Denise Mina - Deception aka Sanctum

He relaxed a bit. I think it was almost a relief to him not to have to try to chisel me. “You broke, too?” he asked.

“Lawyers don’t come cheap,” I said, thinking of our one and a half mil carefully tucked away. “So go easy on the tea.”

After five minutes with Stevie I felt focused and go-getterish. It’s as though he can’t do status games and comes ready-capitulated. I bet that’s why Gow wanted him to manage his affairs, so he could see him often and patronize him. But then, the thing to remember with Stevie Ray is that with no skills whatever, he made a nice living off the back of Gow. He’s not a stupid man, and that’s something to bear in mind. He filled in every conversational pause with a story about how much he’d lost to the car company, how much work he needed done on his house, how everyone thought he was rich. He was being so unchallenging it actually made me feel suspicious. The roll arrived and he took a massive bite and tried to talk about his troubles through milky lumps of bread.

I interrupted him and told him I wanted to talk about my wife. That shut him up.

I took out the notebook I’d written the questions in. I knew I’d crap out if I didn’t have them written down, knew I’d end up asking how he was and finally if he needed any money. I asked the first question and wrote down notes of what he was saying to busy myself, so I didn’t have to look at him while he answered.

Yes, he said, Gow did talk about Susie. He said she was a lovely lady and had been very helpful in getting Donna in to see him. She had okayed their first visit and was kind to Donna. He paused, finishing off his sandwich, and when I looked up, he was watching my face and all but asked me if he was doing it right. He was saying what he thought I wanted to hear.

“Look, Stevie,” I said, “I want you to tell me the truth. I don’t want you to dress it up.”

Stevie smiled uncomfortably and chewed a hangnail, staring at the table.

“I know Gow didn’t talk like that,” I said.

“Can I have an éclair?”

“As long as you stop lying to me.”

He ordered an éclair. The prawn and mayonnaise roll was the most expensive one on the menu, and the éclair was eighty pence. I think he’d checked it out beforehand to make sure he got good value.

Yeah, Gow did talk about Susie. Stevie glanced at my notebook, looked away, sipped his tea, and then smiled as if he was going to be sick. Gow wasn’t nice about women generally. He said things, pretty bad things, actually. Stevie didn’t agree with them, oh no, he doesn’t think about women that way, but, well, ye know how men are together. His cake arrived and he took a bite.

I laughed and jollied him along. We don’t mean it, I said. Stevie jumped on that, agreeing through a mouthful of pastry; no, nothing means anything, it’s just guys talking, like, you know how guys are. This gave me reason to surmise that Gow had said sexual things about Susie, definitely, but Stevie wasn’t about to tell me what they were. I wrote “JUST GUY STUFF” in the notebook so he could read it upside down.

He took another bite of his éclair and frowned at the page, taking about a minute to read the three complex words. Some of the cream had squished out of the side of the cake and got stuck to his chin. In the ensuing conversation it began to look more and more like a big lump of dried cum.

I saw him mouth the words “just guy stuff” and relax. “Gow said he fancied her, ye know, thought she was good-looking. A nice person and such.”

“Look, Stevie, you can tell me what he said, I won’t be offended.” He looked unsure, so I added, “Susan and I have been living separate lives for a few years now.” He still looked confused, so I spelled it out for him. I said I’d been seeing other people and Susie was free to do the same.

Stevie nodded nervously and took another bite. He kept his mouth open as his molars ground the pastry and cream and chocolate together, his tongue pushing the pale lumpy shit forward in his mouth in a rolling bovine rhythm. “Whose idea was that?” he asked.

“It was hers,” I said, acting resentful, making it okay for him to start in on her.

“And whose is the kiddie, then?” I almost leaped across the table. I was prepared to lie to him and make myself a passive, cheated-on husband, but I’d die rather than denounce Margie.

“Mine,” I said firmly, “she’s mine.”

Anyway, the fib worked. Gow talked about Susie a lot. He thought she had lovely tits. Stevie looked up at me and waited for me to punch him. When I didn’t hit him or seem annoyed, he carried on, increasingly astonished by my passivity. Gow’d wanted to fuck her when he first came into the hospital. He thought she was an uppity cow who needed bringing down a peg or two. Gow liked quiet women. Susie wasn’t his usual type, but he did like to tame women. He wanted to make them beg for it and then give it to them. He talked about them begging a lot. Stevie snickered when he reported this, as if he had experience of this scenario, as if any woman had ever begged Stevie to do anything but fuck off. He leaned across the table, lowering his voice. The cream/cum was still stuck to his chin and made him look like a porno gimp. Gow told him about this one time when he met a woman in a bar and she looked like a model but with great tits, right? She took him into the ladies’ room. “I use the term loosely,” he said smugly, obviously repeating a line of Gow’s.

I couldn’t stand him to be confident for a second longer, so I interrupted him to ask whether he was indicating a future intention to use the term “loosely” or whether he was using the term “ladies” in a reckless and all-inclusive manner?

He didn’t understand and got flustered, so I repeated myself in a different way. The last one, he meant the last one. Anyway, this twat took him into the toilet in a pub and lifted her skirt and she had on stockings, garter belt, split crotch, the lot. Stevie went on about all the stuff she did and how she loved it and rubbed her tits on the dirty mirror, etc., etc. It was a jazz-mag story, obviously made up by Gow, either because he was an unimaginative fantasist or to take the piss out of Stevie Ray. Stevie believed it anyway. He went pink telling me about it; I’m sure he had a semi, it took him ages to sit back.

I said I’d heard that a lot of women wrote to Gow in prison.

Stevie nodded. “Yeah,” he said, licking his fingertips lasciviously. “ Lot of women sent in nude pics of themselves. A lot of them were done in, baggy tits and faces like buckets, but Andy used to say this about them: he’d say, ‘It’s just a hole, isn’t it?’ ”

It’s just a hole. I didn’t know what to say. I nodded in shock and offered to get him another éclair. He said no but he’d take a strawberry tart instead. He ate it with gusto, getting jam on the corner of his lips. I couldn’t stop looking at the wreckage of his mouth and chin and thinking menses/cum, cum/menses.

I asked about Susie again, and he paused.

“I’ll tell you what he told me. Right?”

I nodded.

“This isn’t me saying this, he told me this, right?”

I knew it had to be pretty bad, but when I heard what he had to say, I wanted to laugh. It got more and more difficult not to laugh as the conversation wore on. I knew then that she had never touched him, that she might have been in love with him, but my wife, my darling Susie, never ever had sex with Andrew Gow.

Gow told Stevie that Susie sucked him off in the office once. It was when she first came to Sunnyfields, back in ’94. She walked right around the desk and did it. I managed to keep a straight face. Stevie was watching me carefully. I nodded and he carried on with the description. I wanted him to go on and say something else, more balm for my bitter heart. And he did as well.