Deception aka Sanctum

Box 2 Document 8 Contents of Paper Bag

There is a carefully cut out “news in brief” paragraph about Do

She didn’t tell me she was at Do

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.

PHOTO ONE

The first photograph is informal and cut in far too close. Do

I sat looking at the photo for a while, and then I realized that it’s a very telling picture. The reflection is so clear you can see red dots on the soft skin under her eyebrows where she’s overplucked them. You can see where her makeup stops on her neck and how thick her mascara is. She worked hard at it, Do

Do

The photo’s so close in on her that if you didn’t know about Susie’s trouble with the zoom, it might seem creepily intimate. It’s hard not to interpret the picture as Susie sneaking up on Do

PHOTO TWO

The second picture is Do

They’re standing against a wall, in front of a blue poster with a big white question mark. Gow is looking at the camera, his head tipped backward slightly because he’s gri

The picture is very badly lit, which is typical of Susie’s photography. White light spills in from the side, from another camera flash.

PHOTO THREE

This must be the official photograph, a copy of the one she had stuck to the skylight and Blu-Tacked over. He is holding her tiny hand in his big hand, and he is smiling but she isn’t. She’s looking at her hand and seems alarmed. She said in interviews at the time that she wasn’t afraid he’d hurt her, that she knew he’d never hurt her. But she didn’t think he’d ever get out.

Now that I have remembered last spring, I can hardly bring myself to leave it. Winter gave a death kick and we had a few random days of snow, but apart from that the weather was mild; the season was over before it had begun. I remember clouds of pink cherry blossoms blowing into the garden from next door, fleshy leaves carried on the water-clean smell of springtime. We had Margie, the renovations were done, and Susie had settled back into her job.

And then the murders started again.