchen table and ate. It all felt very civilized. We didn’t talk. Her English is so bad that we’ve kind of given up. I think she must have a tin ear for language. She should be fluent by now, given the amount of television she watches.

  The tarts had broken in the bag, so she put the bits on a communal plate in the center of the table. It was lovely bitter chocolate, smooth and rich and yet not filling. As we each broke off sweet nibbles, our fingertips touched, and then our hands. Yeni held on to my fingers and tugged at me, smirking languidly, trying to pull me across the table to her. I was angry and sickened by Susie. I like Yeni, I don’t want to use her to spite Susie; I really do like her, so I resisted, but then she stood up and came around the table, sitting next to me in a chair and bringing her soft big mouth to my tingling ear.

  “ Lachlan,” she said, brushing the lobe with her lips. I heard the warm saliva slack under her tongue as she whispered to me, “Baby asleep. You come with me?”

  She didn’t give me a chance to answer. She slid a hand between my legs, easing her fingers down my inner thigh and pulling me toward her. I was still a bit reticent, but when I looked at her, her lips stained with the wine and smelling of haddock, I knew it wasn’t about Susie.

  I grinned at her. “Yeni,” I said, “you’re very bad.”

  She smiled back. “ Lachlan, I’m want you to fuck with me.”

  It’s the closest thing to a grammatically correct sentence I’ve ever heard from her, so I had to.

  * * *

  We were lying in bed afterward, watching the circus clock on her sideboard creep toward five, knowing that Margie would wake up soon. Yeni was snuggled into the pit of my arm when I asked her what she wants from this. She shook her head and shrugged, but I made her sit up.

  “Come on, Yeni,” I said, trying to be kind. “You’re a bright girl. This has happened twice now. Are you hoping for a relationship?”

  She looked a bit insulted. I had expected her to say yes and then I’d have mollycoddled her a little, softened the blow, but let her know that it wasn’t really on, because I was married. She pulled the duvet around herself, suddenly ashamed of her fantastic tits. As she flattened the bedspread over her chest, the generous fat on her upper arms splayed unattractively. She lost her beauty in the act of hiding, like Eve discovering shame.

  “I know you understand English better than you speak it,” I said.

  She sighed and chewed her lip. “I like,” she said, after a few faltering starts at the statement, “that we cannot speak.”

  “You like that?”

  “Sí.”

  When she saw how much I brightened, she grinned back at me and put up a hand, covering my face, and pushed me back on the pillow. She let go of the duvet and slid down the bed. She had never had any intention of learning English. She’s the eldest in the family of five. She came to Glasgow for a rest.

  As we lay next to each other, our heads dovetailed on the pillow, I think I fell a little bit in love with her. I felt I had descended to somewhere warm, like a presleep drop in blood pressure that shocks you awake. I might be wrong, but I felt that I could write if I stayed with her. I would not spill my seed in conversation and existence; I’d save it all for the page.

  Through the open door at the end of the bed, we heard the ching-ching of Margie’s crib clown, and we grinned in unison up at the ceiling. Any second now she’d start screaming.

  “Yeni, if I went to France, would you come with me?”

  She looked wary. “No south?”

  “No, not anywhere near Spain. Perhaps not even France, perhaps Greece?”

  “Sí,” she said simply, “I like. We can hchave satellite?”

  “Satellite TV?”

  “Sí.”

  “In Greece?”

  “Sí. For Friends.”

  “Yeah.” I took her small, cool hand, touching the sensitive tip of each of her tapered fingers. “We could just about afford that.”

  * * *

  Yeni was in her dressing gown, chasing Margie back and forth in front of the telly, when I left them and came up here. I’ve been taking shots of Margie with the instant camera so that I can enclose them with the daily letters to Susie. When I think about Donna and the money and how sneaky and rude it is for her to move it, I wonder why the fuck I’m bothering.

  * * *

  This evening Yeni said to me, “Jyou very serious.”

  I shrugged, and she waited for me to explain. Eventually she walked out of the room and came back with her coat on. She said she was going to see her friends from the English class. I nodded and gave her a hundred quid and said have a nice time. She tried to give me the money back, but I insisted.

  “For baby-sitting.” I pressed the money into her hand. “For baby-sitting for a whole night. Take it. You have a good time, honey.”

  She brushed my cheek with the back of her hand and made a precious little “o” with her mouth when I called her that. She didn’t cringe or grimace or get pissed off. I heard the front door slam behind her. I hope she genuinely doesn’t want to talk and didn’t just say that so that I would like her more. I hope she never wants to talk.

  * * *

  Susie is a cunt. She’s a duplicitous, faithless, disloyal cunt, and she’ll leave me broken if I don’t do something soon. If this ever gets out, I will be the world’s biggest, most widely recognized, dickless idiot. She’s been laughing at me from the very beginning, from before Otago Street.

  The gloves are off, as far as I’m concerned.

  chapter thirty-eight

  IT’S THREE-TEN A.M. I WAS LYING IN BED JUST NOW, LISTENING TO the cold wind shake the dry leaves from the trees, and a thought occurred to me out of the blue. I carefully worked my arm out from under Yeni, slid out of the bed, and pulled on some pajama bottoms and a sweater. I left her in the warm dark, snoring softly in Spanish through the ripe segments of her lips, and went into the bathroom, staring at myself in the mirror, at my red eyes, round shoulders, and sagging belly.

  Donna II knew that there would be background checks. That is why she knew she couldn’t just assume a made-up name but would need a plausible identity in order to get in to see Gow. But how could she possibly know that? Tucker and Susie’s security checks weren’t a matter of public knowledge. No one else knew they were doing the research. I think she had tried to get in to see Gow before and been knocked back. I think this occurred to Susie, and that was why she took the file and destroyed all the other copies of it. She was protecting Donna II, still protecting her, even after being charged with a murder she thought Donna had committed. When I think of how much she loved me in Otago Street, I don’t doubt that she would have done the same for me.

  I opened the Gow correspondents research file. Three-quarters of them are men and can be discounted immediately. Then there are fifty-six women, thirty-one of whom first contacted Gow around the time of his wedding, when he was in the papers a lot. From the twenty-five women who contacted him before, only twelve of them were before the Donna McGovern letters started in February 1998.

  * * *

  1. The first is a psychic who wrote only once and said she had seen what he did to those women through a spirit guide. She was going to kill him through sending out bad thoughts (no request to visit). Her brain must have fried when he died a gruesome death.

  2. There were a series of sexy letters from a Linda Slaintan. The file notes “photo encl., sexually explicit.” She wrote nine times and asked him to call her back. She then wrote several angry letters after Gow’s engagement to Donna was announced in the press, accusing him of misleading her.

  3. Patricia Gallon was a member of the Plymouth Brethren in Lewisham. She wrote only once, saying that she would pray for his salvation.

  4. A woman from the Isle of Harris believed her husband was Gow’s accomplice on the first murder. The couple were separated, and she promised not to tell the police but wanted to know. Her husband was called Hugh Kean and he drank in t
he Park Bar.

  5. A web designer with a vowel-free surname (Anna Trsykt) asked permission to use Gow’s picture for a competition.

  6. Mrs. Tate, a teacher from Bridgeton, knew him when he was a boy. She wrote once to ask him where he went wrong.

  7. Brenda Rumney from Newcastle thinks he met her mum once.

  8. Nine plaintive letters from his little sister, Alison, asked him to contact her and told him family news. She’s had a miscarriage and was quite ill but recovered before the file ended.

  9. Three letters from a woman in London who offered to be his manager. She said she’d give him a ninety-ten cut of all profits and get him more coverage than Stevie Ray.

  10. Doreen Armitage wrote sexy letters with “photo encl., featuring bondage.” Some cheeky scamp has noted in the file “correspondent breathtakingly unattractive.” Doesn’t sound like Tucker, somehow. Doreen wrote four times.

  11. Marti Gibbon, a priest from America, may or may not have been a woman. Marti wrote a few times, proposing to write a screenplay of Gow’s life. The return address is Santa Monica. I guess that deal fell apart when Gow was acquitted.

  12. A woman from Lanarkshire asked whether her dad was involved in the first few murders. She gives a detailed account of her father’s movements around that time, where he was and what he did for a living. “Photos encl.” The file doesn’t say whether the photos were of her or her father.

  * * *