Read (2002) Deception aka Sanctum for Free Online Page B

rows foot passengers across.) Susie was alone, not agitated but quite serious. She got off on the far bank, pulled her green leather coat closed, and walked off into the dusk. Three hours later she was back in the hotel bar. She was standing at the bar, drinking whiskey and looking disheveled when the police came to arrest her. His blood was all over her shoes. She was holding the glass with two hands, said Mrs. Pascal, because she was shaking too much to drink with one.
    * * *
    I can’t sleep again. I’ve been lying in bed for two and half hours, and I keep getting rushes of adrenaline that make me want to sit up and start punching. I sat in a hot bath, breathing deeply, and drank a hot toddy, but when I lay down again, I wished I could go for a mad, high-kneed run around the garden. Tasks and their possible permutations keep coming into my mind when I lie down. I feel as if I’m trying to remembering things, things that will slip out of my mind if I don’t wake up and write them down immediately. There are bits of paper all over the house with pointless things like “shop— get veg,” “Phone Fitzg. re times,” “clothing— ENOUGH?” Sometimes I can’t remember what these important notes mean the next day. More often I can remember and they don’t matter. I think I’m hoping that I will stumble across the single shred of relevant information that will make sense of the whole episode. Maybe that’s what I’m doing up here in the middle of the night.
    I press the button and Susie’s voice fills the room.
    “No, Donna hadn’t met him before. She saw him in the paper and fell in love with his picture. [Mad laugh.]
    “Gow is an interesting character. Like many serial killers, he was very taken with his press coverage. He remembered the names of journalists who had written about him, imputed an admiring relationship between them. He actually referred to them as ‘my fans.’ . . . No, he didn’t like all the coverage, sometimes he’d get very angry. He was terribly angry with his ex-wife, Lara Orr, but that all stopped when Donna came along.”
    The interviewer interrupts her. He tells her a quick story, which I can’t hear, about a friend called Harold, I think, and then asks her a question.
    “Yeah, lots of people do visit. Gow comes over quite well. It’s the set-up that gives him the edge. You see, he’s very confident, self-assured in the way that only people with no self-doubt or insight can be, and meeting that sort of certainty can feel quite intoxicating. A lot of sensible people came under his spell.”
    He asks another question, and Susie’s answer is adamant:
    “He is, yeah. He’s insistent that he’s innocent, even though he confessed in the first place and then pled guilty at the trial. . . . He claims innocence to make himself more likeable. Think about it: if he admitted he was guilty, he wouldn’t get the sort of coverage he does, would he? Ian Brady doesn’t get that sort of coverage. Sutcliffe doesn’t get it. Just Gow. And the fact that he can claim innocence in the face of all that evidence may mean that he’s more psychopathic than either of them.
    “That’s what psychopaths do: they tell you what they think you want to hear. If you want them innocent, they’ll be innocent; if you want them guilty, they’ll tell you that. Their purpose is to get under the skin of whoever they’re near, to control them. The main variant with psychopaths is how bright they are, how capable they are of making the lies consistent. It’s as close as they get to emotional contact with other human beings.
    “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 funny and tries to continue talking over