(2002) Deception aka Sanctum (24 page)

“Is that all you want to know, then?” he asked.

I said yeah, thanks for coming, hope you enjoyed the pastries. He did, he did, did I have my car with me? He wanted a lift. I said yeah, but I was in a hurry, sorry. Did he see a lot of Gow and Donna after he got out? Well, he said, they went up north a week after his release. Stevie brought Chinese food over to Donna’s house in Kirki the night before they left. Whose idea was it to go up north? Donna’s, he said. She really wanted to go. Gow couldn’t stay in Glasgow really, too many guys wanting a piece of him. Couldn’t even go out to a pub for a drink, but it was Donna’s dream to live up there. She’d booked the hotel, and they were going to go and look for a house and jobs in Sutherland. I said it wasn’t a very good plan. There was no work in Sutherland, and the seasonal waitressing jobs would all be gone in September, but Stevie just shrugged. Did Donna know anyone there? No. Had she been there before? No, but she’d seen pictures.

I said I wanted to ask him one more thing: Where was Lara Orr, and how could I get hold of her? He wiped his face as if he’d just realized he was covered in food.

“I’ve not seen her for ages,” he said. “No one has. She’s probably gone back to Liverpool.”

Never mind, I said, and, once we were outside, thanks for coming to see me. Stevie flattened his hand over his bald head again, looked as if he was about to ask for money, but stopped. He nodded to himself and walked away, pulling his collar up, even though it wasn’t windy anymore and it wasn’t raining.

I felt great as I drove back to nursery. Susie hadn’t slept with Gow. She might have been madly in love with him, the twisted little prick may even have been the love of her life, but they didn’t have sex in prison, I was certain of it. And she’d been sacked before his appeal and was at home the whole time after he got out, so it didn’t happen then.

I’m going to visit Susie in a few days and I’m actually quite excited. I’m going to ask about the hotel letter and about Gow. I hope she appreciates the trouble I’m going to. I’ve spent hours up here working on this.

* * *

But I was going to write about nursery. I had taken Margie there this morning with a light heart and slight tingle in my loins. I wondered if Harry’s mum would be there, and, sure enough, she was wearing a gravitationally impossible low-cut top. I think it was actually a low back and she’d put it on the wrong way around by mistake. She must have gotten dressed in the dark. It is dark until about eight-thirty, give or take, and she has got three boys to get dressed and fed. The straps of her white bra were showing, and she kept having to yank the top down, showing the tops of the cups.

She didn’t come over but gave me the eye, which I liked because she’d been so full on before, and not coming over suggested a little reticence. I went over and said something inoffensive like, “Hi, how are you today?” She laughed loudly, covering her mouth and pulling her top down at the hem.

What was she laughing at? Was she laughing at me? She seemed quite nervous, so I tried to diffuse the situation by saying, “Calm down,” and she laughed again and said she didn’t know what I meant. I just backed away and left, waving good-bye to Margie on the way out. She was rubbing the blackboard with a dolly’s legs and ignored me.

I felt ridiculous when I got outside. What was the woman laughing about? Have I managed, in among all my other failures, to be bad at flirting, too? Maybe she was just nervous? She seems desperate. There’s something of the bunny-boiler about her: a slight craziness around the eyes.

If Susie doesn’t get out or for some other reason our marriage splits up, I’ll be back on the dating scene. I don’t know if I could stand all that guessing what people mean and getting knocked back and putting your emotional equilibrium in the hands of another person. In marriage at least there’s an understanding that you can’t just get dumped out of hand, that they definitely did like you once. It might have been long, long ago in a galaxy far away, but they definitely found you attractive and interesting at some point in the interaction.

I’m sure not all women are like Harry’s mum; it must just be some of them. But what if all the ones who aren’t like that are still married and only the ones like Harry’s mum are back out on the range? What a depressing thought. I think I’d rather stay single than try to negotiate all that crap again. I don’t want an intense face-to-face relationship. I want someone I can take for granted; someone I can not reply to when they call me from the other room. The older I get, the less often I meet new people that I can stand the sight of.

Anyway, after my encounter with Stevie Ray and his jazz-mag visage, I drove back to nursery to get Margie. One of the babies had been sick, and the heat was turned up high, so the whole room stank to high heaven of hot sour milk. Harry’s mum was there again, hanging about near the toy cupboard, wearing a different T-shirt. She came toward me through the sour fog. As she approached, I could see her getting angry, and she said, “Don’t look at me like that.” I explained that I was wrinkling my nose at the milk smell, not at her, but she stayed annoyed and demanded to know how I was. I said I was fine, sorry, sorry. How was she? How were the boys getting along? Yes, nursery was super for them. She paused and whispered she’d like to call me, she had my number from the birthday party list. I said that would be nice, please do, and she tugged at the hem of her top, pulling it down and in.

She’s gorgeous.

chapter twenty-three

YESTERDAY I FINISHED WRITING UP STEVIE RAY AT ELEVEN-THIRTY and went downstairs to watch telly. Feeling pretty smug, I remembered the video in Box 2. Yeni and Margie were in bed. I decided to watch it.

I sat on the settee, watching the TV with one eye, remote ready to hand in case I needed to turn it off quickly. The index showed that there were three items on it: a bit of home video followed by a one-hour documentary shown on Channel Four in February and then another portion of home video buried deep at the end of the tape, hidden beyond seventeen minutes of white noise and snow. If we didn’t have the indexing facility on the tape player, you’d never watch to the end. The dates on the index show that the documentary was aired on television a good month before the last bit of home video. I wasn’t sure which of them was relevant at first, but actually they’re all relevant and tie into the research she’d started with Harvey Tucker.

Box 2 Document 9 Videotape

PROGRAM 1: HOME MOVIE 1 3/1/98 3:18 P.M.

As it started, the image of a gray little office was tugged down the screen in jagged horizontal lines. Finally it resolved itself and, offscreen, Harvey Tucker says, “Brilliant.”

I made extensive notes as I watched.

The room looks small and ugly. There is a shelf of books on the far wall above a metal desk. I can’t actually read the titles, but I recognize the spines of some of the books and can see Susie’s sports bag under the desk. This is her office, but I’ve never seen inside because she works in a secure institution. It is small and gray and low. Susie taped interviews with some of her patients, I remember. She brought the prison’s camcorder home to film Margie’s first Christmas. On one of the bookshelves, up high near the top of the wall, a tiny bright glint catches my eye. It is her wedding ring. The design we got was quite chunky, and she takes it off to work, just like I do when I’m typing things up here. That’s how she lost it. She told security she went to put it back on again after typing a report and found it gone.

In the center of the static shot is a black plastic armchair with a low seat and wooden arms. Donna is sitting in it, looking nervously to the right of the camera, banging her knees together, a little I-want-to-please-you smile on her heavily made-up face. Her hair is thick, pulled loosely up in a ponytail at the crown.

In front of Donna’s feet, on the floor, there is a long bright rectangle of sunlight. It is coming from a window behind the camera. The shadow from the window is so crisp that the four vertical bars can clearly be seen and I can make out the sharp shadow of someone’s head and torso. (I assume it is Tucker but later realize it is Susie.)

It’s painful to look at Donna, knowing she’s lying dead somewhere, her voluptuous little body decomposing, waiting to be found. She seems so young and plump and ripe. She is dressed in a button-up black polka-dot dress with a scoop neck and a pair of clunky white court shoes. You don’t really get a sense of her personality in static photos, but she is fidgety and shyer than she seemed in interviews. She covers her mouth when she smiles, which is often, and pulls her dark hair over her face. At one stage I can see her pull the edge of her hair toward her mouth as if she’s going to start chewing it like a small girl. Then she remembers that she mustn’t do that and tucks it away. Her skin is very pink.

“Hi, Donna,” says Susie, and I can hear that she’s smiling.

Donna grins back at her. “Hiya.” She lifts her hand in a little wave, feels embarrassed about the gesture, and then covers her mouth and giggles as though she has done something wrong.

“Now,” says Susie, “if at any point you feel uncomfortable with this, we want you to say so, okay?”

Donna nods.

Tucker emphasizes the point. “Yes. Any time you want us to stop filming, we will.”

“’Kay.”

She smiles at him, and I can hear in his voice that he is smiling back as he adds, “All you have to do is say so.”

Tucker is not delineated in the shadow on the floor, and it makes his voice seem disembodied and God-like, coming from nowhere. Donna never really looks at him, either, so I have no real sense of where he is sitting in the room other than behind the camera somewhere. Donna looks at Susie all the time.

“Are you going to ask me personal things?” She has a lisp, and her accent is all over England. One minute she’s from London, the next she’s from Newcastle. I thought she was from Leicester.

“No,” says Susie in a soothing voice, “nothing terribly private.”

“Good. Good. I don’t want to talk about my Andrew, either.” She shivers with excitement. “I can’t wait to meet him.”

“I want to ask you about your attraction to Andrew and what made you write to him in the first place. Then I want to ask you about your feelings. Will that be all right?”

Donna shrugs and pulls her hair over her face. “S’pose.” Her line of sight falls slightly, and I can tell from the moving shadow on the floor that Susie has just sat down. Only the shadow of her head is still visible.

“Okey-dokey,” says Susie jovially, and Donna smiles again. “When did you first hear about Andrew Gow?”

“I saw him in the papers.”

“You saw his photograph?”

“Yeah, the one where he’s got the green jacket on. The one with the beard.” (I realize suddenly that this is how Susie knew which photo Donna had seen of Gow; this is why she wrote “Donna’s first view of G” on it and told the guy in GLT about it. I feel I’m really making sense of things, as if I’m finally breaking the back of the materials in this study.)

“And you liked that picture, did you?”

Donna rubs her leg and glances guiltily at the camera. “Yeah. I thought he looked kind.”

Susie pauses. “You see, not everyone would take that out of that photograph. To a lot of people he might look a bit scary.”

Donna smiles a little. “Not to me.”

“Do you think he wanted to look kind in the photograph?”

Donna thinks about it. “Hmm. No, probably not, really.”

“How do you think he wanted to look?”

She thinks about it, but I can tell she’s a bit bored and doesn’t really care. “Handsome?”

Susie makes a noncommittal noise and moves on. “What was happening in your own life at the time when you saw the photograph?”

“Oh.” Donna flattens the skirt down over her knees and bows her head. “My divorce was just through, and then my dad died.” She laughs unhappily.

“And how did that make you feel?”

“Dunno. Bit sad? Dad was a bastard and hit us from when I was a bairn . . . so . . . it wasn’t all bad, and the divorce was good.”

Tucker interjects. “But you looked after your father? You and your husband lived with him?”

Donna points her chin in Tucker’s direction but keeps her eyes down. “Yeah. Then I put him out and stayed on myself.”

“You must have felt some affection for your father, then?”

“Yeah, dunno.” She turns back to Susie, clearly her preferred interviewer. “Where did you get those shoes?”

Susie is thrown. “Oh,” she says. “Um . . . Shoe Nation, I think.”

Donna grins and nods. “They’re very nice.” She sits forward, leaning out of frame. “I like that color of brown. Have you polished them up or . . . ?”

“No, they’re patent leather. They’re always that shiny.”

Donna sat back, filling in the screen again. She looks at Susie and there is a pause.

Susie has spotted the fact that Donna shifted the subject from her father and moves on. “Where do you see your relationship with Andrew going?”

It would be a loaded question for a woman who was in love with Gow, but Susie’s voice is steady and my heart leaps. I rewind and watch that bit over and over again until the nuances of her voice are completely lost to me. Truthful, not fucking him, and possibly not even loving him. This has been a great couple of days.

Donna shrugs, and Susie rephrases the question. “Have you thought how difficult it would be if you spent your lifetime visiting this prison? You might have to move up here.”