by M. R. Carey
The bottom line was that Grace’s system worked. It was fit for purpose. Carol would make the drop. Salazar would get the package out of the drawer as soon as he could do so unobserved, and transfer it to his doctor’s bag. Then at three o’clock in the afternoon he’d trot over to Curie and deliver it to the meditation room.
The circle of life went on.
As for Salazar’s guilt and horror at what he had become, it turned out that he could live with them. That was astonishing to him, but it was demonstrably true because he was still alive. Corruption – preying on the people he was meant to be helping – was the worst sin he could name. But he’d immersed himself in that sin so deeply that he couldn’t see the surface any more. And he’d done it for the simplest and basest reason: because he was afraid.
Not of losing his job. He felt he could cope quite well with public humiliation, arrest, imprisonment. But physically he was a complete and utter coward. He knew too much about how human bodies worked, or failed to work. Even death was a bearable thought, but the pain you might have to encounter on the way was another matter.
So he became the thing he most despised, and told himself that the threat of death (other people’s, not just his own) absolved him. He focused in on logistical decisions, on the short-term and immediate, and abandoned any train of thought that might lead him to more dangerous perspectives. He did what he was told.
But any system is only as good as its moving parts. And the Thursday after the day when Loomis and Earnshaw visited Jess Moulson in her cell, one of the moving parts failed to move.
It was Moulson of course, but Salazar had no way of knowing that. Neither Grace nor Devlin had any intention of letting him in on that side of the operation. Moulson had had her preliminary hearing, which had lasted all of twenty minutes. Mr Justice Foulkes – in his chambers, as informal as the criminal justice system ever got – listened to the tragic story of her hunger strike and said he was minded to waive the submission deadline in this instance. The Crown Prosecution Service, represented by a thin-lipped man who looked as though his grey suit was welded on to him like roofing felt, raised no objection. Moulson had leave to appeal.
After the hearing, she came straight home. She didn’t visit the toilets. Grace’s package stayed where it was.
That had all been on the Wednesday. So now Thursday morning came and went, and Big Carol didn’t make her scheduled visit to the infirmary – the first time she’d ever defaulted. Sally waited as long as he could, but he was scared to go off-schedule in case someone was watching. He walked over to Curie, did the clinic and walked back again without making the drop-off.
Then, because he didn’t have any idea what else to do, he went and found Dennis Devlin in the guardroom. Behind the guardroom actually, on a cigarette break. Half a dozen other screws were there along with the Devil, talking the sort of shit men usually talk when they get together. They didn’t pay much attention to Sally, who didn’t count as a man for these purposes, but Devlin saw him there and signalled for him to wait – a discreet gesture where his hand didn’t leave his side.
He finished his cigarette and stamped out the butt before coming over.
“What?” was all he said.
“There wasn’t a package.”
The Devil stared Salazar down, unamused. “All right. What did Big Carol say?”
“Big Carol didn’t come.”
Which told Devlin that something had gone wrong further up the food chain and he’d better get together with Grace as soon as possible. “Go back to the infirmary,” he told Sally.
“I’m meant to be—”
“Hey. Shut up. Wait for me in the infirmary. I’ll be back to tell you what’s what.”
He left the doctor standing there and hastened to his lover’s side. Big Carol stood alone at the door to Grace’s cell, arms folded and face full of a sort of brooding calm.
“She in there?” Devlin demanded.
“Yeah, but she’s got company,” Loomis said. “Let me tell her you’re here.”
“I’ll tell her myself,” Devlin said, and walked on past her.
He knew that was reckless – stupid, really – but he was always on his spiky dignity with Grace and her people. He felt it harmed his status to stand around and wait for her. He opened the door and walked inside, and right away he was sorry he had. The company was the kiddie cooker, Jess Moulson, one of the designated mules, who had clearly been summoned there because she had failed to perform according to instructions.
It was a harmless enough little tableau – Grace and Moulson sitting opposite each other in the two ladder-back chairs Grace’s cell boasted (real canvas backs and seats, and wooden frames, not ply and plastic). The only sinister touch was the music coming out of the speaker dock. It was classical, which meant that Grace was pissed off and needed her spirits soothed. Oh, and there was Liz Earnshaw, standing right beside Moulson and watching Grace’s face in case some hurting was needed.
In Grace’s cell, of course, hurting would be limited and bloodless. All the really life-changing violence happened at a safe distance. But this was a serious interview with serious things depending on it. Devlin knew at once that it had been a mistake to charge in here. He stood there for a second with his hand still on the doorknob, weighing up the possibility of backing out again without being seen. But Grace had already seen him and she beckoned to him.
Which of course made Moulson turn and see him too.
Her eyes got a little wider. He could sympathise, as far as that went. Him standing there was the visible sign that there was no cavalry coming.
“You’re talking to me,” Grace reminded her.
Moulson took her skittish gaze from Devlin’s face and gave it back to Grace. “Well, I think… I think it’s possible I looked in the wrong cubicle,” she said, sounding about as convincing as a schoolgirl explaining that the dog ate her homework.
“That doesn’t make any sense to me,” Grace said. “There are only three cubicles in that toilet. Which means there’s only one you can say is in the middle. I don’t see where the possibility of confusion comes in. Frankly, I’m disappointed.”
Devlin knew what it meant when Grace said something like that. Never anything good, often something sickening. The stupid bitch who’d blown her own hunger strike might get to be dead after all, he thought – which made him wish all over again that he’d been a bit slower in coming over here. He liked to keep up an arm’s-length sort of relationship with the bloodier side of Grace’s operations. Fingering Shannon McBride and then stepping out of the way so Grace could do what needed to be done was absolutely fine. Anything more than that made him sweat, not from squeamishness but from a healthy sense of self-preservation.
“People were in there with me,” Moulson pleaded. “The right-hand cubicle was locked and there was someone washing their hands at the sink. I think I just panicked.”
“And missed your aim when you were going for one of three doors right in front of you?” Grace shook her head. “I’m trying to see it, Moulson, but it’s not coming clear. Not at all.”
“I’m sorry,” Moulson said.
“Well, that’s fine as far as it goes. I would want you to be sorry. But sorry as you are, I’ve still got to deal with the mess you’ve made.”
She sighed loudly. Liz Earnshaw shifted her stance, sort of standing to attention, alerted by that sigh. It seemed likely that the verbal part of the interview was over and that something else was about to happen. But Grace shook her head and Earnshaw relaxed again.
“I’m assuming you took a lot of beatings when you got out of the infirmary,” Grace said. “I know Hannah Passmore had a smack at you. But she wasn’t the only one, was she?”
“No,” Moulson muttered.
“And before that, you were trying to starve yourself. And before that, you almost baked yourself alive. So a few more bruises here and there, probably you think they won’t be so much to worry about. And probably you’re right. They won’t be.” Gr
ace smiled, but only for a fraction of a second, waving goodbye to that cheery perspective. “But we’ll do it, so we can say we did, and then we’ll move on. Carol and Lizzie will take you back to your cell in a minute or two, and they’ll lay into you very seriously. They’ll leave marks. Visible ones, because this is about making a point. Then you’ll curl up under the blankets and put yourself together again and everything will get back to being much the same as it was. For the most part.”
Grace leaned forward and stared into Moulson’s eyes – a hard, appraising stare. “That hunger strike,” she said. “You went all the way to the edge and you looked down, but you didn’t jump. That’s a hopeful sign.”
She brushed a stray hair away from Moulson’s face. It would have been a gentle gesture anywhere else, but here and now it implied one thing and one thing only: ownership. “What happened at the court today?” she asked. “You got leave to appeal?”
Moulson nodded.
“Good for you,” Grace said. “Well then, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to put you back in the mix when your appeal date comes up. Mr Devlin over there will tell me when that is. And if you ever let me down again, Moulson, I’m going to kill you. There won’t be any warnings, or any more second chances. I’ll make arrangements, things will happen, you’ll pop your little clogs. Please notice that I’m not telling Liz to twist your arm or pull your hair back while I’m saying this. I don’t want you to be distracted. I want you to take these words away and think about them. Will you do that for me?”
Moulson was still staring into Grace’s placid, motherly eyes. She didn’t seem to realise she’d been asked a question. Until Liz Earnshaw nudged her shoulder, and she blurted out a “Yes!”
“Off you go then,” Grace said.
Moulson got up to leave. Her gaze shifted to Devlin again. As a signifier of Grace’s power and reach, he couldn’t have been better placed.
“What are you looking at?” he asked her belligerently. Moulson looked away.
She was shaking visibly as she walked past him, eyes on the ground. Liz Earnshaw followed her, and Big Carol fell in behind the two of them.
“You need me for anything?” Devlin asked Grace.
She looked at him like he’d just asked her what two and two made.
46
After Moulson left, Grace turned her mind to damage limitation. There were steps that needed to be taken to prevent this from getting any worse, and unfortunately some of them seemed to require a redrawing of her contract with Devlin. “You’ll have to go to the courthouse,” she told him, “and pick up that package.”
“Tonight?” Devlin was appalled.
“Yes, Dennis, tonight. We’re still building up our business in Curie, and that fucker Kenny Treacher has been sniffing around. The first thing that happens after Weeks and Hassan get out of solitary is he’ll reach out to them and try to get a shop-front up again. If we’re solid, we can keep him out, no trouble. But we need brand loyalty. If we let the tap run dry, we’re just inviting him in.”
Devlin went over to the door, closed it and set his back to it. His expression was strained and unhappy. “I don’t handle the drugs,” he reminded Grace, lowering his voice. “I don’t go near them.”
“In the normal run of things, no. This is an emergency.”
“I can pay one of the drivers to—”
“No.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“For two reasons,” Grace said. “Think, Dennis.” She took his hand and pulled him away from the door. He came docilely enough, but there was still tension in his rigid stance. She pushed him down on to the chair Moulson had vacated and stood over him with her hands on his shoulders, holding his gaze. And she spoke in her warm, persuasive voice rather than her robot drone. “There’s no run scheduled, so a driver doesn’t have a reason to be there.”
“Neither do I!”
“And the way we’ve divided it up, the drivers don’t see the packages. Only the cons do, and the cons do what they’re told because they know which way the wind blows. This particular package is full of every good thing schedules one and two have to offer. If your driver takes a look inside, he’ll shit bricks and broken hearts. We’ve got to keep this between the two of us.”
Devlin still wasn’t happy. He kept on blathering about how this went against the way they worked together, and what it would mean if he were caught with all those drugs in his hands.
Grace knew she could convince him, but there wasn’t much time to waste. She could see two quick ways of getting him over the finishing line. Either she could elevate him to full partner (which he probably already thought he was) by giving him the numbers of some of those bank accounts, or else she could give him a sexual favour she’d held back until now.
She mulled that little riddle over for a full two or three seconds, which for Grace counted as serious indecision. Then she knelt down and unzipped Devlin’s flies. Either of these courses was going to shift the balance of power between them, but she could easily rinse away the taste of his cock: telling him where the money was meant giving hostages to fortune forever.
“I know it goes past what we agreed, Dennis,” she murmured, sighting past his crotch at his guarded, uncertain eyes. “But sometimes it’s good to go outside your comfort zone. Let me show you, baby.”
It didn’t trouble her. It would only have troubled her if her marriage of convenience with Devlin had grown into something more. Since it hadn’t, one lever was as good as the next.
Something was sticking in her mind, though. After she’d brought Devlin to his climax, done a little hugging and murmuring and pushed him out through the door, she meditated for ten minutes to try and get her head straight. It didn’t work. She kept seeing Moulson’s face.
The trouble with Moulson’s face was that it reminded Grace of her own. Not the one she had now, but the one she’d been born with, disfigured by the facial cleft that had turned her childhood into a perpetual hell. Grace had fought hard to distance herself from the false start heredity had given her. Moulson was like the ghost of that false start come back to haunt her. She told herself that the resemblance was superficial. She had been born with her disfigurements and triumphed over them. Moulson had come by hers through weakness and self-destructive stupidity. The two of them were poles apart.
She pushed away the treacherous temptation to be merciful by rethinking it. Rough edges were what you needed because they were what you sharpened yourself against. Nobody ever got sharp from lying in a feather bed.
47
Jess lay as still as she could under the beating. Afterwards, lying still was easy because it hurt to move.
“A few more bruises here and there…” Grace had said. But there would be more than a few. Earnshaw and Loomis rolled over her like articulated trucks. Earnshaw in particular went at her with a wild, joyless enthusiasm that was like nothing Jess had ever seen.
She’d read somewhere about flagellants, religious zealots who mortified their own flesh by whipping or torturing themselves. Earnshaw was like that, except that she chose other people’s flesh to work on. It wasn’t sadism, or at least the look in her reddened face didn’t suggest any kind of fetishistic pleasure: it was as though she took the lid off some internal pain and it came out of her in a torrent, her flailing fists and boots just conduits for something that was ripping a hole in her as it came.
Once again Carol Loomis called Earnshaw off, with a gentle, indulgent “Hey, Lizzie. Fuck it, come on.” Earnshaw stood back, panting and sweating like a boxer, blowing air past her bared teeth. Jess looked up at her through eyes that were swelling shut. She didn’t move or speak or even cry. It was impossible to tell what might start the process off again, and she didn’t think she’d survive round two.
Big Carol took charge of the situation, lifting Jess up by her shoulders and dragging her over to the bunk. “Congratulations, by the way,” she said as she wedged Jess into a more or less stable position – one where she wouldn’t
just fall back out on to the floor. “On the appeal, I mean. You might get away with killing that kid yet, Moulson.”
Their footsteps receded, but there was no sound of the door closing. Of course they wanted her to be seen since she was an exhibit illustrating an important principle. You didn’t fuck with Harriet Grace, or else this would happen to you too.
For a long while she lay alone. Then Buller came in very quietly, inspected the damage and got to work. She wadded up handfuls of toilet paper to dab at the places where Jess was bleeding. For the bruises, there wasn’t anything much to do.
“You’re a mess, love,” she muttered as she worked. “But it’s not broken bones or anything. And that eye will probably be fine when the swelling goes down. You’ve just got a bit of a burst blood vessel there, I think. Here, press this on your cheek.”
Jess did as she was told. Buller left the cell briefly and came back with a couple of plasters. The antiseptic she already had to hand from when she’d used it to wash Shannon McBride’s wounded hands all those weeks ago. She didn’t suggest going to the infirmary and Jess didn’t bring up the possibility either. As with the earlier beatings, this was something that hadn’t officially happened.
“Lizzie gets carried away once she gets going,” Buller said, dabbing carefully at Jess’s cuts. “I did tell you to stay away from her.”
Jess didn’t bother to say that she hadn’t been given any choice. Her lip was shredded where it had impacted against her teeth: it was easier not to say anything at all.
When lock-up sounded, Buller helped her stand up long enough to shuffle to the door and be counted. If the warder with the click counter noticed the condition she was in, he didn’t feel it was worth commenting on.
48
