(2002) Deception aka Sanctum Read Online Free PDF Page A

them for some time, and masses of notes about Donna. She must have every single interview Donna ever gave to the papers.
    Susie’s written notes about Gow and Donna on some of the newspaper articles, single words mostly, like “grandiose,” “vicarious fame,” and “stupid”— that word recurs a lot on Donna’s clippings. Sometimes, especially from around the time of Gow and Donna’s wedding, she has articles from different newspapers on the same day. Where was she getting all these papers? I don’t remember the News of the Screws being delivered here, and she certainly didn’t get them at her work. She must have bought them in secret, on the way to work or at the shops, and cut the stories out so that she could keep them. They date back for almost a year. This has been going on for fucking ages without my knowing a thing about it.
    * * *
    I phoned Susie’s colleague Harvey Tucker again and a man answered. He hesitated, then said Harvey wasn’t in. I’ve never spoken to Harvey on the phone before, but it definitely sounded like him.
    “Will you tell him I’ll phone back?” I asked.
    “I will, of course, yes. Certainly,” he replied.
    We both sounded very stiff and suspicious. I hung up. It might not have been him. Maybe the guy had seen my name in the papers and felt awkward because of it. Or he’d heard Harvey talk about the trial; that’s more likely. I think it was Harvey, though.
    * * *
    I miss her. I even miss the irascibility, the slights. I miss her coming up here to work alone rather than sit with me in front of the telly after Margie’s gone to bed. I miss knowing she’s up here, doing whatever. It should be easy to comfort myself. She was absent a lot of the time anyway, but it seems especially hard just now. Perhaps it’s because she’s been sitting at home for the past two and a half months. It’s just sinking in, I think.
    Last night I sat in front of the television and tried to pretend Susie was upstairs, ignoring me. Yeni wanted to watch Friends on a satellite channel and sat down on the other settee. I could hardly say piss off, I’m assuaging my grief by pretending to be ignored by my absent wife. I watched Yeni out of the corner of my eye. She’s very young, and I don’t think she understands what the characters are saying, but she smiles along with the jokes and nods sometimes. I suppose for most men this would be a creamer: left alone in a big house with a lonely Spanish teenage au pair. But Yeni is fat and has a prominent mustache, and her breath smells perpetually of yogurt. I think she’s self-medicating for thrush. Susie chose her.
    chapter four
    I GOT A LETTER FROM SUSIE THIS MORNING. IT DIDN’T SAY ANY OF the things I want to hear, like I love you and didn’t kill those people. It said she was there and safe, and feeling a “little under the weather” . . . blah blah, missing you and Margie blah blah, much hope for the appeal blah blah. She tells me what the weather’s been like the past few days. She’s in a facility forty miles away, for Chrissake, we’re in the same weather system. She could have been writing to anyone from anywhere, except that just before the end there’s an unguarded moment when, apropos of nothing, she writes “It’s awful here.”
    I caved in and phoned the prison to check if she was safe. I recognized the voice of the squat-faced receptionist who was there when I visited Susie before she got bail. She’s a sullen little gremlin with a flat nose covered in blackheads. Her uniform was too tight and her white bra strained against the blue blouse, her name badge tottering on a peak like an erect nipple. There was a proud, well-spoken old woman in front of me in line last time, there to visit her drug-addict daughter, she told me later, and the squat-faced guard rudely asked her to repeat her name four times, making her say it louder and louder so that everyone could hear it. The old woman was so upset by the time she sat down that I had