(2002) Deception aka Sanctum Read Online Free PDF

to give her a hankie and the promise of a lift to the bus stop to stop her weeping. It’s important not to cry when you go in to visit prisoners. They’ve got enough on their plate.
    Anyway, I recognized the receptionist’s voice. She wouldn’t put me through to anyone but left me on hold for ten minutes while she asked around. Susie’s fine. I asked when she might get the chance to phone me and the guard sounded surprised that she hadn’t already. I said I thought maybe she wouldn’t have a phonecard and could she put me through to her? The receptionist said it wasn’t a hotel, sir, and she couldn’t page her. I thanked her and hung up.
    I wonder if the induction is going okay and what sort of things they do with them. Maybe they show them uplifting films about life, and how nice it is to still have one. I hope it’s working, I hope she isn’t thinking about suicide. I couldn’t stand the world without her in it. I wrote back in longhand because I can’t get the printer to work up here. I asked her lots of sanitized questions, told her I was thinking of her constantly, and described the garden. I enclosed a nice photo of Margie breaking a cup.
    Box 2 Document 1 Dictaphone Tape
    I was messing with the machine and turned it on, not realizing that the volume was up full. Her voice, calm and untroubled, filled the room like a sudden warm wave, washing through me, an embrace of noise reverberating off the walls. I felt faint suddenly. I wasn’t listening to the words on the tape; I was just sitting there, flooded by her, wishing her home. I had to turn the tape off and rewind. It’s Susie’s voice from the beginning. She must have put the Dictaphone down pointing at herself because the interviewer’s voice is distant and unintelligible. Susie sounds perfectly in control, as if she knows what she’s doing.
    “Well, ask and we’ll see. [Mumbled questions.] I’ll tell you if I’m not prepared to answer. [Long mumbling.] Okay, yeah, that’d be nice. Yeah. ’Kay. It’s got it on it, yeah? [Mumbling.] I’m not completely naive about the press. I’d like to keep my own record of what we say here. It’s not a problem, is it?”
    She thinks she’s being really clever. I wonder if the journalist knows how utterly out of her depth she is. Even telling him she’s not naive sounds like she’s accusing him of being a bastard, like she’s challenging him to fuck her over. But that’s Susie employing her junior doctor’s credo: protest competence regardless of the evidence. She hadn’t the first idea. This is the interview the prosecution used to damn her, the one where she said she hated Donna.
    An obsequious voice, a mumbling waiter, I suppose, asks a question and Susie lets the man opposite her order.
    “Yeah,” she sas flirtatiously, “I’ll have one of those too.”
    “I hated Donna from the first moment I saw her. She looks ridiculous— you must have seen her picture? She gave an exclusive to almost every national paper and charged them a fortune. All that cleavage and lipstick. She looks like a female impersonator.”
    Susie either coughs or laughs. All I can hear is her voice, as if she’s talking into my ear, with the uncracked timbre she had before her confidence was shattered and her creamy voice curdled. I hear her sip a drink and sit back. She’s sitting on leather, good leather judging by the sound, and it shrieks and sighs as she shifts her weight.
    She shouldn’t have given an interview, not to anyone, but she’d been sacked and was bitter and probably a bit panicky. She didn’t tell me until the magazine came out in September. She went off early in the morning, saying she was going to get the papers or stamps, I forget which. She didn’t come back for three hours, and when she did she had red eyes and was shaking.
    I asked what was up. She put the magazine on the kitchen table and looked out the window. “It’s a disaster,” she said, quietly. “I’ll never get work again.”
    I