I smiled and said I was sorry. I nodded at the menu and asked if I could buy her an ice cream. She doesn’t have a lot of money and seemed quite pleased. Still, she tried to pay for the egg rolls she’d already had. I think she’s trying to make it clear that she is not available for good times. I didn’t know how to say “dream on, fat bird” in Spanish, so I smiled and let her pay and then ordered two Knickerbocker Glories and a pot of tea for two.
“My wife and I can’t thank you enough for staying during all of this,” I said.
She shook her head, but I could see she liked my mentioning Susie.
“My wife asked me specifically to tell you that she says thanks. You have been so good to Margie just when she needs extra care. Any other au pair would have left us. You are very kind.”
Yeni shook her head again and nodded and waved her head about some more. When she realized I’d finished, she smiled a beamer. “I like Margie very fine. She is good for to me.”
Her English is shocking. I suppose it’s my fault; I should talk to her more. We nodded and smiled at each other some more, and shrugged and were reduced to giving each other thumbs-up by the time the ice creams came. They looked great. The sun shone in through the window and lit up the strawberry sauce neon-clear. They looked gloriously indulgent.
Afterward we sat, drowsy with carbohydrates, sipping tea and ripping up paper napkins by wiping our sticky fingers on them. I read the papers while Yeni flicked through the pictures in the supplements. It was nice being with someone and not having to interact, just having the comfort of a bit of company. I noticed that she’d stopped smelling of yogurt, so she’s either sorted out her thrush problem or given up eating it. We didn’t talk about Trisha or my parents, but it was obvious why we were both hiding there. Afterward, when we could delay it no longer, I gave her a lift back to the house. It would be nice to have a pal.
Box 1 Document 3 Note of Circumstances (cont.)
SITUATION AT TIME OF OFFENSE
5. Mr. Gow was aged twenty-eight at the time of the indictment. He was married and living with his wife, Lara Orr, at 3582 Cumbernauld Avenue, Cumbernauld. They had no children.
6. The victims were all working as prostitutes in the Glasgow area.
6.1 Victim Mrs. Elizabeth MacCorronah, resident of Flat 3/1, 6 Ochil Place, Milton, Glasgow, had three children, all of whom were in local authority care at the time of the offense. She was a registered heroin addict and had attempted methadone-assisted withdrawal four times. She was married at the age of sixteen. Her husband, Davie MacCorronah, was killed in a house fire in 1991. He was also a registered addict. Mrs. MacCorronah was nineteen at the time of her murder.
6.2 Victim Karen Dempsey, resident of 46 Glen Tanar Street, Lambhill, Glasgow, was single and had a dependent mother. Although not a registered addict, she had a high level of both alcohol and codeine in her blood at postmortem. She was twenty-one years of age.
6.3 Victim Martine Pashtan, resident of Flat 1/1, 236 Saltmarket, Glasgow, was married and had a child aged four months. She lived with her husband of three years, Mr. Alvin Pashtan. She was twenty-four at the time of her death.
6.4 Alice Thomson, of Flat 16/3, 5 Calder Street, Polmadie, Glasgow, was thirty-three at the time of her murder. She had two children, aged thirteen and twelve, both living with their father, John Livingston, in East Kilbride.
6.5 Mary-Ann Roberts, of Flat 1/2, 38 Langa Street, High Carntyne, Glasgow, was single and childless. She was forty-one at the time of her murder. Ms. Roberts had convictions for prostitution stretching back to 1971, when she was nineteen.
7. Although Mr. Gow confessed to the murders, he was unwilling to talk about the commission of the offenses. DNA matches were made between Mr. Gow and the semen samples on the bodies.
PRISONER’S ACCOUNT OF OFFENSES
8. Gow volunteered a confession to the murders upon being stopped by two police officers for cruising in the Anderston area. He admitted to murdering the women, told police where he had left the bodies, and revealed details about the arrangement of the corpses. Forensic examination found traces of the women’s blood in his car. A preliminary DNA match was established between Mr. Gow and the semen samples left at the scene of the crimes. He has entered a guilty plea.
Subsequently, he refuses to discuss the offenses despite his guilty plea. On all other matters he is happy to talk. He is a pleasant, articulate man and presents himself well.
It’s now teatime and I’ve spent the best part of today up here hiding from the crossfire. Firstly there’s Trisha and all the nasty questions I’ve been avoiding: How did Susie look when I visited? What did she say? Is she well, not being mistreated, I hope? Does she have her own room? Is she having to empty her own slop bucket? How the hell am I supposed to know all this stuff? Trisha wants to know if she can come to visit Susie, but I said no, probably not. I’ve promised to ask Susie about her living conditions the next time I go, but I won’t. I’m not driving the forty minutes there and back with Trisha in the car and having her watch me being searched. Susie only gets four visits a month, anyway, and it may be wrong, but I want them for myself. Then Mum pipes up, standing up for me, telling Trisha to write to Susie if she wants to know these things, leave the boy alone, let my people go.
It takes eight hours to drive up to Cape Wrath from Glasgow. Susie could surely have changed her mind and thought of me, or at least of Margie, once during the eight-hour drive. They showed security film from a service station during the trial, and we all watched as Susie stopped to gas the car up and bought a family-size bag of wine gums and a can of Diet Coke. On the film she is laughing and chatting with the girl behind the counter, pointing back to the car because she didn’t know the number of the pump. As the prosecution said, not exactly the behavior of a woman beside herself with worry about Donna. I’d like to think she was buying the wine gums to bribe herself onward, like I was with the toffees, but I don’t think she minded going up there. I don’t think Susie’d go anywhere reluctantly. I wonder if she’d come and visit me in prison if the situations were reversed, and I can honestly say, I don’t think she would.
My chest has been hurting from all the smoking, and I’ve got no one to blame that on but myself. I’ve been up here since lunch, transcribing and playing computer solitaire. It’s a dull but hypnotic game. I’ve cut a picture of a Greek seaside town out of the Sunday papers and stuck it up on the wall. There are whitewashed buildings in the foreground and a steep cliff over an electric-blue sea. It relaxes me. Just looking at it, I can almost feel the sun on my neck. I want to go back there.
This time two weeks ago I was still hopeful that the verdict would go our way. This will be the worst of it if she never gets out, these interminable Sundays stretching off into the future until Margie goes to university. By that time I won’t remember what it is to be happy, the loneliness will be all through me like a cancer.
I wish Susie was home. I wish she was up here working and I was downstairs shouting up at her to come down and talk to me. Even if she was up here fantasizing about Gow, I wouldn’t mind. I wouldn’t care even if she was up here thinking about touching him.
That prison-lovers book says that the women hear whatever story about the murder they want to hear; if they want him to have been protecting a helpless friend, then they’ll hear that in the story he tells; if they want to excuse him on the grounds that he was forced to kill an abusive wife, then they’ll hear that. And if they can’t mitigate the cruelty, then they’ll factor in drugs or drink to explain it. But Susie couldn’t have misheard Gow. She had his records. She was his psychiatrist.