Read Online (2002) Deception aka Sanctum by Denise Mina - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Denise Mina
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get in touch; I could promise him a swap.
The disk that’s with the prison files has a list of people who had contacted Gow in the past two years, like Stevie Ray and Donna. The entries have notes next to them like “letter, sexual content,” “letter, request to visit,” and then the final disposition like “no action,” “visit,” “Gow refusal,” or “Scottish Prison Department refusal.” Some of the correspondents wrote three or four times. One of them wrote twenty-three times, every one of them an “admiring letter, violent content” with a request to visit. Interestingly, it was Gow who kept refusing the visit. Even rapist serial killers must find some people distasteful, I suppose.
* * *
I’ve got to hang on to Susie, my own Susie. The images from her arrest and the court are so overpowering that I have to strain to remember her from before, when we were just two private people, before we became a byword for privileged suburban professionals lusting after a bit of rough.
I’ve been looking at photos all day, thinking about when we met. I was the only guy in our crowd in med school who married another doctor. All my pals, Rosso and Bangor and Morris, they all said it was a bad move, marrying someone like Susie. They didn’t mention Susie, of course; they just said someone who wasn’t a nurse.
Susie Wilkens was in the year above us, and her grades were legendary. She was determined to do psychiatry from the beginning. Not surgery, not the high-prestige technical stuff. She was so good she wasn’t even competing with the rest of us. I thought she was marvelous.
I’ve brought up some photos from our student days to stick on the walls here, to remind me of my Susie. I should put them into an album and leave it around the house so that Margie can see her mummy in normal situations.
Three of the pictures seem especially significant to me:
Photo One
Susie in our crowd from the student union. She is small, five feet four in heels. Her dark, thick hair is long and pulled over one shoulder.
It was one night among many in the beer bar, special only because I’d bought a disposable camera to take pictures of my room in the medical residence to send Mum and Dad so they could see where I was living and agree to the high rent. The rent wasn’t high at all, but they’d been in Spain for a year and were used to nothing costing more than a tenner. I used the end of the film on the beer bar pictures.
There is a lot of movement in the picture. Everyone is mugging furiously, shoving each other around and drinking pints of lager, the amber and froth sloshing up the sides of the glasses. Susie is in the middle of it all. She’s making a silly face, sticking out her tongue slightly and crossing her eyes, as if making ugly faces is something she finds terribly hard. She is holding a bag of crisps: cheesy puff balls.
Photo Two
Susie and I in the sunshine, outside a church. It was a student wedding; one of the guys from the union got married suddenly because his girlfriend was pregnant. The marriage was over before we graduated.
Neither Susie nor I could afford good clothes at the time of this picture. She is dressed with studied abandon in a shocking-pink pencil skirt and black dinner jacket. She thought it was studenty to dress like that. I loved it, loved it when she got things so wrong. She was so rarely wrong.
I have my cheap gray suit on, shiny around the pockets and crumpled at the elbows. I didn’t have the money to dry-clean it. I wore that suit for about four years without having it cleaned or pressed. I remember the semicircular creases on the back of the jacket, like tidal sand. I wore it to christenings, weddings, interviews. In the end it was unwearably smelly and I had to throw it away. This photograph is probably the last time my hair was nice this length, quite Paul Weller, and that was six years ago.
Susie is much more attractive than I am. Her dark hair was long then, rich and shiny
The disk that’s with the prison files has a list of people who had contacted Gow in the past two years, like Stevie Ray and Donna. The entries have notes next to them like “letter, sexual content,” “letter, request to visit,” and then the final disposition like “no action,” “visit,” “Gow refusal,” or “Scottish Prison Department refusal.” Some of the correspondents wrote three or four times. One of them wrote twenty-three times, every one of them an “admiring letter, violent content” with a request to visit. Interestingly, it was Gow who kept refusing the visit. Even rapist serial killers must find some people distasteful, I suppose.
* * *
I’ve got to hang on to Susie, my own Susie. The images from her arrest and the court are so overpowering that I have to strain to remember her from before, when we were just two private people, before we became a byword for privileged suburban professionals lusting after a bit of rough.
I’ve been looking at photos all day, thinking about when we met. I was the only guy in our crowd in med school who married another doctor. All my pals, Rosso and Bangor and Morris, they all said it was a bad move, marrying someone like Susie. They didn’t mention Susie, of course; they just said someone who wasn’t a nurse.
Susie Wilkens was in the year above us, and her grades were legendary. She was determined to do psychiatry from the beginning. Not surgery, not the high-prestige technical stuff. She was so good she wasn’t even competing with the rest of us. I thought she was marvelous.
I’ve brought up some photos from our student days to stick on the walls here, to remind me of my Susie. I should put them into an album and leave it around the house so that Margie can see her mummy in normal situations.
Three of the pictures seem especially significant to me:
Photo One
Susie in our crowd from the student union. She is small, five feet four in heels. Her dark, thick hair is long and pulled over one shoulder.
It was one night among many in the beer bar, special only because I’d bought a disposable camera to take pictures of my room in the medical residence to send Mum and Dad so they could see where I was living and agree to the high rent. The rent wasn’t high at all, but they’d been in Spain for a year and were used to nothing costing more than a tenner. I used the end of the film on the beer bar pictures.
There is a lot of movement in the picture. Everyone is mugging furiously, shoving each other around and drinking pints of lager, the amber and froth sloshing up the sides of the glasses. Susie is in the middle of it all. She’s making a silly face, sticking out her tongue slightly and crossing her eyes, as if making ugly faces is something she finds terribly hard. She is holding a bag of crisps: cheesy puff balls.
Photo Two
Susie and I in the sunshine, outside a church. It was a student wedding; one of the guys from the union got married suddenly because his girlfriend was pregnant. The marriage was over before we graduated.
Neither Susie nor I could afford good clothes at the time of this picture. She is dressed with studied abandon in a shocking-pink pencil skirt and black dinner jacket. She thought it was studenty to dress like that. I loved it, loved it when she got things so wrong. She was so rarely wrong.
I have my cheap gray suit on, shiny around the pockets and crumpled at the elbows. I didn’t have the money to dry-clean it. I wore that suit for about four years without having it cleaned or pressed. I remember the semicircular creases on the back of the jacket, like tidal sand. I wore it to christenings, weddings, interviews. In the end it was unwearably smelly and I had to throw it away. This photograph is probably the last time my hair was nice this length, quite Paul Weller, and that was six years ago.
Susie is much more attractive than I am. Her dark hair was long then, rich and shiny
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