Deception aka Sanctum

chapter twenty-seven

IT’LL BE FINE. I’VE WRITTEN BITCHY THINGS ABOUT SUSIE BEFORE, and she did go to a lot of effort to try to keep me from seeing it. I was surprised by my nice hair when I spotted myself in the bathroom mirror this morning. I had my blue T-shirt on and realized that my belly has gone down a bit. Or maybe it hasn’t. I look thinner in that T-shirt anyway, so I decided to wear it to the visit. I ran across the road to the newsagents, well, hobbled really, because I’m so stiff from my reckless, stretchless run yesterday. I’m not on the cover of any of the papers. The Evington file and everything, it doesn’t change anything, although I feel far less worried about explaining the newspaper article to her now. Susie knows how slippery these newspaper people can be, she’ll know I’ve been stitched up. She’ll be glad to see Margie anyway.

I started off for the prison early with Susie’s dry-cleaned court suit hanging off the jacket peg and Margie strapped into the car seat in the back. She nodded off within the first ten minutes of the drive and slept for most of it. The traffic was light, and I listened to a gratifying radio program about a dead writer whose genius wasn’t recognized during his lifetime. The troll women weren’t there when we arrived, just a man and a fat old woman with a child of about three. They were waiting outside the door, and sleepy Margie perked up when she saw the other girl.

We were all let in and gave our names, I handed over my phone, and the children played together while we waited to be let into the first waiting room. The other girl was dressed poorly and had her ears pierced, but she was an absolute gem. Her language was miles better than any other child of her age I’ve met. She actually said, “May I see your pretty socks?” to Margie at one point. Margie tried to bite her. She played beautifully with Margie and the rubber Tigger toy I’d brought with us. She was patient and understanding and smiled up at both of us when Margie screamed and tried to knock over a chair. The fat woman with her was too old to be her mum; I guessed she was her granny and they were there to visit her mum.

“What a beautifully behaved child she is,” I said.

“She can be a right handful sometimes, but…” said the granny indulgently.

The prison guards are nearly all women. They’re not as beefy as you’d expect, but they’re nippy and unfriendly. It’s like the Surly Lady Army. They’re what I remember girls being like in early puberty: powerful and unwilling and terrifying.

They held us for too long in the first room. I could see them through the glass wall, talking to each other and looking through at us. The granny was getting agitated. She thought something had happened to the girl’s mum; perhaps she’d killed herself or something. She got a bit tearful after we’d been kept waiting for ten minutes and tried to hide it from the child.

“Can’t they tell us why we’re waiting?” she said nervously.

Taking charge, I went to the door and rattled it, motioning to the guard at the reception desk to unlock it so I could come out and speak to her, but she shook her head and looked away from us, muttering to the other guard under her breath. I shook the door again, but she refused to look at me. The granny was weeping openly by this time, and I tried to comfort her by saying the delay might be nothing to do with her daughter.

“Ye dinna understand,” she said. “She’s tried it before.” She snatched the child away from playing happily with Margie and hugged her tight.

Margie started to cry, and the three-year-old child tried to comfort both Margie and her gran at once, patting her Granny’s back and making cheerful swoopy noises to Margie. She must have siblings at home, I thought. I told the granny to stop crying right now, and to my surprise she did. She put the child down to play, but the girl, who was unnaturally calm for a child of her age, kept hold of her granny’s knee and used her free hand to play with Margie. I don’t care if Margie does grow up to be a spoiled, selfish little princess. I never want her to have to do that for either of us. I want to attend to her every whim and keep her ignorant of that impotent need to save other people.

Eventually a different guard opened the door and asked me to wait for a moment while they took the granny through. She was sniveling in panic now, and the terrified child clung to her leg. The old lady disappeared out into the corridor, and they shut the door again. Margie, not knowing what it is to anticipate the next minute fearfully, ran the length of the room a couple of times and started making high-pitched noises. I was grinning at her, asking her what that meant exactly, hmm, Margie-Pargie? Whatever can you mean, you meaty little pudding?

A guard opened the door and invited me into the corridor, so I scooped Margie up and we followed her down to the second waiting room, which was already empty. I set Margie down. “I hope that lady’s daughter is all right?” I said, imagining the granny sobbing her poor old broken heart out in a soundproof room next door.

The guard looked me up and down. “She’s fine.” And then she walked away behind the screen and through a small side door.

They left me waiting there for twenty-one minutes. I knocked on the side door several times, thinking bloody visiting would be over if they didn’t let me in soon. When the guard finally came back, I was really annoyed and said that I shouldn’t be penalized and miss my visiting time because another visit had gone wrong. The guard didn’t know what I was talking about.

“The old lady who was in here,” I explained, “she was very upset because we were held back.” The guard shook her head and left again just as it dawned on me. The old woman was already in visiting her daughter. I was the one they’d held back.

It must have taken four minutes before two male guards came in, but I was doing deep breathing to slow my heart rate down and wondering how to get through the next ten minutes without punching someone.

“We’d like to search you please, sir,” said the fat one.

I exhaled, bristling with relief because I realized that they wouldn’t be worried about my passing contraband to Susie if she was dead. Impatiently, I dropped my coat to the chair and stood like a starfish, no-no-no-ing while he asked me if I had any drugs about my person, any sharp objects or needles. He patted me down while his friend looked on and got me to kick my shoes off so he could feel under my feet. Then he flicked a finger, giving me permission to put my stuff back on, and turned to the outside door. I followed him with my heel still working its way back into the shoe, holding Margie by the waist.

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.