“There are things”- Susie squeezed my fingers together, pressing the knuckles so tight it hurt-“things you don’t know about, Lachie.” Her eyes overflowed and she climbed onto my knee, pressing her face into my neck to hide the tears. I held her, felt her rib cage deflate, stroked her bony little back as she struggled to breathe in. I held her until she caught her breath again and she called me her Lachie. I remember that strong, possessive feeling, that she was my girl, that no one could give her this sort of comfort but me. At the time, I thought to myself, I’m not a completely useless bastard after all.
She had told me that, despite all the public pressure, Gow would never get out because her risk assessment of him was so bad. She was shaken when they sacked her, because she knew they’d get her replacement to do another RA. Gow’s lawyer could easily argue that her report was biased because she’d been accused of stealing his files. But she wasn’t scared when Gow did get out. She didn’t introduce any new security measures to the house and said, “Nah,” when I asked whether we should get rid of the decoy box and buy an actual alarm. Did she think he’d hurt Donna? Was she afraid he’d hurt other women? I must ask her when I visit.
I think she was more afraid when Donna and Gow went missing than when he got out. They had disappeared for over a week before the call. All our phone records show is a forty-second call from the hotel in Durness, and then Susie took off.
I mustn’t give in to this insistent self-pity. Yesterday evening was the zenith. After tea I went into an apoplexy of miserable self-loathing: I ate a whole box of Celebrations in front of the television and almost choked on the irony. Yeni had put Margie to bed by the time I finished the chocolates, and I suddenly felt that I was missing her growing up. I went upstairs and stood by her bedroom door, looking in at her sleeping. I stood there, wishing I was less ineffectual, until I realized that nothing could be more ineffectual than standing about in dim halls, wishing I was otherwise. If I were a friend of mine, I’d give me a slap.
At the start of all this, when Susie was first arrested, I promised myself that I’d be a good man. I promised I’d put my own feelings aside and attend to those of my family, but time and time again I find it’s beyond me. The whole thing has been so emasculating: having the mother of my child taken from me, then sitting in the court like a spare prick, listening to the prosecution suggest that she was in love with Gow. It makes me so angry. I have an urge to go about smashing people in the face just to prove I’m still here, still making my stamp on the world, still a man.
I phoned Susie’s colleague Harvey Tucker again, but he wasn’t in. I need to talk to him. Tucker didn’t pick up this time, but he must have the message by now. He obviously doesn’t want to talk to me. I left a message saying I wasn’t angry or anything. Just wanted to ask him a couple of things to set my mind at rest. He still hasn’t called back. Maybe I could use Gow’s prison files as an inducement to Tucker to 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 because she was young, worn over her shoulders, falling halfway down her upper arms. Her velvet blue eyes flash. She leans into the camera, saying something and pouting as she finishes a word. I notice my arm around her waist is holding her up: she can bend over at an acute angle because I am holding her weight.
Photo Three
Susie is sitting on my knee. We are on vacation with friends, eating dinner in a Corfu restaurant with white plastic chairs and a blue oilcloth on the table. It is nighttime, in an open-air taverna. Twelve shiny, sunburned faces grin around the table. It was our last year of med school, and we all went on a cheap package tour together. They were my friends. Susie came everywhere with my friends. This strikes me as significant somehow. She didn’t seem to have a crowd of her own, or if she did, we don’t have photographs of them.