by M. R. Carey
A cat. Not a real one, but a child’s toy. It looked as though it had been loved to death, the body squeezed out of shape and the head narrowed to a bullet like the head of a baby just coming through the birth canal. Its black and ginger fur stuck up in tufts where it was there at all: there were big bald patches on its tummy and on one of its front legs.
Its name was Cassie. It had sustained most of this damage not through years of being cuddled but in a single traumatic night when it had gone into the washing machine in the Majestic Hotel in Eastbourne, accidentally taken off the bed along with the sheets. Cassie had had a purr up to that point, which was activated by tilting her from side to side. Something had happened to the mechanism when it got flooded with water: after that, Cassie’s purr sounded like a death rattle.
Jess wasn’t sure how she knew all this, but she knew it in a way that didn’t leave any room for doubt.
A lot of other knowledge came along with that rush of second-hand recognition. This was more than just a toy: it was a shield – the last rampart Passmore had thrown up in the face of thoughts too terrible for her to bear any more.
Passmore was right here. Inside the cat, or behind the cat, or peering out from somewhere really close – watching Jess as she knelt beside the battered little toy like a paramedic beside a body after a car crash.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Hannah,” Jess murmured. It seemed to be a reasonable place to start. She said some more things after that. A lot more things. About the dog, and the man with the heavy fists, and about the baby, although she hadn’t ever seen the baby, only heard it crying. The story Shannon McBride had told about Hannah’s last suicide attempt made it clear enough how the baby had come to be a strand in all this hurt and horror.
The one-sided conversation started slow and got slower. Jess had no idea how to do this. She was trying to change the way Hannah Passmore felt about very fundamental things, including herself. She was probably doing more harm just by being here than any number of words could balance out.
And it wasn’t words that did it in the end. It was the baby. As she talked about it, as she asked Passmore what its name was and why it was crying, Jess found herself describing the shape of a baby with her hands in the air in front of her. And slowly, in stop-start increments, like water dribbling into a bowl, the baby came to inhabit that space until Jess to her astonishment was holding him in her arms.
She knew this wasn’t a real child, any more than the dog or the man or the toy cat were real. Any more than her own battered face looming out of the dark was really her. It was an image conjured up at the point where her words touched Passmore’s memories.
But it was an image with power.
The colours in the churning mass around her shifted. They didn’t lighten, but the drab greys and browns began to be broken up by other colours, and the siren sound lost its distinctness, became some other sound that Jess couldn’t make out: someone singing a lullaby maybe, or children chanting multiplication tables in shrill, clamouring voices.
Passmore was standing in front of her. Showing up at last in her own dream.
Jess stood. The legs she didn’t really have felt shaky. She held out the baby and Passmore took it. For a moment, the two women were looking right into each other’s eyes. Moulson could read nothing into that stare, intense though it was. She wasn’t even sure if it meant that Passmore knew she was there.
I’m not, she thought. I’m not here. I’m a dream. Inside another dream.
“He needs changing,” Passmore said. She was still looking right at Jess, not down at the baby. She spoke with slow, massive emphasis.
“That’s probably why he’s crying,” Jess agreed.
Passmore didn’t seem to hear. She walked away, singing to the baby in a throaty undertone they could barely hear.
The ghost of Alex Beech watched her go with a troubled, disapproving look on his face.
She still doesn’t like you, he said after a few moments’ silence.
“I don’t need her to like me. Where’s the door, Alex?”
Everywhere, he told her curtly, already turning his back and walking away. Jess ran to keep up with him. She thought he was probably right – that you could walk in any direction here and get to where you wanted to be, as long as you knew what you were doing. But she still didn’t, and the thought of being trapped in Hannah Passmore’s nightmares terrified her.
As they walked back together through the endless dark, she tried to placate Alex. “I know you thought you were helping me when you scared Hannah,” she said. “And it’s wonderful that you would want to protect me, Alex, it really is. You’re my only friend in Fellside. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” When he still didn’t talk, she tried to break down his sullen silence by another route. “How did you learn to do all these things? To find your way around in this place? It must have taken you ages.”
It’s not hard.
“It’s hard for me. It seems to go on for ever.”
The ghost shook his head emphatically. Nothing goes on for ever. If it did, there wouldn’t be anything else, would there?
56
That night also, Sylvie Stock fell asleep at her desk in the infirmary and had her very own Moulson dream – joining that party a little late, all things considered.
She dreamed she saw Moulson walking down a street in Walton, Liverpool, which was where Stock was born and where she lived until she was nineteen years old. They were on Breeze Hill, the street that led from the ring road down to Walton Hospital. Stock was walking behind Moulson, hurrying on her way to somewhere, but she had to slow down because Moulson was right in her way. Moulson didn’t seem to notice her – didn’t speed up her pace or step aside or even look around.
“It’s hard for me,” she said. It wasn’t said to her but it was loud enough for Stock to hear. “It seems to go on for ever.”
There was someone walking next to Moulson, and that was who she was talking to. This second person wasn’t there until Stock turned to look at him, but then it felt as though he’d been there all along. She thought at first it was the boy Moulson had killed, but it wasn’t. It was someone else entirely. Someone who kept his face turned away, either out of anger or because he didn’t want to be recognised. The other person answered, but all Stock heard was a mumble.
Still, that’s how close Moulson came to her. How close they both came.
In the dream, Stock didn’t hate Moulson, and she wasn’t afraid of her. They just passed each other by. Close enough to talk, but neither of them said anything, and it didn’t even seem to Stock that Moulson noticed she was there.
It was a missed opportunity, she thought as she woke up. Not a real one, obviously, but the melancholy of that thought stayed with her for hours afterwards as the atmosphere of a dream sometimes can.
57
Grace was a victim of her own success.
Her expansion into Curie wing went almost unchallenged, and it turned out there were more customers there than she’d ever imagined. She’d always thought that people on longer sentences, and especially lifers, would be more likely to turn to chemical consolations. The opposite seemed to be the case. The Curie women, so much closer on average to getting back out into the big wide world, seemed to have stronger links to it, along with more disposable income and more ingrained habits.
Habits which it was now Grace’s job to service. And that meant higher turnover, which meant more product coming through.
“Well, it goes one of two ways,” Devlin told her in the course of another après-sex summit conference in her cell. “Either the couriers have got to carry more each time, or there’ve got to be more pickups.”
Grace didn’t waste a lot of thought on that conundrum. “Maybe we could slip a little more into the packages, but we’d be talking a gram here and a pill there. There just isn’t any leeway, Dennis. You know what will happen if any of those women shows a bulge where they shouldn’t.”
“Who’s going to look? If th
ey’ve been under supervision the whole time they were out…” But Devlin ran out of steam mid-sentence, thinking about all the checkpoints the women had to walk through when they came back on-block. Not even Grace could bribe every guard along the way.
“So we need more couriers,” Grace summarised, as though the Devil hadn’t spoken at all. She stroked his chest to soften the blow. “Get me a list. Anyone who’s got an appeal pending or any kind of a medical condition. Get Sally to authorise more trips to Leeds. X-rays. Consultations. Whatever the fuck. He can make up the paperwork as he goes along.”
“There’s something else,” Devlin said, looking hangdog.
“What? Don’t tell me Scratchwell is going back to random searches.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s Kenny Treacher.”
Treacher had slipped to the back of Grace’s mind, but Devlin assured her that it wasn’t mutual. “We knew he wasn’t going to like being pushed out of the picture. He’s still mixing it with Dizzy, and he’s still talking to Hassan and Weeks.”
“Talking?” Grace’s tone had a dangerous edge to it.
“I think maybe supplying.”
“Fuck!” Grace threw off the blanket and got out of bed. Devlin watched her pace for a while. His frank admiration for her well-toned body was tempered by his unease at how tense and edgy she was. These were dangerous waters. “We can’t let that go by,” she said at last. “They’re dealing again? Seriously?”
“A little bit, yeah. You want to come back in here? I can warm your—”
“Dennis. We’ve got to do something.”
She stared at him, waiting for him to do his usual thing. Raise half-arsed objections, be argued down, finally accept the obvious.
“Yeah,” Devlin agreed wearily. “I know we have. Look, the warders I bought off when we arranged that fight, they’re still onside. This will cost more because… well, because of what it is. But I can do it. You just say the word, I’ll make it happen. Pay them to pay someone else to pay someone else, et cetera, et cetera. Long distance, no bounceback to us.”
That was the crucial factor, of course. He was okay with this, more or less, because it wouldn’t be him taking any of the risks. Grace got back in beside him, took his head in her two hands and kissed him, long and hard. “I knew I could count on you, Dennis,” she said. “Nobody gets me the way you do. Make it good, yeah?”
And it was. The price was steep, but Devlin made sure that Grace got plenty of bang for her buck. Two days after that conversation, Hassan and Weeks slipped in the shower, and kept on slipping every time they got up again. Hassan was hospitalised with a broken collar-bone. Dominica Weeks wasn’t so lucky. That was one very slippery shower.
The news of her death took the wind right out of Devlin’s sails. He’d thought he was buying a beating, hadn’t counted on a murder. “What does it matter?” Grace asked him. “It got the job done, didn’t it? It’s not like it’s your first, Dennis.”
Devlin knew what she was referring to, and shook his head. “Suresh was different. All I did was clear the way that time, I didn’t hand over any money. Jesus, Grace, Weeks is dead. There’s going to be an investigation. There’ll have to be.”
“It won’t come anywhere near you,” Grace promised. “It will die on Curie.”
Which it did, eventually. There were detectives and uniformed cops on-block for a few days, going over the crime scene and taking statements. But part of Grace’s outlay had been to a lifer named Stephie Monk, whose terms – five thousand in used bills to her daughter Agnes in exchange for a full and circumstantial confession – were very reasonable. The investigation was a three-day wonder.
That wasn’t the end of it, though. Not entirely. A few weeks after that, Devlin started to hear stories about suspicious strangers showing up at the Pot of Gold, the pub at the bottom of the long road that led across the fell to the village of Ireby. A lot of the warders drank there at the end of their shifts, especially the ordinary turnkeys. Supervisors and above favoured the Mason Arms in Wigton or the Sun Inn in Keswick.
The strangers were cheerful in their manner and open-handed to a fault. They were happy to get rounds in for the Fellside screws, and to listen to their stories about the rigours of their shitty job. Moreover, they were willing to pay big money for a name: the name of Harriet Grace’s mule.
When he heard about this, Devlin immediately took it to Grace. But Grace wasn’t concerned at all. “It’s Treacher,” the Devil told her. “These are Treacher’s people. He’s still after us.”
“Of course it’s Treacher,” Grace agreed. “He had a hard-on for Dominica Weeks and he’s taking it personally that she died. But he’s got no foothold here now. Hassan and Weeks are out of the picture and nobody else is going to deal for him after what happened. He wants to hit back at us, but he doesn’t even know what he’s looking for. He thinks we’ve just got the one courier bringing our shipments in. Let him go piss in the wind for as long as he likes.”
Devlin was less sanguine. He got Grace’s point about her massively decentralised network. It was very clever. But to his mind, the problem with a system where everyone knows a little bit about a big thing is that there are an awful lot of people holding clues as to how that big thing works. Treacher was groping in the dark right now, but it wouldn’t take very many loose words to bring him illumination.
“And then what?” Grace scoffed. “It’s not like we’ve got fixed times or fixed drop points, Dennis. Well, we do in here. Outside, we rotate – and our schedule depends on who’s going out when. Even if Treacher knew how we were working it, he couldn’t block us. Not unless he sends his people to squat in the courthouse, Leeds General and the bloody probation office.”
Which was true as far as it went. But Devlin really missed the good old days when everything was contained in G block. In G block, he was like God, and Grace was like the archangel Grabriel.
He could see trouble coming and he knew he couldn’t stop it. There was nothing to duck or dodge, just a sense of a big shitstorm impending. An argument could be made for battening down the hatches and waiting until it had passed, but Grace wouldn’t entertain that idea for a moment. “We’re still setting up,” she said. “Still building the architecture. If we close the shop now, we’ll never get it open again.”
So much for the voice of reason. Devlin wondered if he should put his foot down, tell her that this was just how it was going to be, but he couldn’t make himself commit to such a reckless course of action. A part of him knew that he would only have the whip hand over Grace as long as he never, ever made any sudden movements in the direction of the whip.
So he did nothing, and tried not to think about what might be building under the horizon.
58
Paul Levine played detective with no success at all.
He started by re-reading the files on Jess Moulson’s original trial from cover to cover. They included a fairly detailed set of background notes on Alex Beech which explicitly stated a complete absence of siblings, half-siblings and cousins of any degree of consanguinity.
Then he went through all the witness statements that had been assembled by the defence but not used in Moulson’s trial – two boxes full of them. He was just duplicating Moulson’s own efforts there, but it was a place to start. There was no mention in any of those documents or in Brian Pritchard’s notes of any female friend or relative who had a particularly intense relationship with Alex Beech, either positive or negative.
It was a waste of half a day – although admittedly not all of that time was spent reading the statements. Somewhere along the way, Paul turned up the folder containing the photographic evidence, much of which concerned Moulson’s and Street’s burn injuries. He wasn’t being prurient, or he told himself he wasn’t, but he found his mind drawn to those images. He couldn’t help himself. The photographs of Moulson’s face before and then during its surgical reconstruction fascinated and moved him. The photos of Street not only left him cold but actually repulsed h
im. He wasn’t sure why. Because Street wasn’t Moulson, probably.
But there was something else in his mind besides those purely personal responses. Something about the images was affecting him, touching his perceptions on a different level. He kept on looking, turning the entire stack over at least three or four times. When he glanced at his watch, he saw with shock and dismay that an hour had passed. He put the photos away and got back to work. Whatever was in the pictures, it had nothing to do with what Jess Moulson had asked of him. Or if it did, his subconscious would work on it and at some point the toast would pop up of its own accord.
The next thing he did was to tackle the media eulogies on Alex Beech, which were daunting. There were more than a thousand. Most of them rehashed the same few facts, the same handful of juicy quotes, so Paul’s read-throughs got quicker as he went along, but it was still a mountain of windy prose, and after he’d scaled it, he was left nauseous and numbed.
There was nothing in there. The dead boy was described in relation to his parents, whose marriage had since broken up, or else in terms of his hobbies and interests: his favourite book or movie franchise (How to Train Your Dragon), his first pet (goldfish), a brief flirtation with Shotokan karate that left him with an orange belt, the lowest after white.
Paul could read between the lines, at least a little. Where were the tearful encomiums from Alex’s school friends? The accolades from his teachers? One or two of the articles had photos of crying kids at a school memorial service, but there were no pull quotes. There ought to be dozens.
He called the school that Alex had attended, Planter’s Lane, and managed to get through to Alice Munroe, his last teacher there. He told her he was trying to build up a profile of Alex to get a better understanding of him. He was upfront about the context, which was Jessica Moulson’s appeal, and even over the phone he could feel the frost settling in.
