(2002) Deception aka Sanctum (15 page)

The journalists were gone from the back lane when I got back. I still feel that they’re watching me. Trisha was watching television with Margie in the front room. She asked me how the visit went. I shrugged. She didn’t tell me off or make any statements about what had happened, which I was grateful for. Yeni was hiding in the kitchen, looking uncomfortable. I think Trisha has been hounding her all day. It’s obvious that Yeni doesn’t like Trisha at all, and I feel I can trust her because of it.

I was suddenly struck by the terrifying thought that Yeni might leave and I’d have to find another au pair and explain the situation to her and the agency and her parents. No one in their right mind would let their teenage daughter come to the house of a lone man whose wife’s a murderer. I realized that I must be much nicer to Yeni, so I asked her if she’d like pizza for dinner and ordered it in for us all to share. I got a big one with artichoke and olives because that’s what she likes. I know she appreciated it because she went out to the deli later and bought me a bar of marzipan (“Fur jyou, Lachie”) and left it in the fridge.

* * *

I wonder about Susie. I wonder how I could live with her and know her so little. I keep looking at the picture of us in Corfu and realizing that we’ve hardly seen each other since Margie was born. I thought that was normal when couples have a baby. I thought you had to take each other for granted and concentrate on the child. I was looking forward to it, actually. It’s a normal part of the rhythm of life. It doesn’t mean one of you can go off and fall in love with a psychopathic convict.

chapter fourteen

THEY PHONED AT SIX-FORTY THIS MORNING TO ANNOUNCE THAT they were coming and arrived just after five p.m., dressed for an Arctic winter. We left their suitcases in the hall and sat around the kitchen table. The place looked nice because Mrs. Anthrobus had been and everything was clean and polished. Mum had brought a basket of pretty red and yellow jellied fruits from Marbella, and we had them with a high tea in the old manner, bread and jam and cakes and Marmite and several strong pots of Ceylon. The garden had never looked so inviting, and I wished I were out there, alone, working up a sweat pruning the apple tree and raking the leaves, kicking up the damp smell of the earth and settling the beds for winter.

Dad’s getting old. He never speaks when Mum’s there, and Mum is always there. He’s smaller than ever before, and his eyelids are coming away from his eyes. He looks awfully tired, not long-trip tired but life tired. I tried to hug him, but he sort of brushed his forehead against my chin and pushed me away.

As with Trisha, Mum and Dad were not invited to my home, nor did I in any way encourage them to come here. However, my wishes and well-being are of little concern to this elderly triumvirate. I’m little more than a sideshow, a useful prop for them to prove to each other how caring and family-oriented they are. Afraid Trisha was usurping her by coming here first, Mum’s been fussing around the house, spraying her scent in corners and doorways. She knows Trisha warned Susie about me before the wedding and is very suspicious of her.

They’ve begun a vicious exchange of tit-for-tat pleasantries that can only end in bloodshed. Trisha says how well I’ve done, and Mum trumps that by saying she knew I would do well, having known me since childhood. Trisha wants to give up the guest room in favor of Mum and Dad, but Mum and Dad want to sleep in the coal cellar so that Trisha won’t be disturbed by dad’s snoring, because you do snore, don’t you, Ian? Eventually I gave M&D my room and said I’d sleep downstairs, that it didn’t matter because I wasn’t really sleeping much anyway.

Mum stroked my hair and looked accusingly at Trisha. Trisha smiled and muttered, “So kind.” The irony of this sort of comfort is completely lost on both of them. They have nary a care that their support has resulted in my being put out of my bed.

Margie is loving it, though. They held her, one at a time, and fed her, cooing and gasping at her every move. It is lovely to see her through fresh eyes, because I forget how enchanting she is. The proportions of her facial features are perfect really, and she’s very clever. She plays little jokes, hiding things and so on, and her singing and talking is very advanced. She chats away all the time, to toys and walls and floors and shoes and the telly. She tries to boss everyone around, getting us to sit in chosen seats, hold a particular doll, eat things, and she claps her hands with pleasure whenever we do her bidding.

I was hoping with everyone here that Yeni might get a few days to herself, but Mum and Dad insisted that she join us for afternoon tea and quizzed her in pidgin Spanish. Having gone to the trouble of bastardizing her language, they were quite indignant to find the discourtesy unreciprocated. Yeni apologized in Spanish and reacted to their stonewalling by blushing and wobbling her head from side to side. Then she sloped off to hide in her room. She really must not leave.

I said I was going to the loo and went up to her room to see if she was okay. She was sitting on the end of her single bed, looking at the pictures in a book about the Romans. She had wound up the noisy little circus clock that Susie had as a child, the one with the seal balancing the ball on his nose. The anxious, tinny tick-tock bounced from wall to wall, making her seem like a child waiting out her time in detention. I gave her a quizzical thumbs-up. She raised a limp thumb back and stretched her lips across her teeth. I made a wait gesture and brought the portable television through from my room. I sat it on the chest of drawers at the end of her bed and plugged it in. I pointed at my watch. “Friends,” I said, and her big fat face lit up.

“Friends?”

“Yes,” I said and turned it on, fiddling with the aerial until I found good reception. Mum called me, and as I went to open the door and go back downstairs, Yeni darted from the bed and caught my arm, turning me around. She gave me the toothiest, cheesy grin and a big, affirmative thumbs-up. We both giggled behind our hands as Mum called again, and I dragged my heavy feet back downstairs to the unwelcome support and comfort of my family.

* * *

I got a locksmith to come this morning before Mum and Dad arrived and install a Yale on this door. It makes the room feel so much more private. When I came back up after tea and heard the firm lock slide shut, I found myself smiling and looking around, rubbing my hands, secure in the knowledge that I was up in my high attic room, alone.

Susie’ll be pleased when she does get out. I’ll give her both keys and let her get on with it.

* * *

Harvey Tucker had the cheek to phone and leave a message reminding me to look out for that file for him. I found it on the disk with the Gow files from Sunnyfields. It’s a table of the people who contacted Gow, dates of when they did, and notes of whether they came to visit or not. I can see from the top left-hand corner of the document that the table has been made up by both Tucker and Susie, so he’s not lying. He did do some of the work. I’m reluctant to hand it over, though. I can’t bring myself to admit Susie really did take the files, and I don’t want to contribute to anything else being published about Gow. Susie must have had a reason for erasing all the other copies: she obviously didn’t want Tucker to get ahold of it.

Donna McGovern’s name is in there. It says she contacted him (“2/2/98 letter, romantic content, photograph encl.”). Then the first visit (“Scottish Prison Department approval for visit. Gow approval for visit”) and a flood of letters, one a day, until the file entries stop abruptly around the time Susie got the bump. A rush of letters from strangers accompanied Gow’s wedding, presumably people wishing him well or ill or just freaks who had seen him in the paper. The most worrying correspondent is the one who wrote fifty-three times in two years (all “sexual content”) and was knocked back for a visit every time, often by Gow himself. But that was a man, a Mr. Thomas Wexler whose address is given as 221 Grape Street, Bristol. I like knowing that. I may go to Bristol one day, and I wouldn’t want to run into Mr. Wexler without knowing that about him.

I’ve started reading that “Lovers in Prison” book that I found up here. It’s a collection of case histories of women who fell in love with murderers in America. Initially I thought I was reading about Donna, but after meeting Harvey Tucker, the book takes on a whole new complexion. It’s interesting in a human-interest-story kind of way, but there aren’t a lot of surprises in it. Apparently, if you want to fall in love with a convicted murderer, it helps if you’re a fool and find it easy to lie to yourself.

The chapter I finished last night, before I fell asleep on the couch (at four-ten a.m.), said that generally the women are dissatisfied and disillusioned with their lives and see it as their last chance to attach themselves to “someone powerful.” Which means that Susie didn’t see herself as being attached to someone powerful and was trying to bridge the gap. Can every fucking thing in this unholy mess be down to my failings? I was interested to note that being Catholic, whether practicing or not, is also a predictive factor. I wonder why? Could it be the emphasis on redemption or just the ability to believe a lot of improbable shite? It’s interesting, because Donna was Catholic but Susie isn’t.

Box 2 Document 3 “Serial Beast Kills Prostitute,” 10/3/93

This is the newspaper article Gow’s tongue was found sitting on in the corner of the bothy. Susie downloaded a copy of it from Stevie Ray’s “Gow— Hard As Nails” website. The download is dated months before he was released, which just goes to prove that she didn’t have a copy to start with and so can’t possibly be the killer.

I’ve heard the website mentioned on TV, when Stevie Ray was doing his tour of the chat shows. Susie’s printed a lot of articles from it, but they’re all poor-quality. In some of them the printed text is illegibly tiny. Some have titles or paragraphs chopped in half. Nearly all of them favor the photographs over the text, even though they all use the same famous picture. Gow is standing with his shoulders hunched, fists together, elbows out to the side, pumping himself up like an end-of-pier muscle man. He has shaved the word “Growl” into his chest, although it seems to read “Groul” because his body hair is quite straight. He’s wearing a pair of children’s white plastic sunglasses. It disturbs me that they’re children’s glasses; the shaded eyepieces are much too small for his big face, and the little white legs splay out at the side of his head. But perhaps it’s only me who thinks that’s creepy: I saw a middle-aged man riding a child’s red bicycle down Dumbarton Road the other day and found it sickening, watching his old knees smash up against his chest as he tried to beat a red light.

The prosecution read this article out in court, so I’ve heard it before. I don’t think there’s anything special in it, but it was an original cutting and was five years old when the police found it, so it must have meant something to whoever left it there with Gow’s tongue on top. They’d hung on to it for long enough.

Two pictures: police tape strung around weak-looking trees on an industrial skyline and a photo of Robbie Coltrane looking moody.

Police are hunting for a serial killer after a fifth body was found yesterday, strangled and dumped on waste ground in Govan. Police say that the murder fits the profile of the Riverside Ripper. The murdered woman is believed to have been a prostitute working in the Anderston area of Glasgow. All the victims have been prostitutes so far; all have been strangled and mutilated with a knife.

Actually, they weren’t strangled. Everyone now knows that they were stabbed and had their tongues cut out, so that they bled to death. This strangling stuff must have been fed to the papers at the time to put off crank confessors.

A police spokesman called for calm and asked the public to come forward with any information they might have about a man behaving suspiciously in the Broomielaw area between the hours of twelve midnight and four on Friday morning. Women are being cautioned not to walk home after dark.

Top Criminal Psychologist Dr. Joe Fennie, who was the basis for TV’s Cracker, starring Robbie Coltrane, talked exclusively to our reporter. “This man will kill and kill until he is caught,” stated Fennie. “He will give in to his sick compulsion until we stop him.”

Previous victims include Alice Thomson, 33, Martine Pashtan, 24, Karen Dempsey, 21, and teenager Lizzie MacCorronah, 19. Lizzie, whose body was the first to be found, left behind three children now being raised by her mother.

Women’s groups are calling for greater action, claiming that police protection is inadequate.

Joe Fennie was in the news a lot at the time. He was being quoted by every paper on every case that came up in Scotland. He’d been at Sunnyfields for a few years in the eighties, so he knew all that crowd. I heard he went to work in a special facility for sex offenders down in Surrey before coming home in disgrace for some minor infraction. Susie doesn’t know him, but his appearance in the press always elicited a big eye-roll and muttering. We met him at a wedding in Carlisle four years ago. He has very bad skin and a squint. Susie says that’s why they always use a picture of Robbie Coltrane.

I can’t see what is special about this article or why the person who murdered Gow would choose it above all the rest of the coverage. It might not be special, it could just be a random article about his case, or it might be that the woman whose body was found in the article was important.

I’m sure the police have already done all this stuff and done it better than I can. I should concentrate on the stuff only I know. I keep going back to the morning of the phone call from Cape Wrath, pulling it apart, pressing my eye so close to the details that they distort and I can’t remember if I’m remembering them or filling spaces between the events. I’ve worked out the following so far.