Deception aka Sanctum

chapter eleven

IT’S THREE-THIRTY IN THE MORNING AND FREEZING UP HERE. MY finger joints are aching, and I’ve got two sweaters on over my pajamas. Mentally and physically, I’m completely exhausted.

I was thinking about Harvey Tucker while I fed Margie her tea. I’ve been leaving messages for a week now. All he needs to do is pick up the phone. I started rehearsing what I’d say to him if he did, what I’d tell him if I was clearing my mind, which is always a mistake. I used to do that in the Western and invariably ended up having fights with people when it would have been much better just to shut up.

I was thinking about how unnecessary it was to be unkind and not return the call, how it was kicking a man when he was down, etc. I got really angry and lost my temper with Margie for knocking over a plant pot and treading soil into the crack in the kitchen lino. I should have known then that I was losing control. I kept coming back to Tucker, thinking about him and getting hot.

It was only four-thirty, and it occurred to me that I could phone Sunnyfields and ask for him. I felt nervous thinking about it; they often didn’t put me through to Susie if she was in a meeting, and he could have successfully dodged me again. I realized that I would be better off just turning up at his door.

I hurried Margie through her tea, abandoning her yogurt so soon after the first refusal that she got confused and ate two-thirds of it before starting the “no” game again. Yeni settled down with her in front of the television, and I said I was going out to the supermarket. Won’t be long. They wouldn’t even notice I was gone.

Harvey Tucker’s street isn’t far off the motorway. It’s narrow and dark, with big old houses set back in wide gardens. At the foot of the street, hemmed in behind a low wall of bollards, a stream of slow-moving rush-hour traffic passed like a lazy herd of migrating buffalo, kicking up dust. The lights were on in the houses neighboring Tucker’s, and cruising slowly past in my dark car, I could see kids turning on televisions in front rooms, families settling in for the evening.

Harvey wasn’t in when I got there. The lights were off: no Mrs. Tucker, then, no grizzly little Tuckers to deal with. Just Harvey living alone, and, I thought, so much the better.

His house is much grander than ours. It’s one of those solid, tall Victorian villas with a crunchy red-gravel drive and big, clean bay windows with swaths and swags of expensive material thrown about all over them. I’ve only ever met Harvey once, at a Christmas party, but I could have guessed he lived somewhere like this. He’s an angular, splindly man with thin legs that match his thin hair and thin smile. He’s about fifty and has a faintly jaundiced pallor. He looks as though he would have been a sickly, whining child.

It was six o’clock, and I know they finish at Sunnyfields at five. It took Susie about fifty minutes to drive home, and we’re diagonally across the city, so I knew he’d be home soon. I waited outside in the car, rehearsing all the hell I was going to give him and watching until I saw a silver BMW pull slowly into the driveway. Tucker turned the engine off and stopped for a moment before he undid his belt. He climbed slowly out of the big, sleek car, opened the back passenger door, took out his briefcase, and shut the door again, pressing the beeper to lock it.

I suddenly realized how near the house he was and thought he might dodge indoors before I caught him, so I opened my car door and, slamming it shut, ran across the noisy gravel to him. He flinched at first, looking terrified, and raised his briefcase as if he were thinking of lashing out with it, but when he saw it was me, he let the bag fall to his side and watched me back off, lock my car, turn again, and come back toward him. It was eerie: he didn’t say hello or anything. It was as if he knew my coming to him was inevitable. When I drew close, he just turned around and opened the front door, switched off the burglar alarm, and shut the front door behind me. Our commonality of purpose felt like one of those creepy gay pickups in films about the fifties. But I’d left about twelve messages asking him to tell me something quite specific, so perhaps it wasn’t all that prescient.

When he turned on the light in the hall, I suddenly felt quite unsafe. The house was very dark, the hall papered in navy blue with gold stripes. The light had a small, stained-glass cone for a shade, but all it did was mute the light on the ceiling. From below, it was an elaborately decorated bare bulb, casting sharp shadows about the hall and Harvey ’s already Gothic face. A tall, dark wood bookcase housed the phone, a series of never opened green-bound books, and several scrawny stuffed birds, one about to take off, one staring at its feet, another (a little owl) staring startled at the opposite wall.

Harvey was standing close to me, a little too close, as if he were afraid of the hall as well. Behind him gaped two large black doorways, one leading to a front room, one to a back. I tried smiling to diffuse the atmosphere.

“So, Harvey Tucker, I’ve been trying to get you,” I blurted. Of course I meant “get you on the phone,” not “get you and attack you physically,” but his face convulsed in consternation, and he stumbled away from me, across the hall to the mouth of the dark front room. “No,” I said. “I mean on the phone. Get you on the phone.”

He didn’t look convinced. “You’ve been phoning me a lot. Too much.” He took a long-limbed step back into the front room, until he was swallowed by the dark. “It’s threatening.”

I followed him in. “Look, Harvey, I don’t mean to be threatening, but you can understand how upset I am-”

He was standing in the dark, holding a long, gnarled and knobbled walking stick over his head. He looked terrified as I came through the door and sort of brandished it in a tiny circle, as a warning. The man had just left his work at Sunnyfields, a containment facility for Scotland ’s most dangerous criminals, and he was knee-tremblingly afraid to be alone with me. A car passed by outside, twin white headlights fanned across the dark wall opposite, and I noticed, for no good reason at all, that his fly was open.

“Come on, Harvey. I’m not the fighting kind,” I said, cheerily. “I need to talk to you. It doesn’t seem much to ask. I’ve had a terrible time.”

Still he hesitated, afraid to give up the stick, until I leaned back and flicked the light on. “I just want to ask you some questions about Susie.”

The room was cluttered, again decorated with a lot of money, some obviously inherited furniture, and very little taste. It was done in dark, depressing colors, blue and red paper, two green chenille armchairs and matching couch, a coffee table with bow legs, a massive gray marble fireplace with a black belly, and a posy of crunchy dried flowers in the grate. On the mantelpiece sat posed professional photographs of a ten-years-younger Harvey and a pinched-faced woman. They were dressed in eighties shoulders and sharp angles, and they were sitting next to each other in front of a “stormy sky” backdrop. Next to it, in a matching thin gold frame, was another picture of Harvey sitting with the same woman and two young girls of about ten, again in front of a stormy sky. Their knees were all pointing in different directions, father left, mother right, children front and side. It gave the picture a splintered quality, as though they would all try to run away from each other the moment the shutter closed, which, judging from the quietness of the house, they had.

Harvey let the walking stick drop to the ground, the end of it hitting the nasty nylon carpet with a loud thunk that reverberated through the house, reminding us that we were alone.

My talking seemed to have calmed him a little, so I rambled on. “I’m sure you can imagine how many questions I must have about what happened to my wife. I’m pretty much in the dark about everything that went on. I thought she was going to the supermarket and then suddenly she’s arrested in Durness for a gruesome murder. I don’t even know anything about her job or what happened there with Gow and Donna. All I know”- I was being sneaky, I knew I was-“is that you were responsible for getting her sacked.”

It had exactly the effect I wanted it to: he shouted at me.

“I did not get her sacked. No one got her sacked. She stole Gow’s files from the hospital. She was caught on videotape putting the files into her bag. That’s why she got the sack.” He leaned back against a mock-Georgian liquor cabinet and panted for breath.

I couldn’t breathe. My mind raced over all the cozy nights we had spent together since her dismissal speculating about Sinclair’s motives: whether he was jealous of her professionally, whether he was a misogynist. I was flattered that Susie’d included me in a discussion about another man’s misogyny. It blinded me to her bald-faced lies. She had known it would. It was so unfair. I’d tried hard to be a good husband and she’d just stood there and lied to me.

I nodded at the liquor cabinet. “Please, can I have a drink, please, Harvey, please?”

Harvey led me by the arm to a chair and sat me down, handing me a tissue. Then he gave me a glass of a nice malt whiskey to sip. I was glad it was only Harvey I cried in front of. I said I was sorry, it wasn’t his fault, not his problem at all, but I needed to know some things. He got himself a big drink and sat down opposite me, on the other side of the marble fireplace.

“I’m sorry for all that’s happened,” he said. “I like Susan very much. Before all this started she was irreproachably professional. She was a good friend to me as well.” He looked up at the photos on the mantelpiece. “My wife and I separated last year, and Susan talked me through it. I don’t think I could have survived it without her. That’s why I felt so bad in the court. I didn’t want to give evidence against her, but they forced me to.”

I said I thought he had seemed a bit ambivalent, and he nodded. “I couldn’t look at her in that dock without thinking about all the help she’d been to me. I felt awful about it all.” His voice cracked, and I looked up. He was staring absently at his glass, looking vacant and old. A dark opening gaped in his trousers. He still hadn’t noticed. “They made me give evidence against her. I liked Susan.” He was talking about her as if she were dead.

“What about Gow? Did you like him?”

He snorted joylessly. “He was a psychopath.”

“Did Susie spend a lot of time with him?”

He put his glass down and looked straight at me, saddened by what he had to say. “An inordinate amount of time,” he said softly. “Inordinate. Hours at a time. We questioned her about it. Sinclair knew there was something wrong. He brought it up at a case conference, and she got very defensive. Said she was concerned about the wedding and wanted to make sure nothing was going to happen. Sinclair said that if she thought there was a security risk, she should report it immediately. It wasn’t that at all, we all knew that. We all knew and none of us did anything about it. If we had done something, none of this would have happened. Sinclair wanted to ask Donna McGovern what was going on, but I and a social worker convinced him it would be unprofessional to go behind Susan’s back. None of the people who were at that case conference can look at each other now.” His chin sank to his chest; a string of hair fell over his forehead, and he caught it between his thumb and forefinger, placing it back. “It’s a terrible thing to have happened,” he whispered. “Just terrible.”

“How would Donna know?”

“Eh?”

“What would the point be in Sinky speaking to Donna about it? How would she know what was going on?”

“Well, Susan spent a lot of time with Donna as well, didn’t you know?”

I shook my head. There was very little I did know.

“Yes, Susan spent a lot of time with Donna, more time than Gow did, technically. Trying to convince Donna not to marry him, I suppose. Have you found the files?”

I shrugged. I could hardly admit to myself that Susie was a liar, much less to a stranger.

“The files Susie took from the office?” continued Tucker. “They should be returned. They’re Prison Department property. You haven’t come across them?” He took a drink, watching me over the rim of his glass.

“Tell me what it is you’re looking for, and I’ll keep my eyes open.”

“A disk with a table of Gow’s correspondents over the past two years. Susan deleted all the copies, but I was rather hoping she kept one on a disk. We were writing an article together. Because of the Human Rights Act, we’re not supposed to read prisoners’ mail anymore. We won’t be able to collate that sort of information ever again. It could be a unique bit of research.”

It would have been Susie’s idea, we both knew that. She’d have read ahead and anticipated the change in the law, thought about it, and drawn up the research outline, and Harvey was hoping to get all the credit now that Susie was in prison.

“I’ll look out for it,” I said, swirling the last of my drink and swallowing it.

“Please phone me if you find it. It’s Prison Department property.”

I don’t think he had anything to do with that research at all.

Tucker watched me drive away. I think he wanted to make sure I actually left. He stood on the step of his dark, empty home and saw me off like a visiting relative, waving for too long, making sure I was out of sight before he went back in.

I stopped the car around the corner and dropped my head to the steering wheel, concentrating on breathing in and out. My head was bursting. My chest ached. I opened the car door and threw up into the street.

They’ve been right about her all along. They were right and I was wrong.