by M. R. Carey
Moulson raised a hand in surrender. “No. There’s no need. I’ll go.”
“Right then,” Lovett said briskly. “Let’s bounce.”
They went into the consulting area, all three of them. “Oh, hey,” Stock said to Moulson. “Can you sign a transfer form before you go?”
Moulson scribbled her name on the piece of paper Sylvie pushed across at her. She didn’t even look at it, which was just as well. She might have smelled a rat if she’d read how she’d insisted on checking out of the infirmary against the primary duty nurse’s strongly worded advice.
“Thanks,” Moulson said as she gave Sylvie back the paper and pen. “Thanks for helping me. I would have been in real trouble if you and Sally hadn’t taken me in here.”
“Well, it’s our job,” Stock mumbled. But she couldn’t meet Moulson’s eye.
After Moulson had gone, she sat down at Sally’s desk, folded her arms around her body and rocked herself back and forth as though she were a baby in a cradle and the baby’s mother, all in one. She did this for twenty minutes straight, feeling self-pity well up inside her like sap pouring out of a tapped tree. She’d never wanted this. Not any of it. She was the victim here more than anybody.
72
The evening wasn’t cool exactly, but it felt that way after the overheated air in the infirmary.
Jess stepped out ahead of Lovett into the silent yard. It looked immense. She’d only ever seen it thronged with women, the horizon never any further than the next little wedge of humanity. This late in the day, with lock-up pending, it was a desert, lit by thirty moons: even though the sun wasn’t all the way down yet, the big spotlights on the towers were already turned on.
“That way,” Lovett said. He tapped her arm as he pointed. Either he hadn’t seen how Jess had responded to Stock’s touch, or he’d seen it and didn’t care.
Jess tacked around the edge of the yard, staying out of the glare of the lights. She was still looking around in all directions, hoping Alex would appear from somewhere and fall in beside her. He didn’t.
She followed the guard down the narrow space between admin and the first prisoner block, into a hinterland of wheelie bins and wooden storage sheds. The light from the spots didn’t penetrate here at all. “No cameras,” Lovett muttered over his shoulder, as though Jess had asked him a question. She had a momentary presentiment all the same. In the outside world, she would never have come into a place like this with a man she didn’t know.
But Lovett was walking ahead of her really fast now, and he didn’t even look back to see if she was following.
He’s scared.
Jess looked down, expecting to see Alex walking next to her. He wasn’t there.
Alex?
Over here. But the words just popped up inside her mind, the way his words always did. There was no vector, no sense of bearing or distance. She turned her head slowly as she walked, trying to locate him.
“Come on,” Lovett said impatiently from up ahead of her. “Keep moving.”
Alex was standing beside a battered metal dumpster from whose half-open lid black plastic bin bags spilled like entrails. Jess was past him before she saw him, and he made no move to follow her.
Scared of what? she called out to him in her mind.
Of being seen, Alex said. He was up ahead of her now, in the angled shadow of the prison’s outer wall. He turned to keep her in view as she went by, but he didn’t join her. Well, of being seen with you.
That makes sense, Jess thought back at him. Devlin is his boss. He’s got to make sure nobody finds out he helped me.
It’s Devlin he’s thinking about. They were talking. Just a few minutes ago.
This time Alex was on her left side, peering through a stretch of fence that bore an electrical hazard sign. A squat bunker-like building behind him was presumably a generator or a switching station.
“What?” Jess asked, keeping her voice low. “That was in his mind? What did you see?”
“Don’t talk,” Lovett snapped. They had come to a steel door. It had no handle on the outside, but it had been propped halfway open with a fire extinguisher. Lovett gripped the edge of the door in one hand and opened it a little wider. He kicked the extinguisher on to its side and rolled it inside with the toe of his boot.
“Come on,” he said. “Quick now.”
Jess tried to look past him. A sudden stab of unease had made her slow to a halt. Inside the door it was completely dark: she couldn’t see a thing in there.
What’s he thinking now? she asked Alex.
“I don’t have time for this, love. Come on!”
He’s thinking… he doesn’t get paid enough for this. Not to risk his pension and everything. That Devlin takes the piss sometimes.
As Alex said this, Jess finally saw what her eyes had been telling her all along. The door that Lovett was holding open bore a sign she’d seen before on her first day out of the infirmary. THIS IS NOT AN EXIT EXCEPT IN CASE OF FIRE.
By day, the colour of the stonework would have told her, but in this fading light all colours were muted to anonymous grey. They were at the back of Goodall block. Not Franklin.
She turned to run. Lovett’s arm, skinny but surprisingly strong, whipped out and his hand caught her wrist. In a single movement he dragged her up against him, then his other hand closed on her shoulder. He turned on one heel and pushed her bodily through the doorway.
The door closed behind her, not with a loud boom but with a soft, irrevocable click.
Carol Loomis’s voice spoke out of the darkness right beside her.
“Told you, Lizzie,” she said. Her tone was cheerful but her voice had a dead echo to it. “She just lost her way, that’s all. She gets there in the end.”
73
There was no time to think. No time to scream, although Jess opened her mouth to give it a try.
The breath was knocked out of her as she was pushed jarringly against a wall. Hands at her waist hauled up her tracksuit top and groped underneath it. Jagged fingernails scraped her stomach.
“Nothing,” Loomis grunted. “Oh dear, oh dear.”
Something hard slammed into the side of Jess’s head, filling it with light and static. Another blow and she went sprawling. Her palms and her knees hit cold concrete.
“Where is it, Moulson?” Loomis asked. “If you can answer in ten words or less, Lizzie may leave you some of your teeth.”
Jess could barely see, even before they hit her. The darkness was almost total. A shadow loomed over her, just about visible against the slightly paler blur of a whitewashed wall. Something grazed her scalp, and a half-second later a metallic clang reverberated right by her ear. A kick that had missed her by a millimetre and hit something else. Something that rang like a bell. Earnshaw swore feelingly.
Hands fastened on Jess, started to drag her upright. She threw her weight backwards, broke the hold but lost her balance and fell down again with a jarring impact. That didn’t matter. Down here was where she needed to be. She’d just realised what that metallic sound meant.
Jess! Alex was right beside her in the dark. He was shrill with panic.
Run away, Alex. Run away.
Why did she say that? There was no danger to him here. But plenty of things a kid his age shouldn’t have to look at.
She squirmed across the floor, propelling herself with her knees, groping blindly ahead of her with both hands. The tips of her fingers touched the edge of something cold and hard, a curved surface. She groped for it and it rolled away, but she lunged and caught hold of it again, by the handle at the top and the thick rim at the bottom.
“Now then,” Loomis grunted. She grabbed Jess by the hair and pulled her sharply around. Jess brought the fire extinguisher with her and used the momentum as she swung, two-handed. The steel cylinder buried itself in Loomis’s body, somewhere around waist height. The big woman made a plosive buh sound like a baby’s first word and suddenly let Jess go again.
Jess shifted her grip on th
e extinguisher and thrust it forward like a battering ram. This time she got a different result. The extinguisher hit something hard that stopped it dead. There was a dull, terrible crunching sound.
Something flailed and scuffled in the darkness. The fire extinguisher was knocked out of Jess’s hands. She scrambled to her feet and fled.
Her eyes were just beginning to adjust to the dark, but it was too little, too late. She saw the blacker rectangle of a doorway at the other end of the corridor and headed straight towards it. She ran hard into the open door, which was edge-on to her and invisible. Her legs went from under her. A second impact, with the floor, took away what breath she had left.
For a moment she just lay there, staring straight up, concussion filling up her eyes with blurry lens flare. Then lights – real lights – flickered three times above her, on-off-on-off-on. Jess blinked blood and fog out of her eyes. She twisted her head to see Earnshaw ten feet away, turning from the light switch to glare down at her.
Beyond her Loomis lay full-length, her forearm and shoulder one continuous curve, like the back of a beached whale.
Jess tried to stand, but she wasn’t even sure where her legs were. Her feet scrabbled against the concrete floor, but she stayed where she was as Lizzie advanced, fists raised in front of her like an offering.
“I am going to fucking kill you,” she growled. She took a step forward.
Alex moved in between them, facing Earnshaw with his small fists clenched. Leave her alone! he yelled. Don’t you touch her!
Earnshaw stumbled to a halt, staring at the dead boy in bewilderment. Something strange and frightening happened to her face. Terror and astonishment passed across it in a sluggish wave.
“No,” she said. And something that sounded like “isn’t.”
Isn’t what? Isn’t possible? That was actually funny, Jess thought. Who stands and argues the toss when the impossible rears up and smacks them in the face?
It was Alex who was advancing now, raging at Earnshaw at the top of his silent voice. Go away! Get away from her! Leave her! His arms windmilled like a farmer herding sheep.
Earnshaw took one step back, then a second. But she reached out a hand with the fingers spread wide. To touch the apparition? To push it aside? To supplicate it?
Alex was beyond caring and beyond thought. He swatted the hand aside.
No. Of course he didn’t. But he swiped at it as though he’d forgotten, in the heat of that long moment, that he couldn’t touch it. The tips of his fingers, for a tangled heartbeat, were where Earnshaw’s fingers were. Neither of them seemed to like the result.
Earnshaw gave a keening wail, her mouth gaping asymmetrically as though she were undergoing a stroke.
Alex flickered like a candle flame in a strong wind. He seemed suddenly terrified, panicked. He tried to dodge around Earnshaw, to the left, to the right, but the corridor was too narrow. Breeze-block walls presented no obstacle to him, but he acted as though they did. Finally, in desperation, he ran right through the shrieking woman.
Earnshaw’s eyes rolled back in her head, showing – for a single sickening moment – pure white. She fell to the floor and lay twitching, a little white foam bubbling on her lower lip with each ragged out-breath.
Jess climbed to her feet. She did it very slowly. There was a continuous tone sounding in her ears, a dentist-drill tocsin. The day-bright neon that now shone down on the corridor showed Loomis lying still, her eyes wide and her lower jaw askew. One side of her head had gone from convex to concave. The fire extinguisher, smeared with blood, lay next to her. Earnshaw was moving without volition, in convulsive shudders, the steel toes of her boots tapping arrhythmically against the floor.
Jess let herself out the way she’d come, finding – thank God! – no trace of Lovett when she opened the door and stepped out. She vomited behind the overflowing dumpster, but there wasn’t very much for her to bring up because she hadn’t eaten anything since lunch.
She walked back across the yard as the sun dipped below the horizon, and found the fire escape door by which she’d left central admin. It ought to have slammed shut behind them, but somebody – most likely Devlin – had covered the lock plate with six layers of duct tape earlier in the evening to allow Lovett to come and go without having to swipe his ID card. The door was still open.
74
When Moulson walked back into the infirmary, Sylvie Stock almost had a cardiac event just at the sight of her. Moulson closed the door behind her, came on over to the desk and pulled up a chair. She sat down facing Stock.
Acting on pure instinct, Sylvie grabbed for the phone, but as soon as she had the receiver in her hand, she thought through the implications of Moulson’s return to the fold and froze there, mouth half open.
Slowly she put the phone down again.
“Is there a Plan B?” Moulson asked. “Someone else coming for me? Or do you want to take me on by yourself?” The reconstructed side of her face was a snarl, the good side deadly calm.
Stock shook her head dumbly.
“Well, then, you’d better listen, because I’m going to tell you what you have to do now. There’s a dead woman on the ground floor of G block, in one of the corridors behind the ballroom, and there’s another one in a very bad way. I think you probably know who they are and what they’re doing there. What everyone else gets to know depends on you.”
Sylvie thought, Dead woman? Who could the dead woman be? Where was Dennis Devlin? Who had died? “I’m not… I don’t understand,” she faltered.
“That doesn’t surprise me in the least,” Moulson said. “But try. I left my fingerprints on everything over there. A fire extinguisher. A door. Walls and floor and I don’t know what else. I bled a fair bit too, as you can see. So there’s a great big trail that leads from that dead body in G block all the way over here to me, and where do you think it leads after that?”
“Oh Jesus!” Sylvie whimpered.
“No, Jesus is clean. But you’re in dead trouble, Nurse Stock. You conspired with Harriet Grace and Dennis Devlin and that other man – Lovett? – to have me killed. I think you should go on over there with a mop and bucket, don’t you? Just as soon as you rip up all your paperwork and stamp whatever needs stamping so I’m still officially right here where I belong.”
Stock stared at Moulson in blank-eyed horror, and Moulson stared right back. The woman Stock hated had up to now been a fairly abstract creation. This creature sitting opposite her, painted in her enemies’ blood, was frightening in a very different and very concrete way. If this was how Moulson pushed back, then Stock wished to God she’d never pushed her. “But… I didn’t kill anyone,” she stammered. “You did it. You can’t…”
But Moulson could. Of course she could. If there really was a woman lying dead in G block, then Moulson could unravel the whole story and there’d be evidence enough to blow all of them to the moon. From Grace to Devlin, Devlin to Lovett and Lovett back to Stock herself. One big fuse burning backwards, like the one in the title sequence from Mission: Impossible, until the final whiteout.
“Please.” The word was forced out of her under pressure. “Please don’t tell.”
“Then go clean up your mess,” Moulson said. “What are you waiting for?” But as Sylvie jumped up, Moulson pushed her down again – a violation that shook Sylvie to her core. “Wait. Leave me your keys. I’m locking the door. Nobody gets back in here until morning.”
“I… I can’t do that! I’m PD. Duty nurse. I’m meant to be here if anyone calls.”
“Then you’d better hope no one calls. Keys.” Moulson held her hand out.
Giving up the keys felt to Stock like surrendering the last shred of autonomy she had in the world. “You said one of the women was still alive,” she blurted. “If she’s hurt, I’ll have to have her brought here!”
“That would be your problem, not mine. You told me there was an infirmary in one of the other blocks. Is there?”
“Franklin. An aid station. There’s not muc
h there apart from—”
“Make do.”
Stock had taken it as far as she could. She surrendered without another word.
75
Grace and Devlin didn’t realise right away that something had gone wrong with their Moulson trap, but they figured it out soon enough. They might have figured it out sooner if the Devil hadn’t been so concerned about keeping the whole transaction at arm’s-length. He’d escorted Loomis and Earnshaw down to that access corridor and unlocked the door, but he never had any intention of coming back for them. The deal was that they’d do what they had to do and then merge back into the general mêlée in the ballroom. The Devil would come in on lock-up and debrief them when he was doing the head count.
But they weren’t there for lock-up, so of course all hell broke loose. And it was out of Devlin’s hands from that moment. As soon as a single prisoner failed to answer to her name, a big machine was set in motion. Gates and guard posts were nailed down, search parties turned over the whole block and then – working outwards – the rest of the site. The next step would have been to call the regular police and put them on an emergency footing. Cue roadblocks and APBs, helicopters with 5K spotlights, dogs, summit meetings with the oversight board, contrite press conferences and a whole ton of pre-programmed damage limitation.
Things didn’t get that far, though. It only took seventeen minutes for one of the search parties to run into Loomis and Earnshaw.
Nothing doing for Loomis. The skull fracture that had killed her had left a visible dent in the left side of her skull. It was scarcely necessary to take a pulse. And there wasn’t much doubt about the murder weapon either, since the fire extinguisher was just sitting there in plain sight with a corresponding dent in it that made it look like the next jigsaw piece along. (No blood on it now though, and no fingerprints. Sylvie Stock had been and gone by this time.)
