(2002) Deception aka Sanctum (23 page)

I sat looking at the photo for a while, and then I realized that it’s a very telling picture. The reflection is so clear you can see red dots on the soft skin under her eyebrows where she’s overplucked them. You can see where her makeup stops on her neck and how thick her mascara is. She worked hard at it, Donna. I can’t imagine what Susie would have made of her, this brassy doll, permed and over-made-up. She never talked about her to me.

Donna doesn’t seem aware that she is being photographed, but she would be able to see Susie’s reflection on the brass plaque. It’s as if she knows Susie’s watching, aware of eyes on her, but acting casual. It seems so knowing, this movie-star calm: she’s saying you can look at me but I won’t acknowledge you, I won’t react. Mind you, with a cleavage like that and the low-cut tops she wore, she must have been aware of eyes moving over her all the time. She’d have to be oblivious to dress like that.

The photo’s so close in on her that if you didn’t know about Susie’s trouble with the zoom, it might seem creepily intimate. It’s hard not to interpret the picture as Susie sneaking up on Donna to batter her to death.

PHOTO TWO

The second picture is Donna and Gow together. He is wearing a crumpled gray suit with big shoulder pads, curling lapel-tips, a white shirt, and dirty sneakers. I recognize it from the old pictures of him being bundled into the prison vans: it’s the suit he wore for his trial. Donna is wearing a white jacket and matching skirt, red court shoes, and two red roses in her jet black hair. She has nothing on under the jacket, and nearly two inches of cleavage is on display. She doesn’t look saggy or tired, not like an old tart or anything, just busty.

They’re standing against a wall, in front of a blue poster with a big white question mark. Gow is looking at the camera, his head tipped backward slightly because he’s grinning so widely. His big banana hand is wrapped around her slim upper arm, pressing hard, gathering the white material. It looks as if he might have said something rude. Donna is looking down at her feet. She looks nervous and out of her depth, and it makes you worry for her, it really does.

The picture is very badly lit, which is typical of Susie’s photography. White light spills in from the side, from another camera flash.

PHOTO THREE

This must be the official photograph, a copy of the one she had stuck to the skylight and Blu-Tacked over. He is holding her tiny hand in his big hand, and he is smiling but she isn’t. She’s looking at her hand and seems alarmed. She said in interviews at the time that she wasn’t afraid he’d hurt her, that she knew he’d never hurt her. But she didn’t think he’d ever get out.

* * *

Now that I have remembered last spring, I can hardly bring myself to leave it. Winter gave a death kick and we had a few random days of snow, but apart from that the weather was mild; the season was over before it had begun. I remember clouds of pink cherry blossoms blowing into the garden from next door, fleshy leaves carried on the water-clean smell of springtime. We had Margie, the renovations were done, and Susie had settled back into her job.

And then the murders started again.

chapter twenty-two

STEVIE RAY IS A BAD MAN, A SELFISH MAN WHO MAKES MONEY BY cashing in on the misery of others, but after meeting him it’s hard to believe he actually means any harm to anyone. He is small and balding in a messy way, not a straightforward receding hairline. He has a brown hairy button on his forehead and thin wisps all over the top. He’s short and fat as well and ties his raincoat belt in a knot at his swollen waist, which makes it look worse. He’s simultaneously repellent and sympathetic. It’s like he’s got his charisma on backward.

I’d dropped Margie off at nursery, more of which later, and was sitting in Greggs waiting for him. I was about ten minutes early, so I ordered a fudge doughnut and a cup of tea (the coffee’s terrible there). I was peeling the frosting off the cake when I heard a commotion at the door. Stevie Ray was a-coming. He’d got tangled up in a pram at the door and was trying to apologize, bow obsequiously, and extricate himself all at the same time. He almost tipped the child out, and the mother became so angry she started hitting him with a full Co-op bag. Things like that must happen everywhere he goes, because he didn’t even mention it when he sat down opposite me. He just flattened a hand over his bald head as if he still had hair.

“Foof,” he said. “It’s windy.”

He ordered tea and a prawn and mayonnaise roll and chattered away about stuff, how bad everything was for him and how much he needed a break. If I hadn’t told him beforehand that I would only buy him lunch and pay his bus fare, I’d have thought he was working up to asking to borrow money from me.

“I owe everyone,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “I owe the car company, credit cards, the bank is after me, and I’ve got nothing coming in now, because of your missus.” He looked up at me.

“I’m not going to pay you, Stevie,” I said. “I know for a fact that my wife is innocent, and anyway, I haven’t got any money.”

He relaxed a bit. I think it was almost a relief to him not to have to try to chisel me. “You broke, too?” he asked.

“Lawyers don’t come cheap,” I said, thinking of our one and a half mil carefully tucked away. “So go easy on the tea.”

After five minutes with Stevie I felt focused and go-getterish. It’s as though he can’t do status games and comes ready-capitulated. I bet that’s why Gow wanted him to manage his affairs, so he could see him often and patronize him. But then, the thing to remember with Stevie Ray is that with no skills whatever, he made a nice living off the back of Gow. He’s not a stupid man, and that’s something to bear in mind. He filled in every conversational pause with a story about how much he’d lost to the car company, how much work he needed done on his house, how everyone thought he was rich. He was being so unchallenging it actually made me feel suspicious. The roll arrived and he took a massive bite and tried to talk about his troubles through milky lumps of bread.

I interrupted him and told him I wanted to talk about my wife. That shut him up.

I took out the notebook I’d written the questions in. I knew I’d crap out if I didn’t have them written down, knew I’d end up asking how he was and finally if he needed any money. I asked the first question and wrote down notes of what he was saying to busy myself, so I didn’t have to look at him while he answered.

Yes, he said, Gow did talk about Susie. He said she was a lovely lady and had been very helpful in getting Donna in to see him. She had okayed their first visit and was kind to Donna. He paused, finishing off his sandwich, and when I looked up, he was watching my face and all but asked me if he was doing it right. He was saying what he thought I wanted to hear.

“Look, Stevie,” I said, “I want you to tell me the truth. I don’t want you to dress it up.”

Stevie smiled uncomfortably and chewed a hangnail, staring at the table.

“I know Gow didn’t talk like that,” I said.

“Can I have an éclair?”

“As long as you stop lying to me.”

He ordered an éclair. The prawn and mayonnaise roll was the most expensive one on the menu, and the éclair was eighty pence. I think he’d checked it out beforehand to make sure he got good value.

Yeah, Gow did talk about Susie. Stevie glanced at my notebook, looked away, sipped his tea, and then smiled as if he was going to be sick. Gow wasn’t nice about women generally. He said things, pretty bad things, actually. Stevie didn’t agree with them, oh no, he doesn’t think about women that way, but, well, ye know how men are together. His cake arrived and he took a bite.

I laughed and jollied him along. We don’t mean it, I said. Stevie jumped on that, agreeing through a mouthful of pastry; no, nothing means anything, it’s just guys talking, like, you know how guys are. This gave me reason to surmise that Gow had said sexual things about Susie, definitely, but Stevie wasn’t about to tell me what they were. I wrote “JUST GUY STUFF” in the notebook so he could read it upside down.

He took another bite of his éclair and frowned at the page, taking about a minute to read the three complex words. Some of the cream had squished out of the side of the cake and got stuck to his chin. In the ensuing conversation it began to look more and more like a big lump of dried cum.

I saw him mouth the words “just guy stuff” and relax. “Gow said he fancied her, ye know, thought she was good-looking. A nice person and such.”

“Look, Stevie, you can tell me what he said, I won’t be offended.” He looked unsure, so I added, “Susan and I have been living separate lives for a few years now.” He still looked confused, so I spelled it out for him. I said I’d been seeing other people and Susie was free to do the same.

Stevie nodded nervously and took another bite. He kept his mouth open as his molars ground the pastry and cream and chocolate together, his tongue pushing the pale lumpy shit forward in his mouth in a rolling bovine rhythm. “Whose idea was that?” he asked.

“It was hers,” I said, acting resentful, making it okay for him to start in on her.

“And whose is the kiddie, then?” I almost leaped across the table. I was prepared to lie to him and make myself a passive, cheated-on husband, but I’d die rather than denounce Margie.

“Mine,” I said firmly, “she’s mine.”

Anyway, the fib worked. Gow talked about Susie a lot. He thought she had lovely tits. Stevie looked up at me and waited for me to punch him. When I didn’t hit him or seem annoyed, he carried on, increasingly astonished by my passivity. Gow’d wanted to fuck her when he first came into the hospital. He thought she was an uppity cow who needed bringing down a peg or two. Gow liked quiet women. Susie wasn’t his usual type, but he did like to tame women. He wanted to make them beg for it and then give it to them. He talked about them begging a lot. Stevie snickered when he reported this, as if he had experience of this scenario, as if any woman had ever begged Stevie to do anything but fuck off. He leaned across the table, lowering his voice. The cream/cum was still stuck to his chin and made him look like a porno gimp. Gow told him about this one time when he met a woman in a bar and she looked like a model but with great tits, right? She took him into the ladies’ room. “I use the term loosely,” he said smugly, obviously repeating a line of Gow’s.

I couldn’t stand him to be confident for a second longer, so I interrupted him to ask whether he was indicating a future intention to use the term “loosely” or whether he was using the term “ladies” in a reckless and all-inclusive manner?

He didn’t understand and got flustered, so I repeated myself in a different way. The last one, he meant the last one. Anyway, this twat took him into the toilet in a pub and lifted her skirt and she had on stockings, garter belt, split crotch, the lot. Stevie went on about all the stuff she did and how she loved it and rubbed her tits on the dirty mirror, etc., etc. It was a jazz-mag story, obviously made up by Gow, either because he was an unimaginative fantasist or to take the piss out of Stevie Ray. Stevie believed it anyway. He went pink telling me about it; I’m sure he had a semi, it took him ages to sit back.

I said I’d heard that a lot of women wrote to Gow in prison.

Stevie nodded. “Yeah,” he said, licking his fingertips lasciviously. “Lot of women sent in nude pics of themselves. A lot of them were done in, baggy tits and faces like buckets, but Andy used to say this about them: he’d say, ‘It’s just a hole, isn’t it?’ ”

It’s just a hole. I didn’t know what to say. I nodded in shock and offered to get him another éclair. He said no but he’d take a strawberry tart instead. He ate it with gusto, getting jam on the corner of his lips. I couldn’t stop looking at the wreckage of his mouth and chin and thinking menses/cum, cum/menses.

I asked about Susie again, and he paused.

“I’ll tell you what he told me. Right?”

I nodded.

“This isn’t me saying this, he told me this, right?”

I knew it had to be pretty bad, but when I heard what he had to say, I wanted to laugh. It got more and more difficult not to laugh as the conversation wore on. I knew then that she had never touched him, that she might have been in love with him, but my wife, my darling Susie, never ever had sex with Andrew Gow.

Gow told Stevie that Susie sucked him off in the office once. It was when she first came to Sunnyfields, back in ’94. She walked right around the desk and did it. I managed to keep a straight face. Stevie was watching me carefully. I nodded and he carried on with the description. I wanted him to go on and say something else, more balm for my bitter heart. And he did as well.

It was rubbish, a series of schoolboy lies about a woman Gow’d never even touched, and I knew it. Gow saying that Susie had sucked him off once was probably intended to make it believable, but if she’d done it once, he’d have said she did it six times. And she’d never do it in the office. She might have sucked off a stranger, maybe even a dangerous stranger, but she wouldn’t have done it in her office in ’94. She was far too ambitious. Then Stevie handed me the big prize.

He said that Susie’d taken it up the arse for Gow because she didn’t want to get pregnant. She knew about these things, being a doctor. I almost clapped my hands with glee. Susie wouldn’t have worried about getting pregnant because she would have used a condom, she wasn’t into anal, and she’d never have anal sex with a man who was arrested cruising a red-light district. The HIV risk factors in that scenario are worse than throwing yourself into the stick bin at a needle exchange. Stevie was in full flow now. It was as if he was so pleased I hadn’t punched him that he couldn’t stop himself. I sat back and let him pad the story out, where they did it and how often, once in this closet, once in that room. Susie asked Gow to take off her “panties,” another jazz-mag term. I actually got bored listening to him. I got some money out and held up the bill for the waitress, and the reader’s-letter recitation tailed off.