Denise Mina - Deception aka Sanctum

“Didn’t you have friends or family back in Leicester?”

“Nope.” She doesn’t sound sad about it.

“Did you have a job?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

Donna looks at her lap. “I worked in a health club, at the reception desk.”

“Do you have a job up here now?” asks Tucker.

“Not yet, but I’ll get one.”

“Don’t you think you’ll miss your old job?” he says. “Don’t you think you’ll be lonely?”

“I don’t feel alone when I’m near Andrew.” She looks at Susie defiantly. “I may not be alone for very long, anyway.”

“Hm,” says Susie. “Do you think Andrew’ll get out?”

“I don’t care if he’s in here for the rest of his life. I’ll stand by him.”

“Have you discussed the rapes and murders with him?”

Donna flinches. I think it’s the use of the word “rapes” that offends her more than murders. “Not those things specifically, no. But he has told me that he was set up.”

“And do you believe him?”

“Of course I do. I trust him.”

“You trust him to tell you the truth?”

“Yes.”

“Are you aware that other women write to him and he writes back?”

Donna flinches again but carries it off with aplomb. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I know that.”

“Are you aware that other women visit him?”

“Yes, that’s only to be expected. I hope that’ll change after we meet.”

“Will you be disappointed if it doesn’t?”

“Aye, I will. Of course I will. I love him.”

Susie pauses and I can hear the noise of paper turning. “Doesn’t it seem very unfair,” she says, “for him to be locked up in here for years? Doesn’t it make you think he might be guilty?”

Donna is wide-eyed. “It is unfair,” she says. “But life’s unfair.”

“Would you strive to make Andrew’s life fair?”

She sits back and nods. “Oh, yeah.”

“Do you participate in politics, then? Are you involved in any other campaigns?”

“No.” Donna curls her lip. “You can only make life fair for you and yours, not for other people. There’s no point, is there? Fighting for people you don’t even know. People you don’t know are bastards and deserve all they get.”

There’s a smirk in Susie’s voice. “But Andrew isn’t bad?”

“Not to me, no. I know him now, you see.”

Susie shuffles some papers. It feels as if she’s looking for the next question. “I think that’s about it, Donna.”

“Have I done all right?”

“You’ve done very well.”

“Will I be allowed to meet him, then?”

“I’m pretty sure you will. Everything seems fine.”

Susie had the final say in whether Donna gets in or not, but she doesn’t let on. A lesser woman would have hinted at it and put Donna in her debt. “You seemed a bit nervous when you came in earlier, I wondered what you were afraid of.” The shadow on the floor is shifting again and Susie is standing up. “I hope it wasn’t us?”

Donna smiles flirtatiously. “Why, are you going to spank me?” For a millisecond an inadvertent smile bubbles up across her face. She catches herself, glances at the camera, looks at the ground, and by the time she looks back at Susie, the thought is suppressed.

I rewind a couple of times to check my impression, but I’m right. Donna said it, and realized she’d made a mistake as soon as it was out. Could it be some sort of S amp;M thing? Maybe she was into Gow’s being a sadist and is pretending to be a naive idiot so she could meet him? She does seem genuine, I have to say, but there is something odd, definitely very, very odd about her.

PROGRAM 2: DOCUMENTARY

The documentary is about people writing letters to Peter Sutcliffe in prison. Having watched it, I can see why Susie kept it. The women, and they are all women, have written to him on a number of pretexts, each one more flimsy than the last.

One woman was going through a bad time herself, so she went to his trial to cheer herself up and fell in love with him. There are at least two grotesquely mismatched junctions in that sentence. Sutcliffe wrote back, and the letters got more frequent, with more and more exclamation marks and love declarations, just like Donna and Gow. Sutcliffe wrote poems for her as well. She did sketches of him sitting in a garden or at the seaside. I suppose it’s the complement of wasting time on each other, really. Eventually she discovered she wasn’t the only woman writing to him and got disillusioned. She felt that he deceived her. She’d given up access to her children for him. What is most startling is her complete unwillingness to take responsibility for her own behavior. She keeps saying he tricked her into trusting him. The man was in a state mental hospital for the criminally insane, a fact which might have served as something of a red flag to more self-protective women.

Next was a happily married woman, all wax jacket, Labradors, and warbling voice, who had seen him in court. She’d done a drawing of him from memory and wanted to visit him to see how accurate it was. She was, without a doubt, the most self-deluding. She couldn’t even admit that her interest in him had a prurient element. Her husband drove her to the hospital once a month for visits and sat outside in the car.

The third woman was very worrying. She was a little old lady who was certain she had served Sutcliffe and another man in a café during the Yorkshire Ripper murders. The other man, Sutcliffe’s friend, had a Sutherland accent that perfectly matched the voice on the bogus tapes sent to the police, the tapes that claimed responsibility and misdirected the investigation for months. Sutcliffe was released to kill again because he had the wrong accent. The old lady wanted Sutcliffe to confess and admit that he had an accomplice. A retired police officer was interviewed and said that it was plausible for two men to have been responsible for the murders. Her husband sat in the background, in a shadow against a wall, like Boo Radley. His face was blank, and he never spoke or moved until she looked at him. She showed off a lot of photographs of them with Sutcliffe. They were hugging him in one, then handing over Easter cards and Christmas presents. She showed off a collection of letters from Sutcliffe that they kept in plastic folders. The woman seemed to have forgotten all about truth and the mystery man by the time she got near to him. She said over and over that he was like a son to her but eventually got annoyed when Sutcliffe wouldn’t admit to having an accomplice and stopped going to see him. She said he had made her trust him and then betrayed her. Exactly how was never made clear.

They had an expert on, and she said that women who form relationships with killers are all lying to themselves and are likely to be motivated by thrill-seeking and, often, a sense of loss. This ties in neatly with all the stuff in the prison-lovers book. I should start reading it again.

PROGRAM 3: HOME MOVIE 2 6/12/98 4:37 P.M.

The camera blanks and starts again. This is another interview, two weeks before Susie got sacked. Susie and Donna are alone this time. The light from the window is sharp on the floor, the shadow from the bars is crisp but shorter, more square-shaped, which means the sun is higher, so it’s a few months nearer midsummer than the first interview. It’s warm in the room too; lazy dust flecks are suspended in the treacly air. Donna is sitting in the chair, wearing a red dress with a scalloped frill around the hem and the V neck. She has the same white shoes on as before, has a matching white handbag leaning against her leg, and is smoking a cigarette. From Susie’s shadow on the floor, I can see that she is smoking, too. The shadow-Susie lifts her hand to her face and exhales on oily gray cloud. I remember when I really smoked. I remember when I smoked as I walked home, smoked through colds, smoked in hot, airless rooms in the summer and made myself sick.