Denise Mina - Deception aka Sanctum

Box 3 Document 17 “Ripper Appeal Hearing Set for Wednesday,” Daily Telegraph, 8/31/98

The Riverside Ripper’s appeal against his conviction for a spate of killings of 1993 is to begin on Wednesday.

At a preliminary hearing in Glasgow, Andrew Gow’s counsel lodged the outline of its arguments. The Crown Office has had four weeks to respond, and the court will begin to hear the case on September 2.

What’s the point in my doing this? No one cares. No one doubts the verdict but me.

YESTERDAY MORNING, I GOT BORED OF TYPING OUT IRRELEVANT news reports and decided to go and visit 48 Evington Road, Leicester. I told Yeni that I might be away overnight. She agreed to look after Margie, saying she’d take her to the park after nursery and they would have a lovely little day together. Then she poked Margie in the tummy, and Margie threw her big bald square head back and laughed like a sailor.

I went into the hall and called Glasgow Airport, got put through to British Airways, and booked a ticket on my credit card. The plane was due to take off in three hours. It only takes fifteen minutes to get to the airport, so I took my time getting ready, filling a bag with shaving things and deodorant and a change of shirt.

I left the car in the long-term lot and went off to kill an hour and ten minutes in the terminal. It was quieter than I expected; there were no long, snaking lines inside; I’m used to long lines for planes to Spain in midsummer. It only took me four minutes to check in because I didn’t have any luggage. Upstairs I decided to take a wander around the shops and found an electronics store. I made straight for the counter at the back. The prices were not good, I know that, but I saw myself tapping out notes for essays and short stories in the sidewalk cafés of Paris and Rome, on Gauguinesque beaches, and I bought myself a laptop. It fits neatly into a small black nylon briefcase and weighs eight and a half pounds.

Breathless with excitement, I checked through security. I asked the official if the X-ray machine could damage my laptop, and he had to ask his superior. It wouldn’t, they assured me. I walked to the end terminal, taking my time, feeling purposeful and professional. I sat next to the other businessmen and looked worried. I kept checking my watch for no real reason.

It was a small plane with single seats on the right and a few rows of three on the left. In a fit of bravura I had accepted a window seat and now doubted the wisdom of it. Luckily there were only eight of us onboard, and no one sat next to me. I’m not a very comfortable traveler at the best of times and felt pretty sick as the plane took off. I drank a whiskey, less as a calmer than to treat myself for being so brave. It was a clear day outside, and I could see perfectly how far we had to drop and exactly which rocky outcrop my soft head would squelch on. I spent the next hour doing battle with the laptop instructions manual, just to keep my eyes off the window.

I only bought the laptop to spite Susie over the quarterly statements. The idea was that I’d be able to get all of my impressions down at the time and wouldn’t need to write it all up afterward. What I hadn’t realized is that there would be so much about the machine that was different and that I would need to get the hang of. In the end I wrote diary notes in longhand on bits of paper.

I realized while I was on the plane that even if I could get the laptop going, I’d feel self-conscious writing in front of other people. I talk to myself, I realize; I say out loud the next line I’m going to write whenever I stop to scratch or pick or take a drink of tea, all of which I do often.

Anyway, once I get the hang of the laptop, I’ll give this clumsy machine away. Morris is trapped in the house with fat Evelyn and could use it to work on in the evenings. I’ll delete all these files. I can start again with my writing, now that I’m in the habit and have no duty to anyone else. I’ve been thinking about starting with the Foucault idea, the one about the history lecturer and his mistress.

I’m going on about the laptop, but I’m sure it will be a good buy in the long run. I’ll be glad to get rid of this one anyway. It reminds me of her. I look down through the buttons on the keyboard and see what I assume are her hairs, flakes from her skin, Susie crumbs.

We had to walk across the tarmac to get into the terminal. East Midlands Airport is really just a giant room with a high ceiling and a drugstore inside. No one checked our bags or anything, which I found surprising. I swept through the arrival gate with my shoulder going into spasm from carrying the laptop a hundred yards and found the taxi stand outside.

Forty minutes on the M1 later I was checking into the Travel Fast in Leicester town center, principally so that I would have somewhere to leave the bloody laptop while I went about my business. I slid it under the bed, checking that I had the receipt on me. I was half hoping someone would steal it, actually, so I could get the money back on my card, but it was still there when I got back from Evington.

I’ve never known anything about Leicester. I couldn’t have pointed to it on a map. The only thing I knew about it was that they made crisps there, and I once heard that when Idi Amin expelled all the Asians from Uganda, a large number of refugees settled in Leicester. Apparently Leicester City Council was alarmed at the number of immigrants and took out an ad in a prominent Ugandan newspaper telling people not to come to Leicester, that Asians weren’t welcome in Leicester and would not be given work in Leicester. The Ugandans were running for their lives and weren’t bothered about a warm welcome. They only knew the name of one place in England, and all fled to Leicester as fast as they could and stayed there.

It’s very flat country. Everything looks new and seems to be built from small red bricks. There were some nice buildings: next to the hotel there was a building with a semicircular portico, but it was overrestored and looked like a mock-up of something old, Disneyland Georgian.

The Evington area is just outside the town center. It’s beyond an old steel bridge over the railway, up and over a sharp little hill that turns out to be Highfields. Evington is full of teeny-tiny redbrick terrace houses with front doors and two windows, one above the other. The sidewalks run right outside the bottom windows, which means having your eyes drawn into someone else’s front room as you walk down the street. A lot of the front rooms are empty or have the curtains pulled. The inset brickwork is nice: sunny yellow brick fans above the front doors.

Unfortunately Evington is a slightly run-down student area with a high turnover of residents. Number 48 was on the main road and was taller than the redbrick two-up-two-downs. It was a narrow four-story terrace that, judging from the jungle of buzzers on the door, had been converted into many flats. The front door was set back from the road, behind a bus stop, tucked in the shadow of a small shop selling model-airplane kits and supplies. The building seemed fatally compromised by subsidence, with a lintel above the door angled sharply to the left. The ground-floor window was filthy and blacked out with a poster of the girl from Trainspotting.

I knocked at the front door and waited but got no answer. Eventually I tried the door and found it open. The hallway was narrow, with a flight of rickety wooden stairs at the far end, lit by a window on the landing. A narrow shelf by the door was spilling over with letters, junk mail, books of coupons from supermarkets, and free newspapers. I knocked at a door on the ground floor and spoke to a bloke wearing a red and green striped rugby shirt. He was eating a bowl of cereal and didn’t seem surprised to find a stranger at his door asking after a missing girl. His name was Mark, and he and his chums had moved in two months ago at the start of the new academic year. They didn’t know any of the last tenants, but they left the place pretty clean. The mail just got chucked into the hall by the postman. He said they delivered letters to this address when they didn’t know where else to send it, or if it was a funny shape, because the door was always open. He said he liked my coat.