It’s the diarist’s dilemma: if no one’s ever going to see it, there’s no real reason to bother writing it, spell-checking it, or taking time over the grammar and phrasing. Why not just think thoughts? If there is a secret desire to be read, does that make what I’m writing any less honest? Who are these literary pyrotechnics meant for? If I knew for sure that no one would ever see these pages, I think I would write differently. I’m going to try to be completely honest, bare.

Still, without knowing what my motive is, the function all of this writing serves is clear: while I’m writing down every small thing, I don’t need to participate fully in my life, which, at the moment, is pretty shitty.

I’ve just found this. I was opening the lowest drawer on the desk and it got stuck. I tugged and tugged and heard the rustle of something falling from the underside of the drawer into the well underneath. I had to take all of the drawers out to get my hand in there. It had been stuck to the bottom with a big lump of Blu-Tack.

It’s handwritten, but it’s definitely by Donna; the grammar’s all wrong and there are no commas.

Box? (not sure which to file this under yet) Document 1

DURNESS HOTEL

Keoldale

PROP: MR. W. PASCALE

Susie-

he is taking me to the broken little cottage above

Loch Inshore. Im scared of him.

Come please please come please

Donna

My first thought was that I should go to Fitzgerald’s house with it and wait for him to get up in the morning. Finally, this is something we can use for an appeal. But then I stopped: Susie had this letter all along and never gave it to Fitzgerald herself. Why? I can understand that she might have been confident she’d get off- I was confident she’d get off- but she could have told him about it since. She could have told me about it since. If she was worried that she’d get into trouble for withholding it, she could have told me and I’d have claimed I’d hidden it or something. I’d do six months in prison for contempt if it meant she’d get out. I would. I’d do that for her.

This letter might be what she and Fitzgerald spent all the phonecard money during the first week talking about.

I know I should take some sort of urgent action, but I don’t know what to do for the best. What if she’s been telling the truth all along?

chapter twenty-one

Stevie Ray, 14 Hamilton Drive, Priesthill 876 2454: 10:30 a.m. Greggs the Baker’s.

INTRIGUED BY MY FIND, I GOT INTO THE CAR LAST NIGHT AND drove out to Kirkintilloch. I wanted to take a look at the house Donna lived in while she stayed in Glasgow. It has been pictured in the papers often enough, but I wanted to look for myself. I can’t stop thinking about Susie since I found the note.

Donna’s old house is off a fairly busy road, but you’d have to be looking to find it. She rented it when she first moved up here from Leicester and Gow lived here with her for a week when he was released, before they took off up north.

The night sky was cold and clear when I went out there; the moon lit the countryside as brightly as a forty-watt bulb. The house is on a patch of flat land outside the town, and a mile away, straight across fields and grass, the massive Campsie Fells rise suddenly like a mammoth back wall to the valley. The one thing you really notice is how remote the house is from anywhere. I wouldn’t have expected a twenty-three-year-old to want that sort of isolated place.

It’s squat, like our house, but only one story high, with two attic rooms. It’s whitewashed and peeling, with small, deep, inset windows. It seemed empty. Overgrown bushes in the front garden make the house look ramshackle, and big bushy weeds have sprung up on the drive. A few dead bunches of flowers were perched against the front door, presumably left there by locals to commemorate Donna, or perhaps even Gow. I peered into the dark windows and saw dull, brown furniture, an armchair, a small sideboard, a table and chairs, but no personal effects. The windows felt cold, so there was no heating on a timer coming on to cozy the house for the residents’ return. There were no signs of life at all.

I stood, trying to imagine Donna pulling up alone in her little Golf Polo, taking the keys from the real estate agent, excitedly unpacking her luggage from the trunk. I imagined her living there, shopping, coming back dreamy-eyed from visits to Sunnyfields, returning alone to a cold house after her prison wedding. Next to the house, across a small pathway to the garden at the back, sat a crumbling garage with wooden doors. I had been sure the house was uninhabited, but as I walked down the lane at the side, I heard an intermittent high-pitched whirr. I froze. It was coming from inside the garage. I listened for a while, approaching the doors, before I realized it was a deep freezer coming on and off. Someone probably was living there. Guilty and ashamed, I tiptoed back to the main road and my own car.

As I drove home, I tried to imagine the Cape Wrath scene again with the letter in it. Susie gets a phone call early in the day, Donna asks for help, and she sets off up north (leave out the lie to me about nipping to the shops because that just distracts my attention). Susie drives for about eight hours, morning to early evening, stopping to fill up the tank, seeming happy when she does. She drives through rain and sunshine, through high winds and deep valleys, and gets to the Kyle of Durness and the hotel, where Mrs. Pascal gives her the letter. Donna asks her to come to the bothy. She sounds helpless in the letter (I know it by heart now)- he is taking me- and desperate- please please come. Without phoning anyone for help (which I don’t understand), Susie goes to Donna, not covering her tracks, not hiding; she goes alone in the ferry across the kyle at dusk, unafraid. Three hours later she is back across the kyle (the tide was out and she walked across the sands; her driving shoes were covered in sand). She is standing in the hotel bar, again not hiding, drinking to stem the shakes, unaware that Officer McCallum has already received the call and found Gow with his hands bound, his tongue pulled out and cut off at the root, left to drown in his own blood. He must have known he was going to die from the moment they tied him up. He must have lain on his side and felt the blood pulse from his mouth, warm and wet under his cheek. He must have looked at someone’s shoes and known he was dying. When I imagine his fate in detail, it doesn’t seem to matter that he did such awful things to other people. Officer McCallum had time for a good hurl out the back before calling his pals and telling them to go and pick Susie up from the hotel bar.

Only a local knew where the phone box was, they said, and Fitzgerald didn’t challenge it. I’ve been looking at it on the map, and the phone box is on the B-road into Durness; you’d know it was there, unless you’d been helicoptered in.

Finding the hotel letter has spurred me on: I’m determined to be more focused about this whole thing. I’m going to sort this out, even if Susie hasn’t the brains or will to survive. I’m going to search this room methodically. I’m working counterclockwise around the walls, starting from the door.

My first find is a paper bag tucked under the leg of the bookcase, behind an envelope of credit-card bills. The open end of the bag had been folded over so that the things inside were held snugly. It’s a small white bag, like the bag a birthday card might be put in when you get it from the shop. I’ll put it into Box 2, which is getting quite full.