by M. R. Carey
From behind them, Ratner swore. “No fucking way!” A hand came down on Jess’s shoulder, but not roughly. “Hey,” Corcoran said. “Come on, Moulson. Mr What’s-your-name. I don’t think this was meant to be a conjugal.”
Ratner slid the van door open and Corcoran stepped back to let Jess climb inside. For a second longer, she held her ground.
“Thanks, Paul,” she said. “Thanks for everything. I’m sorry if you think I’ve used you. No, I have. I have used you. I didn’t mean to, I was just… trying to get something done. To keep a promise.”
“Well, you’re fine,” Paul said, utterly flustered. “I mean, it’s fine. It’s fine and you’re welcome.”
“Enough of this fuckery,” Ratner said.
She stepped in between Jess and Paul, forcing him to retreat. Then she put a hand on Jess’s arm and turned her. Jess climbed into the van, still in Ratner’s grip. Corcoran followed.
“Try and get a good night’s—” Paul called after her. But the closing door cut him off.
65
All the way back to the prison, across the stark beauty of the fells, Jess didn’t say a word and didn’t look up from her lap.
Alex had asked two things of her – that she reunite him with his friend and that she find out the name of his enemy. He wanted to know them both, the girl who’d loved him and the girl who’d hurt him. Jess had failed completely in both goals. She had nothing to give him. Nothing to say to him.
And the package taped to her stomach was a burden almost equally big. Instead of clues, answers, revelations, what she was bringing back to Fellside was hard drugs for Harriet Grace’s dirty little empire. How far from redemption could you get in a single jump?
She couldn’t find a way to sit comfortably with the package. Folding her hands hid it from view but maybe drew too much attention to it, accentuating the straight line ruled across her midriff under the yellow tracksuit top. Leaving her arms at her sides was more casual but made her feel naked and defenceless. She was oppressively conscious of the package’s bulk, the squareness of its corners, even its weight, which had seemed slight at first but was now harder and harder to bear.
She felt as though she was being carried bodily towards a decision she wasn’t ready to make. And once she got back to Fellside, it would be taken out of her hands as soon as she found herself between the rock that was Liz Earnshaw and the hard place represented by Big Carol Loomis.
The high wall of Fellside reached out to them and took them in. They parked up, and Jess was hustled through secure transfer. There were three separate gates to pass through. At the outer gate, Corcoran signed them all back in on a log sheet. At the inner one, Jess’s return was registered manually by a guard and electronically by one of the secretaries on the duty desk.
“Can we have a different van tomorrow?” Ratner asked. “That one smells of piss.”
“Shouldn’t piss in it then,” the secretary pointed out. She broke into chuckles. Corcoran joined her, Ratner kept a stony face.
The two guards walked with Jess across to Goodall, where there were more gates to pass through. Finally they opened the main door into the Goodall ballroom, where Jess expected to be left to her own devices. She stepped away from the guards and back into gen pop like a fishing boat disengaging from a couple of tugs. But it didn’t take. Ratner tapped her shoulder and pointed to the stairs.
“Keep walking,” she said.
Jess didn’t obey. For a moment she didn’t understand what she was being told to do. “It’s free association,” she pointed out. “I think I’ll just… stay here.”
“No, you won’t,” Ratner said. “Mr Devlin’s orders.”
Jess still didn’t get it, although she was starting to. “But—”
“You’re confined to your cell while the appeal’s on. You know how popular you are, Moulson. Someone might think you’ve got a chance of getting out early and decide to do something about it. So you stay indoors and tuck yourself up warm.”
Ratner’s hand gripped Jess’s forearm now and turned her bodily, just as she’d done at the courthouse but with a lot more insistence. “Give me a hand here,” she said to Corcoran.
Corcoran seemed uncertain. “Dennis said this?”
“Yes, he did. Come on, take her other arm.”
“Sorry, Moulson,” Corcoran muttered. She did as she was told, and although her grip was a lot lighter than Ratner’s, Jess was now trapped between them. They propelled her firmly towards the stairway. Ratner made the pace, which was a quick march. Jess almost stumbled as she was propelled up the stairs towards the next landing.
The women in the ballroom had turned to look at her, with speculative rather than hostile faces. To most of them, by this time, Jess Moulson felt like personal business. She had been in their dreams a lot lately.
Jess was almost too stunned to think but there wasn’t much thinking that had to be done. This wasn’t a random act of management – it was Grace: Grace needing to make sure that Jess delivered the goods this time and not trusting her to do it on her own. Earnshaw and Loomis would be loitering near her cell and would step in as soon as the guards left.
That thought hardened her resolve. She might have sleepwalked into submission all by herself, driven by fear or pragmatism or some kind of special pleading about staying alive so she could do right by Alex. But now she had something solid to push against. She did it without thinking.
Ten steps up, halfway between the ballroom floor and the level one landing, she accelerated and leaned back at the same time. Her feet kept climbing the steps, her body’s weight sank back into the arms of the two guards.
She kicked and went over backwards.
They could have held her if they’d seen it coming, but they were bracing from underneath and Jess was shooting out horizontally. She fell back down the stairs, twisting to land on her side because she didn’t want to break her spine. One arm came up to protect her head, the other clutched her stomach in case the drug pouch came free, but she couldn’t maintain the crash position for more than a second or two.
She rolled and clattered all the way back down the stairs to the soundtrack of Corcoran’s yell of surprise and alarm and Ratner’s blurted “Shit!” She didn’t quite have enough momentum to go head over heels: it was a messy, sprawling slither and a bruising crash on to the ballroom floor.
A whole crowd of women ran over to check out the damage, to offer help if they could, or else just to watch something more interesting than cockroach races.
Ratner grabbed Jess by the arm to haul her upright again, but a couple of dozen voices shouted no. Ratner hesitated and looked over at Corcoran, who was also shaking her head. “She might have a spinal injury,” Marge Todd said. “If you move her, you could fuck her up for life.”
“Call the infirmary,” Corcoran said to Ratner. “I’ll stay with her.”
“She’s fine,” Ratner said.
“We don’t know that. Go call the doc.”
Ratner looked like she was going to say something more, but she swallowed it, whatever it was, and went to do as she was told. Jess lay on the floor trying to look like someone concussed and confused. When Corcoran asked her how she was, she didn’t answer.
Patience DiMarta arrived a couple of minutes later, moving at a fast clip. She studied Jess’s bloodied nose and scraped hand and then started feeling her over cautiously for other injuries.
“What happened?” she asked.
“She fell down the stairs,” Corcoran said.
“Fell?” Ratner was indignant. “The mad bitch took a bloody nosedive.”
“Can you feel your feet?” DiMarta asked her.
“Yes.”
“Move them, then.”
Jess did, evidently to DiMarta’s satisfaction.
“How about standing?” she suggested.
Jess sat up, but she made a big deal out of it, moving slowly with a lot of wincing and gasping.
“All right,” DiMarta said. “I’ll take her.”
“She’s meant to be confined to her cell,” Ratner protested.
DiMarta gave her a blank look, as though a piece of furniture had piped up at her. “That’s nice,” she said. And then to Jess, “Come on, prisoner. Nothing wrong with your legs, as far as I can see.”
She helped Jess get herself upright, with Jess turning in a creditable performance as someone who’d taken enough knocks to forget where the vertical hold was.
Ratner again. “I’ve got my orders. She’s meant to be—”
“I’m not arguing with you about your orders,” DiMarta said across her. “She’s hurt; I’m taking her.”
Ratner was standing between them and the door. She stayed there for a moment or so, scowling, weighing up her options.
DiMarta spoke more slowly and distinctly, as though she was talking to an imbecile. “Go to the rulebook. Look it up. Don’t you know anything? If you break this, you’ll be the one to pay for it.”
It was an unanswerable argument. A big part of the infirmary’s function was making sure that Fellside, its managers and its corporate owners were indemnified if any of the inmates came to harm. As soon as DiMarta arrived on the scene, her jurisdiction was pretty much total. All Ratner could do was step out of the way, which she did now with seething bad grace.
“There you are,” DiMarta said grimly. “Thank you so much.”
66
Sylvie Stock was in the infirmary when DiMarta arrived with Moulson. She didn’t take it well.
“What’s she doing here?” she blurted.
“She took a fall,” Patience said. “It’s all right, Sylvie. I’ll deal with it.”
She sat Jess down in a straight-backed chair, disinfected her scraped wrist and cleaned the blood off her face. Jess’s nose was still bleeding sluggishly so DiMarta gave her a tissue to hold under it.
“You’d better get your clothes off,” she said. “Let’s take a look at you, see whether anything’s bent or broken.”
Jess swallowed bile. The moment of decision had its own peculiar taste, sour and burning. “I need the toilet,” she said.
DiMarta nodded. “All right. You know where it is.”
“And I’d like to talk to Dr Salazar, if that’s possible.”
After Moulson had trudged through into the bathroom, DiMarta gave Stock a look with a big question mark in it. “That was an odd reaction,” she said.
Sylvie shrugged it off. “I don’t like that woman. Sometimes you just take against people. For example, if they murder an innocent child or something. I wouldn’t ever let it affect my professional judgement.”
“No,” Patience agreed. “Of course not.”
“I’m serious,” Stock snapped. “I’m a nurse, Patience. I do my job. When have you ever known me not to do my job?”
“Never,” DiMarta said. “Listen, why don’t you go and tell Sally she’s here and wants a word with him?”
“Fine,” Sylvie muttered. She walked out, slamming the door behind her.
She got ten yards down the corridor and burst into tears. It was just too much. She’d done a terrible thing but it had been an accident and it wasn’t fair that it should keep coming back again and again to torture her. And Sally knew everything. Sally could shake her off into the gutter with a word whenever he wanted to.
That was hard to live with. It made Stock desperate. It pushed her to the brink of an interior precipice, where she stood and waited to see whether chance or fate would push her over.
67
Jess walked into the bathroom, locked herself in and sank back against the wall, eyes closed. She felt so weak, she didn’t trust herself to stand upright. The package of drugs against her stomach reflected back her body’s heat like a baked brick. She was almost afraid to touch it.
But when she pulled up her tracksuit top and peeled the tape away, the plastic pouch was cold and clammy to her touch.
It took a long time to flush away the drugs. The pills in particular refused to surrender, bobbing back up to the surface two or three times over before Jess finally got rid of them by dropping sheets of toilet paper over them like nets.
“Moulson, what’s going on in there?” DiMarta shouted through the door.
“My stomach,” Jess muttered.
“What?”
“My stomach,” she said again, louder. “I’ve got really bad diarrhoea. I’ll be out in a minute.”
DiMarta tutted and went away to make up a glass of ORT salts. “You’re in the wars,” she called out conversationally – the same thing she always said when a patient presented with more than one condition at the same time.
Jess flushed again and again until there was nothing left. She folded up the empty pouch and the zip-lock bags and stuffed them into the pocket of her trousers. Then she ran the tap for a long time, because DiMarta would expect to hear it. She splashed cold water on her face. Stared at herself in the mirror with the water trickling down her cheeks like tears.
She’d done it. There was no going back now. She was at war with Harriet Grace. Only she’d forgotten to bring any weapons.
She unlocked the door and went back out into the infirmary. “Drink this,” DiMarta told her, thrusting the glass of salts into her hand. “It will rehydrate you. And then take your clothes off. I need to see how bad the damage is.”
This time Jess did as she was told. She downed the salts. She stepped out of her clothes as DiMarta drew the screens across, and submitted docilely to an examination. DiMarta was thorough, looking for swelling and bruising – there was a lot of bruising, old and new – testing the rotation of Jess’s joints, making sure her pupils were responsive, and generally exercising due diligence.
While she was still doing all this, Sally arrived and called out to them from the other side of the screens. “It’s me, Patience. Sylvie said—”
“We’ll be right with you, Philip,” DiMarta said. She was the only one at Fellside who ever used Dr Salazar’s first name.
Jess put her clothes back on. DiMarta folded the screens back.
“I understand you wanted to speak to me,” Salazar said. He looked concerned. “This was the first day of your appeal, wasn’t it? I saw it on the news. Would you like something to settle your nerves a little?”
Jess hesitated. This was her window, but whatever she said couldn’t be unsaid. And if she made her plea to Salazar and he refused her, there would be no hope left at all.
“It’s… Actually it’s private,” she said. And then, taking the plunge, “It’s about drugs.”
68
Sally fought an invisible battle against himself that lasted for several very long, very full seconds.
Drugs.
Why would it not be? A lot of Fellside’s inmates were junkies or former junkies. Moulson might not mean illegal drugs at all. She might mean the drugs that he prescribed. She might have a medical condition she’d forgotten to disclose. She might have any of a thousand things to confess, to request, to reveal.
But something in her face warned him. Out of nowhere, he was terrified, naked under her asymmetrical gaze.
“Well,” he said, “I don’t think I’m necessarily the best person to—”
“You know Grace?” Moulson interjected. “Harriet Grace, in G block?”
Sally kept his face neutral with a colossal effort. He crossed to his desk and sat down because he knew his legs were shaking and he didn’t want DiMarta to see.
“Patience,” he said, shuffling some folders meaninglessly. “Would you mind leaving me and Ms Moulson alone for a moment or two?”
DiMarta stared at him, nonplussed. It was against regulations, of course. There was meant to be a nurse present whenever Salazar saw any of the inmates. Sometimes that rule had to go by the board in the barely coordinated chaos of their working lives, but actually to ask for privacy when privacy wasn’t allowed…
“I was due a break anyway,” DiMarta said, her tone a little stiff. It hurt her that Sally didn’t trust her discretion. She’d thought
they had a rapport. But it didn’t matter. She was taking all the holiday she’d accrued to whittle down her notice period, so this was her last week at Fellside. Soon she and her family would be stepping off the plane in Monfortinho, and the Yorkshire moors would be a fading memory.
When the door closed behind her, Salazar turned back to Moulson. She was still sitting on the straight-backed plastic chair in which DiMarta had examined her. He faced her with daunted courage, like a Christian in the arena who’s seen the lion limping and thinks a deal might be done involving thorns.
“What was it you…?” he invited her.
“Harriet Grace tried to use me as a drug mule,” Moulson said. “She’s going to kill me if you don’t help me.”
The doctor raised a hand, trying to ward the information off before it landed, but Moulson went on anyway. “I had to pick up a packet from the courthouse in Leeds. The toilets there. The middle cubicle. I think she does the same deal with everyone who’s got an appeal coming up.”
“But then… where is…?”
“Where are the drugs? I flushed them just before you came in. I picked the package up, but then I didn’t want to deliver it. That was why I fell on the stairs. I made it look like an accident, but it wasn’t. It was all I could think of. That if I got signed in here, she might not be able to reach me.”
Sally listened aghast. Everything Moulson was saying fitted into the gaps in what he already knew like cogwheels locking their spiky little teeth and starting to move. This was the big secret, the part of Grace’s operation that he was purposely locked out of. He knew it all now, the whole chain of supply. Apart from Grace and Devlin, he was probably the only one in the whole of Fellside who did.
But if Moulson wanted asylum, she’d chosen the worst place in the whole prison to look for it. He couldn’t help her – not when Grace already had him on her payroll. When she found out Moulson was here, she’d send Devlin to fetch her, and Sally would have no option but to hand her over.
