Deception aka Sanctum

by Denise Mina

  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.

  Driving through the town at midnight, through the parallel universe that is pub closing time. All the newsagents had cloyingly alliterative posters, tattered and smudged from a day of windy rain: SEXY DR. SUSIE’S SWINGING SECRETS. I fret about smoking ten cigarettes a day and being slightly overweight at twenty-nine; the town was full of drunk, fat, laughing people smoking casually as they walked down the streets, stopping at late-night shops to buy fatsnax and yet more cigarettes. Half of them didn’t even have enough clothes on for the weather. The young women especially, walking along with their tits hanging out and skirts up their arses. Susie said they are dressing to impress one another, but I don’t think any heterosexual man would ever believe that. I’m not going to let Margie out until she’s twenty-five. She can wear what she likes, but she’s staying home with me.

  The colors at night are yellow and blue and gray. Uplit faces are slow, drunk. People move gracelessly, laugh loudly, fall languorously. Hot chips spill onto litter-strewn streets, crying women hail cabs, and angry men go after them (Angela, you stupid bitch, Angela, fucking come back here). The red eyes of the car in front leave crusty, bloody trails in the yellow dark.

  I cruised through the town, not going anywhere really, not consciously, until I found myself far out on the south side, on the council estate. It’s built on the edge of a deep wood, with ugly concrete cottages from the fifties lining broad streets and a badly broken-up road surface. I had to snake along, veering back and forth across the road to miss axle-shattering chasms. I only saw two or three other cars there.

  Beyond low brick walls were bare little gardens, overlooked by bright windows with curtains. They had ornaments arranged on the sill: a china cat, a nasty vase with dusty plastic flowers jagging out of it, a ceramic flower basket. None of the front gardens had anything growing in them. Stevie Ray’s house had two small windows knocked into a much bigger one, but the surround wasn’t finished on it and the white PVC frame sat inside chipped and crumbling brick. A pile of bricks and loose rubble sat in the middle of the front garden. The lights were off.

  I drove past Stevie’s house three, maybe four times before I pulled over just beyond it and stopped. I was so angry by this point I could have kicked his door in. I wanted to ask him how he could live with himself, did he think I was a wanker? Well, did he? I sat in the car, taking deep breaths so I wouldn’t be too angry, smoking a cigarette, which made me angry again.

  I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Stevie Ray coming along the road toward me, back from a night in the pub. Next to him was a small blond woman, and I thought he’d got lucky. They were walking so close, smiling but chatting very little, it was a touching scene. I’d calmed down by this point and knew I’d have to work myself up into having a fight again, so I slid down in the seat, and as I watched, I realized that the woman looked familiar.

  They turned into the garden. For a moment I worried that they’d notice my car. They could have, but at that moment the woman said something, flicking her finger toward the crap piled up in the front garden. The gesture was disapproving, but she dropped her shoulders in despair at the same time, as though she’d pointed it out a hundred times. Stevie didn’t say anything, but his back tensed guiltily. From that one gesture and response, I knew immediately that they were living together and had been for a long, long time.

  Then Lara Orr took out her keys and opened Stevie Ray’s front door.

  I was stubbing out my fifth cigarette, about to get out and knock on his door, when a rap at the window made me jump, the seatbelt yanking me back and hurting my shoulder. Stevie Ray was at my window, looking wary but curious. He was breathing frost, wearing stripy pajamas under a heavy woolen dressing gown and outdoor shoes on bare feet. I pressed the electronic button and Stevie reeled back as the window started and lowered. He’d been expecting me to punch him.

  “Listen,” he said, talking fast and hanging on to the wall behind him with both hands, “I’m sorry, but a guy’s got to make a living. You’ve got everything- you wouldn’t understand. You’re clever and good-looking and you’re a doctor. You’ve got a healthy daughter-”

  “You prick,” I said, brave inside my car. “My reputation’s ruined because of you. What a cheap thing to do, even for you. It was cheap.”

  Stevie looked at the ground. “I needed the money,” he said. “I’m sorry. I am a prick.” He came closer, put a hand on the roof of the car, and drummed his fingers once, leaning down into the cab
to speak. “Are you, um… d’you, um, want a cuppa?”

  I looked up at him. He actually felt sorry for me. “Come away in and have a cup of tea with us,” he said, sotto voce, eyes serene. “There’s someone inside who wants to meet you.”

  “Lara Orr?”

  Stevie nodded, glowing at the mention of her name. “She’s been following you in the papers. She feels bad for you.”

  I was genuinely touched. How deeply kind, I thought. How good women can be sometimes.

  All promise of a spiritual connection was shattered when I saw inside their house. All the paper had been ripped off the walls in the hall, and someone had painted over the scrappy mess in the cloying peachy color of artificial limbs. The real shock was the undulating dirt floor. It was actual dirt, muddy, sandy dirt for growing things in, but, being December, the frost was through it. Someone had laid bits of cardboard box down, but the freezing damp hung in the narrow hallway. There had been floorboards once, that much was clear from the struts sticking out of the side of the wall about an inch above the ground level.

  Stevie saw me looking around at the mess. “I’m doing, ahem, some renovations.”

  The living-room floor was still intact. It was a steep step up from the hall and had a once-green carpet on the floor, now encrusted with dirt to the point where it was black and shiny at the doorway. Newspapers were spread over the floor to act as a protective cover. A midnight blue velvet settee with full ashtrays and plates and cups balanced on the arm stood just inside the doorway. A large television was precariously balanced on a red plastic child’s chair next to a big gas fire. Standing there in the cold muddy hall, looking up into the floating platform of the warm living room, I felt like a soldier on the Somme dreaming of his modest home.