(2002) Deception aka Sanctum (7 page)

What the fuck was she doing in Cape Wrath? I wonder about the details that don’t fit. If she did go up there to save Donna, why didn’t she phone the police when she saw Gow’s body? Instead of phoning the police, she went into the hotel and ordered a large whiskey. She was there for thirty-five minutes and didn’t alert anyone.

She was slightly nervous when Gow was released, I remember that, but she’d been sacked only two months or so previously, and I thought his appeal was a reminder.

She went straight into the kitchen the night she was sacked; she didn’t come into the front room with me and Margie. She didn’t even reply when I called her. I found her at the table, drinking our second-best brandy and smoking a cigarette indoors. I knew something big had happened.

I was pleased when Susie told me she’d been sacked. Finally, I thought, we’ll get to spend days and days together. I can show her what I do all day, introduce her to my small enjoyments; she’ll slow down. We’d be all right for money; we could live on the interest and I could work again if we ran short. Let’s travel together, I said. Let’s get another nanny and go and see Africa or China together before we’re too old.

“There are things”— Susie squeezed my fingers together, pressing the knuckles so tight it hurt—“things you don’t know about, Lachie.” Her eyes overflowed and she climbed onto my knee, pressing her face into my neck to hide the tears. I held her, felt her rib cage deflate, stroked her bony little back as she struggled to breathe in. I held her until she caught her breath again and she called me her Lachie. I remember that strong, possessive feeling, that she was my girl, that no one could give her this sort of comfort but me. At the time, I thought to myself, I’m not a completely useless bastard after all.

She had told me that, despite all the public pressure, Gow would never get out because her risk assessment of him was so bad. She was shaken when they sacked her, because she knew they’d get her replacement to do another RA. Gow’s lawyer could easily argue that her report was biased because she’d been accused of stealing his files. But she wasn’t scared when Gow did get out. She didn’t introduce any new security measures to the house and said, “Nah,” when I asked whether we should get rid of the decoy box and buy an actual alarm. Did she think he’d hurt Donna? Was she afraid he’d hurt other women? I must ask her when I visit.

I think she was more afraid when Donna and Gow went missing than when he got out. They had disappeared for over a week before the call. All our phone records show is a forty-second call from the hotel in Durness, and then Susie took off.

* * *

I mustn’t give in to this insistent self-pity. Yesterday evening was the zenith. After tea I went into an apoplexy of miserable self-loathing: I ate a whole box of Celebrations in front of the television and almost choked on the irony. Yeni had put Margie to bed by the time I finished the chocolates, and I suddenly felt that I was missing her growing up. I went upstairs and stood by her bedroom door, looking in at her sleeping. I stood there, wishing I was less ineffectual, until I realized that nothing could be more ineffectual than standing about in dim halls, wishing I was otherwise. If I were a friend of mine, I’d give me a slap.

At the start of all this, when Susie was first arrested, I promised myself that I’d be a good man. I promised I’d put my own feelings aside and attend to those of my family, but time and time again I find it’s beyond me. The whole thing has been so emasculating: having the mother of my child taken from me, then sitting in the court like a spare prick, listening to the prosecution suggest that she was in love with Gow. It makes me so angry. I have an urge to go about smashing people in the face just to prove I’m still here, still making my stamp on the world, still a man.

I phoned Susie’s colleague Harvey Tucker again, but he wasn’t in. I need to talk to him. Tucker didn’t pick up this time, but he must have the message by now. He obviously doesn’t want to talk to me. I left a message saying I wasn’t angry or anything. Just wanted to ask him a couple of things to set my mind at rest. He still hasn’t called back. Maybe I could use Gow’s prison files as an inducement to Tucker to get in touch; I could promise him a swap.

The disk that’s with the prison files has a list of people who had contacted Gow in the past two years, like Stevie Ray and Donna. The entries have notes next to them like “letter, sexual content,” “letter, request to visit,” and then the final disposition like “no action,” “visit,” “Gow refusal,” or “Scottish Prison Department refusal.” Some of the correspondents wrote three or four times. One of them wrote twenty-three times, every one of them an “admiring letter, violent content” with a request to visit. Interestingly, it was Gow who kept refusing the visit. Even rapist serial killers must find some people distasteful, I suppose.

* * *

I’ve got to hang on to Susie, my own Susie. The images from her arrest and the court are so overpowering that I have to strain to remember her from before, when we were just two private people, before we became a byword for privileged suburban professionals lusting after a bit of rough.

I’ve been looking at photos all day, thinking about when we met. I was the only guy in our crowd in med school who married another doctor. All my pals, Rosso and Bangor and Morris, they all said it was a bad move, marrying someone like Susie. They didn’t mention Susie, of course; they just said someone who wasn’t a nurse.

Susie Wilkens was in the year above us, and her grades were legendary. She was determined to do psychiatry from the beginning. Not surgery, not the high-prestige technical stuff. She was so good she wasn’t even competing with the rest of us. I thought she was marvelous.

I’ve brought up some photos from our student days to stick on the walls here, to remind me of my Susie. I should put them into an album and leave it around the house so that Margie can see her mummy in normal situations.

Three of the pictures seem especially significant to me:

Photo One

Susie in our crowd from the student union. She is small, five feet four in heels. Her dark, thick hair is long and pulled over one shoulder.

It was one night among many in the beer bar, special only because I’d bought a disposable camera to take pictures of my room in the medical residence to send Mum and Dad so they could see where I was living and agree to the high rent. The rent wasn’t high at all, but they’d been in Spain for a year and were used to nothing costing more than a tenner. I used the end of the film on the beer bar pictures.

There is a lot of movement in the picture. Everyone is mugging furiously, shoving each other around and drinking pints of lager, the amber and froth sloshing up the sides of the glasses. Susie is in the middle of it all. She’s making a silly face, sticking out her tongue slightly and crossing her eyes, as if making ugly faces is something she finds terribly hard. She is holding a bag of crisps: cheesy puff balls.

Photo Two

Susie and I in the sunshine, outside a church. It was a student wedding; one of the guys from the union got married suddenly because his girlfriend was pregnant. The marriage was over before we graduated.

Neither Susie nor I could afford good clothes at the time of this picture. She is dressed with studied abandon in a shocking-pink pencil skirt and black dinner jacket. She thought it was studenty to dress like that. I loved it, loved it when she got things so wrong. She was so rarely wrong.

I have my cheap gray suit on, shiny around the pockets and crumpled at the elbows. I didn’t have the money to dry-clean it. I wore that suit for about four years without having it cleaned or pressed. I remember the semicircular creases on the back of the jacket, like tidal sand. I wore it to christenings, weddings, interviews. In the end it was unwearably smelly and I had to throw it away. This photograph is probably the last time my hair was nice this length, quite Paul Weller, and that was six years ago.

Susie is much more attractive than I am. Her dark hair was long then, rich and shiny because she was young, worn over her shoulders, falling halfway down her upper arms. Her velvet blue eyes flash. She leans into the camera, saying something and pouting as she finishes a word. I notice my arm around her waist is holding her up: she can bend over at an acute angle because I am holding her weight.

Photo Three

Susie is sitting on my knee. We are on vacation with friends, eating dinner in a Corfu restaurant with white plastic chairs and a blue oilcloth on the table. It is nighttime, in an open-air taverna. Twelve shiny, sunburned faces grin around the table. It was our last year of med school, and we all went on a cheap package tour together. They were my friends. Susie came everywhere with my friends. This strikes me as significant somehow. She didn’t seem to have a crowd of her own, or if she did, we don’t have photographs of them.

I’m very involved with her in the photograph. I’m smelling her hair and my hand is on her slim, brown thigh, my index finger disappearing up the outside leg of her high-cut shorts. I remember how completely wrapped up in each other we were. We kissed in public and touched each other, behavior I find appalling when I witness it now. But then, in the very early days, nothing seemed real or important but that we were together.

* * *

It wasn’t all blindness. Susie’s wrong about that. I did know she had flaws, and I didn’t fall in love just because I projected things onto her, either. She had qualities that I had never even thought of before I met her.

She had a sharp analytical mind, could tease the essence from a phrase or picture, see grades of meaning in statements. I’m just not that bright or interested in dissection. She’d think of a joke and laugh uncontrollably before she told it. She wouldn’t ever give an inch over the house cleaning and always made me do my share before we found Mrs. Anthrobus. I loved the fact that she had principles and was so self-contained. Those weren’t qualities I went out looking for. They blew me away. It wasn’t blindness at all.

* * *

Margie’s sleeping through the night and seems to be adjusting finally. I wish I’d paid more attention to her before the verdict, but I was sure Susie would be coming back with me that night. We should have introduced the possibility that Mummy might not come home. I think she knows how bad it is. When she says “Mummy,” she immediately looks at me and Yeni, waiting for whatever reaction we’ve unknowingly been giving. She’s more clingy than she used to be. Still, she asks for Anna, her little friend from nursery, more often than she asks for Susie.

I know I should take Margie back to nursery as soon as possible, but I’m dreading it. They’ll have read the verdict in the papers. I told Mrs. McLaughlin that I wouldn’t see her for a while because Susie would be dropping Margie off for the next few weeks. I’ll look like an idiot.

If the other parents snub me, I’ll feel terrible, and if they’re nice, I’ll feel even worse. I’d like to move Margie into a different nursery and never see any of them again, but she likes it there and has made friends.

I wish I could sleep.

chapter eight

FOUND A CONTACTS DATABASE ON THE COMPUTER, AND WHEN I typedin “T,” I found this: Harvey Tucker, 191 Orca Road, Cambuslang.

* * *

Susie’s comment on the tape, about how love is a mistake, wasn’t directed at me. She could just have been pissed and showing off to the journalist, flirting with him, letting him think she was available. She’s entitled to a bit of private head space, allowed to talk to people without me there. That’s all she was doing. In some ways it speaks well of our relationship. I want her to feel autonomous. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

She managed to call me this morning, a full seven days after the verdict. The phone rang while I was standing in the hall eating hot garlic bread (all that’s left in the freezer). If I’d been in the living room, I could have used the cordless and gone off somewhere private, but Susie said that she couldn’t talk for long anyway. She’s been given a job in the laundry, Monday is their heaviest day, and it doesn’t pay well.

“I’ll need to phone Fitzgerald a lot in the next few weeks, and I should keep as much of the phonecard as I can.”

Why would she need to talk to Fitzgerald a lot? I thought the sentencing hearing was straightforward. Perhaps they’ve thought of something for the appeal, but I didn’t think to ask that until after she’d rung off.

“Susie, it’s great to hear your voice.” I kept saying her name to remind myself that she wasn’t dead, that she’d just gone away for a while. It was difficult to hear what she was saying. A woman was shouting in a singsong voice in the background. Another woman told her to shut up or move away from the phone area, and the singer let rip a string of expletives.

“But, Susie, Fitzgerald can phone you, can’t he?”

“No.” Her voice sounded distant, as if she were looking away from the phone, back at the shouting woman. “Well, I don’t know all the rules yet. Maybe that’s right.” Then, in a quietly muttered aside: “Shut her up, will you?”

“You can reverse the charges to here, as well, you know.”

“I think we’ve spent quite enough money already, don’t you?” she said flatly. “Anyway, we’ve got to buy our phonecards out of the wages they give us.”

“Can’t I send you some?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise the rich prisoners would get a lot more talk time than the poor ones, and that wouldn’t be fair.” She sounded scornful. I couldn’t tell if she was being sardonic about the system, the rules, or my stupidity in not instinctively knowing the rules about convicted prisoners’ phone calls.