Deception aka Sanctum

He asks another question, and Susie’s answer is adamant:

“He is, yeah. He’s insistent that he’s i

“That’s what psychopaths do: they tell you what they think you want to hear. If you want them i

“If you look at the past three years’ articles about Gow, you can see that. In one year alone he has declared himself a born-again Christian, a Seventh Day Adventist, and last year he became a Muslim by changing his surname to Ali and refusing to eat bacon.”

The interviewer guffaws. Susie doesn’t. She doesn’t think it’s at all fu

“You see, he was being visited by a number of people with different religious convictions, and he joined anyone who came to see him. It may seem fu

The interviewer has stopped laughing. He sounds disappointed and offended, as if she has insulted his favorite comedian or something. He asks a question, and I realize that he’s goading her. This interview took place two months before Cape Wrath. It’s his first-ever interview, and he’s already guessed what eluded me for a year: that Susie has strong feelings about Andrew Gow. Now she’s talking quickly and defensively.

“Not my skin. No, he didn’t… That’s my job, giving nothing away. The purpose of what I do is objective assessment… Well, it’s important for Do

Even I know that this last bit is a piss-poor excuse for committing professional suicide. Do

“If Do

Susie takes a drink while the interviewer asks something. I can hear him saying “Gow.”

“No, look, I can’t talk about the murders or Gow’s history. You can get that information yourself, anyway. I have to be careful what I say, especially now that the appeal is coming up.

“You shouldn’t make him out to be a hero, you know. Serial killers’re not heroes to the police or the families of their victims. They’re inadequates worshiped by inadequates. D’you know what he did to those women? I read once that the people who buy the records by American gangster rappers are generally middle-class white teenagers. Same thing. That luxury of distance.”

The interviewer’s talking, coaxing Susie, and her voice gets closer. I think she’s looking at the Dictaphone. “No. No, I’m not afraid of Gow. He won’t come for me.” They made a lot of this phrase in the court case: whether Susie meant he won’t come for me, in other words, I’ll come for him, or whether she just meant he wouldn’t come. I’m glad they only had the printed interview to go on. From the intonation on the tape it definitely sounds like she’s hinting that she’ll get him.

There are books on her shelves up here, professional and sociology books and a couple specifically about women falling in love with prisoners and killers. The spines are broken and the top corners of the pages are dirty where Susie’s been doing that disgusting thing she does when she reads: cleaning gunk out of her nails on the top corner of the page.

She’s sought these books out and taken her time reading them. She hasn’t opened them on the table and run her finger down the margins, paring out the relevant information for a work-related article or argument. She has luxuriated over the contents, which means that she probably read them in here, in this room. I’ve seen her reading in here, she sits sideways at her desk and opens the bottom desk drawer to rest her feet on, her mouth sitting slightly open, i

She read a lot up here, and yet we never talked about books. I never asked her what she was reading, but she didn’t bring it up either. I have a vague memory of asking her about a book by someone we both knew at university. She said it was good, not a comprehensive look at treatments, but it had a thorough literature search at the begi

It makes me speculate, though: what else did she think about a lot and never mention? I wish her here. Suddenly I want ten clear, clean minutes to talk without the baggage of the past few months, few years actually, from before Margie was born. I want to ask her what she thinks about all sorts of things, as if we were first going out together and I was still listening to her.

I spent so much time with Susie ignoring her. What must she have seen when she looked at me? A fat guy with a weird haircut who doesn’t want to do anything but read obscure novels and pester the garden.

We should have done things together instead of pissing the time away. We should have talked more, done stuff, sat with the television and the radio off and taken the time to look at each other. After we moved in together, so much of our time was spent simply stumbling along, thinking forward or sideways or about cars and clothes and furniture and pensions and Margie. We haven’t even been on a proper holiday together, and I can’t blame anyone but myself. We kept going to my parents’ in Marbella and having a fraught time, whispering in hot rooms about a

Susie resented using her holidays to visit them. How would I like it, she used to ask, if she made me spend all my time off at her parents’? My excuse was we needed to see them as a family, but I could have gone there on my own. The truth is I wanted her there as a buffer. She said often, right from the very begi