(2002) Deception aka Sanctum (3 page)

Once you’re sitting at the desk, the narrowness of the room and the high sloping ceiling make it feel cozy. It’s only when you’re standing in the doorway, balancing on the shallow top step and looking in at someone else sitting here, asking them when they’re going to come down and spend time with you, that it seems claustrophobic.

chapter three

EVERYONE’S IN BED, AND I CAN’T CONCENTRATE ENOUGH TO watch TV. It’s been two full days since the verdict now, and Susie still hasn’t called. I thought she’d want to talk to Margie at least. She may be finding it hard to get through here because our phone hasn’t stopped ringing. There are constant messages from journalists offering money and sympathy. One of them said I should see ratting my wife out as “a kind of justice.” A Mirror journalist called four times today. His name is Alistair Garvie and he’s from London. He keeps saying “London” over and over and over, as if it’s a magical place a hick like me would never have heard of.

Susie has my mobile number, though, so she could phone if she wanted to. I expect she’s on the induction course for convicted prisoners. They send them on a course in the first few days of their sentence, to tell them the rules and so on. Susie says it’s really to keep them busy, so they don’t get the chance to think about killing themselves, because the reality of a long sentence starts to sink in during the first few days.

We saw an induction group walking across the grass once. The whole valley was swathed in sheets of biting cold rain, and I was in the visiting room with Susie during her brief spell on remand. The pretrial women averted their eyes from the window, as if any contact with the freshly convicted might jinx their chances. I watched them, though, only curious then, not thinking it relevant to me or us. All the women were dressed in blue jogging pants and sweatshirts and walked in a gaggle, topped and tailed by four female officers, as they made their way across to Bravo block for a talk about something. They all looked hard-faced and sad, even the officers. I remember the heavy way they walked, as if they were cosmically disappointed, let down by everything they’d ever seen or done or watched or eaten. They were a poor-looking bunch, not that the remanded women were much better, but at least they had a spark of hope and were allowed to wear their own clothes.

It’s easier on the eye if prisoners wear their own clothes. Then you can categorize and distinguish and dismiss them from your mind quickly. Tracksuit and no bra: drug-addled loser. Stonewashed jeans and high heels: tart and/or shoplifter. Elegant gray cashmere crew neck, jeans, and soft baby-blue running shoes: wife, keeper of my tender heart, absent verb in my life sentence.

The induction group wore a blue uniform, which is supposed to strip them of their individuality, but for me, watching through the barred windows, the uniform made them all matter, made them all potential friends and neighbors. Convicted prisoners didn’t seem real to us then. Susie was innocent and she was getting out on bail anyway. Her biggest problem at that time was getting to the bail hearing on the Big Blue Bus.

The blue security-reinforced minibus starts its morning journey at six-thirty a.m. with a pickup of the accused women, including for a short while my dear wife, from the Vale of Leven, Her Majesty’s Prison. After traveling all over the central beltway picking up single and multiple miscreants hither and thither from any secure holding place, the BBB doubles back on itself and two and a half hours later sheds its load at the Glasgow High and Sheriff Courts. The wheels on the justice bus go round and round and round. As Susie said herself, a three-hour bus drive at six-thirty in the morning would be nightmare enough, without the added burden of ten traveling companions, many hungover or coming off drugs, who are about to meet their families and (not always the worse of the two) their doom.

A fat woman from Falkirk tried to talk to her. Susie said she swung her big red face over to her and said all men were bad news, kept calling her “my friend.” Her new chum complained that the police had put her into a cell with a sleeping man. Evidently, they were confused as to her gender. Susie did a great impression of her accent. “I says to the polis-man, ‘Fit’s this oen ma chest, well? Them’s tits!’ ”

Susie was so glad to get bail and be allowed to go home. She went for occasional meetings with Fitzgerald, but other than that we just stayed in. Mostly we sat around and watched TV, and she came down from this study to eat with us. She wouldn’t let me touch her, though, and she didn’t want to talk about any of it. Every time I asked about Gow or Donna or her going off to Durness, her eyes would fill up and she’d say, please, Lachie, please, just till after, be my friend. I am your friend, Susie, but I want to know, I need to know. I’d plead with her, stroking her hand, afraid I was begging. Please, Lachie, please, just leave it. And then she’d punish me by hiding up here for hours at a time.

I wish she were downstairs, sleeping, breathing deep and slow, feeding on the air inside our safe, dark house. And in the morning I could take her up a big milky coffee and toast and apricot jam and open the window and let the smell of the garden in.

Shit shitshitshit shit shitishitshit shit shit.

* * *

I can’t think of Susie today without seeing her in the Vale, walking endlessly back and forth across grass in the shitting rain, being forced to sit through disappointing talks, told to expect nothing ever again, and trained in the disappointed walk. Maybe she can’t get to a phone. Maybe they don’t let them phone out when they’re in the induction course.

* * *

I’ve got to find something for this appeal. I’ve emptied out two boxes of receipts into a bag and I’ll use them to keep potential appeal papers together.

* * *

Box 1. Formal papers: Gow’s prison file, plus all the formal papers from Susie’s trial.

Box 2. Less formal stuff from plastic bag under this desk: Susie’s collection of newspaper and magazines articles re Donna, the wedding, and Gow, plus video and cassette tapes.

* * *

I’m afraid Gow will be on the video and it’ll creep me out, knowing he’s dead and how he died. I’ve hidden the tape under the papers in the box. I will watch it, but not just now.

Box 1 Document 1 Indictment

It is hereby charged that you, Susan Louise Emma Harriot, née Wilkens, of 7 Orchard Lane, Dowanhill, on September 26, 1998, did assault Andrew Alfred Gow, then residing at The Firs, Lenzie Road, Kirkintilloch. It is charged that you did stab him in the chest and throat, remove his tongue with knives and pliers or similar instruments at The Bothy, Inshore Loch, Cape Wrath, or elsewhere in Scotland, to his severe injury, and you did murder him.

It is further charged that you did assault Mrs. Donna Helen Gow, née McGovern, there or elsewhere in Scotland and you did murder her.

This whole second para was crossed out.

* * *

Mum phoned this morning and left a shrill message. She heard about the trial on the news and said she’ll come over if I don’t call her at once. I heard Dad coughing furiously in the background. I need a visit from my parents like a twisted testicle.

They’ve never liked Susie, they don’t understand children, and they complain about not being warm all the time they’re away from Spain. But they do worry about me. They’ll read the papers and the speculation about the sentence, which was all exaggerated, of course.

I hope none of their friends out there saw the photos of me. I often feel that I’ve gone from being their son to a thing they boast about to their friends, a form of social leverage. A doctor? No, qualified as a doctor but got out before all his friends. Saw it was a career trap— leave out the reason: that I couldn’t stand the incessant contact with random people. Leave out the fact of my disenchantment with working, my house-husbanding career, and skip straight to— wife’s a doctor, of course, dear Susan, a psychiatrist, so clever. Mum often asks me to send a BIG card to Dad or phone friends of hers I’ve met once or twice to inquire after their grandchild/trip home. It’s all about appearances. It would matter so much to them if I’m in the papers and recognizable. I’d hate to shame them, especially Dad. They’re dejected at my progress as it is. I haven’t the confidence to tell them about my writing in case nothing ever comes of it.

* * *

I went back into town to pick up the car this afternoon. It’s been there for two days. Miraculously, it didn’t have a ticket on it, but someone had scratched a long line into the paintwork on the driver’s side. It was bizarre being back there. It seemed very quiet. Bits of paper fluttering through the narrow streets. Pink vomit on the pavement. People walking past me without a second glance. I felt invisible enough to walk up the steps of the court. This is how it’ll be now. My days of being a minor, provincial celebrity are over and no one’ll remember except those sick fucks who take an interest in such things. I’d like that very much. I stood at the top of the stairs and looked out over the green. The view’s completely different when you’re standing upright.

When I got back home, a few camera crews were sitting in folding metal chairs outside the wall, watching the wooden door to the garden. They weren’t here during the trial and don’t seem to have noticed the back door to the alley. Maybe they do know about it but can’t get their trucks down there. They saw the garage door open before they noticed my car and scrabbled around, shouting at each other, pulling the cameras off the tripod and running over to the car. The automatic door seemed to take forever to open. Just as they were halfway across the road I took my foot off the brake and let the car roll in, pressing the remote button so that the door began to shut. I almost clipped the back of the Saab. One of the crews was Japanese. Why on earth would the Japanese be interested in this? They’re probably still out there, filming the garden wall.

* * *

I’m beginning to realize how ill-equipped I am for this. I’ve been waiting for Susie to ring and tell me she’s arrived and settled in safely, as if she’d gone to a professional conference or a hen weekend in Dublin. I can’t get my head around her being away. I went to the shop on the way home and bought Jesti-jesters. I’ve got a cupboard full of Susie’s favorite biscuits, and she won’t be home for ten years. I’m still sleeping on one side of the bed, putting the lights out as soon as I lie down in case I wake her.

We’ve got to win this appeal. I’ve been sorting out the big plastic bag of papers and newspaper clippings and tapes under her desk. There’s the copy of GLT magazine with the interview they printed with Susie (bastards), a Dictaphone tape, clippings about Gow’s case that look quite old, as if she’d been gathering them for some time, and masses of notes about Donna. She must have every single interview Donna ever gave to the papers.

Susie’s written notes about Gow and Donna on some of the newspaper articles, single words mostly, like “grandiose,” “vicarious fame,” and “stupid”— that word recurs a lot on Donna’s clippings. Sometimes, especially from around the time of Gow and Donna’s wedding, she has articles from different newspapers on the same day. Where was she getting all these papers? I don’t remember the News of the Screws being delivered here, and she certainly didn’t get them at her work. She must have bought them in secret, on the way to work or at the shops, and cut the stories out so that she could keep them. They date back for almost a year. This has been going on for fucking ages without my knowing a thing about it.

* * *

I phoned Susie’s colleague Harvey Tucker again and a man answered. He hesitated, then said Harvey wasn’t in. I’ve never spoken to Harvey on the phone before, but it definitely sounded like him.

“Will you tell him I’ll phone back?” I asked.

“I will, of course, yes. Certainly,” he replied.

We both sounded very stiff and suspicious. I hung up. It might not have been him. Maybe the guy had seen my name in the papers and felt awkward because of it. Or he’d heard Harvey talk about the trial; that’s more likely. I think it was Harvey, though.

* * *

I miss her. I even miss the irascibility, the slights. I miss her coming up here to work alone rather than sit with me in front of the telly after Margie’s gone to bed. I miss knowing she’s up here, doing whatever. It should be easy to comfort myself. She was absent a lot of the time anyway, but it seems especially hard just now. Perhaps it’s because she’s been sitting at home for the past two and a half months. It’s just sinking in, I think.

Last night I sat in front of the television and tried to pretend Susie was upstairs, ignoring me. Yeni wanted to watch Friends on a satellite channel and sat down on the other settee. I could hardly say piss off, I’m assuaging my grief by pretending to be ignored by my absent wife. I watched Yeni out of the corner of my eye. She’s very young, and I don’t think she understands what the characters are saying, but she smiles along with the jokes and nods sometimes. I suppose for most men this would be a creamer: left alone in a big house with a lonely Spanish teenage au pair. But Yeni is fat and has a prominent mustache, and her breath smells perpetually of yogurt. I think she’s self-medicating for thrush. Susie chose her.

chapter four

I GOT A LETTER FROM SUSIE THIS MORNING. IT DIDN’T SAY ANY OF the things I want to hear, like I love you and didn’t kill those people. It said she was there and safe, and feeling a “little under the weather” . . . blah blah, missing you and Margie blah blah, much hope for the appeal blah blah. She tells me what the weather’s been like the past few days. She’s in a facility forty miles away, for Chrissake, we’re in the same weather system. She could have been writing to anyone from anywhere, except that just before the end there’s an unguarded moment when, apropos of nothing, she writes “It’s awful here.”