(2002) Deception aka Sanctum (31 page)

“Hey, Harriot,” he shouted as I walked past. “Where’d you get that fancy coat?”

No one even took a photo of me. Fuckers.

chapter thirty-one

I’VE BEEN TRYING TO PHONE SUSIE ALL MORNING BUT CAN’T GET through. So I sat down and wrote a long encouraging letter, telling her that I was thinking of her (true), that I missed her (not really true at the moment) and wished I was with her during this difficult time (outright lie). I’m going to try to write every day, give her news about Margie and send photos of her. If I were in Susie’s position, I know I’d be thinking about killing myself, and she mustn’t do that. She has to get through the next short while, for Margie’s sake if nothing else. I want to remind Susie that she’d be increasing Margie’s statistical chances of suicide by a factor of four if she kills herself, but I’m afraid that if I mention it I might be putting the idea in her head. I’m not against suicide per se, but I do think you lose the right to consider it once you’ve had kids.

The papers are full of Susie and Donna today. I bought five of them. Loads of people have sold their story. Our old nanny, Saskia, who went off to live with a hospital porter in Toryglen, has told her story exclusively to a local evening paper. It’s funny to see her face again. She looks much older, scowling out from the front page, dark-eyed, with her wiry auburn hair cut short. Inside, she is sitting on a nasty armchair, in front of a horrible gas fire. I always thought she would live somewhere pretty, and I’m sadder about that than the fact that she sold her story. I showed the picture to Yeni, who nodded and smiled and carried on changing Margie. I wonder if she would ever sell her story. And what a story. She might have already sold it, I suppose. Journalists phone here all the time, so it wouldn’t be hard for her to make contact. Alistair Garvie— the man from the Mirror— still leaves at least one message a day. She might even have seduced me just to have a unique spin on her story, but I don’t think so. She’s very detached from everything. She lives in a wee world of her own.

Another paper has a story from someone who worked at Sunnyfields with Susie, a disgraced social worker or something. Yet another interviewed the property agent who let Donna the Kirki house. He says she was nice but owed his firm back council tax (not such an interesting exclusive that one). The papers without interviews are rehashing all the old information. They’ve all managed to get in some of the details about the murders and what was done to those girls, which is hideously prurient. One has a huge teaser banner for Stevie Ray’s story about me, which will be in tomorrow’s edition. The very best I can hope for is that it gets lost in the rest of the coverage. One of the papers mentions the fact that no one has come forward to claim Donna’s body. She had no one apart from Gow. Perhaps that is why she left Leicester without a backward glance and, according to Susie at least, was prepared to kill innocent girls not much younger than herself.

Mrs. Anthrobus came this morning. She hadn’t even noticed the papers and seems to think that Susie is away on a business trip no matter how often I tell her she’s in prison. She may be a daft old goat, but still I changed the sheets on Yeni’s bed myself and washed them before she arrived.

* * *

Susie phoned this afternoon, sounding drugged and slow. She asked to speak to Margie, and I tried to warn her about the papers tomorrow, how they were going to say things about me that weren’t true and not to mind them, but she said they were full of lies all the time. Who cares, she said, and I felt that she was speaking more broadly than just the particular.

Is Margie awake, she asked, what’s she doing? I described what Margie was wearing and tried to get her to talk into the receiver, but she wouldn’t. She didn’t react at all when Susie called her. I don’t know if she’s stopped recognizing the voice or the drugs make Susie sound different, but Margie carried on picking up and dropping the snake draft-excluder to watch its eyes boggle about. I picked it and her up and took them out to the quiet hall to settle her down a little, but she was tired and just dribbled onto the receiver, staring through the door into the bright kitchen as she picked at the corduroy on her little trousers.

Susie called to her again, hopefully, desperately. She called to her through a medicated smog, across a thousand miles and a dozen centuries, but Margie didn’t flinch. She was bored with me shaking the snake at her and tried to get down. I couldn’t hold her anymore, and she wriggled off my knee and wandered off into the kitchen.

She was all the way across the kitchen, crouched and picking at something that had spilled and dried on the floor by the stove, but Susie was still calling her name. “Can she hear me, Lachie?”

“Oh yes, she’s sitting up now. Yes, she is. Aren’t you, Margie?” I spoke in that instinctive, weird falsetto that people only ever use with small kids. “Where’s that coming from, hmm? Susie, I wish you could see her. She recognizes the voice but doesn’t know where it’s coming from.”

Susie was pleased and called her again in the same high voice. “Hello, darling, it’s Mummy. I’m your mummy, yes, I am. You remember me, don’t you? I love you, Margie, I love you, my lovely girl.”

“Where’s that coming from, Margie-Pargie, eh?” I said. “That’s right, it’s Mummy, your mummy.” I gave a hollow laugh. “Oh, she’s looking round for you.”

“I love you, Margie,” said Susie, and I could tell she was crying, “I love you, darling. You know me, don’t you? I miss you. I do. I miss your little face.”

“Yes,” I said, clutching the knitted snake, “you know that voice, don’t you? That’s right. It’s your mummy. Where’s Mummy?”

“Where’s Mummy, baby?”

“Where is Mummy?”

“I love you, baby.” Susie sniffed hard and banged the receiver— or her head— on something: she banged something very hard off something else.

“She can’t take it anymore, Susie. She’s gone off to look for you.”

Susie gave a wet gurgle of pleasure. They must have been giving her buckets of sedatives.

“That’s right,” I told the dark hall. “You go and find Mummy. Good girl.” I don’t know if she knew I was lying; if despite the medication Susie remembered that Margie is twenty months old and therefore intrinsically contrary. She sniffed and sighed. “Thanks, Lachie.” And she hung up.

I immediately called the prison and said that I thought she was suicidal. After leaving me on hold for a while, the prison officer came back and told me that she was on suicide watch and not to worry. I’m only quite worried. More than worried, I’m bloody exhausted. I want a holiday from my head.

* * *

Box Two is very full now. I could file all these things in the other boxes, but it’s best to keep the boxes thematic so that I can find things when I need to.

This article was interesting because the families of the later two women killed were much better off and had better representation. The press portrayal was more sympathetic, and the campaigning got under way immediately. This was a scant eight weeks after the second murder, and Susie had just been sacked.

Box 2 Document 14 “Families of Ripper II Call for Investigation,” 7/3/98

Gina Wilson and Nicola Hall never met when they were alive, but in death their families have come together to launch Families For Justice, an organization campaigning for the reopening of the original Riverside Ripper cases. Andrew Gow was convicted in 1994 of the spate of murders but has since always maintained his innocence, claiming more recently that his confession at the time was given under duress. Mr. Neil Wilson and his wife, Sheila, have pointed out that Gow had a history of confessing to crimes and this should have been noted at the time. “The police must answer for these deaths,” said Mr. Wilson yesterday. “They knew how slim the evidence was and yet proceeded against Gow, abandoning the original investigation.”

Neil Wilson went on to make something of a career of it. His organization Families For Justice (FFJ) developed into a body campaigning for more input from victims and victims’ families in court cases. I don’t think they ever got anywhere, but they were on all the debating shows. It was so different from the 1993 families and Karen Dempsey’s mother, but the earlier families were poor and unable to use the media or afford lawyers. It just shows that justice is a commodity: if there were a battle between the victims’ families from Lockerbie versus those from Zeebrugge, the Lockerbie families would win hands down every time because they had pricier tickets and are better resourced.

Neil Wilson was never off the telly at that time, I remember. We watched a lot of telly then. Susie was at home all day and gradually put the television on earlier and earlier. She got dressed later and later, as well. She was pretty depressed, I suppose, until the call came from up north.

* * *

I’ve been thinking about Donna and no one claiming her body for burial. How does a woman in her midtwenties with great tits and a chatty nature leave behind no one? Women can be friendless in their late forties, when they’re past it, but any woman in her midtwenties with a tarty sense of dress will surely have someone. The ex-husband hasn’t even surfaced to sell his story.

Mum and Dad have been on the phone telling me how awful everything is. Mum is embarrassed that it’s all over the press. I hadn’t the heart to tell her about tomorrow’s papers.

Yeni came back from a walk, and I sat down at the table and lit a cigarette (in the kitchen!). I told her that some lies about me were going to appear in the papers tomorrow and I was nervous about it. She made a sad face and patted my head and called me “sorry Kevin Bacon.” I made her sit down and asked her not to leave us, at least for the next couple of months, whatever happens. She said a very definite no and it took me five minutes of quizzing to work out whether she meant no, she wouldn’t go or no, she couldn’t give that sort of assurance. At the end of it she picked up my cigarette from the ashtray, took a puff and stubbed it out. Then she opened the French doors and made a sweeping motion to get the smoke out of the room on the grounds that “It’s stinks.”

Outside the French doors, across the green lawn, the Japanese maple and Boston ivy have turned a deep dark scarlet, making the back wall a frozen tidal wave of blood heading toward the house. Night falls very early now. My heavy heart feels as though I’m walking into a dark tunnel, and I wish today were over.

chapter thirty-two

YENI’S BEEN OUT FOR MILK AND BROUGHT THE PAPER BACK WITH her. We sat at the table and looked at it together. They used that horrible picture of me leaving the court on the day Susie was found guilty, the one where I look like Paul Weller’s Fat Elvis years. Blinded by the low winter sun coming in through the French windows, I thought I caught Yeni looking at me strangely. I asked her if she believed all that stuff about me.

She said, “What is it?”

I couldn’t be bothered elaborating. I said, well, you’ve been in this house for a year now, you know what goes on in here. She said yes, don’t be angry, and, smiling, she stood up, leaned over, and kissed my eyelids. I pulled her onto my knee and thanked her. I said that I was so grateful for her support, I’d buy a truck made of marzipan for her. Happily such items are not readily available around here and she agreed to settle for a pizza later instead.

When the sun hits her brushed-cotton skin and she looks happy, I could wrap her up in my new Armani coat and run her to the airport and whip all three of us off to Greece or somewhere, to a place where fucking a dusky young beauty while your wife languishes in prison isn’t regarded as an appalling thing to do. France maybe.

I asked her to take Margie to nursery tomorrow, and she actually said no to me.

“Jyou cannot hide, Lachie; you have done nothing. Jyou have to go with Margie.”

She’s right, of course, but I do want to hide. I said I’d get her a nice surprise if she did, and she agreed reluctantly, but said it would be better for me to go. She’s very adult about everything.

I find the way she moves enchanting. It’s like a dance. If she reaches for a thing, she sweeps her arm quickly and then catches herself, as though she needs to consciously conjure up memories of failure and caution. She raises her arm too high, halts it and slows, letting it alight on the object, then brings it back slowly. I love the confidence in that sweep, the lunge, the reaching for my cock because she wants to. I don’t know if I envy her age and underlying belief that nothing can go wrong, or if I just like her. If it’s her age and naïveté, then I’m a nasty old man. If it’s her I like, then I have a crush on her, which isn’t such a bad thing. Having a crush on someone could be my mind’s way of tricking me into feeling something positive, a psychic trick to restart the endorphins after all the misery and insomnia.

I know that running off to France is only appealing because I want to hide my face. I don’t want to be seen because I don’t know what people will think of me. It’s not true, none of it. Susie and I were never unfaithful to each other (because of Yeni I have to add “before”). We were never unfaithful to each other before. Stevie Ray’s a spineless little shit.

* * *

Yeni and Margie were fast asleep in the house, and I was trying hard not to come up here and spend the tail hours of the evening speculating about everything, typing up five-odd pages that end on a self-pitying note, and then slink off to bed for a crappy sleep. I told myself I was going out for a smoking session in the car, but really I knew it was nothing of the kind. I’m smoking properly again, getting through about ten a day, and I can feel my heart rate rising every time I inhale, my bronchioles getting itchy and irritated, my lung capacity diminishing. It feels good.