This letter might be what she and Fitzgerald spent all the phonecard money during the first week talking about.
I know I should take some sort of urgent action, but I don’t know what to do for the best. What if she’s been telling the truth all along?
chapter twenty-one
Stevie Ray, 14 Hamilton Drive, Priesthill 876 2454: 10:30 a.m. Greggs the Baker’s.
INTRIGUED BY MY FIND, I GOT INTO THE CAR LAST NIGHT AND drove out to Kirkintilloch. I wanted to take a look at the house Donna lived in while she stayed in Glasgow. It has been pictured in the papers often enough, but I wanted to look for myself. I can’t stop thinking about Susie since I found the note.
Donna’s old house is off a fairly busy road, but you’d have to be looking to find it. She rented it when she first moved up here from Leicester and Gow lived here with her for a week when he was released, before they took off up north.
The night sky was cold and clear when I went out there; the moon lit the countryside as brightly as a forty-watt bulb. The house is on a patch of flat land outside the town, and a mile away, straight across fields and grass, the massive Campsie Fells rise suddenly like a mammoth back wall to the valley. The one thing you really notice is how remote the house is from anywhere. I wouldn’t have expected a twenty-three-year-old to want that sort of isolated place.
It’s squat, like our house, but only one story high, with two attic rooms. It’s whitewashed and peeling, with small, deep, inset windows. It seemed empty. Overgrown bushes in the front garden make the house look ramshackle, and big bushy weeds have sprung up on the drive. A few dead bunches of flowers were perched against the front door, presumably left there by locals to commemorate Donna, or perhaps even Gow. I peered into the dark windows and saw dull, brown furniture, an armchair, a small sideboard, a table and chairs, but no personal effects. The windows felt cold, so there was no heating on a timer coming on to cozy the house for the residents’ return. There were no signs of life at all.
I stood, trying to imagine Donna pulling up alone in her little Golf Polo, taking the keys from the real estate agent, excitedly unpacking her luggage from the trunk. I imagined her living there, shopping, coming back dreamy-eyed from visits to Sunnyfields, returning alone to a cold house after her prison wedding. Next to the house, across a small pathway to the garden at the back, sat a crumbling garage with wooden doors. I had been sure the house was uninhabited, but as I walked down the lane at the side, I heard an intermittent high-pitched whirr. I froze. It was coming from inside the garage. I listened for a while, approaching the doors, before I realized it was a deep freezer coming on and off. Someone probably was living there. Guilty and ashamed, I tiptoed back to the main road and my own car.
As I drove home, I tried to imagine the Cape Wrath scene again with the letter in it. Susie gets a phone call early in the day, Donna asks for help, and she sets off up north (leave out the lie to me about nipping to the shops because that just distracts my attention). Susie drives for about eight hours, morning to early evening, stopping to fill up the tank, seeming happy when she does. She drives through rain and sunshine, through high winds and deep valleys, and gets to the Kyle of Durness and the hotel, where Mrs. Pascal gives her the letter. Donna asks her to come to the bothy. She sounds helpless in the letter (I know it by heart now)- he is taking me- and desperate- please please come. Without phoning anyone for help (which I don’t understand), Susie goes to Donna, not covering her tracks, not hiding; she goes alone in the ferry across the kyle at dusk, unafraid. Three hours later she is back across the kyle (the tide was out and she walked across the sands; her driving shoes were covered in sand). She is standing in the hotel bar, again not hiding, drinking to stem the shakes, unaware that Officer McCallum has already received the call and found Gow with his hands bound, his tongue pulled out and cut off at the root, left to drown in his own blood. He must have known he was going to die from the moment they tied him up. He must have lain on his side and felt the blood pulse from his mouth, warm and wet under his cheek. He must have looked at someone’s shoes and known he was dying. When I imagine his fate in detail, it doesn’t seem to matter that he did such awful things to other people. Officer McCallum had time for a good hurl out the back before calling his pals and telling them to go and pick Susie up from the hotel bar.
Only a local knew where the phone box was, they said, and Fitzgerald didn’t challenge it. I’ve been looking at it on the map, and the phone box is on the B-road into Durness; you’d know it was there, unless you’d been helicoptered in.
Finding the hotel letter has spurred me on: I’m determined to be more focused about this whole thing. I’m going to sort this out, even if Susie hasn’t the brains or will to survive. I’m going to search this room methodically. I’m working counterclockwise around the walls, starting from the door.
My first find is a paper bag tucked under the leg of the bookcase, behind an envelope of credit-card bills. The open end of the bag had been folded over so that the things inside were held snugly. It’s a small white bag, like the bag a birthday card might be put in when you get it from the shop. I’ll put it into Box 2, which is getting quite full.
Box 2 Document 8 Contents of Paper Bag
There is a carefully cut out “news in brief” paragraph about Donna and Gow’s wedding and three photographs, all the same size, all of the wedding. I know that Susie took them herself. The prints have the matt finish and white borders that she always asks for at Snipper Snaps, and I can tell that she was using our camera because she never zooms in properly.
She didn’t tell me she was at Donna and Gow’s wedding, a fact that haunts me now.
According to the press cutting, the wedding took place on a Tuesday in April this year. I’ve been trying to work out what we would have been doing, what happened on Tuesday nights at that time. Nothing. I looked up the television listings for that time in an old Sunday supplement Susie had up here. Nothing special at all. None of the dramas during the week seemed familiar, none of the soap story lines rang a bell, and then I realized why: Margie was teething and wasn’t sleeping for longer than five hours at a time. Susie was working, so I’d taken over nights. I was spaced out, just coping from one screaming fit to the next. It was after Saskia left and before Yeni arrived.
Susie would come home from work, drop her bag by the chair in the hall, take off her coat, and hang it up in the closet. She’d kick off her shoes and come into the sitting room. I’d ask her how her day was. Fine, yeah, okay. No, nothing much really. If Margie was awake, Susie’d put the telly on for the news. It wasn’t really for the news, I knew that, it was for an excuse not to talk to anyone for an hour or so, but that was okay, I understood.
Margie and I lived in the sitting room in those days. I kept all of her toys in the big storage box on the parquet floor under the window. It was a mild winter, just a week or so of really cold, head-down weather. I remember buds on the branches outside the sitting room in the first week of January. I remember birds’ nests in the bare trees, like tangles in fine hair, gradually being covered by foliage. It was Margie’s first-ever spring. The view from those windows was my world in those days. I used to do the ironing with the telly on and feed Margie in the kitchen by the door, where the laminate flooring is. I was proud of how efficient I was with her. I’ve never felt closer to anyone. We’d sit next to each other on the settee when the lunchtime news came on and I’d say, “What do you think about that, Margie-Pargie?” And she’d look up at me and smile. It was just because I was talking to her, I know that, but her smile made my heart swell and synapses zing. She was mine. I loved her and each unrecapturable moment. She was mine alone. The minute she went to nursery it all changed. She has her own social life now, and our relationship has never been quite the same, it can’t be. Yeni arrived soon after.