Denise Mina - Deception aka Sanctum

Susie would come home from work, drop her bag by the chair in the hall, take off her coat, and hang it up in the closet. She’d kick off her shoes and come into the sitting room. I’d ask her how her day was. Fine, yeah, okay. No, nothing much really. If Margie was awake, Susie’d put the telly on for the news. It wasn’t really for the news, I knew that, it was for an excuse not to talk to anyone for an hour or so, but that was okay, I understood.

Margie and I lived in the sitting room in those days. I kept all of her toys in the big storage box on the parquet floor under the window. It was a mild winter, just a week or so of really cold, head-down weather. I remember buds on the branches outside the sitting room in the first week of January. I remember birds’ nests in the bare trees, like tangles in fine hair, gradually being covered by foliage. It was Margie’s first-ever spring. The view from those windows was my world in those days. I used to do the ironing with the telly on and feed Margie in the kitchen by the door, where the laminate flooring is. I was proud of how efficient I was with her. I’ve never felt closer to anyone. We’d sit next to each other on the settee when the lunchtime news came on and I’d say, “What do you think about that, Margie-Pargie?” And she’d look up at me and smile. It was just because I was talking to her, I know that, but her smile made my heart swell and synapses zing. She was mine. I loved her and each unrecapturable moment. She was mine alone. The minute she went to nursery it all changed. She has her own social life now, and our relationship has never been quite the same, it can’t be. Yeni arrived soon after.

PHOTO ONE

The first photograph is informal and cut in far too close. Donna is getting ready for the wedding, checking her makeup in the reflection on a brass plaque commemorating Princess Anne doing something at the prison in 1976. It’s a good photo actually, technically very competent. Donna’s putting lipstick on, using the brass as a mirror, looking down at her lips as she does it. Her eyelashes are long and hide her eyes. Her hair is pulled up at the back, and the willowy hairs at the nape of her neck are visible. Her neck is incredibly white; a small black mole nestles off-center between the two ligaments. The skin on her neck is soft, powder-soft, and fringed by the smallest hairs, like Margie’s baby hair. When I think of Margie’s newborn head, I can almost feel my fingertips running over it, the duckling softness of it. It was so soft I never knew for sure that I was touching anything at all until I looked at my hand.

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.

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.”