by M. R. Carey
“I understand your problem,” he mumbled, looking anywhere but in her eyes. “But there isn’t anything I can do for you.”
“Please,” Jess begged him. “If you just sign me in here for a few days, until I think of what to do next. I made a promise. I made a promise to someone who needs me. There isn’t anyone else he can ask, so if I…” She swallowed visibly, her gaunt throat bobbing. “If I die, he’s alone.”
“Yes, yes, I see that,” Sally said. He didn’t ask who this mysterious someone was – he thought the story was a fiction to give more weight to her plea. “I know what Grace can do. But I can’t get involved. You should go to the governor. Tell him everything.”
“You think he’ll help me?”
Sally’s mouth opened, closed, opened again. No sound came out of it.
Will he help you? In my experience, no. He’ll smile in your face and leave you hanging. This was what he thought, but he didn’t say it, because at that moment, Devlin walked into the room, throwing the door open without knocking.
The Devil didn’t even look at Sally. His eyes went straight to Moulson and it was clear that he wasn’t surprised to see her there. He must have heard from Ratner or Corcoran by this time, or seen the incident report.
“Just come to take her back to her cell,” he said. “If you’re finished with her.” He walked straight towards Moulson, reaching out with his right hand.
That was what did it, if any one thing did it. Devlin’s certainty. Devlin being so sure that finding Moulson in the infirmary meant that he owned her and owned what happened to her next.
Sally planted himself in Devlin’s way. It only took one step, which was probably just as well. The doctor might not have been capable of a longer journey right then.
“I’m not,” he said. “Not finished. Not at all. I’m sorry, Dennis. This prisoner has a suspected concussion and I’m keeping her in overnight.”
Devlin looked at Sally like he’d trod in a dog turd and the dog turd had tried to put the blame on him. “What?”
“I’ve signed her in,” Salazar said.
“Sign her out again.”
Moulson was watching all this with wide, scared eyes. Devlin come to bring her to Grace without pretence or subterfuge. The doctor standing in between them like the world’s softest rock.
“This is my surgery, Dennis,” Sally said. “And it’s my call.”
“Trust me, Sally,” the Devil said, “it really isn’t.”
“Well, my clinical opinion is what counts here. Suspected concussion. It’s written in the register, and there it stays.”
Devlin’s gaze was on the doctor now: the immediate obstacle, the matter in hand. His right fist came down to rest on the handle of his nightstick. “A concussion. You’re sure about that?”
“No. But I don’t have to be. I’m going to keep her under observation.”
Devlin unshipped the nightstick, slowly and with great deliberation.
Sally gave a ragged laugh.
“What’s funny?”
“It’s funny that you think you can threaten me with that.” Sally’s voice was high and strained. “Are you going to kill us both, Dennis? Beat our brains out in the middle of the admin block? I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
Devlin raised the nightstick like a teacher’s pointer. Sally tensed but all the Devil did was tap him on the shoulder, very lightly. “I didn’t say a word,” he said coolly, “about hitting anyone. A concussion. Fine. You’re the doctor, Sally. You’ve got to take all the risks into account. You’re doing that, right? Weighing up the risks?”
Sally stared into the other man’s eyes for a second longer than he should have done. He saw what was boiling in there and almost lost his nerve.
But he still managed to get the word out. Somehow. “Yes.”
“Then I’ll leave you to it.”
The Devil put his sidewinder back in its holster. He gave Moulson one more curious glance before he turned on his heel and walked out.
Sally ran into the bathroom where he threw his guts up into the sink. He did it for a long time, until all he was getting was a thin, clear trickle like saliva.
“Thank you,” Moulson said from behind him.
“Lock the door,” Sally told her, his voice slurred.
“I haven’t got the key.”
He fished in his pocket and handed it to her without turning around. He didn’t want her to see him soiled and disgraced.
He counted her footsteps as she walked to the infirmary door. Heard the key turn in the lock there.
Just a gesture, really. A superstition, almost, like throwing salt over your shoulder or touching wood. It wasn’t the door that would keep Devlin and Grace out (Devlin was senior on-block, he had a master set). It was the logistics. The awkwardness. The infirmary being where it was, in the broad human thoroughfare of the admin block. You couldn’t commit a murder here. It would be madness.
But you couldn’t live here either. Not for ever. And in Sally’s case, not past eight o’clock. That was when his shift ended.
69
Devlin went back to Grace’s cell and told her what had happened. That he’d had Moulson right there in front of him but couldn’t bring her away. He wasn’t happy about having to say it, and he was even less thrilled with Grace’s reaction, which was of course to blame him.
“Salazar?” she echoed. “Salazar sent you packing? The man’s a frigging meringue, Dennis!”
There was no gainsaying that. Soft and paunched though the doctor was, there had always been something brittle about him. A meringue was exactly what he was. But a thing can be easily breakable and still be a bastard to deal with. Ice is brittle, but try walking on half an inch of it. Devlin didn’t bother to make that point: Grace would have accused him of making excuses. Instead he said, “I’ll deal with Sally when the time comes. The question is what you want to do about Moulson.”
“Nothing,” Grace said. She picked up her iPod and fidgeted with it, scrolling rapidly through its menus. Devlin knew he was about to hear something heavily orchestral.
“Nothing? Are you serious? She’s laughing at us!”
“Maybe she is. But nobody touches a hair on her head until I find out whether she’s got that package.”
“And if she hasn’t?”
“Then someone has to go and get it, like last time.”
She slammed the iPod back down into the dock. Keening violin chords oozed from the speakers.
“Someone? Don’t be shy, Grace. Say it. You mean me.”
“Of course it’s you,” she said. “We went over this. Anyone else we send gets to see how the connect works. You don’t want that any more than I do.”
“Okay, but I’m not going tonight. I’m on duty. There’s no way I can go off-site for that long.”
“Well, first things first. Let’s see what madam has to say for herself. What time does Salazar’s shift end?”
Devlin carried all the work schedules in his head. “Eight o’clock,” he told her at once.
“And he’s not down for any overtime?”
“Nope.”
“Then he’ll be out of the way by quarter past. Who’s the night nurse?”
“Stock.” He got where Grace was going and answered the next question too. “I know her pretty well. I think maybe we can get her on board.”
“Really? In spite of the risk?”
“I’ll talk the risk right down. And obviously I won’t tell her any more than she needs to know. Afterwards she’ll keep her mouth shut because she’ll be neck-deep in it. She won’t have any choice.”
Grace nodded, her eyes flicking back and forth as she thought out the details. “It’s worth trying anyway. Doesn’t give us much time before lock-up. But the light will be starting to go – that’ll help.”
She told Devlin what she had in mind. Obviously the hardest thing to do would be to winkle Moulson out of the infirmary and back on-block. Stock (assuming she was amenable) would be well plac
ed to do that as soon as Salazar was off the scene. Lizzie and Carol would take delivery at the Goodall end. All that was needed was a guard to play piggy-in-the-middle, and that couldn’t be Devlin because Moulson knew not to trust him.
Devlin liked the plan very much – especially the part about him not being directly involved. He told Grace he approved and would do the necessary.
“Good to hear it,” Grace said. Devlin thought there might be a trace of sarcasm in her voice, but this wasn’t the time to vent hurt feelings. Grace knew she needed him. Maybe she was shocked that he’d allowed Sally to get away with treating him like that, but let her judge him by what happened to Sally next.
He took his leave of her and went looking for Sylvie Stock. He ran her down in Franklin block, where she was pretending to check and resupply the first aid post. What she was really doing was hiding from Jessica Moulson and from the terrible prospect of spending a whole night in her company.
“I need you to do me a favour,” he said bluntly.
“I’m not in a giving vein right now,” Sylvie warned him. But when he told her what the favour was, she changed her tune.
70
Up in the infirmary, Sally told Jess Moulson how Naseem Suresh had died.
He’d never told anyone else, and he didn’t set out to tell her. It just happened. They were sitting up there together with the door locked against the world. Sally had ordered in dinner from the commissary and dinner had come – one bed filled, so one meal, which they shared.
Being back in the infirmary reminded Moulson of her first day at Fellside. The siege conditions placed them both inside each other’s guard. They sat side by side on one of the beds in the quarantine ward, and they were honest with each other as if they were bound by some childish pact. Spit on your hand and swear.
“I wasn’t ever brave,” Sally said. “I think to be brave you’ve got to know what you’re up against and carry on anyway. Being stupid or arrogant… that’s not the same thing. I was about as stupid and arrogant as it’s possible to be. So when Naz came to me and said she wanted to blow the whistle about the rackets that were being run in G block, I told her I’d help her in any way I could.”
“Why did she come to you?” Jess asked.
“I had a name in those days. To be honest, I was a bit of a troublemaker. In a good cause. I complained about things. Made a noise about bad conditions when I found them, or sloppy systems. I thought I had a mission here. Holistic health. Mind and body and spirit and everything, no limits. A lot of the warders hated me, and I didn’t mind that at all. Word got around. It was natural enough that she’d come to me.”
He shook his head in sorrowful amazement. “It didn’t seem impossible at all. That we could fix the whole prison. I know it’s hard to believe when you look at me now.”
“You just sent Dennis Devlin packing,” Jess reminded him. “That’s what you’re like now.”
But Sally was still reliving the past. “Now Naseem…” he said. “Naseem was brave. She was seeing things in Goodall that reminded her of the shit she’d lived with on the outside. She’d been pushed into prostitution by an uncle. Someone her father owed money to. She was turning tricks at fourteen to pay her family’s debts – can you imagine that?
“Then the police raided the brothel and she thought she’d been rescued. But they arrested all the girls. Treated them like they were the criminals. They said the trafficked women were going to be deported right back to where they came from. The rest would do time. That was when Naz assaulted one of the officers. Hit him with a bedside lamp and broke his jaw.”
“She sounds like a real piece of work,” Jess said, half appalled and half admiring.
“Oh yes,” Sally agreed. “Well, Liz Earnshaw loved her. That speaks to her robustness, doesn’t it? But she had… I don’t know. A strong sense of how things ought to be. She hated unfairness. Bullying. Cheating.
“And one day she came to me and said she was ready to blow the whistle. She had chapter and verse on every bent screw in Goodall and every racket that was being run. She wanted me to talk to the governor and set up a deal.”
“Some kind of plea bargain, you mean?”
“No, not that. Not that at all. Just a guarantee that if she talked, she’d be protected all the way to the trial. So she’d get to give evidence. And I said of course she would. But I didn’t really know how to make good on that, so I was cautious. Or I thought I was. I went to Scratchwell. No names, no pack drill, but I put a question to him. If an inmate did come forward, what sort of systems would he put in place to keep her safe while he heard her out?”
“And?”
Sally’s shoulders sagged and the corners of his mouth turned down. “Naseem died the same night. They murdered her in the third-floor toilets in G block. And Dennis Devlin came in here to tell me that if I ever said a word to anyone about Naz’s little fantasies, he’d tell the governor I stole drugs out of my own cabinet.”
Moulson frowned, not getting it. “But how did Devlin know? About Naseem, I mean. Did the governor…?”
“The governor is a fucking idiot. But I don’t know. I asked him not to speak to anyone, and I didn’t give him Naz’s name. He said I could rely on his discretion. He said he wouldn’t talk to anyone inside the institution. Anyone at all. It’s hard to believe he would have gone straight to the senior warder in G block and told him that G block might be rotten.”
“Did anyone else know?”
“No. Nobody. So it must have been Scratchwell. He must be even stupider than he looks. I suppose he said ‘an inmate’, and Devlin knew who that meant. Maybe Grace was already watching her.”
Sally looked as though he was about to cry. Jess put a hand on his shoulder. “Either way, it doesn’t sound as though it was your fault.”
“I don’t know. I could have gone to the papers first. Made it public so they would have thought twice about…” He shrugged, slowly and massively. “That’s not it anyway. That’s not the worst of it.”
“What, then?”
He did cry now. Fat, greasy tears, chasing each other silently down his cheeks. “I could still have done it with what she’d already told me. I could have spoken up, and I didn’t. I didn’t say a word. I realised, after Devlin left… the… the only reason they didn’t kill me was because they had the drugs as a handle to use on me. That was all it was. Otherwise I’d have gone the same way.”
The doctor wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. It just made them redder. “I can’t tell you what it was like,” he mumbled. “I saw her. Saw what they’d done to her. And instead of thinking they had to answer for it, I thought, That could have been me. That could still be me.”
His hands were moving, describing in the air something he could see in his mind’s eye. “She was… They didn’t just hurt her, they disrespected her. Her body was wrapped in toilet paper, to say… to say, this is a piece of shit. A nark. So nobody would speak up for her afterwards. Nobody would mourn her.”
“Earnshaw mourned her.”
“Earnshaw went mad. I’m not sure that’s the same thing. You know what? I wish now it had been me they took into the shower block.”
“Sally…”
“No, I don’t mean I wish I was dead. It’s not self-pity, it’s… I’m thinking of outcomes. If I’d died, Naz would have gone on and done what needed to be done. She wouldn’t have let them scare her into line. Things could have turned out… very different.”
They sat in silence for a while, and then Jess told Salazar about Alex Beech. The mystery she’d been set to solve. She didn’t say she was keeping a promise to a ghost, but she told him that this was why she couldn’t be Grace’s errand girl. “I’ve got too much to lose. If I’m innocent of this, of the murder, but then I’m guilty of helping her bring the drugs in…”
Sally told her he understood. It was a half-truth, like when she said that Naseem’s death wasn’t his fault. Each of them was aware that the other was trying to climb up out of a pit. They
gave each other what they each craved the most right then, and what both Brian Pritchard and Pastor Afanasy had prescribed: the benefit of the doubt.
At eight o’clock, Sally had to leave. Off-shift, off-site – that was the rule. If he didn’t sign out, he’d be looked for. But he said he’d find Nurse Stock, who was in charge of the night shift, and make sure she knew about Moulson’s status. “Nobody will move you before the morning. You can go to the court from here, and I’ll be on duty again before you get back.”
Jess thanked him, and briefly hugged him. It caught Salazar by surprise, and he didn’t know how to respond. He patted her on the shoulder, one-handed, embarrassed.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he promised. And went off to find Stock.
Jess locked the door again behind him and lay down on the bed on top of the covers. She breathed in and out, shallowly, gathering herself.
Then she stepped out of her body and went to find Alex.
It didn’t frighten her any more to wander through the spray of memories, along a beach where the tide was the past endlessly returning. If she felt anything, she felt relief. A sense of coming home, or at least coming back to a place that knew and welcomed her: coming back in a way to a childhood haven, like a tree-house or a pillow fort. The Other Place.
She saw her own face reflected in the world she walked through, ghost echoes of her floating in the air that wasn’t air or drifting in the water that wasn’t water. That was the Fellside women thinking of her. Most of them weren’t even asleep yet, but they turned their inward eyes on Moulson as she passed by the little windows of their souls. As she walked abroad in the night where they all really lived.
You hurt yourself, Alex said. He had fallen in beside Jess without her noticing. She smiled as she turned to welcome him, but the dead boy’s face was stern.
A little. You saw?
No. I’m seeing it now because you’re remembering it. You fell down the stairs. It was dangerous, Jess. You could have died.