Denise Mina - Deception aka Sanctum

I stood outside the house and pretended to wait for the bus. I showed every person who came past Stevie Ray’s photo of Donna and asked whether they had seen this woman. No one had. A businessman in a pinstripe suit came down from the top-floor flat (I heard him walk down the full length of the wooden staircase). Two students were waiting at the bus stop, and neither of them had ever seen Donna.

Thinking deductively, I worked out that since Donna smoked, if she had lived here, there would certainly have come a time when she’d need late-night cigarettes. I asked in the local newsagent’s, but they didn’t recognize her. The liquor store didn’t, either. I asked in the local Spar supermarket, and they didn’t know her.

It is quite possible that Donna never lived there and used the address as a letter drop. She might have counted on walking in and taking a letter addressed to her from Gow. But the question remains: Why couldn’t she get letters at home?

The hotel room was small. There was a two-foot path around the bed and a chair in the corner. Everything was slightly old and a little bit broken. The curtain had come off its track in the middle, just enough to look saggy. The television was hidden inside a cabinet with peeling veneer. In the cupboard below sat a mini-bar (with rust spots around the seal) containing an enticing, sensuous selection of a small beer, a yellow wine, a purple wine, a mini gin, a Coke, nuts, a chocolate bar, crisps. I ordered up a sandwich from room service and while I was waiting for it to arrive, I ate all the food in the mini-bar.

I put the telly on at the end of the bed and flicked through twenty or so channels. I arrived at a blurry screen with a blue sign in the corner that said the signal was blocked. Behind the blur two women were either fucking or jogging through a very pleasing cake sale; breathless delight met ecstatic groan, to a backing track of a wailing saxophone. I’d have requested it and happily paid, but I was worried a newspaper would find out and tell everyone in Britain I’d had a wank in Leicester, so I sat on the end of the bed in my underpants, listening and eating a dry sandwich. The glamour of travel.

The next morning I awoke early, sweating wildly into the sheets, feeling completely exhausted. The room was overheated, and I fell out of bed, throwing myself at the double glazing, trying to work out the puzzle of the windows and get one open before I suffocated. My breakfast was outside the door with the paper I had requested. I could hear showers and televisions down the hall and the noise of elevators at the far end whirring up and down, giving out a warning “tink” as they landed.

As I stood under the shower like a limp washrag, I thought about the distance I saw in Susie’s eyes during my visits. She loved someone else. The hours in the office with Donna suddenly made sense, the pictures of her up all over the study, the mole nestling on the back of her neck, the tension between them on the video, it all made perfect sense. I felt like a fucking idiot. I knew two things absolutely and fundamentally:

1. That the night we went to see Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, Susan had been telling the truth about her buxom friend from the sixth form.

2. That my wife and Donna McGovern had been having a love affair in which I featured not one jot. I was not a special guest star. I was not invited in as a spectator. I would not come in at the end of the film and satisfy them with my huge cock. Susan loved Donna, not me. She loved her. When she looked at Donna, her mouth watered, her pupils dilated, her heart sang.

I spewed my guts up into the sink. I spewed the last speck of compassion and sympathy out of my rotten gut and flushed it away. I spewed and washed the taste away with chewy toast and bitter coffee. I sat on the side of the bed and felt my penis shrivel back into my body.

I went downstairs, left the laptop behind the desk for safekeeping, and set off for Highfields on foot.

It was cold and raining, a thin misty rain, and I worried about my coat. Then I thought, fuck her, I’ll buy another one. I walked through an industrial district as nondescript and unremarkable as the town itself, then followed a snaking road past the railway station and over the hill. I asked a woman at a bus stop to direct me to the Highfields address. The woman said that I should be careful up there if I was a stranger, it was quite a rough area.

Highfields actually has nicer houses than Evington. They are still tiny and crammed up close to each other, but the facades are iridescent because of a glassy-flint pebble dash. It’s odd to go somewhere like that and have someone tell you it’s a rough area. In Glasgow roughness is obvious from the hideous housing and the burned-out cars and rubbish everywhere. I saw a drunk couple sitting in a bare ornamental garden in the middle of a busy roundabout. They were very thin and hanging on to each other, passing a cigarette back and forth. Other than that it seemed a nice place. Donna’s street was littered with children. I heard a bell ring, and they all disappeared around the back of one of the houses.

I found the door of Donna’s house and knocked. After a while a gray-haired Asian woman came to the door. She wore a nice green sari and did me the favor of looking at the photo, but her vocabulary seemed to consist entirely of the word “no.” She kept trying to push the door shut while I was talking. Eventually I gave up trying and let her shut her door, rude cow. The woman next door had been listening through the wall, I think. I knocked, and my hand was barely back at my side when she opened the door and looked at the photo of Donna. The lady nodded. She was tiny, very dark-skinned, and had a thick accent.

She kept me on the doorstep, but I could see that the house behind her was immaculately clean. There was something lovely cooking; it smelled like seed cake. I didn’t know if she’d feel comfortable talking to a man, but I tried to make myself less threatening by saying I was looking for a friend of my daughter’s. Without getting the photo out, I asked about the McGoverns from next door.

“Yeees, that’s right. Yeees.” She drew the word out, opening her mouth wider as she got to the end. “Yeees. They did live here for many years, left not so long ago. Last year. I live here for thirty years. Yees, all married life. He died. The man, father? Yeees. Died. Very, very sad. Not nice man. Not happy family. Husband left. Shouting.”

She put a hand behind her ear to show she had been listening through the wall. “Donna nice girl, yees, good girl, work hard for family. Modest girl. Good for family.” It didn’t sound like blousy, over-made-up Donna at all.

I told her that the current owner hadn’t been all that keen to talk to me, and she sucked her teeth in a way that suggested she didn’t altogether approve. “Cheeky old dog,” she whispered, and we had a little laugh together.

“I heard,” the woman said, hand on her heart, “that Donna is dead.” She opened her hand heavenward, flicking the fingers out to show that Donna was gone like a seed from a pod.

I nodded. “It’s very sad. She was very young.”

“Good girl. She sold house when father died, took money, and they went away. Traveling, you know.”

“They went away?”

“Donna and friend. Girl who stay there for while. I didn’t see. Donna I know all her life.”

“Were you here when she broke her collarbone?”

I could see the memory coming back to her. She smiled warmly and nodded. “Yees, fell off bike. Very sore.” She pointed to a pavement curb farther up and opened her eyes wide. “OUCH!” she said, and we had another little laugh together.