Denise Mina - Deception aka Sanctum

Following the recent House of Lords judgment in Harriot v. Welsh, it is finally possible to publish, for the first time in the UK, the notorious Lachlan Harriot diaries.

These pages came to be in my possession through a series of happy accidents. In the winter of 1998 I was approached through mutual friends concerning some materials relating to Dr. Susie Harriot. A local doctor, Dr. Morris Welsh, had come to be in possession of a set of diaries written by Lachlan Harriot, the husband of Dr. Susie, and was deeply troubled by their contents. Dr. Welsh, a good man who is much maligned in this text, was keen to do the right thing but unsure how to go about it.

A week earlier, Dr. Welsh had taken Lachlan Harriot’s old computer away as a favor. Knowing that Harriot’s computing skills were minimal, Morris Welsh did a quick search of the recycle bin, checking for important files that might have been accidentally deleted. It was there that he stumbled across the diary files that were to make him famous and add yet another twist to the Dr. Susie murder case. Having alerted the police to the facts outlined in the files, Morris Welsh sold them on to me, as a collector of true crime stories and the highest bidder.

A little over a month before this discovery, Dr. Susie had been convicted, in a worldwide blaze of publicity, of the gruesome murder of Andrew Gow. The public was still intrigued by the case: how could a mother and professional woman, previously of good character, suddenly turn into a vicious animal who would cut the tongue from a man lying restrained on a cottage floor and leave him to bleed to death? As his psychiatrist, did Dr. Susie know more about Gow than the rest of the world? Was it an act of revenge by a jilted lover? Had she indeed fallen in love with him? The answers to these and many other questions were afforded by these diaries.

This is the first time that the law has encountered a set of computer diaries being sold by accident on old hardware. Even before the final judgment was delivered, the case of Harriot v. Welsh represented a significant development in the intellectual property and copyright law of this country. It was in response to this that the ExLibris (TM)Author Assignation software was developed, a system now used worldwide and subject to a series of copyright challenges itself.

The right to publish the diaries was challenged but upheld on two grounds: Had Harriot reserved copyright he would have been able to claim authorship and stop publication. However, because the files were written on his wife’s computer, Susie Harriot was deemed the user and by default the author, and the copyright defense was not available to him. Susie Harriot herself neglected to bring a copyright action. The second course of action was Lachlan Harriot’s privacy case, brought under the Human Rights Act, but the House of Lords found that Dr. Harriot had vitiated his right to privacy, having courted publicity and given a series of interviews to the Mirror newspaper. He had, therefore, left himself with no defenses.

What follows is the transcript of those diaries, complete and unabridged. The sole alterations to the text are the additions of a start date to orient the reader and then numbered headings at the beginning of new entries, put there for the sake of clarity.

Denise Mina

Glasgow, 2002

Tuesday, November 3, 1998

I’M SHOCKED. I WOKE UP AFTER FOUR HOURS’ SLEEP THIS MORNING still trembling. It feels as if there’s a bubble of bile at the back of my throat, ready to splatter out through my mouth if I try to speak. I was exuberantly sick in the taxi on the way home, all hot browns and greens, which is odd because I have no memory of eating for the last three days. I tipped the driver twenty and apologized over and over. He said, don’t worry, pal, no bother at all, just get out for fucksake, quick, before it happens again.

How could they find her guilty? She’s a doctor, for Chrissake, she’s a mother. We’re both professional people. Things like this don’t happen to people like us. Now I understand why mothers stand over dead children and shout NO as if their soul were exploding. It’s a primordial urge; fate has made a terrible mistake and needs to be informed; in a just world this could never happen.

The courtroom was packed for the verdict. Even the policemen from the other courts snuck in to stand at the back in the dark. The public galleries seemed to include the same faces each day, but they must have changed. The line was one hundred, two hundred yards long every morning. A ragged, untidy snake of people having one last cigarette, nodding and chatting to the people before and aft, sometimes hunched against a hard rain, sometimes upright as meerkats in the morning sun, ready to come and sit in the warm, watching our lives being ripped apart as they nibbled their candies and nudged one another. Almost all were quite old. I wondered if that’s the optimum age for shamelessly indulging in ghoulish interests, but they’re probably retired or unemployed and have more time for such activities than young people.

Surprisingly few of the audience were journalists. From the extent of the coverage, you’d think every hack in the country was there. The journalists stood out because they were there for a purpose, bored and bent over notepads, scribbling in shorthand, glancing up every so often when a new player appeared. A larger portion of the crowd watched in shiny-faced amazement. A bald man who smelled like mustard always managed to inveigle his way to the front row. He seemed to know everyone. A recurrent group of three septuagenarian women saved places for each other in line. They all had the same tight white perm. One afternoon one of the ladies brought fruit scones for them to eat with their cups of tea from the machine in the lobby. She had buttered them and wrapped them individually in cellophane. They tittered and giggled as they ate. I was sitting on the bench across the corridor from them, thinking to myself: they’ll remember this trial because of the scones. My life’s being fucked ragged and all they’d remember are the fruit scones and their chum’s winsome wit in bringing them each a funny little snack.

I sat through the two weeks alone, the sole representative of Susie’s family. She waved to me, made faces, and occasionally turned for a reaction. I pretended to be a journalist with exclusive access and wrote everything down in a poor man’s impression of shorthand (jst shrt wds, rlly). The newsmen had worked out that I was her husband at the start of the case. They realized during the first day, because they saw me talking to Fitzgerald during the breaks.

Fitzgerald has become a bit of a celeb during the trial. He was lampooned in the press last Sunday: a cartoon showed his headmasterish scowl and his big gray eyebrows, dressed in lawyers’ robes, driving an expensive sports car with APPEAL written on it and money flying out of the back. They’re never, ever funny, those cartoons.

The journalists approached me at the start of the trial; some even slipped notes into my hand like lovesick schoolgirls. The answering machine is choked with messages every day. They want to buy my story or get some sort of comment about each new development. They offer money, fame, a chance to have my say. They approach and approach, ignoring my snubs, rebuffing my rudeness.