(2002) Deception aka Sanctum (12 page)

3.2 On May 19, 1993, did assault Karen Dempsey, then residing at 46 Glen Tanar Street, Lambhill, Glasgow, repeatedly punch her on the head and body, repeatedly strike her on the head and body with a hammer or similar instrument, abduct her from Waterloo Street, Anderston, Glasgow, abandon her at the Netherton canal bank, Temple, all to her severe injury, whereby she died of her injuries there, and did murder her.

3.3 On June 12, 1993, while acting along with people or person unknown, did assault Martine Pashtan, then residing at Flat 1/1, 236 Saltmarket, Glasgow, repeatedly punch her on the head and body, knock her to the ground, forcibly detain her in motor vehicle registered number B513 DSF, and abduct her from the bus station at Anderston, Glasgow, and there, or elsewhere in Scotland, repeatedly strike her on the head and body with a hammer or similar instrument, repeatedly strike or slash her in the chest and face with a knife or similar instrument, all to her severe injury, and in Water Row, Govan, Glasgow, did remove said Martine Pashtan from that motor vehicle and abandon her there, whereby she died of her injuries there, and did murder her.

3.4 On July 28, 1993, did assault Alice Thomson, then residing at Flat 16/3, 5 Calder Street, Polmadie, Glasgow, repeatedly punch her on the head and body, and there repeatedly strike her on the head and body with a hammer or similar instrument, forcibly detain her in motor vehicle registered number B513 DSF, and abduct her from Dundas Street, Glasgow, all to her severe injury, and in Millerfield Road, Dalmarnock, Glasgow, did remove said Alice Thomson from that motor vehicle and abandon her there, whereby she died of her injuries there, and did murder her.

3.5 On October 1, 1993, did assault Mary-Ann Roberts, then residing at Flat 1/2, 38 Langa Street, High Carntyne, Glasgow, repeatedly punch her on the head and body, and there repeatedly strike her on the head and body with a hammer or similar instrument, forcibly detain her in motor vehicle registered number B513 DSF, and abduct her from the Broomielaw Road, Glasgow, and repeatedly strike or slash her in the chest and face with a knife or similar instrument, all to her severe injury, and at the Garden Festival site, Govan, Glasgow, did remove said Mary-Ann Roberts from that motor vehicle and abandon her there, whereby she died of her injuries there, and did murder her.

PREVIOUS CONVICTIONS

4. Mr. Gow had six previous convictions, including theft (x 4), taking and driving away (x 1), breach of the peace (x 1), and drunk and disorderly (x 1). The convictions were disposed of by three short periods of detention and two fines. The last sentence was completed in 1990.

SITUATION AT TIME OF OFFENSE

5. Mr. Gow was aged 28 at the time of the indictment.

The police found samples of blood in his car from all but the second woman. Gow started off with someone else helping him sometimes, and then he killed alone. The killings got closer and closer together and more frantic. He cut their tongues out, initially, it was thought, as a symbolic gesture so that they couldn’t talk if they survived. The tongue became part of his fetish, though, and they found evidence that he watched them bleed to death. His DNA was found on several bodies, although I heard that the bleach he threw on them degraded the semen samples. I remember them showing a cheap bottle on a TV crime show and asking for information. Dowsing a cut on someone’s skin with bleach— the intrusion of that small, imaginable domestic detail, somehow makes him seem unimaginably callous. The bleaching seems much worse than what was done to Gow himself, much worse.

It was all over the papers around the time of our wedding. They called him the Water Rat because the bodies were always abandoned near the River Clyde. The name was alarming; it sounded as if the killer was climbing out of the water, hunting people, and then slipping back into the dark river. A historian on television at the time said that when the River Clyde stopped supporting Glasgow, when the ships went to be built elsewhere, then the brokenhearted city turned its back on the water. I realized that he was right: everything in Glasgow faces away from the river, all the buildings have their backs to it, and the fast roads skirting it keep pedestrians away. The Water Rat felt like the river’s revenge on the faithless city. The name stuck until the national press got hold of the story and changed his nickname to the Riverside Ripper. I think Water Rat was better.

The city changed during that time: women wouldn’t go out; men were afraid to slow their cars down in dark streets in case they attracted suspicion. Everyone who had been in the city on the nights around the killings claimed that they saw something, a shape, a car, felt someone watching, smelled fusty river water a mile from the bank. The city glowered, every dark corner and deep shadow became a moist and needy mouth waiting to swallow the careless. Our wedding reception was in a riverside hotel. Later on, when the band had finished, I remember groups gathering around the glass walls, looking out at the dread water sneaking past the window, exchanging gossip about the case in an undertone.

* * *

It stinks in this study this evening. I’ve regressed so completely to teenage sulkiness that I’m smoking a cigarette up here in the dark. I resisted starting again for a whole year after Susie did. She used to smoke up here. She started again one year to the day after Margie was born, as if she were celebrating having her body back. I read somewhere that it’s a sure sign a woman is having an affair: weight loss and starting smoking again, going back to old habits. I didn’t think she could possibly be seeing someone at the time because all she did was work, and I knew what her colleagues looked like.

The last year and a half have been coming to me in flashbacks all day today. Every minute we spent together since she went back to work after Margie. Every word she said to me has another aspect now, an extra side that I knew nothing about at the time.

The day she got fired I found her in the kitchen drinking brandy and smoking a cigarette. It was late June, and the door to the garden was open. The delicious smell of freshly cut grass wafted around the room. I recall the kitchen as dirty for some reason; maybe Mrs. Anthrobus was on vacation.

“How can they fire you? Don’t they have to give you warnings before they fire you?”

She didn’t answer me. She shut her eyes, pursed her mouth, and sucked on her cig, holding the smoke in her lungs, exhaling reluctantly. She had been warned, however many times they have to warn you— it’s usually three, I think. A trinity of warnings, and she never told me. When I think back, she didn’t tell me very much about anything. She’d say, “Oh, yeah, by the way, the car needs oil,” or “I met so-and-so at Sainsburys on the way home.” I suppose I thought I was getting the big picture because she told me the details.

“Fucking Sinky has been putting in reports about me behind my back. It’s like an orchestrated scheme to oust me from the department.” She slapped the table, a gesture that now seems overemphatic. “D’you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if he stole those files himself.”

“Why would Sinky do that?”

“Because”— big inhalation, eyes closed—“he can’t fucking stand to have a woman on staff in a position of power. He’s the most misogynistic man I’ve ever met. He honestly loathes women. That’s one of the reasons he works at fucking Sunnyfields, he’s looking for an exclusively male environment.”

I wonder if it was just luck or she knew the impact this assertion had on my ego. She has known me long enough. She knew how it would blind me.

“It’s just a dreadful shame”— big sigh, sad nod—“that all men don’t appreciate the wonder of women the way I do.”

I probably didn’t say that, but I feel as though I did. I feel as though she played to my weakness so completely that I might as well have smiled and shrugged and told her to fabricate anything she liked about what had happened, however implausible, because really, Susie, I’m such a self-involved prick, I’m not even really listening.

Sinky had, according to Susie, been building up to making his big move for quite a while. Having noticed that she was off when Margie was running a fever and hadn’t filled out her time sheet accordingly, he filed complaints about her timekeeping (strike one). He then complained about the record-keeping in the addiction group she ran on Thursdays. No one had ever kept proper records, and although it had been established at a previous departmental meeting that the group was supposed to be closely minuted, no one had ever done it or worried about it until now (strike two). Strike three was pretty close to not being a lie. Strike three was some records missing from the back office, and Sinky accused her of taking them, although she hadn’t. Strike three was not that she stole the files and was caught on film slipping them into her bag and tiptoeing out of the room, creating a huge potential security risk for the prison because they couldn’t be sure what she had taken out or who she had taken it out for. That was not the representation of strike three that she presented to me.

The next morning, the first day of our new lives together, she got up early and came up here to work on some unspecified thing. When she came down for lunch, her eyes were very red and her hair stank of smoke. I don’t think we’ve had an honest conversation since.

* * *

I remember when they were going to release Gow, I commented that the news programs were using nicer photos of him now, and she sat up and asked me if I thought he was attractive.

It’s the betrayal of trust that smarts the most, makes me feel stupid and gormless. I trusted Susie so much. I was naked before her, and she was wearing an invisible trench coat. I wonder if she told Gow about me, how I called to her every night as she came through the door, asking how her day was, honey. That irritated her, I know it did, but I kept doing it because it made me laugh. I wonder if she was seeing him when I gave her that antique watch for her birthday. She didn’t like it very much and only wore it to please me. I can imagine them together: “He gave it to me. I feel so bad. I don’t know whether to wear it or not.”

I wonder if she told him about the time I couldn’t get it up; whether they had a laugh about it. But that wouldn’t be her style at all. “I feel so bad even discussing this with someone else,” she’d say. “He’d be so hurt. I feel awful.” She’d be a better person twice: once for tolerating my private failings and again for being kind about it.

* * *

My world has shifted sideways suddenly and I find that I’m not even a central character. I’ve never felt less in my life. The evolutionary biologists must be wrong: if we’re not designed for monogamy, why is infidelity so excruciatingly painful? Shouldn’t I just shrug and move on?

It’s so long since I smoked that the man in the shop said they didn’t make Piccadilly anymore, much less packs of ten. I fucking need a smoke. Over and above Tucker’s revelations last night and my getting two and a half hours’ sleep:

1. Margie and I were rushed on the way to nursery this morning.

2. We have a most unwelcome guest.

Unannounced and uninvited, Susie’s Aunt Trisha has come to stay with us. I need a bit of time to take in what Tucker said, instead of which I can hardly find a quiet corner of the house to be alone in. She actually knocked on the door while I was having a long leisurely shit this evening. We have three fucking bathrooms in this house and she was standing outside the one I was in, clutching a vanity case. She couldn’t find those other bathrooms, she said. It was not without a frisson of compensatory pleasure that I stood on the landing, holding my limp newspaper, and watched her lock herself in with the rank stench of my lower intestines.

* * *

This morning Margie and I were walking slowly through the park. I was busy mulling over what Tucker had said last night, trying to think of alternative explanations for Susie and Gow’s long chats but drawing a blank. It had been raining and the leaves and grass glistened bright and white, trembling in the searing breeze. Margie was hitting the ground with a twig she had found and making talky noises, intonation without vocabulary, which I love because I can hear what her little voice will be like when she does start talking properly. We walked on past the trash bins, following the path we always take, when a man with a big camera leaped out at us from behind a shed door and took our picture. I grabbed Margie and shouted at him, stupid things like how dare he, stop it at once, and what a rotten thing to do. I forgot to swear or act hard at all. The photographer didn’t even reply to me, just walked away looking at his camera. It was as if I wasn’t talking to him at all, as if I wasn’t a person. My shouting upset Margie more than he had.

She was crying when we got to nursery, but the mums at the door couldn’t have been nicer.

A little blonde who has a son called Harry kept smiling at me. “How awful,” she said, through a big grin. “That’s awful.” She kept standing on her tiptoes. I think she was quite excited by it.

I called Fitzgerald the moment I got back. His office has been phoning the papers all day, issuing lawyerly threats. He assures me that none of the national papers will use Margie’s picture. It brought it home to me for the first time how much of a burden this is going to be to Margie. She’ll always be The-Girl-Whose-Mum. It’ll never leave her. I mentioned the notes I’d made to Fitzgerald— about the search of the bothy— but he didn’t seem very excited. He didn’t leap to his feet, pull his coat on, shout “I’ll be right over,” and slam the phone down. He sort of sighed, burring his lips. Maybe I could make a list of all these points and drop it at the office, he said. He’d have a look at it. It’s pretty annoying. He was the one who asked me to have a look through the papers. I’m spending hours doing this for him.