by Denise Mina
It is further charged that you did assault Mrs. Donna Helen Gow, née McGovern, there or elsewhere in Scotland and you did murder her.
This whole second para was crossed out.
* * *
Mum phoned this morning and left a shrill message. She heard about the trial on the news and said she’ll come over if I don’t call her at once. I heard Dad coughing furiously in the background. I need a visit from my parents like a twisted testicle.
They’ve never liked Susie, they don’t understand children, and they complain about not being warm all the time they’re away from Spain. But they do worry about me. They’ll read the papers and the speculation about the sentence, which was all exaggerated, of course.
I hope none of their friends out there saw the photos of me. I often feel that I’ve gone from being their son to a thing they boast about to their friends, a form of social leverage. A doctor? No, qualified as a doctor but got out before all his friends. Saw it was a career trap- leave out the reason: that I couldn’t stand the incessant contact with random people. Leave out the fact of my disenchantment with working, my house-husbanding career, and skip straight to- wife’s a doctor, of course, dear Susan, a psychiatrist, so clever. Mum often asks me to send a BIG card to Dad or phone friends of hers I’ve met once or twice to inquire after their grandchild/trip home. It’s all about appearances. It would matter so much to them if I’m in the papers and recognizable. I’d hate to shame them, especially Dad. They’re dejected at my progress as it is. I haven’t the confidence to tell them about my writing in case nothing ever comes of it.
* * *
I went back into town to pick up the car this afternoon. It’s been there for two days. Miraculously, it didn’t have a ticket on it, but someone had scratched a long line into the paintwork on the driver’s side. It was bizarre being back there. It seemed very quiet. Bits of paper fluttering through the narrow streets. Pink vomit on the pavement. People walking past me without a second glance. I felt invisible enough to walk up the steps of the court. This is how it’ll be now. My days of being a minor, provincial celebrity are over and no one’ll remember except those sick fucks who take an interest in such things. I’d like that very much. I stood at the top of the stairs and looked out over the green. The view’s completely different when you’re standing upright.
When I got back home, a few camera crews were sitting in folding metal chairs outside the wall, watching the wooden door to the garden. They weren’t here during the trial and don’t seem to have noticed the back door to the alley. Maybe they do know about it but can’t get their trucks down there. They saw the garage door open before they noticed my car and scrabbled around, shouting at each other, pulling the cameras off the tripod and running over to the car. The automatic door seemed to take forever to open. Just as they were halfway across the road I took my foot off the brake and let the car roll in, pressing the remote button so that the door began to shut. I almost clipped the back of the Saab. One of the crews was Japanese. Why on earth would the Japanese be interested in this? They’re probably still out there, filming the garden wall.
* * *
I’m beginning to realize how ill-equipped I am for this. I’ve been waiting for Susie to ring and tell me she’s arrived and settled in safely, as if she’d gone to a professional conference or a hen weekend in Dublin. I can’t get my head around her being away. I went to the shop on the way home and bought Jesti-jesters. I’ve got a cupboard full of Susie’s favorite biscuits, and she won’t be home for ten years. I’m still sleeping on one side of the bed, putting the lights out as soon as I lie down in case I wake her.
We’ve got to win this appeal. I’ve been sorting out the big plastic bag of papers and newspaper clippings and tapes under her desk. There’s the copy of GLT magazine with the interview they printed with Susie (bastards), a Dictaphone tape, clippings about Gow’s case that look quite old, as if she’d been gathering them for some time, and masses of notes about Donna. She must have every single interview Donna ever gave to the papers.
Susie’s written notes about Gow and Donna on some of the newspaper articles, single words mostly, like “grandiose,” “vicarious fame,” and “stupid”- that word recurs a lot on Donna’s clippings. Sometimes, especially from around the time of Gow and Donna’s wedding, she has articles from different newspapers on the same day. Where was she getting all these papers? I don’t remember the News of the Screws being delivered here, and she certainly didn’t get them at her work. She must have bought them in secret, on the way to work or at the shops, and cut the stories out so that she could keep them. They date back for almost a year. This has been going on for fucking ages without my knowing a thing about it.
* * *
I phoned Susie’s colleague Harvey Tucker again and a man answered. He hesitated, then said Harvey wasn’t in. I’ve never spoken to Harvey on the phone before, but it definitely sounded like him.
“Will you tell him I’ll phone back?” I asked.
“I will, of course, yes. Certainly,” he replied.
We both sounded very stiff and suspicious. I hung up. It might not have been him. Maybe the guy had seen my name in the papers and felt awkward because of it. Or he’d heard Harvey talk about the trial; that’s more likely. I think it was Harvey, though.
* * *
I miss her. I even miss the irascibility, the slights. I miss her coming up here to work alone rather than sit with me in front of the telly after Margie’s gone to bed. I miss knowing she’s up here, doing whatever. It should be easy to comfort myself. She was absent a lot of the time anyway, but it seems especially hard just now. Perhaps it’s because she’s been sitting at home for the past two and a half months. It’s just sinking in, I think.
Last night I sat in front of the television and tried to pretend Susie was upstairs, ignoring me. Yeni wanted to watch Friends on a satellite channel and sat down on the other settee. I could hardly say piss off, I’m assuaging my grief by pretending to be ignored by my absent wife. I watched Yeni out of the corner of my eye. She’s very young, and I don’t think she understands what the characters are saying, but she smiles along with the jokes and nods sometimes. I suppose for most men this would be a creamer: left alone in a big house with a lonely Spanish teenage au pair. But Yeni is fat and has a prominent mustache, and her breath smells perpetually of yogurt. I think she’s self-medicating for thrush. Susie chose her.
chapter four
I GOT A LETTER FROM SUSIE THIS MORNING. IT DIDN’T SAY ANY OF the things I want to hear, like I love you and didn’t kill those people. It said she was there and safe, and feeling a “little under the weather”… blah blah, missing you and Margie blah blah, much hope for the appeal blah blah. She tells me what the weather’s been like the past few days. She’s in a facility forty miles away, for Chrissake, we’re in the same weather system. She could have been writing to anyone from anywhere, except that just before the end there’s an unguarded moment when, apropos of nothing, she writes “It’s awful here.”
I caved in and phoned the prison to check if she was safe. I recognized the voice of the squat-faced receptionist who was there when I visited Susie before she got bail. She’s a sullen little gremlin with a flat nose covered in blackheads. Her uniform was too tight and her white bra strained against the blue blouse, her name badge tottering on a peak like an erect nipple. There was a proud, well-spoken old woman in front of me in line last time, there to visit her drug-addict daughter, she told me later, and the squat-faced guard rudely asked her to repeat her name four times, making her say it louder and louder so that everyone could hear it. The old woman was so upset by the time she sat down that I had to give her a hankie and the promise of a lift to the bus stop to stop her weeping. It’s important not to cry when you go in to visit prisoners. They’ve got enough on their plate.
Anyway, I recognized the receptionist’s voice. She wouldn’t put me through to anyone but left me on hold for ten minutes while she asked around. Susie’s fine
. I asked when she might get the chance to phone me and the guard sounded surprised that she hadn’t already. I said I thought maybe she wouldn’t have a phonecard and could she put me through to her? The receptionist said it wasn’t a hotel, sir, and she couldn’t page her. I thanked her and hung up.
I wonder if the induction is going okay and what sort of things they do with them. Maybe they show them uplifting films about life, and how nice it is to still have one. I hope it’s working, I hope she isn’t thinking about suicide. I couldn’t stand the world without her in it. I wrote back in longhand because I can’t get the printer to work up here. I asked her lots of sanitized questions, told her I was thinking of her constantly, and described the garden. I enclosed a nice photo of Margie breaking a cup.
Box 2 Document 1 Dictaphone Tape
I was messing with the machine and turned it on, not realizing that the volume was up full. Her voice, calm and untroubled, filled the room like a sudden warm wave, washing through me, an embrace of noise reverberating off the walls. I felt faint suddenly. I wasn’t listening to the words on the tape; I was just sitting there, flooded by her, wishing her home. I had to turn the tape off and rewind. It’s Susie’s voice from the beginning. She must have put the Dictaphone down pointing at herself because the interviewer’s voice is distant and unintelligible. Susie sounds perfectly in control, as if she knows what she’s doing.
“Well, ask and we’ll see. [Mumbled questions.] I’ll tell you if I’m not prepared to answer. [Long mumbling.] Okay, yeah, that’d be nice. Yeah. ’Kay. It’s got it on it, yeah? [Mumbling.] I’m not completely naive about the press. I’d like to keep my own record of what we say here. It’s not a problem, is it?”
She thinks she’s being really clever. I wonder if the journalist knows how utterly out of her depth she is. Even telling him she’s not naive sounds like she’s accusing him of being a bastard, like she’s challenging him to fuck her over. But that’s Susie employing her junior doctor’s credo: protest competence regardless of the evidence. She hadn’t the first idea. This is the interview the prosecution used to damn her, the one where she said she hated Donna.
An obsequious voice, a mumbling waiter, I suppose, asks a question and Susie lets the man opposite her order.
“Yeah,” she sas flirtatiously, “I’ll have one of those too.”
“I hated Donna from the first moment I saw her. She looks ridiculous- you must have seen her picture? She gave an exclusive to almost every national paper and charged them a fortune. All that cleavage and lipstick. She looks like a female impersonator.”
Susie either coughs or laughs. All I can hear is her voice, as if she’s talking into my ear, with the uncracked timbre she had before her confidence was shattered and her creamy voice curdled. I hear her sip a drink and sit back. She’s sitting on leather, good leather judging by the sound, and it shrieks and sighs as she shifts her weight.
She shouldn’t have given an interview, not to anyone, but she’d been sacked and was bitter and probably a bit panicky. She didn’t tell me until the magazine came out in September. She went off early in the morning, saying she was going to get the papers or stamps, I forget which. She didn’t come back for three hours, and when she did she had red eyes and was shaking.
I asked what was up. She put the magazine on the kitchen table and looked out the window. “It’s a disaster,” she said, quietly. “I’ll never get work again.”
I thought she was being overdramatic until I read the interview. It definitely contributed to the end. If she’d felt she had anything to lose, I don’t think she would have gone to Cape Wrath. Which means, of course, that her career mattered more in the final instance than me or Margie or the house or our way of life or her freedom.
I never understood why the interviewer hated her so much. It seemed to me that she was doing him a great favor. And he was a pal of Morris Welsh’s, which should have been a warning, I suppose. Of all the magazines to give an interview to, GLT was probably the most unprofessional. They sandwiched the article between an interview with a retired gangster and a chart of the biggest tits in porn. When she gave the interview, she didn’t know it was for GLT, just that Morris’s pal was starting out and could sorely do with the scoop. The photograph was unkindly lit and made her look old and wizened. Wizened; my beautiful Susie.
I think she agreed to be interviewed because she was hoping for a completely new career as a media psychiatrist. She’s always watching telly and criticizing the psychiatric pundits on it. Forensic psychiatry’s a small world. She wasn’t in any hurry to suffer job interviews or explain her departure from Sunnyfields. She kept speculating about who’d heard about her sacking. Now I realize that this speaks volumes about her state of mind; she never wondered if nice people had heard and felt bad for her, only whether all the shitty bastards in the profession had heard and were pleased. And there are nice people in the profession, a couple of really nice women, like Tabitha Morley and that Finnish woman with the nose. If I’d been fired it wouldn’t have mattered, but Susie’s career is a huge part of her identity. It was a sort of death to her, I think; all her hard work being denied.
She had bought a suit for the GLT interview, a pale blue woolen one with a shorter skirt than she’d normally go for. She hid it from me, hung it at the back of her closet and pretended it wasn’t new. She looked lovely in it. She couldn’t wear it to court because it pinched her at the waist and looked sexy. She had to wear somber blacks and blues, straight-sided jackets that hid her shape and made her look sexless. She didn’t have anything like that in her wardrobe. She sent me out to buy them before the trial. I got her a navy blue blazer that had ridiculous gold buttons with anchors stamped on them. It was graceless and horrible and she wore it almost every day. When we still thought she’d get off, we were having tea in the kitchen and she said she liked the blazer because it reminded her of who she wasn’t.
I loved her in that pale blue woolen suit, loved the way she moved in it, the modest way she tugged at the hem when she sat down. If we can’t find any grounds for an appeal, she might never get to wear it again. She’ll be too old when she gets out.
I rewound the tape and pressed play. As I listened I imagined Susie looking great, sitting on a modernist leather sofa, legs crossed at the knee, gently swinging her free foot, holding an elegant espresso cup.
* * *
“All that cleavage and lipstick. She looks like a female impersonator.”
* * *
Susie’s right: Donna did look extraordinary. There are a lot of pictures of Donna in the plastic bag and on the walls around the office. For a blushing bride concentrating on her husband’s appeal, she managed an astonishing number of interviews.
She was five feet two and wore clumpy high heels that made her walk as if she were falling forward the whole time. She dressed in frilly über-feminine dresses with plunging necklines and many gold chains. She looked a bit country-and-western with her big hair and sticking-out bum. The newspapers portray her as thoughtful but grasping (they nearly all mention how hard she negotiated the price of the interview), and the magazines have her as an ecstatic newly married nut case. In one women’s magazine there is a particularly tasteless photo of her throwing a wedding bouquet backward at the wire fence around Sunnyfields State Mental Hospital. And some of the stuff she’s quoted as saying, honestly, the League for People with Shit for Brains could sue her for bringing their name into disrepute.
I turn up the volume:
“Yeah, it’s a recognized phenomenon, prison romances. They’re sad, sad women mostly. Often the men are in the course of serving their sentence when the women start writing to them. They meet them on a visit and start an affair. [The interviewer asks something that I can’t make out.] No, Donna hadn’t met him before. She saw him in the paper and fell in love with his picture.”
Susie starts to laugh, and Morris’s pal laughs politely along with her. He doesn’t find it as funny as Susie. She gives such big, barking laughs that it ends
up sounding forced, as though she doesn’t find it funny either.
I have a picture of Gow from the bag under the desk. Susie has marked it “Donna’s 1st view of G.” This must be the picture Donna saw of him, the one that she fell in love with. In the picture Gow is looking over his shoulder at the photographer. His hands are cuffed together and he’s wearing a green prison jumpsuit. His head is shaved, but he has the elaborate facial-hair arrangement of a man who’s in no hurry to get out to work in the mornings: a pencil line along the jaw, a mufflike hair cap on his chin, a thin mustache. His eyes are small and beady. He’s about as attractive as an anal prolapse.
chapter five
I WAS EATING A SANDWICH IN THE KITCHEN JUST NOW AND I GOT SO freaked out that I had to come up here. This is not a joke. They’re really going to keep my Susie in a prison for years and years and years. It’s grotesque. My heart will starve.
All the papers are in tidy piles now, some on the floor, some on the desk, waiting for me to work through them. Yeni is downstairs giving Margie a bath. Margie’s in a terrible temper this evening. She’s crying at everything. I keep turning around to talk to Susie about it and finding she isn’t there anymore.
What happened to us? We shouldn’t be worrying about murder convictions and appeals. We should be buying bigger houses, moving up the career ladder, fighting about next summer’s holiday destination. The worst of it is that it wasn’t just a random bolt from the blue. Susie had been gathering clippings about Gow for nearly a year, she got the sack over him, she followed him up to Cape Wrath. Let those who have eyes see.
