(2002) Deception aka Sanctum (28 page)

The grass strip was wet, and I felt eyes watching me from the little slit windows opposite. A woman shouted something I couldn’t make out, and Margie shrieked a funny little piercing cry like a bird of prey. My coat was flapping open, one shoulder not pulled on properly, and I was walking unevenly, still stamping my right foot into the shoe. All I wanted was to get in there and see her, see she was all right and not dead.

When they opened the door from the inside, the first thing my eyes fell on was the old woman and the girl, sitting with a young woman, barely an adult herself, who was holding the child and beaming, pressing her cheek to the child’s. The girl had her eyes shut, savoring the love. The old woman looked up at me pityingly as Margie clambered down and ran across the room to her mummy.

Susie was sitting in the corner, head back, propped between two walls. A very long cigarette was burning in her limp hand, and she had a red nose and swollen eyes. She didn’t even put her cigarette down to pick up Margie, she just held her hands open and let Margie climb across her lap to the seat next to her.

In spite of what I read last night, I was pleased to see her too and scurried across the room in my half-on shoe, falling into the seat next to her. “Susie, Christ, are you okay?”

Her face crumpled and she sobbed against my chest, holding her cigarette up and away from me like an overwrought drunk at a party. I wrapped my arms around her and indulgently imagined that we were at home on the settee, she’d just been sacked and I was comforting her, and everything was fine, fine. We’d get the chance to spend time together now. We could take a new nanny and travel. Go to the Sahara and watch the sunrise over the High Atlas Mountains. I patted her shoulder and kissed her head.

It took Susie seven minutes to cry herself to a standstill, and during that time I was as happy as a man sitting in a prison visiting room can be without having a wank. I opened my eyes and saw her cigarette had burned all the way down and the ash had fallen into my lap in a perfect skeleton.

Finally, Susie patted my chest and sat herself up. “You are so good to me,” she said, shaking her head and wiping her face. “It means so much, Lachie, I can’t tell you. Especially just now, when things are so bad.”

I took her hand and told her I loved her and would do anything— literally anything— to make things better for her. Carried away by my own rhetoric, I said it was the highlight of my life to come to this filthy room and see her. She looked beautiful, and, poor sweetheart, tell me why she was so sad.

“She’s dead,” she said, “Donna’s dead.”

I said, “Yeah, we knew that already.”

No, Susie said. They found her body yesterday, on a hillside in Sutherland. A Ministry of Defense team on maneuvers had found her body at the bottom of a cliff. She’d been mutilated like the Riverside Ripper victims.

I didn’t understand. “Was she killed recently?”

“It happened at the same time as Gow. They’ve only just found her.” Susie sniffed. “The police have just left. I didn’t really believe she was dead. I imagined her off somewhere, carrying on her life.”

I didn’t know what to say. Everyone knew Donna was dead. They’d found copious amounts of her blood in the boot of the Golf Polo after they found Gow. I asked if they were sure it was Donna. She nodded. “They’ve matched the dental records and a fractured clavicle she had when she was seven.”

I nodded. We only had six minutes left. “Are they going to charge you with it?”

Susie said no as she lit another cigarette. “They’ve got me already. Waste of money.”

We had four minutes left. “Susie,” I said, “I have to ask you something stupid. Were you having an affair with Andrew Gow?” It sounded more sissy than I expected. Susie laughed loudly, like the laugh on the Dictaphone tape about Donna, but not bitter or scary.

Genuinely amused, she cupped my cheek in her hand. “Oh, Lachie,” she said, exhaling my name like she used to during sex, “Lachie, how could you think such a thing?”

“When you said to Morris that someone had killed those girls to get Gow out, who was it you were talking about?”

She fell forward slightly from the waist. “Donna,” she whispered.

“Donna killed those girls?”

She nodded.

“But you told Morris and Evelyn it wasn’t.”

“I only realized after. Anyway, I wouldn’t confide my suspicions to that pair of arseholes.”

(I didn’t think about it until now, but she didn’t share her suspicions with me, either.)

Shock hit her in a fresh wave and she started to cry again.

“But if Donna killed those girls, why did they find semen on them? How could they get a DNA match?”

She was crying so much that she couldn’t talk. She tried but couldn’t bring her lips together. She made a slight wanking motion with her hand, and I understood.

“Are you sure?”

She shrugged and carried on crying. It seemed to be compulsive. She covered her open mouth and tried to sit as though she were having a normal conversation, but her eyes dripped tears and her breath came in gulps. I told her about finding the hotel letter but hadn’t the heart to give her a hard time about it. She carried on crying, listening and nodding but crying all the same.

“Shall I just hang on to the letter for now?” I said.

She nodded.

“For the appeal?”

She nodded.

Before I left she squeezed my arm tightly and apologized. “I am so, so sorry,” she breathed, “sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be silly.”

She shook her head and said she was sorry again. It was only later that I wondered whether she was apologizing for crying or something else entirely.

I find what Susie said about Donna shocking, but it does make sense. Having seen her on the video, you know there’s more going on in her head than she let on. I can’t see her kneeling over a dead teenager, though, much less hacking at her mouth and throwing a sample of Gow’s sperm on her.

It also occurred to me, during a moment when I was considering all the possible possibles, that if Susie believed Donna had killed those other girls to get Gow out, then it would be a perfect motive for killing Donna too. Susie might have thought that she was saving the world from a violent couple who would inevitably kill again.

Maybe Susie did kill them and genuinely doesn’t remember. She often used to talk about patients who had blanked out committing their offenses because it was too painful. There’s nothing in post-traumatic stress disorder that says they can’t be responsible for the trauma; it just means that they were upset by it.

Still, possible possibles aside, I drove home happy. They announced on the radio that the remains of Donna McGovern, from Highfields in Leicester, had been found in Sutherland. I turned it off. I didn’t want to hear about that. Susie may have said terrible things about me and Yeni, but she’s not dead, she definitely wasn’t fucking Gow, and she wasn’t in love with him. I feel like I’ve been undivorced, uninsulted, uncuckolded. I’ve never felt more horny; it was like being a teenager again. Every time I passed an attractive woman on the drive home, I thought about Harry’s little blond mum. I’d think of her being a little bit pissed and out of order, giggling and pulling down the hem of her top so that her round little tits pop out. I’ve struggled all evening not to open the kitchen drawer and find the birthday party list. It’s eleven o’clock now, getting to the point where it’s much too late to phone. It would be dangerous to start anything just because I’m relieved. She could so easily go straight to the papers. I’ll leave it. I’ll leave it for a bit.

chapter twenty-eight

I DON’T WANT SUSIE EVER TO READ THIS, BUT I NEED TO WRITE about it. I’ve changed the computer password to “Marzip.” It wasn’t meant as a big symbolic gesture or a shift of loyalties or anything. It doesn’t mean anything, not at all. It’s just that wrappers from marzipan bars are lying around the desk and I’m a bit nervous today, my mind’s gone blank. I’ve slept with Yeni.

There, it’s in the file now. I slept with her and liked it. We stayed up all night having fun and being nice to each other. I know she’s young. I know she’s lonely, and she probably did it because of that, and I’m older and it’s wrong of me. But for the first time in weeks I was present in the moment, not speculating about the future or rewriting the past, and it felt like a month-long holiday.

I don’t want Susie to stumble across this file the way I did hers. I suppose it would be just as bad if she found the stuff I’ve written before, about not trusting her and how I felt during the visits. I’ll get rid of this computer. I’ll say this one’s broken and buy her a new one. I’ll pretend it’s a nice treat.

I said to Yeni this morning at five-thirty, “Yeni, we can’t have an affair, I do have a wife.”

And she said, “Hmm, Lachie, afster this day we’re not talk about it again. This . . . hmm.” She paused and dipped her chin to her bare knee as she tried to think of the words. “Friendly fuck, for friend.” And she stroked my face.

It sounds sordid when I write it down, but it wasn’t when she said it. It was tender and kind and sweet. Even her mustache looks kooky and sexy now. She is an amazing woman.

Before I left to drop Margie at nursery, I nipped back upstairs to her bedroom to tell her quickly that we were heading off. She was on her side, the duvet curled around her curves like a flattering strapless dress, her black hair fanned out over the white pillow. The moist air in the room was thick with pheromones and vigorous sweating. I crouched down and rolled my face into her soft hair, nuzzling her neck, and said I might come back from nursery and snuggle in beside her. She said no, she’d be asleep and now we were just friends. I love that. I keep wanting to wake her up and ask her if it’s still all right, if she still likes me, if I’m a horrible predatory old bastard. But it wasn’t me who started it.

I’d finished working up here at about eleven-thirty yesterday evening. I’d actually finished at eleven and went downstairs to get the phone. Bangor phoned to cancel our drinking session on Sunday: Evelyn’s taken Morris back and he’s not allowed out at night. She won’t even let him work evenings. I came straight back up here because I didn’t want to phone Harry’s mum. I read a bit of the book about women who marry murderers. Maybe I should have chugged off, but it didn’t occur to me. I thought Harry’s mum was the danger, not me.

When I came down, Yeni was sitting watching television, some film with Kevin Bacon in it. I sat down in the opposite chair and said, “Oh God, how much longer does this crap go on for?”

She laughed and said, “Shut up, Lachie, it’s very sad.”

I pretended to cry, covering my face (a bit like Susie had during the day) and saying oh, poor Kevin Bacon, he so brave; Holy Mother protect him from the other actors, boo hoo. It got a laugh, but she was obviously engrossed, so I shut up and went to the kitchen. I got the two hidden marzipan bars out of the fridge. When I went back into the sitting room, I sort of went “ta-da” and held them up. She beamed at me. She reached out to take one with her right hand, and then her left hand came out of nowhere and snatched the other one as well. We were wrestling down by the side of the settee when she straddled me and sat up, panting and looking down at me with such an expression of approval and affection and, well, enjoyment. She wasn’t tolerating me or being kind or keeping things going or hiding feelings from me. She genuinely enjoys me. I put my hand on her thigh and we looked at each other for an electric moment. Then Yeni toppled forward from the waist and kissed me hard on the lips.

Within minutes we were upstairs, in her room because it has a lock on the door, wrestling on the bed and giggling and eating marzipan and feeding it to each other. Before I had even touched her, she whipped off her top, yanked one of the cups of her bra down, and balanced a nugget of sweet golden paste on her tit, lying back and grinning. Her cherry nipple was the center of a swell of coffee skin, lighter than her caramel tummy, warmed in the sun for eighteen summers.

I climbed off the bed, unable to take my eyes off her breast (or indeed the marzipan— they both seemed enormously exciting to me at that moment). I stood there, bent over and panting. I asked if she was sure she wanted to do this. She seemed surprised at the question. I said that she was young and the house was mine and I didn’t want her to feel she needed to do this or that it couldn’t stop right now. She thought about it for a moment and looked at me, gasping like a man having a stroke. She laughed and made her delicious tits shudder. Looking up, looking me straight in the eye, she reached out and stroked my cock through my trousers.

Yeni is fat. She has big tits and love handles you could hang a bike on, but she doesn’t care. Her stomach creases above her thighs, and a roll of flesh hangs down over her pubes, but she doesn’t look like a second prize. She looks like a fertility goddess because she’s so proud of herself. It makes her seem unbelievably dirty and sensual, like you could fuck her all night and then eat pizza off the cheeks of her ass, and she’d still laugh and like you.

I did ask her if it was all right, I did, but I feel I’ve done something unconscionable that I’ll be held accountable for at some point in the future. The odd thing is, I feel as if I’ve done something bad to Yeni, not Susie. Susie barely comes into it. The only time I don’t feel ambivalent about what happened is when I’m with Yeni. When I’m with her I know it’s fine.

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