I keep transcribing these things, and I don’t know why I’m doing it. All they do is make me recall portions of our lives that I’ve forgotten.
Box 3 Document 16 “Crimewatch Gina Offers No New Clues,” Glasgow Herald, 5/15/98
Despite a reconstruction on the BBC’s Crimewatch program, no new witnesses to Gina Wilson’s movements have come forward. What is known is that Gina Wilson went missing on her way home from a nightclub in the city center after a night out with friends. Gina followed the Broomielaw down to the junction of Union Street looking for a taxi and then disappeared. Both her body and that of the previous victim, Nicola Hall, were found in locations bordering the river.
Ripperologists have warned that the murders could be following the original pattern of the Riverside Ripper slayings.
I’m trying to break the habit of coming up here in the middle of the night. There’s no point in poring over the articles if there isn’t going to be an appeal. I need to get back to sleeping properly. I come up here and spend hours smoking and hiding.
I was lying in the dark ten minutes ago, thinking about Susie. It is very dark tonight. It’ll get worse before the winter’s over. In the dank dark, right in front of my face, I saw Susie sitting in her cell, a miniature square of white, so small I had to squint hard to see, and my head began to hurt. She is sitting on her bed, looking at her hands. The light above her is bright, and her face is washed out with the whiteness of it. Susie is thinking about killing herself.
I see her being locked in her suicide-watch cell, the guard checking her through the eyepiece. Susie’s sitting quite still on the edge of her bed, listening to the scuffling noises outside the door. She stares at her hands, exaggerating her medicated muddle, her jaw hanging open. From outside the door she hears the scratch of metal on metal as the guard slides the eye-shield down and moves on to check the next cell. They probably don’t do that; it would be too obvious a signal that they had finished looking at the prisoner. They probably can’t hear anything inside, but in the bright box Susie has some physical sign that she is no longer being watched. She suddenly becomes animated, moving too quickly as befits her fruit-fly size and mental excitement. She stands up and hurtles over to the wall, pulls a rope made from knotted bed linen out from her sleeve and loops it over the radiator. The light is bright in the room, and I have to squint once more to see. It’s Susie but not Susie; it looks like her but it isn’t her. She hooks the rope around her neck and grins, a smile so wide it almost splits her face. Her eyes are already dead as she sits down short of the floor, her hair jerks up and down, and she hangs, grinning, on the rope’s end. My head is aching.
I sat up and did breathing exercises, trying to calm myself down. It’s nonsense, like the monsters Margie thinks are in the toilet, or the ankle-grabbing hairy hand under the bed. And then I lay back down and saw her again.
The prison would have phoned me to tell me if anything had happened to Susie, but I keep thinking that she may have killed herself just one second ago. They are cutting her down, notifying the doctor, getting the death cert, before they contact me. It would take about thirty minutes to an hour for them to contact me, I think. And then I think, no, she’s still alive, but I’m wishing her dead. I’m wishing her dead because it would make everything less complicated for me. Then I could be a sad rich widower and women would want to save me. I could step back from my sadness by writing about love and the empire, or loss and philosophy. Women would flock to me and men would seek my company. It would be so much less complicated than this peculiarly suburban mess of inching betrayal and small insults. Anything would be better than this.
In the deep dark night, I know Susie stopped loving me a long time ago. What I took to be familiarity was friendship and boredom. She loved Gow, not me, and she killed him and his wife. With a family pack of wine gums in her pocket, she followed them up north and killed them both.
She didn’t even do me the honor of divorcing me. She just ignored me. No matter how hard I try not to care about her, I do. But she doesn’t reciprocate. You can’t really fake that sort of disinterest.
She’s the only person I’m close to, the only person I connect with. I don’t remember being close to anyone before I knew her. Now I find that the island I’ve been rowing toward for seven years was a cloud on the horizon and I’m hopelessly adrift.
chapter thirty-four
I’VE JUST OPENED THE MAIL. TWO QUARTERLY STATEMENTS ARrived this morning, one from the high-interest savings account and one from the shares portfolio we have with Mercer. Both statements acknowledge the change of address to c/o Fitzgerald amp; Co. They also document substantial amounts of money being moved out of the accounts exactly one month ago, just after her conviction. Susie’s moving money out of my reach, but she can’t get to the bank. That’s why she’s using all her phonecards to call Fitzgerald. It also explains why Fitzgerald keeps acting as if I’m a filthy upstart. He’s been organizing moves of raw cash and putting it where I can’t touch it.
It’s the lack of trust that I can’t get over. Susie may have had an affair, could have killed two people, has certainly been convicted, and she’s moving the money away from me. She might be able to move the three Mercer portfolios unilaterally, but she can’t move the money from the Imcras account or the Donaldson ISA funds without my consent. If I divorced her, I could get all of it; I’m looking after Margie, after all. There’s a bit of her old man in her; he was a sneaky, secretive old bugger too. She must have glue for blood.
Among all the papers and articles Susie has amassed up here, she has only two things about Gow’s release: this short article and the picture from the newspaper, the one where Gow and Stevie Ray are holding hands and Donna is lurking in the background. I think Susie was losing the urge to collect things about it by this time. She was at home full-time and she didn’t get as many opportunities to buy the papers.
Box 3 Document 17 “Ripper Appeal Hearing Set for Wednesday,” Daily Telegraph, 8/31/98
The Riverside Ripper’s appeal against his conviction for a spate of killings of 1993 is to begin on Wednesday.
At a preliminary hearing in Glasgow, Andrew Gow’s counsel lodged the outline of its arguments. The Crown Office has had four weeks to respond, and the court will begin to hear the case on September 2.
What’s the point in my doing this? No one cares. No one doubts the verdict but me.
chapter thirty-five
YESTERDAY MORNING, I GOT BORED OF TYPING OUT IRRELEVANT news reports and decided to go and visit 48 Evington Road, Leicester. I told Yeni that I might be away overnight. She agreed to look after Margie, saying she’d take her to the park after nursery and they would have a lovely little day together. Then she poked Margie in the tummy, and Margie threw her big bald square head back and laughed like a sailor.
I went into the hall and called Glasgow Airport, got put through to British Airways, and booked a ticket on my credit card. The plane was due to take off in three hours. It only takes fifteen minutes to get to the airport, so I took my time getting ready, filling a bag with shaving things and deodorant and a change of shirt.
I left the car in the long-term lot and went off to kill an hour and ten minutes in the terminal. It was quieter than I expected; there were no long, snaking lines inside; I’m used to long lines for planes to Spain in midsummer. It only took me four minutes to check in because I didn’t have any luggage. Upstairs I decided to take a wander around the shops and found an electronics store. I made straight for the counter at the back. The prices were not good, I know that, but I saw myself tapping out notes for essays and short stories in the sidewalk cafés of Paris and Rome, on Gauguinesque beaches, and I bought myself a laptop. It fits neatly into a small black nylon briefcase and weighs eight and a half pounds.