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I allowed myself a bribe toffee. Eventually, twenty minutes before the visit was due to begin, an unsmiling guard came through and stood outside the glass wall. The locked door buzzed open, we were ushered into the corridor, and then a second door, leading into the prison proper, buzzed open. We all walked through, the guard made sure the door was shut behind us, and we followed her to the second waiting room. I had another toffee. I don’t know why they had to keep us there for so long, but it was another gray room with the same haranguing posters. The troglodyte family started laughing at something, hee-hawing through smoker’s phlegm, rocking back and forth in their chairs, elbowing each other. A guard came through the door and flicked a finger at me, motioning me to follow him. He took me into a side room off the main corridor. There was a narrow table, a white curtain, and a burly male guard standing next to a sharps bin, pulling on latex gloves. I stalled at the door.

“Mr. Harriot,” said the first man, “under the Prisoners and Young Offenders’ Institutions Scotland Rules 1994, we are authorized to search you prior to your visit with your wife.”

I looked back at the open door. They were going to search me, strip me and stick a finger up my arse in a room with an open door. I managed a strangled “No,” but it was so small I don’t think they heard it.

“We are authorized to ask you to take your jacket off.”

“My jacket?”

“Yes, sir, your jacket. Please, take it off. Do you have any sharp instruments on you? Any syringes or knives that we should know about?”

The guard took my jacket, stroking it carefully, while the other man patted me everywhere, my underarms, between my legs, the soles of my shoes. His fingers brushed the underside of my balls and made me wince. I know he noticed. He paused momentarily, cringing, I hope, and then looked in my mouth and got me to waggle my tongue around. They looked through the stuff Susie’d asked me to bring. The waiting room was chock full of suspicious and desperate characters. Why search me?

“Because, sir, you are a doctor and we have reason to believe that your wife is suicidal.”

So that was how I found out Susie was on suicide watch. I don’t know if they felt sorry for me or what, but they decided to leave it at that and let me go back to the waiting room.

I’ve just been downstairs to make a cup of tea and found Trisha watching television and drinking cocoa. She’d changed her tune and said, rather accusingly, that she’d have brought up a cup of tea if I’d said I wanted one. I will not be chased around my own house. I said I didn’t want one then, but I do now. I almost resent her insomnia more than I resent her presence. Night is my time to be alone in the house, my time when I don’t need to be self-conscious. I don’t like her creeping about.

We lined up by the prison door and traipsed single file across the ten-foot stretch of windy grass, guarded on either side by prison officers. The door behind us locked before the door in front opened. Inside the door the troglodytes dispersed: they were there to see two different people. The convicted visiting room is disgusting, furnished with knee-high brown tables and spongy yellow chairs with no arms and melted fag burns all over them. Everyone was smoking; it looked like a Philip Morris laboratory. A vending machine selling Coke and crisps in the corner had a thick metal belt around it, strapping it to the wall, presumably to prevent anyone from ripping it off its foundations and throwing it.

I tried to remember who Susie and I were in Otago Street, a lucky pair of scamps, not a man who could be patted on the balls with impunity and his murderess wife. Then I saw Susie across the room. She looked like shit. Her black hair was frizzy at the top and her eyes were swollen from crying. She had lost weight in the week and a half since I last saw her. She was dressed in a shapeless blue sweatshirt and jogging pants that were too short for her. The elastic cuff clung to her calf above the ankle, showing off her white socks and the black slip-ons I’d bought her for court.

She scowled at me and waved grimly. Eager visitors swept past me, and I stood there, not wanting to go to her. I wanted to turn around and run away and keep my Susie safe, but I clutched the final toffee in my pocket, walked over, and bent to kiss her.

She gave me her cheek, which a





“Oh, I, um, flattened my hair,” I said, self-consciously.

“With toffee hair spray?” She looked a

When I said she told me not to, she got tearful and stared at the table. I said I’d brought the radio and the battery and the other things she asked for, but she didn’t speak then either. I put my arm around her shoulder and told her that we’d get her out of there, that we were doing everything we could for the appeal, that things would be fine, she’d see, things would be okay and not to worry. She started to cry. She just shook and shook. All around us groups of people talked quietly while the women in blue uniforms hugged the kids on their laps. I stroked Susie’s hand and said Fitzgerald wouldn’t let a single thing go. I felt awful for finding her vulnerability so frightening. I used to love it, but then, I suppose she was only ever a little bit vulnerable. Even when she was in labor she just seemed very, very angry, not broken like this.

“Susie, they said you’re suicidal.”

She rubbed her red eyes hard. “Well, I’m not. They use suicide watch proactively sometimes. I’m a high-profile case, and if I killed myself it would cause an uproar. They’re being cautious.”

“What does ‘suicide watch’ mean?”

“You’re put in a special cell and they look in on you every fifteen minutes. The cell has all the corners taken out so you can’t hide.”

She tried to chat. The sentencing reports were coming on well, she said, and should be ready in a couple of weeks’ time, but then she ran out of things to say and sat, miserably still.

I took out a pack of cigarettes, and she fell on them. We smoked together. We haven’t smoked together since we lived in Otago Street. She caught her breath, managed a shaky smile, and thanked me. She told me to leave the pack for her. I said it had been my full intention to pursue that course of action from the outset, and that made her smile. I asked her what she was reading, whether she wanted me to send in some books. She drew on her cigarette, inhaling heavily, and said she couldn’t read, couldn’t concentrate. The atmosphere was nicer between us then. She took my hand, gave it a little squeeze, and we smoked in silence for a while. I thought suddenly of her with Gow, and I felt myself dying inside, atrophying through moral compromise, like a Nazi general’s fat wife. I wanted to whip my hand away and tell her I knew what she’d been doing with Gow in her office, dirty bitch, that Harvey Tucker had told me. I had to breathe in deeply, over and over again.

After a while I started talking quietly, and just to have something to say, I told her not to worry. I was going through all the papers at home and would find any tiny detail we could use for an appeal.

She sat up stiffly and looked at me. “What papers? What are you talking about?”

“The stuff in the study,” I said. “Around the computer and on the disks.”

“But that’s my stuff. Those papers aren’t about this, they’ve got nothing to do with this.” She was speaking very quietly, angrily, spitting words at me, and then she stopped and looked suspicious. “How did you get into my study? I put a lock on the door.”