Fellside

by M. R. Carey

  But she wasn’t. She was trying to spit it up. “I’m sorry,” she said to Jess, her voice loud and hard. “I’m sorry I hit you. Okay? Just… leave me alone!”

  And then she turned and walked away, passing the guards, who’d slowed to a dead stop, becalmed by the lack of violence.

  She walked all the way back to where she’d been sitting. Her shoulders were hunched and she was crying – shuddering, strangled sobs. Even after she sat down, there wasn’t another sound in the big, busy room, so everyone heard her. But some of them had seen her face too, and that was the biggest shock. Passmore wasn’t angry, she was scared. And underneath that she was bewildered, as though she didn’t know what was happening to her and she didn’t know why.

  It wasn’t as though that was an unusual combination of emotions in Fellside. But it wasn’t one anyone had seen Hannah Passmore, or any of the lifers, wear before. It was a “first offence” kind of face – the face of someone who hadn’t realised until that moment how bad things could get.

  In free association that evening, Shannon McBride regaled a large and varied audience with the story of Passmore’s crime and punishment. “She robbed a bank. Robbed a bank with a plastic gun she made up out of a kit and painted to look real. Then when they caught her she chatted to the police while her husband slipped out into the shed and burned all the cash. They only got her because money ash is different from regular ash.”

  “Is this story going anywhere?” Pauline Royal demanded. As Hannah’s former cellmate and good friend, she was standing by to make sure that nothing disrespectful got said.

  McBride raised her hands with the palms out to indicate a general openness and obligation to the truth. “You know what Hannah’s like, Po,” she said. “You all know. You wouldn’t think she’d ever been scared of anything in her life. But she was scared today. That’s where the story is going, all right?”

  Po gave a terse shrug, but she didn’t disagree. She had been worried about Hannah after that outburst in the lunch queue and had gone looking for her in free association. She’d found her friend in the library, holding an X-Men comic and pretending to read it. She was still distraught, and Po had done her best to talk her down. But Hannah wouldn’t say one word about what Moulson had done to take the wind out of her sails. Actually, she wasn’t saying much at all, and what she did say made no sense. She talked about a dog, and a dead baby, and Moulson waiting for her at night. Or someone waiting anyway: the pronoun shifted from he to she and back again pretty freely. “I don’t want to see it,” Passmore kept saying, her voice hoarse, her eyes wet and wide. “I don’t want to see it any more.”

  That day marked a turning point in terms of the way G block looked on Jess Moulson and interacted with her. There was the odd incident afterwards from time to time. A jostle in the refectory line, or some catcalls on the yard. But Jess didn’t catch another beating. Not for a good long while, and not from that direction.

  38

  When you’re getting yourself right with the world, you start by paying off all the old debts you can think of.

  Jess wrote to her Aunt Brenda to ask about how she was recovering, but mainly to apologise for not being a better niece. I was selfish when I tried to kill myself, the same way I’ve been selfish about everything else that mattered, she wrote. I knew it would make you unhappy but I couldn’t see past my own guilt and misery. The guilt is still there, but I’m working on it in a different way.

  Brenda, you’ve always been there when I needed you. After Mum died, you were the only person left who I cared about. Sometimes it felt like you were the only person left who I even knew. And you were so good to me. You did everything you could for me. You always have. Please don’t think that the way I turned out is any reflection on you. It was just me. It was always just me. I still don’t think you should come up here. It’s a long way out across the moors and the journey would half kill you. But more importantly, you’re here already – in my heart.

  She was going to leave it at that, but she wanted to explain why she had changed her mind. She wanted Brenda to understand that she hadn’t been thoughtless or capricious, either when she decided to die or when she veered back at the last moment towards life. Alex came to me in a dream, she wrote. He asked me to help him. I can’t really explain, and I know it sounds completely crazy, but I really think I can do it. I think I have to. This is what I’m for, Auntie B. This is why I’m still alive. Don’t be afraid for me, and don’t be sad for me. I’ve made you sad enough already. As long as I can, I’ll write and tell you how this goes.

  She wrote to John Street too. It wasn’t that she felt any weight of guilt about the injuries to his hands. He’d put her through enough pain when they were together to more than offset that. But she had a dim sense of how these things worked. His life must have stopped at around about the same time hers had. When you get caught up in events that loom so big in the world’s eye, you’re pinned to them for ever. She wrote an equivocal letter to him, saying she hoped they could forgive each other and indicating that she’d made some progress on her side of that equation.

  The answer, when it came, wasn’t from Street at all. It was from Nicola Saunders, her former work colleague and sometime pusher, who had known Street longer than Jess had and had introduced them in the first place. She and Street were living together now, Nicola said, and she would take it as a favour on Jess’s part if she just stayed out of John’s life and maybe finished the job she’d started with her hunger strike. He told me some of what you put him through. And you talk about forgiving him? That’s the sickest joke I’ve ever heard. He won’t ever forgive you, Jess. But he survived you. That was a feat in itself.

  There were other letters, but not all that many. If you took Alex Beech out of the mix, Jess wasn’t left with many relationships where karmic balance was an issue. Or many relationships at all, for that matter. First do no harm isn’t a big ask if you don’t do anything.

  What had she been? She could barely get her head around the question, let alone answer it. What did it say about her life if it had been so empty that a simple addiction filled it to capacity?

  It was the other way around, of course. She knew that really. Heroin works the way a cuckoo chick works. It tumbles all the other eggs out of the nest to make sure it gets all your attention all the time.

  She had something else to obsess her now, and she was a little bit afraid that that was all she was doing. That she’d taken on this impossible quest on Alex’s behalf because her life, that empty nest, needed something else to fill it.

  But mostly she only had those doubts when Alex wasn’t with her. When he was there, he became the only thing that mattered. Fellside was the illusion and he was the reality, the bedrock. What was the point of worrying about the purity of her own motives? There had never been anything pure about her in the first place.

  39

  The Devil came into the infirmary right at the end of his shift, looking to talk to Dr Salazar. But Sally wasn’t in residence; there was no one in there but Sylvie Stock, tidying up the drug cabinet. She asked if she could help, but Devlin told her no. It was just a sore shoulder that he wanted Salazar to take a look at before he clocked off and headed home.

  “I can give you some ibuprofen,” Stock offered. This was unfamiliar territory for her. Generally she had a strong sense of what was in her job description and what wasn’t. Tending the ailments of the staff fell into the wasn’t category, and normally she would have ignored Devlin until he left. But she was still riding out the waves of emotional turmoil from Moulson’s near-death experience and from Sally’s having seen what she’d done. Now she was leading a life of virtue in hopes of deflecting the shitstorm she thought had to be coming down on her.

  “I’m fine,” Devlin said. “I’ll just wait.”

  Which he did. In silence. It played on Sylvie’s nerves like a file on a fiddle string, and she got jumpier and jumpier as time went on. What was worse, though, was when Sally finally came back a
nd saw Devlin sitting there. He turned to Stock without a second’s pause and told her to go home early. “I’ll finish here, Sylvie,” he said. “Don’t you worry about it. I’ll see you Monday.”

  Stock protested weakly that she didn’t mind finishing what she’d started, but she could hardly complain about being let off the last half-hour of her shift. When Sally shooed her out, she had to go, even though she was convinced now that Devlin had come over there specifically to talk about her. She knew, with absolute certainty, that as soon as the door closed behind her, Devlin would turn to the doctor and say something like, “So what do you want to do about this business with Nurse Stock?”

  She walked to her car feeling like an axe was falling on her in slow motion and she couldn’t move to get out of its way.

  The staff car park was on the other side of the road from the prison in a little dip of ground that looked right out over Sharne Fell. There was a footpath going down, but, like most people, Stock just walked on over the verge and down the grassy slope.

  This time, though, she kept right on going, through the car park to the much steeper drop on the far side. Four hundred feet below her, a waterfall as thin as a knife fell into a bowl of grey rock that it had made for itself over the space of a hundred thousand years or so. There was a split in the rock so that it really looked – from above, as Stock was seeing it now – like hands cupped to take the water.

  She thought for a good long while about letting the cupped hands take her too. She liked to read salacious stuff, from the Daily Mail to True Crime magazines, so she knew to a nicety how the media treated wicked women, especially nurses. Kristen Gilbert. Genene Anne Jones. Beverley Allitt, the angel of death. Stock hadn’t done anything like what those women had done, but that wouldn’t stop them. Probably they’d give her a really catchy nickname – something like Allitt’s, only more melodramatic.

  Her career would be over. She’d only ever wanted to help people but she’d be remembered as a sadistic maniac. All because of Jessica Moulson and her failed hunger strike. If the woman had been so set on dying, what had stopped her? It was as though Moulson had gone to all this trouble just to set a trap, and Stock had walked right into it. It was almost a relief when her despair turned into anger. Then the anger got so hot that it boiled away in its turn, leaving behind a strange calm and clarity.

  If she survived this, if God gave her a second chance, she swore to herself that she’d never do anything bad again.

  But if the roof fell on her, it would fall on Moulson too. She’d make sure it did.

  Once Devlin was alone with Sally, he got right to the point. “Okay,” he said. “Grace is happy with how that first one went. You’re in. No more drops to your place though. You know Big Carol? Carol Loomis? The way it’ll work from now on is like this: she’ll bring the stuff to you every Thursday, right before you go over to Curie for your clinic. So make up a reason why she needs to keep coming, and write it up. Some kind of chronic condition. You’ll use the same drop-off as before, under the dais in the meditation room. Okay?”

  Sally was bemused. “But… then…” he said. “What – somebody else is bringing the drugs into the prison?”

  “You’ve got a mind like a steel trap, haven’t you, Sally?” Devlin sneered. “Yes, we’ve got someone else bringing the stuff in. All we need you for is to carry it past the guard post into Curie. Half the risk, but the same pay-off, so hooray for you. Now give me my prescription, I’m running late.”

  Salazar handed over the pethidine and Devlin left without a word. The whole conversation had taken so little time that when he stepped out of the front gate, after signing himself off in the daybook, he could see Stock in the car park across the road, only just now walking to her car. She had her head down and her shoulders hunched, like someone walking through a downpour only she could see.

  40

  Brian Pritchard still considered himself to be Jessica Moulson’s solicitor in defiance of his client’s statements to the contrary. But he had stopped expecting any response to his requests for meetings and consultations as the deadline for appeal loomed and then passed. When Moulson finally changed her mind and said she wanted to lodge an appeal after all, and to schedule a meeting, he decided to proceed cautiously.

  Moulson didn’t like him, and more importantly didn’t trust him. Whatever this change of heart meant, it was probably better for someone else to sound her out in the first instance. And he had a particular someone else in mind: his articled clerk, Paul Levine, who had from the first shown a very strong interest in Moulson’s case.

  Given the arduous journey that would be involved, Pritchard apologised to his junior for the poisoned chalice. Paul said he didn’t mind at all. As low man on the corporate totem pole, he was obliged to say that, but it was also the truth. Or if it was a lie, it was only by omission. The full truth was that Paul was overjoyed when Pritchard told him where he was off to. He was hard put to it not to dance.

  That crazy excitement stayed with him the whole way from London King’s Cross to Leeds City station. It grew, if anything, as he rode (in a taxi which smelled faintly of vomit) across the grandeur of Sharne Fell; as he walked through the gates in the fifty-foot barricade around Fellside prison; as the clanging, echoing doors opened one at a time and ushered him into Moulson’s presence. He felt like an ambassador to a foreign court. And he launched himself into the interview like a dam bursting, full of barely suppressed energy and barely comprehensible intensity.

  It was just the two of them, in the interview room rather than the main visiting area. Attorney – client privilege guaranteed them absolute privacy, although Levine had a panic button on his side of the table in deference to Moulson’s high-security status. Not that she looked like much of a threat right then, only halfway recovered from the beatings that had followed her release into gen pop.

  To Paul, she looked magnetic. Beautiful. He had fallen in love with Moulson during her trial, and, although he hadn’t seen her since, he still carried that torch. He would have been the first to admit that this was a weird infatuation. Moulson was a convicted murderer, a pariah, and her face, with its asymmetry and its inorganic texture, was about as far from any definition of beauty as you could get.

  He was convinced of her innocence, of course. He had seen Pritchard’s notes, had helped to prepare them. He knew there were questions that had never been asked at the first trial, let alone answered.

  But it was more than that. He found Moulson thrilling to be near and to talk to. He saw her life as a three-act tragedy with opiates in the role of major antagonist. And her face mesmerised him. It had something better than beauty or symmetry. It had transparency. It looked like a mask but it hid nothing. Every emotion that showed there showed huge and clear and eloquent, as the muscles on the bad side struggled to throw up their asynchronous copy of the good side’s workings.

  It was fair to say that Paul Levine came out of a different corner from most people as far as pain and disfigurement went. He had been a self-harmer in his teens, for more than four years, and that had been the time in his life when he felt most fully and wonderfully alive. He’d stopped cutting when he went to university because he’d become afraid that he would never be able to form a relationship with another human being that was as meaningful as the one he had with his own skin and the blood that flowed underneath it.

  A handful of romantic encounters, short but deep, proved that he could make that kind of attachment and left him in a different place mentally. He’d never taken up the cutting habit again, but he remembered those days very vividly. He kept his kit – razor blades and bandages and antiseptic – in a shoebox at the back of his wardrobe where other men might keep porn. He surfed the websites where other cutters put up photographs of their most recent injuries. And he still saw the romance in those injuries, the beauty that was like an offering to a world that was too stupid to understand it.

  Beauty was the word that came into his mind when Moulson walked into the inter
view room. The marks of her beatings mostly didn’t show, but the bruises hidden under her clothes caused her to walk with exaggerated care, like a woman twice her age. To Paul, paradoxically, that lent her an air of spectacular grace. He thought she moved like a queen in a medieval pageant.

  He pulled himself together, set up his voice recorder and started to tell Moulson – in an over-loud, over-emphatic splurge – what he and his firm had been up to since the trial.

  “We’ve examined all the witness statements for discrepancies, and we’ve gone over the police interview transcripts for procedural weaknesses. That gave us quite a few small leads to follow up, and one big one. We think we can make something of the fact that Alex Beech was home alone on the night of the fire. His parents said they were at work, but we followed that up and the timing doesn’t work. It’s possible they were at a pub on Alexandra Park Road. If they were, there’s an argument of contributory negligence right there. That ought to play in your favour, and might mean we can ask for a mistrial on the grounds of their perjury.

  “Mr Pritchard also thinks we can go for a mistrial based on the emphasis the trial judge gave to your heroin habit in his summing up…” And on and on, all this stuff just pouring out as though a million words on other subjects could take the place of the handful he really wanted to say to her and couldn’t.

  He could see that he was making a bad impression. Moulson didn’t say anything, and she didn’t move. He wished that he’d started off by asking her if she had any questions. He could have used that as a way of easing her into the discussion.

  But he felt he had no choice now but to go on in the way he’d started. He hurried on to his next point, which was mental incapacity. “The conviction is only sound if the psychiatric assessments of you were accurate. If you were of sound mind. We want to open up that question again, and try to make more of the intolerable stress you were under living with an abusive partner. Your extended hunger strike after you were convicted, which came very close to killing you, speaks very strongly – I hope you don’t mind me saying this – to a disturbed state of mind. We think we can project that backwards and use it as evidence that you weren’t thinking clearly and rationally on the night of the fire.”