Fellside

by M. R. Carey

  There was more. He was pretty sure there was more. But he’d got a little lost in his notes through looking at Moulson more than at the page, and he seemed to have reached the end without traversing all the territory on the way.

  “I want to ask you something,” Moulson said as soon as there was silence for her to speak into. “Sorry, I mean… thank you for all this. I can see you’re doing a great job for me. I feel safe in your hands. But there are a few things I feel I want to get a better understanding of before the appeal.”

  “Go ahead,” Paul said. He sat back with his eyebrows raised in an expression of attention and interest. He wanted so much for her to like him. He wanted to tell her how well he understood her, although he was astute enough to know that he really didn’t – that he was projecting his own fantasies on to her and seeing something that probably wasn’t there. He had form, unsurprisingly. Those college love affairs were marked, all of them, by a sudden rush to intimacy and then an equally sudden recoil. Paul was a romantic. That was the vice he succumbed to more than any other.

  “Alex’s body,” Moulson said. “They must have examined it. I mean, there was an autopsy.”

  “Yes, of course. The findings were submitted into your trial record.”

  “And what were they? The findings?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “His injuries. Can you tell me what they were like?”

  Paul considered this question. He knew the answer, of course. He knew every inch of her file. But how much detail did she want? “He was burned.”

  Moulson leaned forward. “Yes, I know he was burned. But was there anything else? Injuries that didn’t come from the fire? I’m thinking he might have been attacked earlier. Before the fire started. That he could have been bruised or cut. Was there anything to suggest that? Would there be? Would injuries like that show on a burned-up body?”

  Paul made a show of looking through his notes, although he didn’t need to. “I don’t believe there was anything like that,” he said. “Soft tissue injuries wouldn’t necessarily show, but cuts… yes, cuts would have been visible.” He knew a lot about cuts from a different context. He spoke with confidence.

  “What I’m getting at,” Moulson said, “is that it might not have been the fire that killed Alex.”

  “It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t.”

  “Then…”

  “It was the smoke.”

  Moulson’s eyes widened. It was as though this was news to her, although it couldn’t possibly be. It had all been covered at the original trial. But then she had been in shock back then. Maybe she hadn’t taken it all in.

  “The smoke,” she repeated.

  “Exactly,” Paul said. “It’s what kills most people in domestic and industrial fires. Twice as many as die from the flames. You were treated yourself, if you remember, for smoke damage to your lungs.”

  Moulson didn’t answer. Paul remembered now what it was that he’d left out of his presentation. He’d meant to say more about John Street. “We also need to revisit your partner’s deposition,” he said, aware that he was changing the subject. “We want to establish what he did in between the time when he placed the 999 call and the time when the fire engines arrived. He claims not to remember much about that period, but we’re pretty certain he didn’t go back inside the block…”

  We know that because of the smoke, Paul thought. That was the connection he’d just made in his mind. Everybody else had breathed in smoke and Street hadn’t. That bastard got out clean, when really he was the one who ought to have died. Not a professional opinion, not one he could ever voice, but still…

  “Even with the burns on his hands,” he continued evenly, “there was certainly more he could have done to raise the alarm. The time window before the first fire engine arrived was about thirteen minutes. The fire kept on blazing for almost a quarter of an hour, and Street seems to have let it. With more time, who knows what could have been done?”

  Once again, Moulson didn’t seem to have listened to a word he said. She was pursuing her own train of thought. Which was still about the boy. “Alex was alone in the flat that night?” she asked Paul. “That’s what his parents said, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Is that relevant?”

  “I don’t know. But we’re sure? There couldn’t have been anyone else?”

  Paul shrugged, feeling out of his depth again. “Well, yes. Of course there could have been. But the front door of the block is visible in the CCTV footage. We’ve accounted for everyone going in or out through that door. And as you know, the back door is only accessible from inside the building. You can’t open it from the parking area behind the block unless you’ve got the key. Which isn’t to say that someone couldn’t have come in that way. But unless they were a resident themselves, they’d have needed someone inside the building to open the door for them.”

  Moulson’s frown intensified. In some way he didn’t understand, he was failing her. “Suppose there was someone else already up there with him. Is there any way we could find out?”

  Paul had no idea what to say. The wounds. The mysterious someone. Was there a pattern here that he was meant to see? “We could go back to the witnesses, I suppose. But I’m not sure it would help. The appeal will review points of law; it won’t re-hear the case. Why? Do you have any reason to think there was someone else there? Someone the prosecution failed to call?”

  “Or someone the family didn’t want to mention. A childminder? Might there have been a… a relative or a neighbour who was looking after Alex, and who…” The words tailed off but Paul could tell from the rapid darting of her eyes that they carried on inside her head where most of this argument seemed to be taking place.

  “It might be worth exploring,” he said warily. “If there’s something you know, or even suspect, I’ll be happy to…” He was going to say “pass it along” – to the partners, to Mr Pritchard. But that wasn’t what he wanted to tell her at all. “I’ll be happy to investigate for you.” There you go. He’d put it right out there for her. Maybe she saw it, maybe she didn’t, but he’d said it.

  “I want to see the autopsy report,” Moulson told him. “Would that be possible?”

  “Of course. But I already gave you all the pertinent—”

  “Yes, you did. You gave me a very clear summary. But I’d like to see it please. Actually I’d like to see everything. Photocopies of all the statements, and the trial transcript, and… whatever you’ve got.”

  Paul made a note. “All right.” His hand shook just a little. After all the months of stonewalling, Moulson was engaging with her defence at last. That meant he’d be seeing more of her. More was fine in his opinion. More was excellent. This meeting was going very strangely, and he was sure he was missing a lot, but just being with her was lifting him on to another plane. He knew he would start to feel depressed as soon as he walked out of this room, and be depleted and fretful and dull until he was back here.

  “What else are you looking at?” Moulson asked him.

  He floundered a little. “Well, the broader… technicalities. Formal parameters. Strictly speaking we’re outside the limit for filing an appeal. In light of your medical condition over the past few weeks, we’re sure we can get around that, but we’ll probably have to take it to a hearing so the CPS can state a position too.”

  Moulson did that thing again, striking off at a tangent so he didn’t know if she’d been listening to him at all. “When can you get me those papers?”

  “Tomorrow,” he promised rashly. “I’ll have the copies made when I get back to the office and courier them to you. And then I can… I can come up again and go over them with you. In case there are any areas you don’t completely understand.”

  “I’d like that. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. I’ll put down in my notes that you’ve made a request to that effect.”

  Which was stretching the truth more than a little, but Moulson didn’t protest the point. Qui tacet consenti
re. If you don’t say no, you just said yes.

  He had to go. His time had been up half an hour ago and he was amazed that nobody had come. He stood and held out his hand. Moulson took it.

  “Thank you,” she said again. “I’ll see you soon then.”

  Paul was careful not to hold on to her hand for longer than was appropriate. The contact was electrifying, of course it was, but nothing showed in his face. He walked out briskly, resisting the urge to look back at her.

  But all the way through the checkpoints, to the gate, across the fell, down to London and the banal exigencies of his job, he was looking at her beautiful face in his mind’s eye and hearing her hoarse, half-broken voice whispering in his ear.

  I feel safe.

  In your hands.

  Paul, I feel so safe in your hands.

  41

  Jess sat in the interview room after Levine had left, waiting for a guard to come and take her back across the yard to Goodall block.

  She felt a little stunned. More than a little. She’d agreed to the meeting so she could start delivering on her promise – to find Alex Beech’s friend and Alex Beech’s torturer. But she’d gone running into a tripwire before she’d even got into her stride.

  It was the smoke that killed him.

  Of course it was. And she had known that. She remembered the salient points of the evidence in court, although she’d barely taken them in at the time. Smoke damage in Alex’s lungs. Soot deposits in his airway below the level of his vocal cords. Carbon monoxide in his blood. It was cut and dried. If there’d been any doubt at all, it would have come out at the trial, but there wasn’t.

  Jess, I died because she hurt me!

  The vehemence in the words made her wince. She didn’t look up. She could feel Alex standing at her side, but she knew he wouldn’t be visible in the bright sunlight streaming through the window.

  “No, Alex. You died in the fire. Your body was examined by experts. There’s no way they could be mistaken.”

  They could be lying though.

  Jess shook her head. “Why would they lie?”

  I don’t know. Because they’re scared of her.

  “Scared of… You mean the bad girl? The one who cut you?”

  Yes. They might be scared she’ll cut them too.

  “I don’t think they’re scared of the bad girl.” Jess said it as softly as she could, trying to let him down gently. She’d thought he was the best authority on the manner of his own death, but there was no gainsaying this. He had to be mistaken. “There’s a person called the coroner, whose job is to—”

  If they’re not scared, then they’re hiding something. That’s what the police do. They hide things. They make it look like you did something wrong when you didn’t, and they make it look like they’re always right.

  His grimly matter-of-fact tone surprised her. It sounded as though he was talking from experience, although it couldn’t be his own. Was there some history of criminality in the family? Was there a memory there of some clash between his parents and the law where he’d been a piece of collateral damage?

  Jess weighed up all the things Levine had just told her and finally, deliberately, set them aside. She wanted to do right by Alex. It was the only thing she wanted right then. Anything she might choose to do with the rest of her life – which she’d only just got back, thanks to him – could go on the back burner and stay there.

  She was starting to be afraid that the bad girl was just something he’d dreamed. But she would keep on looking all the same, until he told her to stop.

  42

  As for the governor, his whole life was like a dream at this point.

  Once Jess Moulson had been released into Goodall (the natural habitat of all murderers and monsters) and the world hadn’t ended, his confidence in his ability to handle the situation metastasised. He forgot his earlier fears altogether. Requests for interviews from dozens of media outfits were stacking up on his desk; he decided to answer a few of them.

  He was selective, or at least he told himself he was. No red-tops. No talk shows. No live interviews. He knew how important it was to stay in control of the message. He favoured one-to-ones with correspondents from broadsheet newspapers, but he would do magazines if they looked to be serious trade publications and radio if it was Radio 4.

  In every interview, he stressed the two planks of the Fellside regime: its rigour and its fairness. “These are old-fashioned terms but they’re still the bedrock of good prison discipline,” he said dozens of times with minor variations. “Prisoners need to know that the same rules apply to everyone, without exception. As long as that’s true, nobody objects to the strictness of the regime. Time and again it’s when rules are inconsistently applied that you get resentment, unrest, incidents, even riots.”

  Scratchwell thought he gave a pretty good account of himself in these interviews. He remembered what he’d been told about keeping a low profile, but he convinced himself that discreet briefings of this kind were within the spirit of that advice. If the oversight board had any reservations, they only had to tell him so and he would stop. But no emails came, so clearly he hadn’t overstepped the mark. Possibly N-fold were already seeing the advantages of having a celebrity (in a small and decorous way) in their stable.

  Scratchwell was well aware that the same media outlets were sniffing around Moulson too. Messages turned up on the prison’s website every day which he was obliged to pass on to her, offering her interviews, book contracts, documentaries, even merchandise and licensing deals. Most of this stuff looked like scams and baited hooks of one sort or another, but by the law of averages some of it was probably on the level. It made no difference. Moulson ignored everything even-handedly. She seemed to feel she was already famous enough.

  But even without her active participation, she and her crimes were very much in the public eye. There was a series on Channel 4 called Wicked Women where they told Moulson’s story as part of one episode in spite of the fact that she had an appeal pending. An actress played Moulson, checking that John Street was asleep before she set the fire (Scratchwell was sure that was an invented detail). There was also a charity that was set up for child victims of adult violence, the Angel Trust, that featured Alex Beech’s face prominently in its newspaper ads. Fame kept seeking Moulson out whatever she did or didn’t do.

  The governor congratulated himself that he was navigating these difficult waters much better than she was. By engaging with the media, he ensured that he had a voice. He presented his own case eloquently. Moulson, on the other hand, was being carried along like flotsam in the turbulent tide of public opinion.

  He quite liked that metaphor when it first came to him. He thought he might even use it, or some version of it, in an interview. But on further reflection, he saw it wouldn’t do. It suggested that Moulson’s concerns and his own amounted to the same thing – the massaging of their reputations.

  He needed an analogy that had him disseminating good practice. Sharing his philosophy with the world. Becoming part of a dialogue in which people like Moulson lost their individuality and became examples.

  Instances of lasting truths.

  43

  The documents Levine had promised turned up two days later. Nine boxes of them, making a stack that stretched from floor to ceiling of Jess’s cell. Buller was too awed to be indignant, especially when Jess sat down on the edge of her bunk, opened the first box and started reading through the contents.

  Once she started, she didn’t stop. Levine had sent through the date for her hearing too, and it was only a week away. Jess had the sense that something big and heavy was rolling into motion, and that once it was properly underway, she would have very little power to steer it – might have no choice at all but to hang on tight. But the appeal was also the best chance she would ever get to discover more about what had happened to Alex on the night of the fire. The more she found out now, the better her chances were of using that opportunity when it came.

  �
�She’s got some balls on her anyway,” Buller told Po and Kaleesha and a half-dozen other women one night in the ballroom. “She’s ploughing through that shit, hours on end. Makes you wonder…”

  “Wonder what?” Po demanded.

  Buller shrugged. “Whether she really did it.”

  “This whole place is full of innocent people,” Kaleesha Campbell pointed out cynically. “And her balls weren’t on show when she chickened out of that hunger strike. Maybe she just wants the attention.”

  “Right,” Buller agreed. “She wants the attention. That’s why she’s in here every night, doing the big I am.” That got a laugh all round. There was something faintly ridiculous about calling Moulson an attention-seeker. She spent most of her time in her cell. When she was out of it, she folded herself down so small you couldn’t see her.

  And after the boxes arrived, she became even more of a recluse than before. She lived in those damn things. Thousands of pages of documents, tens of thousands, and after a while most of it was just repeating stuff she’d read before somewhere else. But she read it again anyway, because you never knew.

  It became a standing joke on the wing. Then it became something else. The women of Goodall liked a trier, and they liked a story. Moulson was both. As her preliminary hearing got closer, she started to accumulate a capital of goodwill. She was completely unaware of it: out of all the Goodall inmates, she was the only one who had no sense of Goodall as a community. Its webs had started to weave themselves around her as far back as Shannon McBride’s first round of confabulation, but those webs were like Alex – so subtle that you couldn’t see them in daylight.