“I know,” says Donna, tapping quickly. “I heard about it.”
“She was nineteen and liked line dancing. She lived with her parents.”
“I already know that,” says Donna, nodding and tapping, tapping and nodding. “I said I heard about it.”
“You heard about ‘her,’ Donna. Not ‘it,’ ‘her.’ Did you know she was Catholic? She went to Lourdes every year-”
Donna leans forward in the chair, eyes open, voice raised. “I HEARD ABOUT IT.” She seems to regret her outburst immediately. She throws herself back in the chair, tapping and grinding her jaw. “It’s hard for me too, you know. I have feelings too.”
“Two young girls are murdered and you have feelings too?”
“My husband has been wrongly imprisoned for five years, and it’s only just coming out now. I’m bound to have some feelings about it.”
Susie sighs and a long, thin stream of clear air punctures the swirling shadow of smoke on the floor. “Do you think he’ll get out, Donna?”
Donna glances at her. “What do you mean?”
“Do you think that Andrew, your husband, will be released?”
Donna shakes her head slowly, still keeping her eyes down. “No.”
“How would you feel if he did?”
Donna looks up and a deep, unspoken fear pinches at the corners of her mouth, taints her eyes. “That would be great,” she says unconvincingly.
“Oh, for fucksake, Donna,” snaps Susie, “stop pissing about.”
It’s so unprofessional, so out of character, that I freeze the tape and rewind to see the buildup. It seems to have come out of nothing. Susie is angry, and she isn’t hiding it. “Do you think you’d be safe with him?”
“Who’d care?”
“Donna, you have to learn to take care of yourself. You’re twenty-three. It’s time to grow up.”
Donna knows she has won a small victory. She looks at Susie and raises her eyebrows twice, like Groucho Marx, and then she glances at the camera, remembering it is there. She lowers her eyes.
“Where are you from, Donna?”
“We’ve been through this.”
“Where did you start out?”
“ Leicester.”
“You don’t sound as if you’re from Leicester.”
Donna looks up, coquettish and innocent. “Is that wrong of me?”
“What area of Leicester?”
“Highfields,” she says. “The Highfields area.”
“Is that near the middle or on the outskirts?”
It’s obviously a test, to see if she even knows where it is. Donna meets it full on. “Near the middle. Why are you annoyed at me, Suse?”
Suse? Excuse me, Suse? Suse’s shadow can clearly be seen on the floor. She stands up and stubs her cigarette out in an ashtray. Messy tendrils of shadow spill across the floor like ink in water. She takes one step over to the camera tripod and switches it off.
Afterward I wished I hadn’t watched the video. It’s spoiled my optimistic feeling. Now I feel I have a lot of uncomfortable questions to ask Susie when I see her, only this time I really don’t know what they are.
chapter twenty-four
LOOKING OVER ALL OF THE MATERIALS, I’M STRUCK BY HOW MUCH has happened since Donna first wrote to Gow in February. Donna wasn’t bright, but some people are catalysts, and dramatic events follow them wherever they go. Like Morris, whose wife has put him out now- Nurse Julie wasn’t bluffing. Donna was only twenty-three when she first wrote to Gow. She had been divorced and orphaned and was already starting a new life in a strange country. I hadn’t even graduated when I was twenty-three. Donna and Gow married within two months of the first letter; the new Ripper murders started a month after Donna’s first letter; and then Susie got sacked in June for stealing his files. The campaign for Gow’s release had gathered momentum with a number of celebrity endorsements; he was out of prison by September, and he and Donna were both dead by the end of the month. Donna didn’t even live to see her twenty-fourth birthday.
Box 2 Document 10 News in Brief, Glasgow Herald, 3/6/98
In a disturbing replay of the Glaswegian Riverside Ripper murders of the early nineties, the body of a young woman was found next to the River Clyde yesterday. The woman, whom police have not yet named, was found dead under the city’s Kingston bridge. A team working on the renovations to the bridge arrived for work yesterday morning to find the woman’s body under a tarpaulin. The police had no comment to make as to a connection with the river murders but would say that the woman was not a prostitute and that there were significant differences between this and the 1993 cases.
Andrew Gow, the man convicted of the Riverside Ripper murders, recently hit the headlines when he remarried in Sunnyfields State Mental Hospital. He has maintained his innocence since shortly after his conviction. His new wife, Ms. Donna McGovern, was unavailable for comment yesterday.
I remember these new cases unfolding in the press and on television. I remember us watching the news reports about it. It seems strange, given how significant those events were to become in our lives, but I only really remember two specific conversations about it all.
One exchange was in the front room. It was spring and the room was bright, the window was wide open and outside the garden was very green and lush. I was ironing, and Margie was in the kitchen with Yeni. The television was on for the news, and Susie was slumped on the settee. We’d had an argument about her smoking in the house. Within a few short months Susie’s position on domestic smoking had shifted from regarding it as a form of child abuse to arguing that it was justified if Margie was out of the room or looking away. We had fought about it, and afterward, when we reached a stalemate, the argument hung between us like a bad smell.
Have you noticed, I said, trying to be cheery, how they’re using more attractive photographs of Gow on the telly as the campaign for his release gathers momentum?
She asked me straight out, “Do you think he’s attractive?”
I laughed and asked her whether she was serious.
“Yeah, I’m serious.” She pulled herself upright and looked at me with a face like an angry little fist. “Do you think he’s attractive?”
I put the iron down. I didn’t think he was attractive, but in the old mug shot they used to use on TV, he was scowling, looked very malnourished, and had black bags under his eyes. (He was working nights, she said. Driving the cab. That’s why he looked so tired.) But in the new photos, taken more recently, he was smiling and seemed healthy.
Susie nodded into her lap and stood up, announced that she was going outside for a smoke, and left me alone to finish her blouses. At the time, I didn’t think Gow’s case was particularly relevant to us. Susie worked at Sunnyfields and knew him, of course, but everyone was talking about the campaign. It was big news.
I only remember one other specific conversation. We were out for dinner with Evelyn and Morris. I remember it because afterward Susie said she didn’t want to go out with them again, that she didn’t like getting that drunk anymore. It shocked me because I didn’t think you could drop friends you’d made at university. I hadn’t stopped to think what they were like- they were just Morris and Evelyn. But Susie was right: they are a bit seedy. They always remind me of how old we’re getting and how undignified and ugly being pissed in a restaurant is. That night Evelyn needled Morris incessantly, making digs about money or something. They’re not nice company, but the blessing is they both like a drink, so you can get pissed and not listen. I have to admit that they used to make me feel smug because at that time we were happier together than they were, and Susie hadn’t let herself go and get massively fat like Evelyn did after the kids.