Denise Mina - Deception aka Sanctum

I finally phoned Mum. Her voice was high and panicked, and she said she was on the verge of calling the police to come over to the house and check on me. I asked her why on earth she would do that. She fluffed her reply but basically seems to think I might try to kill myself and Margie. I told her not to be stupid: if I kill myself, who’ll organize the papers for the appeal? Then I realized how depressed and subordinate this made me sound. She wants to come over and visit. I said she could if she liked but it’s unnecessary. I have a lot of support, and Susie will be home just as soon as this gets sorted out. Mum didn’t sound convinced but promised not to book a flight just yet. She said she didn’t mind that other people would read about us in the papers; what was important was my health and Margie and Susie. As long as we all had our health, it didn’t matter what other people heard about our family troubles. Everyone had problems, and our family need be no different. I think Mum and Dad’ve talked about this a lot and this is the line they’ve come up with.

Dad came on and struggled to clear his throat for five minutes. Eventually he said he was sorry about what had happened. I accepted his condolences. He said they didn’t care about other people hearing about my problems (suddenly they’re my problems); what mattered was that we were all healthy. The devil-may-care posture was wearing thin.

He said, “They can’t take your health away from you, can they?”

I said, “Well, they can if they shoot you in the face,” which, far from sounding chipper and cavalier, only confused and frightened him. I hope he doesn’t repeat the comment to Mum; it would scare her as well. It’s imperative that they don’t come here.

Dad kept saying never mind, never mind, things will buck up. I suspect he always thought Susie was a bit racy because of the money and is glad to see the back of her. He actually said, “Chin up.” What happens to expats in Spain? He was a GP in Ayr for fifty years, and suddenly he starts talking like a regimental sergeant major, all Colman’s mustard and fucking Bovril. They ended a discussion about my wife’s murder conviction by asking me to send them water biscuits. I felt like shitting in a box and sending it registered.

I keep thinking about Cape Wrath. There have been a lot of different versions printed in the papers. The articles reproduce a map of the cape with the red Ministry of Defense training area warnings saying DANGER AREA all over them. It’s very dramatic.

My version of Cape Wrath is different from the others because it doesn’t start with a long drive or a beautiful, dark-haired psychiatrist walking into a small hotel. Mine starts with Margie eating breakfast and an early-morning phone call: it was a Friday morning in late September. Susie answered the phone in the hall, said, “Oh, it’s you,” and turned away so I couldn’t hear what she was saying. In the police’s version it was Gow on the phone, telling Susie where he was, perhaps inviting her there. In the Susie version it was Donna asking for help. In the Lachie version Susie hung up, came into the kitchen, and told me she was popping over to the supermarket, back soon. Bye, Susie. Bye, Lachie darling, and the door shut behind her. She drove for eight hours to the very north coast of Scotland and the pretty little hotel on the beautiful banks of the Kyle of Durness. She walked straight into the lobby and told the owner’s wife, a Mrs. Zoe Pascal, who she was and who she was looking for- not exactly the behavior of a woman who was sneaking about or intent on committing two murders. The woman handed her a sealed letter. Again Susie said it was from Donna; again the police said it was from Gow, but there’s no dispute about what it said. It must have mentioned Loch Inshore and the hut because, without even stopping for a cup of tea, Susie took the ferryboat across the kyle. (It is literally a ferry boat. It isn’t a ship or a steamer. It’s a wee man with a boat who rows foot passengers across.) Susie was alone, not agitated but quite serious. She got off on the far bank, pulled her green leather coat closed, and walked off into the dusk. Three hours later she was back in the hotel bar. She was standing at the bar, drinking whiskey and looking disheveled when the police came to arrest her. His blood was all over her shoes. She was holding the glass with two hands, said Mrs. Pascal, because she was shaking too much to drink with one.

I can’t sleep again. I’ve been lying in bed for two and half hours, and I keep getting rushes of adrenaline that make me want to sit up and start punching. I sat in a hot bath, breathing deeply, and drank a hot toddy, but when I lay down again, I wished I could go for a mad, high-kneed run around the garden. Tasks and their possible permutations keep coming into my mind when I lie down. I feel as if I’m trying to remembering things, things that will slip out of my mind if I don’t wake up and write them down immediately. There are bits of paper all over the house with pointless things like “shop- get veg,” “Phone Fitzg. re times,” “clothing- ENOUGH?” Sometimes I can’t remember what these important notes mean the next day. More often I can remember and they don’t matter. I think I’m hoping that I will stumble across the single shred of relevant information that will make sense of the whole episode. Maybe that’s what I’m doing up here in the middle of the night.

I press the button and Susie’s voice fills the room.

“No, Donna hadn’t met him before. She saw him in the paper and fell in love with his picture. [Mad laugh.]

“Gow is an interesting character. Like many serial killers, he was very taken with his press coverage. He remembered the names of journalists who had written about him, imputed an admiring relationship between them. He actually referred to them as ‘my fans.’… No, he didn’t like all the coverage, sometimes he’d get very angry. He was terribly angry with his ex-wife, Lara Orr, but that all stopped when Donna came along.”

The interviewer interrupts her. He tells her a quick story, which I can’t hear, about a friend called Harold, I think, and then asks her a question.

“Yeah, lots of people do visit. Gow comes over quite well. It’s the set-up that gives him the edge. You see, he’s very confident, self-assured in the way that only people with no self-doubt or insight can be, and meeting that sort of certainty can feel quite intoxicating. A lot of sensible people came under his spell.”

He asks another question, and Susie’s answer is adamant:

“He is, yeah. He’s insistent that he’s innocent, even though he confessed in the first place and then pled guilty at the trial… He claims innocence to make himself more likeable. Think about it: if he admitted he was guilty, he wouldn’t get the sort of coverage he does, would he? Ian Brady doesn’t get that sort of coverage. Sutcliffe doesn’t get it. Just Gow. And the fact that he can claim innocence in the face of all that evidence may mean that he’s more psychopathic than either of them.

“That’s what psychopaths do: they tell you what they think you want to hear. If you want them innocent, they’ll be innocent; if you want them guilty, they’ll tell you that. Their purpose is to get under the skin of whoever they’re near, to control them. The main variant with psychopaths is how bright they are, how capable they are of making the lies consistent. It’s as close as they get to emotional contact with other human beings.

“If you look at the past three years’ articles about Gow, you can see that. In one year alone he has declared himself a born-again Christian, a Seventh Day Adventist, and last year he became a Muslim by changing his surname to Ali and refusing to eat bacon.”