by M. R. Carey
“I’m not thinking of Goodall – I’m thinking of Curie. Dizzy gets out in two weeks. There’s an opportunity there.”
She waited for Devlin to start nit-picking. She knew what the objections were, and she had answers for all of them.
He started out with the most obvious one. “What about Hassan and Weeks?” Those two were Dizzy Disraeli’s prison daughters, and they were almost certainly planning to pick up her distribution network after she was released.
“That’s why we’re having this conversation now,” Grace said. “I’m thinking that Hassan and Weeks might get themselves into some trouble. Bad enough so you have to throw them in solitary for a week or two…”
Devlin smoothed out his shirt while he thought this over. “That’s going to take a lot of arranging. Don’t get me wrong – I can do it. But it will cost. And who’s going to sell for you? If I shut Dizzy’s tap off, yours has got to be up and running or there’ll be blood on the walls.”
“I’ve got some people in mind.” Grace ran through the names she’d come up with – Ellen Heinz, Sue Calvie, Jasmin Sullivan, a couple of others. But she could see from Devlin’s face that he was still more focused on the spanners than on the works.
“You’ll need someone to carry the stuff in,” he pointed out. “I can’t walk into Curie. Not regularly. Not with a pound of black up my shirt.”
“That’s the big issue,” Grace agreed. “Do you know any Curie screws we should be talking to?”
Devlin shook his head emphatically. The six prisoner blocks at Fellside were independent republics and the rackets mostly didn’t run between them. Grace could understand his reluctance to play recruiting sergeant: that kind of conversation would require him to show his before the other parties showed theirs, which would be a substantial risk.
And speaking of risk, Devlin now named another one. “What would we do about Kenny Treacher?” Treacher was Dizzy’s supplier – a man with a very bloody reputation. Grace had seen the man a few times when he came in to visit Dizzy. She thought he looked like someone who would kill you without changing his facial expression, which even at rest was like a crab-apple that had tried to eat itself.
Treacher had known Dizzy before she went to jail, but his most intense relationship was with Dominica Weeks, Dizzy’s daughter, who he’d met while she was inside and according to rumour was going to marry as soon as she was out. He couldn’t be bought off or brought on board. He would already have plans in place to ensure a smooth regime change once Dizzy passed the baton. Taking Hassan and Weeks out of the equation would leave him temporarily with no handholds, so he couldn’t stop someone else moving in and stealing his customers. But he wouldn’t like it much, and he might try to stir up trouble afterwards if he thought he had a chance of undoing the done deal.
“You let me worry about that,” Grace said lightly. The truth was that any reprisals Treacher launched would most likely be confined to the lowest rungs of the ladder. She was happy to accept collateral damage there. “You just think about mules. Ask around if you can. It’s really got to be a screw who carries the stuff through. One with a few years on her too, if we can manage it.”
“Want to specify hair colour?” Devlin grunted.
“Blonde, Dennis. With big wide eyes. People who look like angels get an easy ride.”
Dead on the forty-five-minute mark, Devlin stepped out of Grace’s cell, walking between Earnshaw and Loomis, who stood facing front like the Beefeaters at theTower of London. He adjusted his tie and checked the hang of his trousers to make it very clear he knew that they knew what had been going on inside the cell, and that he didn’t give a shit. Then he strolled away with his accustomed swagger.
Big Carol mimed the act of fellatio until Earnshaw’s blank stare unsettled her and she stopped.
19
News about the murderess who’d decided to die spread quickly around Fellside.
And quickest of all in G block, where Shannon McBride (back from Leeds General with nine fingers, splints and pins all over her painstakingly repaired hands, and at least a month’s exemption from work details) provided the perfect vector of transmission. She felt as though Moulson was her property, at least on a narrative level, and it hurt her to think of other people building where she had the initial stake. So she told anyone who’d listen to her about how Moulson had sung her to sleep, and how Moulson’s voice had this weird hypnotic power. It was an old story by now, but it still had some currency – especially from the horse’s original and genuine mouth.
Shannon told it in the commissary to add some spice to a bland corned-beef hash. Her audience was drawn from the second floor of the block, her cellmates and posse. Po Royal was there, and her girlfriend Kaleesha, the G block librarian. So was Hannah Passmore, the only lifer on the second floor. Hannah didn’t really belong in this peaceable and literary bunch, but she had bunked with Po back in the day and they still looked out for each other.
“Maybe that’s how she killed that kid,” Po said. “Sang him to sleep and he never woke up.”
McBride thought that was pretty amazing, and normally it would be something she’d be very happy to weave into her story. But it made Moulson into a monster. When she thought back to that terrible night, what she remembered most of all was the way the pain had seemed to be unbearable right up until Moulson touched her, and then it had faded right away.
Well, that and the fact that she’d sort of mistaken Moulson for a boy at one point, or thought there was a boy in the room, or something. But that part was confusing and it didn’t seem to go anywhere, so she left it out.
Shannon thought about stories she’d heard when she was a kid about scary women who sang, where the power was in the singing and you were much better off not listening. Sirens and selkies and suchlike. She didn’t want to put Moulson in that company. But maybe Moulson could have some of that power without being bad.
“She does have a really weird voice,” she admitted. “It sort of gets into your bones and vibrates.”
“If she’s got a vibrator, I want twosies,” said Kaleesha. That comment got her a dig in the ribs from her cellmate and lover. “You stay bloody clear of it, you dirty bitch!” Po admonished her.
Hannah Passmore shook her head sombrely. “Singing,” she said with distaste. “What’s she got to sing about?”
“Maybe she can’t help herself,” McBride suggested. She was embellishing freely now. “Her eyes were sort of glazed over. It was like she was in a trance or something. Like the song was just going to come out of her no matter what she did.”
“What did she sing?” Po asked her. There had been lots of things, but the only one Shannon could remember was “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper. That bathetic detail just fell to the ground and lay there, and she made a mental note to make it something different next time she was asked. The song really wasn’t the point, when all was said and done. The point was the story – or rather, getting a reaction to the story. She was more than happy to adjust the finer details to meet her listeners’ needs and preferences.
What Shannon liked about stories was the attention they got her, and the way the stories kept on going around after she’d started them. It made her feel like she was plugged into the life of Goodall wing – like she was the belle of the ballroom. In other ways, she knew, she was strictly marginal. She’d been that way long before she got to Fellside. Her family had disowned her as soon as she got herself arrested – well, as soon as they found out the charge was drug dealing – and her fiancé had dropped her like a shitty stick. Nobody ever visited her and she never got any letters. The space she’d left behind her in the world outside had closed again without her in it. So she told stories, and for as long as she had an audience, she convinced herself she had friends.
Then after the night of the Q box trial, she suddenly did. Women who’d never had time for her before were stopping by her cell to talk or offering her a game of Connect 4 or gin rummy in the ballroom. So she offered up her stori
es, which were really all she had in the way of conversation, and rubbed herself up, purring, against the luxury of an audience.
Moulson was a good story and Shannon polished it to a high gloss with many iterations. She could never be entirely certain, though, what response she was going to get. Very few of the Goodall women took the tabloid verdicts on the Inferno Killer at face value. But they knew a child had died, and they didn’t take that lightly. For Moulson to die in her turn seemed like a reasonable outcome.
Some people, of course, were a lot more pragmatic about the whole thing. Harriet Grace, for example. Word was that she’d opened a book on how long Moulson would last. For anything longer than six weeks, the odds topped off at a hundred to one. But there wasn’t anyone in Fellside who took that bet.
Shannon really hoped that Moulson would change her mind and live. She wanted that for a lot of reasons. It would give her a chance to say thank you to her for helping her through those dark hours.
And being so very unlikely, it would make a much better ending.
20
Another week went by, and Jess stuck to her guns.
She was dying by inches and ounces. But she’d crashed through the pain barrier in the third week, and now most of what she was feeling was coming to her dulled and deadened. Apart from when she swallowed or tried to talk, which was agony because of the fungal infection under her tongue.
“I can treat that,” Dr Salazar had told her when he turned the edge of her tongue with a depressor and found the livid, swollen flesh. “There’s no reason why you have to suffer.”
He’d actually said it more than once. The last time, he’d almost pleaded. Jess could tell that it distressed him to sit by and watch pain that he could do something about. But she didn’t know how strong her willpower was. Worse things would be happening soon. If she said yes to treatment now, how could she trust herself to say no later? And if she stopped being able to say anything, would she have set a precedent without meaning to?
It was better to just ride it out until none of it mattered any more.
The tramadol helped, not so much by easing the pain but by erasing whole stretches of time. The effects of the drug had intensified as her body mass got less and her system got weaker. Now, whenever Salazar or one of the nurses gave her a shot, it was as though she were a cork being shoved deep into black water. She would rise again slowly, slowly, to find a different nurse on duty and half a day gone.
One time, when she came back to herself after one of these immersions, she had the strong conviction that she wasn’t alone in the room. It was like her first night out on the main ward, only even stronger. Someone was moving behind the head of her bed. She waited for whoever it was to come into her line of sight, but they didn’t. They just kept moving back and forth behind her – the footfalls light and uneven in a way that made it hard to imagine what the owner of the feet was doing. Skipping? Dancing? Pushing something along the floor with no hands?
She might have risked a hello, but she knew what it would feel like if she moved her ulcerated tongue. She waved instead, a half-hearted ghost of a movement where her hand barely left the sheet.
The footsteps stopped right at her shoulder and the bed-frame creaked as it was touched. The unseen visitor sniffed loudly – the liquid sniff of a nose that needed to be blown – and then there was a chafing sound at the limit of audibility; Jess imagined a hand rubbing a face, or someone scratching an itch.
The longer the silence lasted, the less likely it seemed that the other person would break it. And now the silence was complete, which made Jess wonder whether she’d heard anything at all. Perhaps this whole experience was an artefact of recovering from the oblivious kiss of the painkillers.
But she felt something now: a stirring of air against her cheek. The visitor was still there, and close enough that she could feel their breath on her face.
She turned her head very slowly to lessen the jarring of unused muscles.
There was nobody there, and nothing at all behind the bed. The bed was pressed right up against the wall, the headboard actually fixed to it. The space in which those footsteps had skipped up and down didn’t exist.
21
“So you’re saying she’s running out of road?”
Devlin was sick of Salazar beating around the bush. Sick of standing in the infirmary and sweating his balls off because the admin block had no air conditioning and the heatwave just went on getting hotter. He wanted a straight answer. But Doctor fucking Feelgood here was still shying away from giving him one.
“All I’m saying is that she’s reaching a crisis,” Salazar repeated for about the tenth time with a shrug of his sloping shoulders. “The next forty-eight hours are going to be crucial.”
“Crucial?”
“Decisive.”
“Shit! You’re just using ten different words to say the same frigging thing. Is she going to die or not?”
The doctor winced, his eyes flicking from left to right and back again to avoid focusing on Devlin’s face. Devlin knew Sally for a pussy. The kind of pussy who hated making a stand on anything, even if that just meant stating a categorical opinion. There was an irony in that, because Sally’s huge, potato-shaped bulk made him seem imposing and permanent. And once upon a time there had indeed been some doggedness to him. Now he was a man who mostly ducked out of the way before you could come at him, just like he did now.
“I’m not having that conversation,” he told Devlin.
“Yeah, you are, Sally. Otherwise we’ll have another conversation about dipping your paw into the honeypot. We could bring the governor in on that one.”
Sally had gone through a brief period of borrowing from his own stock. It was when his wife, Leah, was dying from cancer and he’d used the drugs to give her a softer landing than she would otherwise have had. Devlin had found the evidence in the form of an invoice the doctor had thrown away after working up a convincing fake with a bottle of correction fluid and a photocopier. Devlin now had both the original invoice and the doctored copy in a file in his office. He’d kept Salazar’s secret, but he called in the favour on a regular basis. It hadn’t let him down yet. He was confident that it never would because it was only one half of a perfect lock. The other half was Naseem Suresh, who Devlin never mentioned at all because he knew he didn’t have to.
“Speaking of self-medication,” he added, driving his point home in case that needed doing, “what have you got for me?”
Salazar went to the secure cabinet, unlocked it and came back with three pink and white packets of pethidine. Devlin pocketed them without a word. He’d had an intermittent habit ever since he got to Fellside – or rather, ever since he took up with Grace – but he was way too sharp to fall over the diamorphine event horizon. Pethidine, taken half a tab at a time, was like a long, slow fuck, and he got along with it just fine. He knew from daily observation that heroin didn’t have nearly such good manners.
“Okay,” he said, happy that the natural pecking order had been duly established. “Joking aside, give me a time of death for that bitch.”
But Salazar still seemed reluctant to commit himself. “Moulson is weakening fast now,” was all he’d say. “She’s probably going to have a major organ failure in the next few days, and I won’t intervene unless she asks me to. But if she asks…”
Devlin was puzzled. “I didn’t think she was talking any more.”
“No, she isn’t,” the doctor admitted. “It would be difficult for her. Her mouth is in a very bad state. But she’s still aware of her surroundings, at least some of the time. It’s not impossible that she might say a… a word or two, or make some gesture that I could interpret as asking for an intervention.”
“A gesture you could interpret?” Devlin piled the words up high with disbelief and contempt.
“Yes.”
“Well, here’s a thought for you, Sally. Don’t.”
“Don’t…?”
“Don’t interpret. Let nature take its c
ourse.”
The doctor stood on his dignity, but it didn’t add as much to his height as he might have hoped. “I’m the best judge of my own responsibilities, Dennis. I’m employed by the prison but I work for my patients, like any doctor does.”
“Well, that’s what I’m asking you to do, you fucking idiot. This is what she wants, right? And the governor told you not to interfere. I’m just telling you the same thing.”
“But if she changes her mind…”
Devlin put his hand on Salazar’s shoulder – a little bit like a father, even though Salazar was ten years older than him.
“Help her to stay strong,” he said.
Sally didn’t say anything. But there was something in his face that looked a little bit like defiance. Devlin didn’t leave it at that anyway. He leaned in close, his hand still gripping tight onto Sally’s shoulder.
“You remember what happened the last time you decided to stand up and be counted?” he growled.
“Yes,” Sally said. “Of course I do.”
“We’re not going to have a repeat of that, are we?”
The doctor blinked very rapidly a whole lot of times. “Well, that would be unlikely,” he said. “This is… this is not a comparable situation.”
That was when Nurse Stock walked into the infirmary, and she walked in softly enough that neither of them noticed her.
“You just remember this, Sally,” Devlin said. “The woman you’ve got in there killed a kid. She fucking cooked him. In a perfect world, she’d get what she gave that little boy. She’d go out baked and basted like a Sunday roast. People like you, all you think about is your own good intentions. You see a pain, you put some ointment on it. You see a disease, you prep a needle.”
“I don’t see what you’re getting at, Dennis,” Sally said quietly. His eyelids were still going like a semaphore.
