Fellside

by M. R. Carey

  Devlin felt that something I can’t explain equated to something that’s not my fault, and he didn’t agree at all. “I went on your word, Sally,” he said, grabbing hold of the doctor’s lapels and pushing him back against the racks of the drug cabinet. Bottles of pills and tubes of unguent spilled on to the floor as Salazar tried to squirm sideways out of his grip. “And I passed your word along to Grace. Now look at this. We’re all out of pocket because you can’t do your job.”

  “I told you,” Salazar protested. “I told you I couldn’t give you a definite yes or no.”

  “You told me you might be out by a day or two. You didn’t say she might live to draw her fucking pension!”

  Salazar was about to say something, maybe something about Moulson not being out of the woods yet, but Devlin didn’t let him. He slammed his fist into the doctor’s stomach.

  Salazar sank to his knees with a hiccup of shock and pain.

  Devlin could get behind the shock at least. He was shocked too. He had no idea until he did it that punching Sally was even an option. But he hadn’t minded how it felt at all, and he was ready to repeat the experience if Sally offered him a good excuse.

  Gripping a handful of Salazar’s hair, Devlin tilted his head back so they could go on talking face to face. “You let me down,” he said, his voice level despite his drunkenly sloshing emotions. “I asked a simple favour, Sally, and you messed it up. Just so you know, we’re not friends any more.”

  Salazar was trying to splutter out explanations and protests and more explanations. He wasn’t making too much sense, and in any case, Devlin wasn’t listening. Suddenly, coming out of nowhere in the same way that sucker punch had come, he’d had an idea. A really big one. It filled his attention wall to wall for a few seconds.

  He’d cut loose on Salazar in a moment of weakness, his frustration getting the better of him. Perhaps it went deeper than that though. Perhaps he was trying to prove something to himself – that he was as big a man in his domain as Harriet Grace was in hers.

  But thinking that through reminded him of Grace’s little problem with regard to Curie wing. He had been using Sally all this time as a personal and private resource, deliberately keeping him out of Grace’s eyeline. No matter how well he and her ladyship got on, he preferred for Grace not to know about his other little solace, the pethidine, and where he sourced it from. The day he put his balls in the palm of anyone’s hand and invited them to make a fist would be the coldest day hell ever saw.

  But Sally as a drug mule had an almost irresistible appeal. The doctor could go wherever he liked, whenever he liked. He mostly preferred not to, of course – left it to the nurses to run the satellite clinics in the prisoner blocks while he sat up here in his little make-believe ER and counted bedpans – but he could change all that whenever he chose to.

  When you came down to it, who was better suited to dropping off drug shipments than a doctor? It was genius – the solution to Grace’s short-term problem, and in the longer term, the kind of asset you could build an empire on. Sally would kick, of course, but he didn’t have it in him to kick hard. Not these days.

  Devlin let go of Sally’s hair and stood back. Sally scrambled to his feet.

  “Fix yourself up,” Devlin told him brusquely. “Go on. You’re a fucking mess. What time do you finish your shift?”

  Salazar wiped away tears with the heel of his hand, which was shaking. Devlin watched him work out the not-so-complicated sum of what he would do next, the correct answer being nothing. He couldn’t complain about what the Devil had just done to him because that doctored-by-a-real-doctor invoice was a hostage for his good behaviour. He couldn’t wield the axe because it would bounce back in his face and split him in two.

  “What time do you finish?” Devlin repeated. “Are you deaf?”

  “S-six o’clock,” Sally said.

  “Come over to Grace’s cell when you’re done. No, wait. Come over right after lunch. Write it up as a medical visit. Say she’s got menstrual cramps or something.”

  Salazar didn’t seem thrilled at this prospect. He groped around for an excuse, came up with exactly the sort of feeble bullshit he was generally known for. “With menstrual cramps she’d just come into clinic.”

  Devlin breathed out through his teeth – half of a laugh bolted on to half of a sneer. “Something else, then. Dealer’s choice. Just be there.”

  “For what?”

  “A job opportunity.”

  “I’ve already got a job!”

  “Yeah.” Devlin conceded the point. “You do, for now. And if you want to keep it that way, Sally, you’ll do what you’re told and whistle while you do it. If you make me come and get you, I’ll be in a really shitty mood.”

  Devlin headed for the door, but he stopped to look into the quarantine ward. Moulson was sleeping there, her breathing low and steady. Her cheekbones still stood up like the poles of a collapsed tent, but there was some colour in the skin around them.

  “Clueless little bitch,” Devlin growled. “She can’t even kill herself right.”

  After Devlin had gone, Dr Salazar tucked his shirt back in and tried to hide the fact that Devlin had torn a button off it.

  He was still crying. He couldn’t make himself stop, even though he knew that Stock might come back at any moment and see him. Every time he managed to wipe his face dry and get his features composed, it would just start up again.

  It was the humiliation more than the pain. And the fear, which of course was the most humiliating thing of all.

  He knew he didn’t have a choice. Some fights you’d lost before you ever got into them. Devlin and Grace. If you tried to touch one, you were bound to get both on your back. They held each other up like some scary religion with two mighty pillars.

  Salazar could remember not being afraid of them, or of anything. But then two tragedies had fallen on him out of a clear sky. Two deaths. The first was an inmate, but his thoughts shied away from that now as they always did. The second was his wife, Leah. She had been his courage and his wisdom and his strength. She had all those virtues, and when Sally walked out of Fellside each night into her arms, he had bathed in them and got his own supplies all stocked up.

  Sally was open-eyed about his idolatry. He’d known Leah was seeing someone else in the last years of their marriage, and though it had hurt him, he’d got over it. He was nobody’s idea of the perfect lover, or the perfect husband. Whatever she was giving (or taking) elsewhere, she’d always given him everything he needed. One of his deepest regrets was that he’d never thought to wonder what she needed until it was too late to ask.

  30

  Governor Scratchwell wasn’t the kind of man to overplay his own authority. He was well aware that Moulson recovering consciousness was a huge deal-changer, and therefore not a situation he should treat as a freestyle event.

  He called the legal expert on the number she’d left for him, and got a different legal expert with a much more abrasive manner. When Scratchwell told expert number two that Moulson was awake, he said he was aware of that. His tone suggested it was somehow Scratchwell’s fault, but his words were more equivocal. “You did everything in your power to give Moulson a painless and dignified death. Now she’s reconsidered and you’ll respect that too. Release her into gen pop.”

  “But… is that wise?” Scratchwell ventured. “She’s very high profile now, because of all of this. And the nature of her crime…”

  “Which is murder.”

  “The murder of a child.”

  “With no sexual assault. We’re not seeing her as a high risk to your normal running, Mr Scratchwell. Not any more.”

  Because it’s not you that’s risking it, Scratchwell thought bitterly. He couldn’t explain about the book that had been run on Moulson’s survival. Officially he didn’t know about it, because knowing about it would have required him to shut it down – to push against an aspect of Fellside’s ecosystem that he kept well away from. But he knew that it had happened,
and that as a side-effect it had kept Jessica Moulson as a trending topic in the prison throughout the six weeks she’d been on death watch. To release her now, with everyone watching, with the rumour mills spinning at maximum velocity, felt like tempting providence.

  But his corporate bosses weren’t exactly giving him a choice. He was going to have to cut Moulson loose and live with whatever happened next.

  The one thing Scratchwell could do was to have a word with the most experienced supervisor on Goodall. Tell him to keep an eye on Moulson in case she made trouble or had it made for her.

  Half the male screws at Fellside were perverts or incompetents, and any Venn diagram would show a large overlap between the two. But Dennis Devlin was a man you could rely on.

  And Jessica Moulson would be as safe in his care as in God’s own pocket.

  PART THREE

  STATE OF GRACE

  31

  Everybody had their own version of Harriet Grace’s origin story. Like thunder or earthquakes, she seemed to require an aetiological myth. Shannon McBride’s was the connoisseur’s choice though. She’d stolen it wholesale from Mr Devlin, who she’d overheard in conversation with two of the G block guards, and she preserved all his idioms and intonations. It was far and away the best thing in her repertoire, but she was careful about when and where she told it. If word of her recitals ever got back to Grace and Devlin, the Devil would probably hurt her worse even than Grace would, because he’d have his own hurt coming in due course.

  “She did it twice,” Shannon would say. “That’s the thing you’ve got to know about her. Two times over she made herself. I mean, like, literally out of nothing.

  “She didn’t have rich parents or a good education or any of that stuff. All she had was, you know, her belief in herself. Her belief that she could do it.

  “She grew up in Churchbeck, and let me tell you in case you didn’t know, Churchbeck is not Manchester. It’s not even Bury. It’s just one of those places where factory workers used to live in Dickens novels and shit. And Dickens isn’t hiring any more.”

  That always got a laugh, and though Shannon herself didn’t actually get the joke – or know who Dickens was, for that matter – she was happy to take the credit. With the scene set, she would lean in close as though she was imparting great secrets. “Grace went to one of those massive comprehensives that they made by collapsing a whole lot of little schools all in together. She had a bad time of it, no doubt. She got beaten and bullied and bent all out of shape. I know you wouldn’t think it now, but she was the victim back then. Mostly because she was really weird-looking. She had a thing.”

  If nobody asked the obvious question, Shannon would wave her hand across her face as though she was trying to mime something that was too hard to describe in words. The words of this legend might be Devlin’s but she added the stage dressing herself, and she was good at it. Sooner or later someone would play straight man for her. “What kind of thing?”

  “I think they call it a facial cleft. But there’s lots of different kinds and she had one that was way out there. Crazy. Like, her lip and her nose were all folded back into her cheek, sort of in a pleat. She couldn’t even talk properly. They called her Frogface. And nobody would touch her or get too close to her in case they got the Frogface Curse.

  “But she was really clever, even then. All the kids who were picking on her in the playground, she beat them all when it came to her grades and all that stuff. She came out with a fistful of A-stars, even though she was off school half the time having all this surgery done. They can’t fix a facial cleft all at once because the bones of your face don’t all grow at the same speed. So they’ve got to do it a bit at a time.

  “And in the end they made her beautiful. She’s still got these little tiny scars – under her hair and along the line of her jaw – but you can only see them if you get in close and look really hard, and who’s gonna be up for that?”

  Shannon tended to rush through this part of the story fairly quickly in case anyone asked her how she knew about Grace’s scars, or came up with questions about the surgery that she couldn’t answer. If they asked about the exam grades she just said airily that you could look that stuff up online.

  “So now here she was with a new face and a new job, and she was on top of the world. She was working down Bury job centre. Setting up interviews for all the little snots who used to give her grief. She made them dance, from what I heard. Oh yes.

  “Anyway, that was how she got into all the people-trafficking stuff. It was only what she doing already really, except with illegal immigrants. She was hiring them out for building sites or crop-picking or whatever and taking two-thirds of the pay-off for herself. Making money hand over fist.”

  This was the cue for a dramatic pause. The audience knew the punchline, because here was Grace doing a twelve-stretch in the middle of nowhere. How are the mighty fallen. And risen again. But they didn’t know the precise mechanism, and in some ways this was the best part, so Shannon drew it out.

  “It was Operation Gary that fucked her. What, you never heard of that? It was after all those cockle pickers drowned in Morecambe Bay. They set up a special task force to stop people from doing what Grace was doing.

  “But she might have got away with it if she hadn’t taken on a partner. She was never all that great with computers, and it was slowing her down. She needed someone who could run ads on the ‘Help to Work’ website and stuff like that. Match up supply and – what’s the other one? – demand, yeah, when she had a dozen illegals in the back of a van doing nothing.

  “So she took on this nice young man. Stephen Menzies. He did all that stuff for her. Did some other stuff for her too, if you know what I mean. Scratched her back and oiled her crack.

  “Only Menzies was a police grass. He was part of this Operation Gary, and he got all the dirt on her and then gave evidence against her when she was arrested. She got twelve years, with deferred parole. Plus they stripped out all her bank accounts and took her house off her and everything. Illegal enterprise, whatever they call it. They left her with the clothes she stood up in. Banged her up in here.

  “I know what you’re thinking. It takes time to bounce back from something like that. And it does. It took Grace about a month. From the moment she came in here, she was looking around her and seeing how it all fitted together. All the rackets. The big operators – there were three or four of them back then – they thought she was nobody. First-timer and all that. They didn’t pay her any attention. Until she walked right up and took it away from them.

  “It’s all about what you believe in, and what Grace believes in is Grace. And nobody else, not any more. She never forgets and she never forgives. Once she had it all sorted in here, she went back and dealt with a few bits of old business.”

  This was Shannon’s favourite part, which was why she always saved it for last. “She hired these two blokes. Johnny Satchell, who used to be the bouncer at Electric nightclub, and this ex-squaddie, Peter something or other. A real head case, he was – scariest man you could ever meet. Grace paid for twelve hours of their time. Top dollar, but she said she wanted their best work.

  “The clock started when they knocked on Stephen Menzies’ door. Saturday morning, eleven o’clock. She knew he’d be in, and he was. All by himself. And by God, she got her twelve hours’ worth.”

  32

  Dr Salazar had his audition with Grace sitting on one of the comfortable chairs in the privacy of her cell. It was a great deal more luxurious than his consulting room.

  Devlin had warned him not to say a single word about their private arrangement regarding his pethidine habit, and Sally didn’t. In fact he barely opened his mouth at all: between fear and shame, he was an elective mute.

  Grace seemed to be fine with that. Sally felt she mainly wanted to be listened to, not to listen. “This is a new venture for us,” she said, leaving the us undefined. “We’ve got total control of the market here in Goodall, so if we’re goin
g to expand at all, we’ve got to move outwards into the medium-security blocks. You understand?”

  Sally nodded.

  “Now Mr Devlin thinks there might be a part for you in all this, doctor, and I value Mr Devlin’s opinions. But you haven’t always been in my corner. Two years ago you were making serious trouble for me, and I had to get serious with you in return. I’m sure you remember that. The thing is, it’s okay to try something like that once, when you don’t know any better. But I wouldn’t want you to try it again. I’d want reassurances. I won’t ask for promises, because promises don’t mean anything. I just want to hear you say that you’ve learned your lesson and you won’t do anything stupid.”

  “I have,” Sally said. “I’ve learned my lesson.”

  “And…?”

  “And I won’t do anything stupid.” The words came out easily and brought no increased unease. For Salazar, just being here in this situation was the functional limit of degradation. The speed of light. If you hit the speed of light and accelerate, you can’t go any faster.

  Besides, anything that came out of his mouth, any promise he made, was automatically a lie. He was going to give in his notice as soon as he finished his shift tonight. Walk away from Fellside and never come back. Grace wouldn’t chase him. And Devlin wouldn’t inform against him once he was gone – not when there was nothing to gain and a risk that he might inform right back.

  Grace studied the doctor’s face for a while before going on to outline what it was she wanted from him. “We don’t currently have many friends in Curie. None of the guards over there are on my payroll. That will change, but to start with we need someone who can go in and out freely and make drop-offs to my dealers there. It’s a seed crystal, really, that we can grow from. Have you got any questions about any of that?”

  Sally shook his head.

  Grace’s sunny mood took a slight dip. “You should have lots of questions. Where? When? What? Who? I haven’t given you any of the details. Are you even listening to me, doctor?”