Deception aka Sanctum

“You saw the paper, then?”

Susie didn’t answer.

A slim prisoner with bleached white hair and a pierced nose walked past and smiled at Margie. “She’s beautiful, Susie,” she muttered and walked on.

Susie waited until she had gone. “Yeah, a helpful screw saved it for me. What have you been doing?”

I looked up at her. “What?”

“I said, Lachlan, ‘What have you been doing?’ ”

Distracted, she turned away from me and waved over at a prisoner with a five-year-old boy standing sulkily next to her. “Hello, Patrick,” she called to the boy. She looked at me again and saw that I was perplexed. “What have you been doing since I last saw you? Have you been swimming, or for tea with the queen?” I shook my head a little. “Tell me all your news, Lachlan. We have to talk about something during these visits. It can’t all be high emotion, you know.”

And there she was. Back in control. Mr. and Mrs. Wilkens’s little Princess Susie. In ten years’ time she would get out and come home and take my life over again. She would make all the decisions and oust me from whatever small encroachments I had made. She’d come home and get her own way every day and in every way, jollying me along into my grave.

I lit a cigarette. “I need to talk to you,” I said quietly.

She gave me a sharp smile and opened her mouth, ready to ridicule me, but her expression dissolved when she saw how serious I was. “What about?”

“I know, Susie,” I said, “I know what you’ve been doing.”

She narrowed her eyes, impatient because I was calling the shots. “And what have I been doing?”

I took a deep breath. “Moving money.” I took a deep draw on my cigarette. “Away from me.”

She was surprised I knew, I could tell that. She picked up Margie as a distraction. She smiled again, trying to act calm, but I could tell she wasn’t. “You should get a job, Lachlan. You’re a fit young man. You can’t sit about at home living off my dad’s money forever. There won’t be anything left for Margie if you do.”

This made me really angry. “I gave up my job to… Someone has to bring up Margie, and you obviously weren’t going to do it.”

“We had to let Saskia go because you gave up your job without even asking me-”

“No, Susan, we didn’t do anything. You let Saskia go. I didn’t want her to go. I gave up my career so that Margie could be cared for by her own family.”

She gave me a sidelong smirk. “Career?” she said. “Exactly which dazzling career is that, Lachlan? Your medical career? Your brilliant career as an insurance salesman? Or is it your literary career? Are you still waiting for your big idea? How long has it been? A year and a half full-time and twenty-seven part-time?”

She had raised her voice. Other people in the visiting room were aware of us and spoke quietly, looking everywhere but in our direction. The guard who makes the women stand in tidy lines by the door was watching us from the other side of the room, waiting for trouble to erupt.

I took out a packet of cigarettes from my pocket and looked up at her. “A gift,” I said, putting them on the table, standing them on end.

She didn’t want to take them, but she wasn’t in a position to knock the kindness. She snatched them away, afraid I’d change my mind. She took one out and lit it cautiously.

I could have said to her: You know, Susie, I might have fucked up my career, but at least I’m going home tonight. I’m a good dad. No lesbiotic con artist got me to hand over my life. I could have told her that I do have things to say, I will write something one day, you’ll see. I could have said at least I stayed faithful to you, and you were off fucking a woman whose name you didn’t even know. She made you love her, and let you watch as she chose Gow over you. I could have said she tricked you, you stupid cow. You ridiculous, bourgeois faux-sophisticate. You daft faithless fucking whoring bitch. You’ve laughed at me for the last fucking time, you witless, cheap cunt.

Instead I cleared my throat. “I’ve saved all the documentation about the money, so don’t even try to lie about it. I want a divorce, Susie. Trisha can bring Margie to visit you in the future, because I’m not coming back here.”

I stood up and looked down at her, shrinking into her chair, shriveling smaller and smaller until she was a sobbing, wet-faced speck in her ripped yellow nylon chair. I picked Margie up by the waist and left her mother crying in the stinking visiting room.

I’m not going back there. I’m never going back there.

epilogue

In the four years since the diaries were uncovered by Dr. Welsh, the veracity of the contents have generated a tremendous volume of materials: immeasurable column inches worldwide, several television documentaries (one British, one American, and two Japanese), five books, and a TV film. Despite valiant efforts, these investigations have turned up little or no hard evidence. Lachlan Harriot himself claims that the diaries were nothing more than a fiction-writing exercise and now refuses to discuss them.

A woman named Brenda Rumney had worked at Selfridges, but her temporary contract came to a natural conclusion three days after Lachlan Harriot claimed he was in the shop. Brenda was adopted and had been estranged from her adoptive family, a fact that may help explain why she disappeared after leaving work in Selfridges. She has not been found but has been sighted in Australia, New York, Bali, and Cardiff. Her adoption papers ca

An u

Do

The freezer in Kirkintilloch was an upright, and in laboratory tests, it has been established that similar models could barely accommodate a small woman’s body without necessitating the breaking of bones. [2] The body of Do

Expert forensic odontologists have drawn comparisons and discrepancies between the skull of Do

Upon the advice of his lawyer, Eamon Fitzgerald, Lachlan Harriot invited Strathclyde Police to conduct a search of his home. Neither the video, the hotel letter, the list of correspondents to Andrew Gow, nor his prison files was ever found. In contrast to this, Dr. Harvey Tucker has given an affidavit claiming that the videotaped interview with Do

And so debate about the case continues. Meanwhile Dr. Susie Wilkens (now divorced) has become the subject of a campaign for an appeal, largely funded by the FFJ. She is due to be paroled in 2008. Lachlan Harriot and Yeni Tarrossa

Denise Mina Glasgow, 2002