Denise Mina - Deception aka Sanctum

It was during that time that the mist came into the front room. It was July and I’d left the front-room window open when I went to bed. When I came down in the morning, the garden mist was all through the room, a swirling fog at chest level. I walked slowly through it, and the damp cloud closed in around me. As my bare feet came down on the red kilim carpet, they smashed the settled dust of water droplets and left perfect photographic prints. I told Susie when she came down for breakfast, but the mist was gone by then, and she listened but didn’t understand. It felt like a dream sequence, and now I think maybe it was. No one around me was living in the same reality. What sort of self-centered buffoon would mistake a cataclysmic event in his wife’s life for a splendid opportunity to spend quality time together? I’m a fool, a selfish fool. I hadn’t a clue what was going on. Rome was burning and I played Dixie on the spoons.

This study’s a mess. Susie’s left bits of paper everywhere, all over the floor, on the desk, Blu-Tacked to the wall; there are even some on the window. I haven’t been in for a while because she’d taken to locking the door and I didn’t want to pry (another clue I completely missed/rewrote/dressed up as a lady rabbit). There’s a photograph stuck to the glass on the skylight, a picture of Gow and Donna’s wedding, with Blu-Tack smeared angrily over Donna’s face. The light shines through it so it’s a translucent picture of Andrew Gow standing with a headless woman. It’s creepy. I’ll take it down.

These prison files trouble me intensely. I want to talk to Harvey Tucker, Susie’s colleague from Sunnyfields, to ask him if what he said in court was right, if Susie had been seeing more of Gow than could be justified professionally. I got the feeling he didn’t mean to insinuate that. During his evidence I looked up at him and he seemed uncomfortable, as if he’d been railroaded into saying things. I’ve got this in my notes:

PROSECUTION: How would Mr. Gow come to be spending time in Dr. Harriot’s office?

HARVEY TUCKER: I’m sorry, I don’t understand.

P: How would any prisoner come to be in the office of a psychiatrist? Can they just walk in and demand to be seen?

HT: No, of course not. They’d first of all have to approach an officer and ask to see someone. Then the officer would refer them on to the psychiatrist.

P: [looking incredulously at the jury] Is that the ONLY way? [He raised a hand in a rainbow gesture as he said it. He really was the most awful ham.]

HT: No, well, we could ask to see them as well.

P: A psychiatrist can call a prisoner to their office?

HT: Yes [faltering] within reasonable hours… some prisoners-

P: [cutting him off] We have submitted into evidence Dr. Harriot’s appointment book for the two months immediately prior to her dismissal. Is four hours in the space of three days a usual amount of time to spend with a prisoner?

HT: That’s hard to say [looking very shifty].

P: In this sort of case, where the initial paperwork is done, the risk assessment is done, no one has asked for a new report: would it be usual in such circumstances?

HT: I don’t think it’s poss-

P: JUST a yes or no will suffice, Dr. Tucker.

HT: No.

P: Not a usual amount of time?

HT: [quietly] Not usual, no.

Tucker was very uncomfortable when the prosecution dismissed him, as if he had something else to say.

Anyway, I phoned him just now but got no answer. I left a message asking him to call back, said it was important. I hope he doesn’t think I blame him or anything. I know Sinky Sinclair was responsible for Susie’s getting sacked, not him, but I don’t care about that either at the moment, I really don’t. I can see how the lawyer got Tucker to say what he did. I’m not in a blaming frame of mind, I just want to ask him about it.

It’s obvious in hindsight that Susie was going through some huge crisis before she took off for Cape Wrath. Looking back, it’s so clear. At the time I thought she was just being huffy and withdrawn. She was so insistent that she hadn’t taken Gow’s file, even after they sacked her. That was a massive, throbbing, neon-ringed clue. Sunnyfields only has one applicant per post. It’s so hard for them to recruit for forensic psychiatry, they wouldn’t have fired her unless they had absolutely no other option.

Margie’s gone down for her nap, so I’ve come back up here to do a bit more tidying. This is a nice room. I never thought that before. It’s more of a converted closet than a room. It’s warm because it’s at the top of the house, and there’s a wee stereo. The skylight Susie had put in last summer frames the top of next door’s oak tree and stops the room from being suffocating. The plain white walls and the low bookcase keep it airy and fresh. And of course there’s this computer, which I’ve never been allowed to use because I’m a Luddite and might break it. All I need is the word processing to write up the papers as I sift through them for the appeal. I know how to put the machine on and off and I can save the things I’ve written. That’s all I need to do, really.

Once you’re sitting at the desk, the narrowness of the room and the high sloping ceiling make it feel cozy. It’s only when you’re standing in the doorway, balancing on the shallow top step and looking in at someone else sitting here, asking them when they’re going to come down and spend time with you, that it seems claustrophobic.

EVERYONE’S IN BED, AND I CAN’T CONCENTRATE ENOUGH TO watch TV. It’s been two full days since the verdict now, and Susie still hasn’t called. I thought she’d want to talk to Margie at least. She may be finding it hard to get through here because our phone hasn’t stopped ringing. There are constant messages from journalists offering money and sympathy. One of them said I should see ratting my wife out as “a kind of justice.” A Mirror journalist called four times today. His name is Alistair Garvie and he’s from London. He keeps saying “ London ” over and over and over, as if it’s a magical place a hick like me would never have heard of.

Susie has my mobile number, though, so she could phone if she wanted to. I expect she’s on the induction course for convicted prisoners. They send them on a course in the first few days of their sentence, to tell them the rules and so on. Susie says it’s really to keep them busy, so they don’t get the chance to think about killing themselves, because the reality of a long sentence starts to sink in during the first few days.

We saw an induction group walking across the grass once. The whole valley was swathed in sheets of biting cold rain, and I was in the visiting room with Susie during her brief spell on remand. The pretrial women averted their eyes from the window, as if any contact with the freshly convicted might jinx their chances. I watched them, though, only curious then, not thinking it relevant to me or us. All the women were dressed in blue jogging pants and sweatshirts and walked in a gaggle, topped and tailed by four female officers, as they made their way across to Bravo block for a talk about something. They all looked hard-faced and sad, even the officers. I remember the heavy way they walked, as if they were cosmically disappointed, let down by everything they’d ever seen or done or watched or eaten. They were a poor-looking bunch, not that the remanded women were much better, but at least they had a spark of hope and were allowed to wear their own clothes.

It’s easier on the eye if prisoners wear their own clothes. Then you can categorize and distinguish and dismiss them from your mind quickly. Tracksuit and no bra: drug-addled loser. Stonewashed jeans and high heels: tart and/or shoplifter. Elegant gray cashmere crew neck, jeans, and soft baby-blue running shoes: wife, keeper of my tender heart, absent verb in my life sentence.