(2002) Deception aka Sanctum (33 page)

I didn’t want to fight with them, so we sat looking at the photos until we had all finished our cigarettes. Stevie turned to an indoors one of Donna leaning toward the camera across the top of a wooden surface. She was wearing a purple and white tie-dye top that swept down to her cleavage and a gold crucifix dangling between her boobs. She was smiling, pressing her lips tight together the way she always did in photos. It was quite a good picture.

“What’s that scar there from?” I said, pointing to a pink mark that had caught the light.

“That’s where she broke her collarbone when she was wee,” said Stevie. “It was a bad break. She was in a cast for months.”

I laughed but they didn’t. Of course they didn’t. They never went to medical school. They couldn’t know that you can’t use plaster to set a fractured clavicle. Old MacDonald used the same joke every year: it’s like using an envelope to try to set jelly, he’d say, and the second-years would titter. Nor would Stevie know that a bone breaking through skin wouldn’t leave a perfectly straight, small scar at ninety degrees to the bone. Donna’s scar looked like a deep paper cut, it was so straight. And he wouldn’t know that pink scar tissue is relatively recent.

He could see how intrigued I was by it. “You take that picture,” said Stevie as I stood to leave.

“I don’t want it,” I said. He shoved it toward me.

“Take it, take it,” he insisted, pushing it into my hands.

I’m sure it was meant kindly. Lara scrunched up her nose and crossed her arms, watching Stevie struggle hard to do the right thing.

“Okay,” I said. “If you tell anyone I took it, I’ll tell the papers about you two, right? And about the state of your hall.”

Lara blushed at the thought. Stevie followed me outside. “You’ll write a book about all of this,” he said. “One day. You’re clever.”

“No,” I said, “I won’t write a book.”

“Of all of us, you’ll write the book.”

“No, I won’t.”

He smiled imploringly. “Just make me nice in it.”

* * *

I put the photo of Donna up here, stuck her to the edge of the shelf in front of me. Donna McGovern: curiouser and curiouser.

chapter thirty-three

I CAME UP HERE TO WRITE ABOUT NURSERY, BUT AS I WAS SETTLING down in the chair, putting the cup of tea down, etc., I was thinking about evington.doc, and I looked at the first letter Donna sent to Gow. It was sent from Evington Road, Evington, in Leicester, but Donna’s address was not Evington. Her father’s house was in Highfields, and her husband moved out a year before her father died. Two months after his death, she was still living there alone when she wrote to Gow. But why would she need a different correspondence address if she was living alone? She’d lived in North Street all her life and sold the place when she came up here. Susie must have called the file “evington” for some reason, perhaps to highlight the discrepancy?

I’m drawn to write about nursery. The women there are so nice and supportive, and the herd of wee wild kids reminds me that life goes on whether I want it to or not. I only went because Yeni refused to go back and collect Margie. I begged her and then acted stern but it had no effect whatever. I even tried bribery. I offered her a tenner (cheap, I know, but you don’t want people to know you’ve got money; that’s how you end up with none). She turned her nose up at the note and refused me on the pretext that she had “sjchores.”

“Yeni, leave them,” I said, slumping to my knees. “For the love of God, return my daughter to me, please.”

“Lachlan.” She stood above me, her hands firmly on her hips, speaking as if to a naughty brother. “Jyou cannot hide in this house. These story papers: no one believe that for you.”

I protested for a bit longer, but I felt she was probably right. I’m an unlikely swinger, having a morbid fear of both indignity and public nudity. It’s not written on my T-shirt, but I think it’s probably clear from the shamed way I carry myself. Anyway, I wore my new coat and walked slowly through the park.

Before Susie’s arrest, the women at nursery were a bit suspicious of me and kept me out of their warm circle. Now when they see me approach the door, they make a point of waving and catching my eye and saying hello. They don’t even really know anything about me other than I’m being made a monkey of in the papers. If I had walked in there this afternoon carrying a severed head, someone would have come up to me and said, “Poor you.”

Some mums were gossiping at the top of the steps but stopped when they saw me coming. They said hi, calling me by name, and an unknown hand squeezed my elbow compassionately as I brushed past and went downstairs. Inside everyone smiled at me or waved. Harry’s mum wasn’t there, which was a relief and took the onus off me to make conversation or deal with any kind of situation. The small woman who once had vomit on her back came over and said, “Everyone knows that’s crap,” before scuttling off. I don’t think she should swear in front of the kids so much, but I appreciated the gesture of solidarity.

Margie had bitten a boy on the tummy, and Mrs. McLaughlin needed to talk to me about it. She explained that Margie’s gums hurt and she doesn’t understand that biting doesn’t feel good to everyone else as well as her. She needs the fact brought home whenever she bites anyone. As she talked, I could see her eyes trail across the shoulder and sleeve of my coat, taking in the quality of the material. I put my hand in my pocket so that the front flapped open and she got a glimpse of the lining. I saw her eyes widen at the shock of pale blue. I love this coat. I wonder what else they’ve got in that shop. Later, when we got home, Margie tried to bite me on the arm.

* * *

I’ve been thinking all afternoon about Stevie Ray and Lara Orr. It was eleven-thirty before I worked out that Donna’s body’s being found with Susie’s wedding ring has been a terrible shock, and Lara and Stevie’s romance, another shock, may well be completely unrelated. It feels as though one has something to do with the other because they both have a strong emotional resonance for me. It’s the mental equivalent of mashing two mismatched jigsaw pieces together. I was hoping in some way that one might cancel the other out, like red and white wine on a carpet.

The ring is a giant, tectonic shock because it makes me think that Susie must be guilty after all. I look at my own ring now and feel sick. I took it off and put it on the shelf up here. The overhead light catches the gold, and the ring winks at me. We know, the ring and I, we know she may have done it. Everyone else in the world recognized it ages ago, dealt with it, accepted it, but not me. Only now, a full three months after she was charged, only now can I see her with a small knife in a dark bothy, the ragged, gaping neck of a family packet of wine gums sticking out of her pocket, leaning over Gow, reaching into his open mouth, his hands swelling up, big and purple enough to be mistaken for gloves.

Accepting it, just as a possibility, here, in the sanctuary of this secret room, feels strangely comfortable. It feels as though I have known all along that she might have done it and have sprained my brain trying not to admit it. Could all that pain and discomfort have come from my lack of acceptance? I wonder whether Susie could have given Gow her wedding ring as a sign of her loyalty. Then he could have killed Donna and left the ring there and Susie killed him in retaliation?

If she killed either of them, she’s in the right place. If she did it, then Margie is better off growing up without her, and I’m better off by myself. I’m young enough to start again. I’m not in a bad position to be left alone. I live in a lovely house, I have a beautiful daughter who is healthy and adorable. I have access to a lot of money in my bank accounts— really, a lot of money. I’d never have to work again. I could get full-time child care in the house now and actually get down to some writing. I could buy a laptop, get rid of this machine, which is and always will be her machine, and make this my own study.

I can feel myself separating off from Susie, pulling away and slowly letting the skin between us split. It hurts. I feel the pull and ripping tug on the unripe scab. There will be a right time to pull away completely, but just now I cannot resist the urge, I pull and bleed, just to see what it will feel like to be Susie-free. It’s a phantom pain, because the Susie I thought I was attached to was never there.

Box 3 (overspill from 2) Document 15 “College Friends Mourn Gina’s Death,” Evening Times, 5/13/98

A memorial service was held yesterday for Gina Wilson, victim number two in the second spate of Riverside Ripper murders. College and school friends joined Gina’s family outside St. Michael’s Chapel in Mount Vernon.

“She was a lovely girl,” said a college friend, “we will all miss her.”

Gina, 19, had been studying catering at the city’s Central College of Catering and Hospitality Management. She was a popular girl who was active in her local church. She had given up her Easter holidays for the past four years to accompany groups of disabled children on pilgrimage to Lourdes.

I keep transcribing these things, and I don’t know why I’m doing it. All they do is make me recall portions of our lives that I’ve forgotten.

Box 3 Document 16 “Crimewatch Gina Offers No New Clues,” Glasgow Herald, 5/15/98

Despite a reconstruction on the BBC’s Crimewatch program, no new witnesses to Gina Wilson’s movements have come forward. What is known is that Gina Wilson went missing on her way home from a nightclub in the city center after a night out with friends. Gina followed the Broomielaw down to the junction of Union Street looking for a taxi and then disappeared. Both her body and that of the previous victim, Nicola Hall, were found in locations bordering the river.

Ripperologists have warned that the murders could be following the original pattern of the Riverside Ripper slayings.

I’m trying to break the habit of coming up here in the middle of the night. There’s no point in poring over the articles if there isn’t going to be an appeal. I need to get back to sleeping properly. I come up here and spend hours smoking and hiding.

* * *

I was lying in the dark ten minutes ago, thinking about Susie. It is very dark tonight. It’ll get worse before the winter’s over. In the dank dark, right in front of my face, I saw Susie sitting in her cell, a miniature square of white, so small I had to squint hard to see, and my head began to hurt. She is sitting on her bed, looking at her hands. The light above her is bright, and her face is washed out with the whiteness of it. Susie is thinking about killing herself.

I see her being locked in her suicide-watch cell, the guard checking her through the eyepiece. Susie’s sitting quite still on the edge of her bed, listening to the scuffling noises outside the door. She stares at her hands, exaggerating her medicated muddle, her jaw hanging open. From outside the door she hears the scratch of metal on metal as the guard slides the eye-shield down and moves on to check the next cell. They probably don’t do that; it would be too obvious a signal that they had finished looking at the prisoner. They probably can’t hear anything inside, but in the bright box Susie has some physical sign that she is no longer being watched. She suddenly becomes animated, moving too quickly as befits her fruit-fly size and mental excitement. She stands up and hurtles over to the wall, pulls a rope made from knotted bed linen out from her sleeve and loops it over the radiator. The light is bright in the room, and I have to squint once more to see. It’s Susie but not Susie; it looks like her but it isn’t her. She hooks the rope around her neck and grins, a smile so wide it almost splits her face. Her eyes are already dead as she sits down short of the floor, her hair jerks up and down, and she hangs, grinning, on the rope’s end. My head is aching.

I sat up and did breathing exercises, trying to calm myself down. It’s nonsense, like the monsters Margie thinks are in the toilet, or the ankle-grabbing hairy hand under the bed. And then I lay back down and saw her again.

The prison would have phoned me to tell me if anything had happened to Susie, but I keep thinking that she may have killed herself just one second ago. They are cutting her down, notifying the doctor, getting the death cert, before they contact me. It would take about thirty minutes to an hour for them to contact me, I think. And then I think, no, she’s still alive, but I’m wishing her dead. I’m wishing her dead because it would make everything less complicated for me. Then I could be a sad rich widower and women would want to save me. I could step back from my sadness by writing about love and the empire, or loss and philosophy. Women would flock to me and men would seek my company. It would be so much less complicated than this peculiarly suburban mess of inching betrayal and small insults. Anything would be better than this.

In the deep dark night, I know Susie stopped loving me a long time ago. What I took to be familiarity was friendship and boredom. She loved Gow, not me, and she killed him and his wife. With a family pack of wine gums in her pocket, she followed them up north and killed them both.

She didn’t even do me the honor of divorcing me. She just ignored me. No matter how hard I try not to care about her, I do. But she doesn’t reciprocate. You can’t really fake that sort of disinterest.

She’s the only person I’m close to, the only person I connect with. I don’t remember being close to anyone before I knew her. Now I find that the island I’ve been rowing toward for seven years was a cloud on the horizon and I’m hopelessly adrift.

chapter thirty-four

I’VE JUST OPENED THE MAIL. TWO QUARTERLY STATEMENTS ARrived this morning, one from the high-interest savings account and one from the shares portfolio we have with Mercer. Both statements acknowledge the change of address to c/o Fitzgerald & Co. They also document substantial amounts of money being moved out of the accounts exactly one month ago, just after her conviction. Susie’s moving money out of my reach, but she can’t get to the bank. That’s why she’s using all her phonecards to call Fitzgerald. It also explains why Fitzgerald keeps acting as if I’m a filthy upstart. He’s been organizing moves of raw cash and putting it where I can’t touch it.