Fellside

by M. R. Carey

  Sally could use his own stock so long as he didn’t use his own packaging – the box would have a batch code that would lead right back to him. But that wasn’t a problem, since Devlin invariably threw away the box before he left the infirmary, leaving the tiny white pills safely anonymous to a casual glance.

  Three easy stages would do it. One: peel back the foil on the container, take out the pethidine tablets, replace them with a doctored alternative. Potassium cyanide would be quickest, but would also be quite hard for Sally to source without leaving a trace. Much better was Conium maculatum. Hemlock. There was a clump of it growing in full view in the horticultural gardens at Cholt Hey. A dozen leaves, mashed and boiled and dried and powdered, would be more than enough. Complete respiratory collapse in a couple of minutes at most if he got the concentration right. Devlin would think he’d got something caught in his throat right up until the paralysis set in.

  Two: replace the foil. And then three: remove his fingerprints from every last centimetre of the foil strip and the plastic blister pack. He would need to do a few dry runs to get his hand in, but he had interned in a pharmacy and he was sure he could make it work.

  He was equally sure that he never would. This pleasant stroll through the logistics had made him aware of the one piece of equipment he was lacking. He just didn’t have a killer instinct. Even playing the murder out as a fantasy left him queasy. There was no way he could bring himself to do any of this in real life.

  He tested himself, just to be sure. He imagined killing Devlin face to face, using every method he could think of. Gun. Knife. Blunt instrument. Strangling cord. Hand grenade. Even in the ideal theatre of the mind, he couldn’t close the deal. Just couldn’t. There was a hole where his bloodlust should be. He hated Devlin enough to kill him a hundred times over, but it seemed the first step was always going to be too steep for him.

  So what did that leave?

  He could go to the governor with what he knew. But he had put his eggs in that basket once before and the bottom had fallen right out of it. There was nothing to hope for from the governor except disaster.

  Go to the papers? Panorama? The World Wide Web? But with what? All he had was his bare word. And he wouldn’t even have that for very long because Devlin or Harriet Grace would kill him for certain as soon as he opened his mouth.

  The doctor raced around this little rat-run in his mind until he thought he was going crazy with it. All his hatred was focused on the Devil. He didn’t resent Grace much at all. Criminals doing criminal things? That didn’t count as news. Devlin was different. Devlin was meant to keep order in Fellside, and instead he was a vector for evil and chaos. Devlin controlled him and humiliated him and terrorised him on a daily basis. Sally couldn’t live with it any more.

  But there didn’t seem to be any way to take Devlin down that didn’t lead to self-immolation. And Sally wasn’t under any illusions about his courage or his moral fibre. Not any more. He’d proved time and time again that he wasn’t built to be a fighter or a martyr. So what he needed was a way to strike at Devlin from cover and never be caught.

  One thing he did have was money. Every drop he made brought another envelope full of grubby, crumpled, non-sequential banknotes, which Devlin had warned him not to even think about taking to the bank. Sally’s vices were cheap ones – Indian takeaways and DVD box sets – so the money was just piling up in a kitchen drawer, which was getting a little hard to open.

  Sally invested some of it in a very expensive, very high-spec gadget that called itself a Spycam Super-Pro. It was about the size of his thumbnail, but was miraculously capable of recording video with full sound. The receiver was a lot bigger but looked innocuous, a flat black box that might hold a socket wrench kit or a set of steak knives. It had sufficient range to be left in Sally’s car, drawing power off the 12-volt socket, while the camera sat in the infirmary underneath a framed photo of Sharne Fell, safely hidden in the flame’s shadow. A day’s footage took up about five per cent of the receiver’s hard disk space.

  Once Sally had installed the camera, he took pleasure in coaxing Devlin to say incriminating things about their joint enterprise in front of it. He would ask leading questions about Grace, their expanding client base in Curie wing, the timing of the drops. Devlin usually told him to mind his own business, but even these equivocal responses made it clear what the two of them were doing. And every once in a while, the Devil would make a slightly longer speech, mostly out of a desire to put Sally in his place: there were lots of circumstantial details in those.

  Each night Sally would review the day’s footage, meticulously extract, label and save the files he wanted to keep, transfer them to his home computer and trash the rest. He was building up a pretty impressive archive. But he could never get Devlin to tell him anything about the other side of Grace’s operation – how the drugs got into the prison and who carried them. He tried to lay out bait in the form of general statements, thinking aloud about the logistics of the drops and pickups, but Devlin just ignored him.

  It was all sky-pie, in any case. Sally didn’t have a clue what he was going to do with any of this stuff. Leave it to someone in his will, maybe. Even a revenge he wouldn’t be around to see would be some comfort. But in the meantime, he drew a little strength from the knowledge that he had something in his back pocket that the Devil knew nothing about.

  Two things actually.

  “I’m going back home to Portugal,” DiMarta told him one evening when they were clocking off together. “I’m giving in my notice tomorrow. But I wanted you to know first.”

  “Your mother?” Sally guessed.

  Patience nodded. “She’s finding it much harder to move about. And there’s a vacancy at Dona Estefania. Shift work, just like here. I think I could make a go of it.”

  “I’ll miss you,” Sally said, meaning it. “But you should be with her. No doubt about it.”

  60

  Jess was distressed to hear about her Aunt Brenda’s relapse. Then delighted when Paul handed over her new number. Then distressed all over again when he told her that he couldn’t help her any more. “Directly, I mean. With your own… investigations.”

  He knew he sounded evasive. He couldn’t help that: he was evading her. Hoping to forestall questions, he lifted the cardboard box from his lap and pushed it across the table. Seven thousand pages of documents, exempted from quarantine by the magic of lawyer – client privilege.

  “I want you to have this,” he told her. “It’s everything I could find on the case that wasn’t in the evidence boxes. There’s newspaper articles, our own internal notes, a few other bits and pieces that I picked up along the way. I went through all of it at least once, but maybe you’ll see something I missed.”

  Jess was dismayed. “But I need you to keep working on this,” she said. “It’s relevant to my appeal. I already told you—”

  “We’re taking a different tack with the appeal, Jess.”

  “What tack? Tell me.”

  Yeah, well, I would if I could, Paul thought glumly. It was less than twenty-four hours since he’d sat in front of the partners in one of the boardrooms and tried to make a case for letting her in on the secret. He’d been a lone voice.

  “I’d prefer not to at this stage,” Brian Pritchard had told him. “We’re still researching your find, and we need to be absolutely sure of our facts before we finalise our strategy.”

  What he meant was: leave her out of the loop. Paul knew that, and he knew why. Most of the evidence that had condemned Jess had come from her own mouth – and at the end of the trial she’d wanted to change her plea to guilty, against the advice of her counsel. Then after that there’d been the hunger strike. “Martyr syndrome,” Pritchard called it. He saw Jess as a loose cannon who could easily sabotage her own appeal, either intentionally or by accident. And while it was her legal right to do just that, the partners on the whole preferred to win their cases when they were susceptible to being won.

  So Paul was
here to review one or two relevant portions of Jess’s testimony, and to give her the box as a consolation prize. But his timing was off, and the second part of that agenda torpedoed the first. He was too anxious, as always, to show her he was on her side. Jess opened the box and started to sort through the contents, seeming much more interested in Alex Beech’s past than in her own future.

  Which, when you thought about it, pretty much proved Pritchard’s point.

  “Can I just ask you to re-read this?” Paul said, thrusting a document out towards her and holding it in front of her face until she looked at it.

  “What is it?” Moulson asked.

  “Part of the transcript from your first trial. John Street’s testimony about the night of the fire. Could you read it over and tell me if there’s anything there you disagree with?”

  Moulson read quickly and distractedly. “No,” she said. “It’s all correct.”

  “The times? The sequence of events? Everything is accurate?”

  “I think so, yes. Didn’t I already say that?”

  “Yeah, you did. But we want to make sure nothing slipped through the gaps. Please, Jess, read it carefully.”

  She did her best, her eyes flicking over the lines, most of her mind somewhere else entirely. “It all looks fine,” she told him.

  “Okay. One more.” He handed her a second sheaf of papers: more transcripts, this time of her own testimony.

  Moulson gave him a sour look when she realised what it was. “I’m not going to remember better now than I did at the time, Paul. If I disagree with anything I said back then, the clever money would be on the original version.”

  Paul shrugged. “I’m just asking you to read it and tell me if that’s still how you remember it.”

  He thought for a moment she was going to rebel even at that. Her mouth opened, then closed again. Scowling, she read the document. She gave it a lot more attention than she’d given to Street’s account. She read every line.

  Then handed it back to him. “Yes,” was all she said.

  “The timing. The sequence.”

  “Yes. That’s how it is in my mind.”

  “You both shot up at eight o’clock? You and John Street?”

  “Yes. Or a little later, maybe. John went out and bought the stuff. We shot up as soon as he got back.”

  “You don’t mention whether he went first or second.”

  Moulson thought for a moment before she answered. “I went first.”

  “Because you asked to, or just because?”

  Another pause. “Because John was in charge of the needle.”

  “That was something that was agreed between you?”

  “It wasn’t something we ever…”

  “Okay, so it was just assumed? Taken for granted?”

  Jess nodded.

  Paul asked her a few more questions about her memories of the fire, but didn’t go anywhere near Alex Beech. He was afraid to set her off again now when he needed to leave.

  He kept a disciplined silence as he gathered his notes, shut down his laptop, stowed everything back in his briefcase. He made it all the way to the door, but as he reached for the handle, the temptation just got too strong to resist. He turned on the threshold and looked back at her.

  “What would you do,” he asked her, “if you won the appeal? Where would you go?”

  Moulson only stared. “Decisions, decisions,” she said after a few moments, trying to make it into a joke.

  “Seriously, Jess, do you have a place to stay?”

  “Seriously?” The good half of her mouth quirked and trembled a few times. For once he couldn’t tell what emotion it was trying to convey. “I think I’d have to check into a hotel somewhere. And then get thrown back in here again for bad debt. I suppose I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

  “When you come to it,” Paul said, “you can stay with me. If you want to.”

  He put the door between them before she could reply.

  As he left the prison, Paul had so many contradictory emotions churning inside him that he thought he might be sick. He was still jubilant about what he’d found in the CCTV evidence. That had given him the confidence to say what he’d just said to her. But saying it left him terrified. He had exposed himself so blatantly! And then there was the guilt. He’d promised her that he’d try to find out about Alex Beech’s friends, and he’d been doing his best, but then – because of what he’d found – he’d had to leave her stranded. He was going to save her, but failing her still hurt.

  61

  Jess went from the interview suite to the phone queue, where she stood her vigil with the box of documents in her hands. There was no answer from Aunt Brenda’s mobile, and when it went to voicemail, the payphone pocketed her 60p. She queued again, struck out again and lost another chunk of her diminishing change. After that, she gave it up, deciding that she might have better luck if she tried again later. At 60p a shot, she would only get three tries each day.

  She took the box back to her cell, which was already full of boxes. “Oh, fucking wonderful,” Lorraine Buller muttered when she saw it.

  “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s fine. There’s still a land route to the sink.”

  Jess was still thinking about what Levine had said as he left. She’d realised by this time that he had a sort of infatuation with her. Those heavy-handed hints that she was going to win her appeal were probably just wishful thinking – part of a romantic fantasy that ended with her falling into his lawyerly arms. That might have been a pleasant fantasy for her too, back before her face got ruined. Now – quite apart from her being damaged goods, bad news and hard work – her fantasies mostly centred on being in a place without any mirrors in it.

  It was free association time, so she broke the box open right away. The lid was tight, and she had to tug a little harder than she’d expected. The box slipped out of her hands and the contents spilled across the floor. Lorraine Buller, who once again was reading on her bunk, complained about the mess but without much animation. It was too hot to get angry, and anyway it didn’t take more than a few seconds for Jess to scoop up the fallen papers, handful after handful, and stack them on the table.

  She sat down and read. She started with the newspaper articles. They were written in a racier style than the notes and depositions, and they had pictures, so they leapt to the eye. But as she read, a different image kept catching the ragged edge of her attention. It recurred in a lot of documents, always in the same place – right at the top, dead centre.

  Jess fished one of these documents out and flicked her eye down the rows and rows of little boxes filled with neatly typed platitudes. It was one of Alex Beech’s old school reports. C for English, B for Maths and Science, B for Art. Bland generalisations about skills attained or not attained. There were no insights here. Only, at the bottom, like a little white flag of surrender, his form teacher’s summary that “Alex is a quiet boy who pays attention in class but could be encouraged to participate more”.

  This man or woman (the signature was a squiggle, something-something-Munroe) hadn’t known Alex Beech. Not at all. Or maybe the assessment had been an accurate one until the fire. Maybe it was death that had changed Alex from a cipher into an avenging angel who could walk into Hannah Passmore’s dreams and slap her senseless.

  Jess put the sparse, unconvincing document aside and went back to the newspaper articles.

  But something was nibbling away in a corner of her mind, and after a minute or so she went back to the school report. She’d already noticed what was weird about it. Now she had to wait while that knowledge made its way from subliminal alleyways to the forefront of her mind. Her scalp prickled a little when the full realisation hit her. She sorted through the box’s contents looking for the rest of Alex’s reports. They were all the same.

  It was probably nothing, she told herself. The dead boy had forgotten a lot of things about his past life. He’d even been a little vague about his name the first time they
’d met. But this wasn’t forgetting exactly. And it didn’t feel like nothing to her.

  Alex? she called inside her mind.

  He didn’t come. He still didn’t like the daylight hours much, and as they got closer to midsummer, the hour of his arrival had slipped a little later each day. When the sun hit the top of Fellside’s outer wall, chasing the thin sliver of remaining sunlight across the exercise yard to the back of the refectory, that was when he would make his entrance, walking through the wall of the cell as though it wasn’t there at all – which for him, of course, it wasn’t.

  “Walk,” a gruff voice said.

  Jess turned at the sound to find the cell suddenly a lot more crowded. Carol Loomis and Liz Earnshaw had walked in together, but now they separated to stand on either side of the door, very much the way the warders did when they picked a cell for a random search. Carol was the one who’d spoken – to Lorraine Buller, not to Jess. She hooked a thumb over her shoulder to indicate in which direction Buller’s walk should take her. Out.

  Buller climbed down from her bunk slowly, reluctance written on her face. “You going to hit her some more?” she asked.

  “None of your fucking business,” Earnshaw rumbled. “Off you go.”

  Lorraine headed for the door. But she stopped on the threshold. “You know she’s got her appeal coming up? If she goes into court looking like raw meat, the governor will come after you. He’ll have to.”

  Carol Loomis gripped Lorraine’s shoulder and pushed her out. “We just want a word,” she said. “Don’t you worry about it.”

  She shut the door, and the three of them were alone. Jess’s mind fizzed with terror. Her memories of Earnshaw’s unfettered violence were still very fresh. She backed away, even though neither of the women had made a move towards her.

  Big Carol grinned and shook her head. “You know what your trouble is?” she said. “You always pick the wrong moments to piss yourself. We’re not here to hurt you. Just to pass on a message.”