by M. R. Carey
Lizzie was sitting up with her head buried between her knees. She was whining. Miserable, terrified sounds that she didn’t seem to have any control over. The guards who found her couldn’t get any actual words out of her, so they phoned the infirmary. A minute later, Stock got the message on her pager.
And came bustling along from nowhere at all, trying to look as though this was news to her. Devlin was already there. It was him who told her to check Earnshaw over and try to figure out what was wrong with her. He was keeping it together remarkably well, and that helped Stock to do the same, even though she felt like the next loud noise would make her break in pieces.
The first time she’d visited the access corridor to wash away the prints and Moulson’s blood, Lizzie had been lying catatonically still, with her face against the wall and her knees tucked up to her chest, like a foetus in Doc Martens. It was hard to tell whether the mewling sounds she was making now were an improvement.
Stock did all the obvious things – mainly ruling out concussion, stroke and drug overdose. And at some point in all this, Earnshaw quietened down again. She still wasn’t responsive – still hadn’t said a word – but she was calmer and she seemed to be marginally more aware of what was going on around her, sometimes following Stock’s movements with her eyes.
Devlin asked her what had happened, but she didn’t give any sign that she heard him.
“Looks pretty clear to me,” one of the other screws said. And really it did. It looked like Earnshaw had thrown a massive wobbly of some kind and hammered Big Carol flat in the course of it. Even knowing about the ambush and how it had gone wrong, Stock wasn’t sure if she could buy the idea of Jess Moulson bringing down these two big, powerful women. She’d have to be a ninja or something. Anything made of flesh and bone would hit Liz Earnshaw and shatter. But it was Lizzie who looked broken.
There was a lot of back-and-forth about what should happen next. Devlin was for sticking Lizzie back in her own cell overnight, which would have kept her in circulation for Grace to interrogate her when she started making sense again. But the other screws thought Dietrich block offered a better range of facilities for a dangerous and emotionally unstable inmate who might just have beaten another woman to death. The infirmary was mentioned, but it didn’t have many fans.
Then the governor rolled up and the answer turned out to be “none of the above”. Scratchwell was a few frayed inches away from hysteria, and he wasn’t hiding it very well. He regretted every one of those media interviews now. He’d made himself the face and the voice of Fellside so he was going to be tied to the stake now when this catastrophe hit the news, as it inevitably would.
His thoughts were so focused on his own survival that he saw the problem of containment as the most pressing one. He made the right noises (or some reasonable simulations) about Loomis’s tragic death, but he wanted to be in control of how and when it got reported.
“I think the safety of the other inmates is paramount,” he pronounced. “Put this prisoner in solitary.” In the heat of the moment, he forgot to use his own mealy-mouthed euphemism.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Stock piped up.
Save-Me gave her a ferocious look. “I’m sorry?”
Sylvie was sorry too, but she’d been trained as a nurse and for most of her life she’d acted like one. The blind spot she had for Moulson didn’t make her unfit for her job in other ways. “Earnshaw is really in a bad way right now,” she said. She nodded towards Exhibit A, who was rocking backwards and forwards a little, staring down between her knees. “That sort of thing – those involuntary movements she’s making – they’re called autistic gestures, and they’re generally an indicator of profound mental health problems. I seriously wouldn’t advise locking her up and leaving her unsupervised. That’s just asking for trouble.”
“What’s your name?” the governor demanded.
It was right there on Sylvie’s badge, but obviously Save-Me was a busy man and couldn’t be expected to read something just because it was right in front of his face. Or remember Stock from her job interview, for that matter.
“Stock, sir.”
“And are you a mental health professional, Stock?”
“No, sir.”
“No. And we have a large number of them right here onsite, in Dietrich. When I want my decisions to be second-guessed on mental health grounds, I’ll go to them. In the meantime, you should confine yourself to issues within your actual expertise. Mr Devlin, please take this prisoner to one of the punitive withdrawal rooms. And the… the body to… well, just put it somewhere safe and out of the way.”
Stock walked away quickly, shaking so hard that she thought her outline must be blurred. A lot of that was just anger at Scratchwell for being such a condescending, moronic shit-heel. She hoped he did move the body because then he’d lose his job for interfering with a crime scene.
All of this rage and indignation helped to quieten down the other voice inside her head. The voice that was saying, She’s dead she’s dead she’s dead. Oh God, you just got a woman killed.
And it wasn’t even the right woman.
76
Devlin delivered Liz Earnshaw to one of the half-dozen solitary cells on the top floor of Goodall. (There was a similar set-up in each of the five prisoner blocks, but G block’s was the only one where you needed to book early to avoid disappointment.) Earnshaw went as quiet as a lamb.
When he got back down to ground level, the Devil found everyone still standing around waiting for someone else to tell them what to do. Even the governor, whose job it was to do the telling.
Devlin took Scratchwell off to one side. He said that while the governor called the West Yorkshire police (the governor started at this – he hadn’t even thought of it until then), he felt that he himself, as senior on-block, should stroll around Goodall a little and make sure that everything was as it should be. The governor thanked him profusely and gave that plan his blessing. God forbid there should be any more nasty surprises waiting to be discovered.
So Devlin got to make an after-hours visit to Grace’s cell. He couldn’t go inside without opening up from the main control panel, but the two of them had a whispered conference through the cell door’s Judas window. Grace was shaken when Devlin told her Loomis was dead, but when she heard about Earnshaw’s mental collapse, she was utterly appalled.
“What the bloody hell happened?” she demanded. “Moulson didn’t do this. No way did that scrawny little bitch do this. So who did?”
“Maybe Loomis and Earnshaw just fell out,” Devlin said, voicing the majority opinion.
“My arse, they did! What about your man? Did he see anything?”
“Lovett? No, he dropped Moulson off and ran like shit.”
“So where is she now? It’s your prison, Dennis. Don’t tell me you don’t know.”
“Best guess is she scuttled straight back to the infirmary. I know for a fact she wasn’t signed back on to block. I wanted to ask Stock, but there were too many people around. And I can’t go over there to check. Not with the whole place on full alert. We’ve got to clean up after ourselves, Grace. If she talks, what evidence is there that they can pin to us?”
“Nothing,” Grace said at once. And then, “Well, nothing except that last package. We’ve got to see if she picked it up, and if she didn’t, we’ve got to fetch it. With that gone, everything else is just her word against ours. That’s for you to do, Dennis. You and nobody else. See to it.”
“Courthouse is closed now.”
“I know. You get yourself put on the escort run tomorrow. Go in with her. There’s nobody else we can trust it to.”
No blowjobs this time (although to be fair, the door would have got in the way). She just gave him his marching orders. In the general stress and strain, the niceties were falling by the wayside a little.
Devlin went down to the duty desk where he wrote himself on to the next day’s escort run to Leeds, transferring Andrea Corcoran to the Good
all ballroom as acting senior. After that, he walked back over to G block in a gloomy and restless mood. Normally after a late shift he would have the morning off, but tomorrow he’d have to be here at 8 a.m. for an 8.30 start. And there was no way he’d even be leaving tonight until the sneaks and geeks from Leeds had finished poring over Loomis’s dead body. He was looking at a maximum of four hours’ sleep, assuming he could get to sleep at all.
As he walked across the yard, he looked up at the windows of the infirmary. They were dark. It pissed him off to think of Jess Moulson probably already asleep up there, snoring obliviously through the shitstorm she’d caused. She hadn’t taken out Carol Loomis: that would have been ridiculous. But she’d slipped out of the trap somehow, and the trap had fallen in on itself. Loomis and Earnshaw must have had some kind of an altercation just before Moulson got there, and the sound of them fighting had alerted her in time to save her bacon.
Temporarily.
But in the fullness of time, he and Grace would see to her properly and appropriately. That thought consoled him.
77
In fact, Jess was very much awake. She was still sitting at Dr Salazar’s desk, where she’d been sitting when Sylvie Stock left her two hours earlier.
She was waiting for Alex Beech to come back and talk to her. Except that she wasn’t thinking of him as Alex Beech any more. She’d had plenty of time by then to think about what it was she’d done when she climbed out of the abyss and found him. And she knew that found was the wrong word.
She’d made him. Made him wear that face and be the thing she wanted most to see. Dr Carter may have been clueless about a lot of things, but she was right about that. The imagination is a plastic power, Mrs Moulson. A shaping power. We make the things we need. Even as a child, Jess had just had a gift for that. She made what she needed out of whatever raw materials came to hand, including other people.
There was something that had made its home down there in the dark, but it had only become Alex Beech when she looked at it. It had forgotten its own face by then.
Not it. She.
I think I was a girl until you came.
Until Jess put a yoke on her and harnessed her to the laden wagon of her own guilt. Here, pull this for a while, kid. You look young enough, and strong enough.
So who was she when she started out? The solution to that mystery was as far away as ever. But the answers to the ghost’s questions were maybe becoming a little clearer. Jess had seen the expressions passing across Liz Earnshaw’s face when Earnshaw saw Alex standing there, blocking her path. Something like terror. Something like astonishment. Something else she couldn’t identify at all.
And not just that. Earnshaw had said something. Not out loud, because she didn’t have enough breath left to push it out past her teeth, but Jess was sure it was a name.
Where Jess saw Alex, Earnshaw had seen a different face entirely. And she had known who she was looking at.
Alex had seemed to share that moment of recognition. He didn’t panic and run away like that for nothing. He’d always been drawn to the other Goodall women. Had hovered around them and made up stories about the things he saw in their dreams and memories. So what had he seen in Liz Earnshaw?
That was a rhetorical question, obviously.
He’d found his nasty girl. That was why he ran. And that was why Earnshaw could see him when nobody else could. It was Earnshaw he was meant to be haunting in the first place, before Jess ambushed and redecorated him. Because it was Earnshaw who had killed him.
The night passed slowly, and Alex didn’t come. Jess called out aloud to him every few minutes, but got no answer. Finally she screwed up her courage and stepped out of her body into the night world. She thought if she just went a little way, she might be able to catch a glimpse of him. But she had no idea where to look, or how.
She only realised then how much she’d relied on him in their previous excursions. She’d thought she was starting to find her way in this place, but without Alex at her side, she was as lost as ever. She wandered from mind to mind, from one sensory tempest to the next, shouting out his name. But there was no response.
No, that wasn’t true. Of course there was a response. No answer from Alex, maybe, but in the dreamers she walked through there was alarm and perturbation, moans and starts and interrupted sleep. Jess left a wake behind her, and the wake was nightmares.
It wasn’t anything she could help. Her mind was full of Carol Loomis’s death and her own almost-death when Liz attacked her. Those things – the fear and the pain and the claustrophobic panic of being shut in with her killers – were still standing at the very front of her thoughts, vivid enough that everything they touched took their colour. It was a ripple effect, spreading out from Jess in all directions.
She’d seen the same phenomenon at work a few nights before, but it was still too new to her, and the logic was too strange. She didn’t know she was spreading poison just by being there and remembering.
Every woman in Fellside dreamed of blood and violence that night. The ones Jess touched directly dreamed Carol Loomis’s death – dreamed themselves smashing her head in with the fire extinguisher, the heavy heft of it and the sudden stop. The grating vibration, subtle and quick, as the raised rim on the extinguisher’s base caught on some piece of impacted bone. The sound of Loomis’s body as it fell and the grateful surrender as the heavy steel cylinder dropped from their numbed fingers.
There was a warder in those dreams too. Jess didn’t know Lovett well enough to remember his face, but his uniform showed out strong and clear in her mind – and so did the moment when he had picked her up, helpless, thrown her into the darkness and slammed the door.
The women further away from Jess’s fruitless searching saw and heard and felt some of the same things, but got them piecemeal. They experienced the manhandling and the panic and the shattering of Loomis’s skull as a sort of semi-abstract jumble, a slew of unconnected impressions. They woke up choking, panicking, tasting blood from their own bitten tongues.
And slept again, still unsettled, to pass a diluted distress on to other women even further away.
It was like ink spreading through water. Except that the ink was murder, first-person shooter style.
78
Devlin got a kick out of seeing Moulson’s face when Ratner brought her out through the checkpoint to the vehicle yard and she saw him waiting there. She actually stopped dead for a moment until Ratner gave her a push in the middle of her back and told her to get a move on.
Devlin held open the van’s rear door, smirking as she went by. She didn’t see it, though: she didn’t have the guts to look him in the eye. “All aboard that’s going aboard,” he said cheerfully.
Well, he hoped it sounded cheerful. He was feeling like he’d lain down in front of a road roller. Those four hours of sleep he’d promised himself had turned out to be three hours of being horizontal with his eyes closed. The detectives from Leeds, two real charmers with pretty-boy good looks and Ermenegildo suits, had had a million questions. Some of them were even good ones. How was the corridor where Carol Loomis died reached from inside the block, and from outside it? How was access to it controlled? Who had keys to the intervening doors, or a staff ID that would swipe them open? Who saw the dead woman last, and where was she then? Who were her known associates? One of them even made a connection to the last death at Fellside. “Dominica Weeks. We closed off on that, right? Did she and this Loomis know each other?”
By the time they finally went away to have a one-sided chat with Liz Earnshaw in solitary, Devlin was physically exhausted and emotionally wired. He drove home stewing in a potent mixture of worry and anger.
Actually he didn’t drive straight home. He went to Salazar’s house first. He was scared the evidence trail might lead back to the infirmary at some point, and he wanted to make sure Sally had a clear grasp of what he could and couldn’t say to the nice men from the detective division.
He knew the way, of course. B
eing there brought back old memories. Leah in the window watching for him to arrive so she could open the door without him having to knock. Leah on all fours opening herself up for him while her husband was away off in Fellside changing bedpans. The time they’d used his handcuffs, which had been the best time by a country mile.
Now Leah was dead. That was a strange thing when he thought about it.
He knocked a few times, then rang the doorbell once. No answer. And he couldn’t hammer on the door in the middle of the night without rousing a posse of nosy neighbours. He had to admit defeat at last and walk away, which did nothing at all to improve his temper.
But maybe it was just as well, he thought now, as he climbed in next to Moulson and swung the door to. Sally brought out the worst in him, no doubt about it. The mood he’d been in last night, he might have gone too far and killed the gutless bastard.
He’d tried to get through to Stock, too, with no better results. The infirmary was closed and locked when he left, but he called her mobile four or five times. She wasn’t picking up.
So he was still completely in the dark about what had happened the night before, and how Carol Loomis had ended up dead. But he couldn’t see any scenario in which Moulson had killed Carol and then walked away from Liz Earnshaw in one piece.
All he wanted from Moulson was an explanation as to what the hell had gone wrong with the package. Not even that, really. As long as the drugs were still in the toilet cubicle (and he was pretty sure they were), then that little matter was done and dusted. They wouldn’t use Moulson again obviously, because she was sod-all use for anything, but bygones would be bygones at least until the cops went away. Moulson just needed to understand that if she talked to anyone – anyone at all – about anything other than the weather, then she would find out very quickly why silence was golden.
“Strap in,” he said to her now, giving her arm a sharp nudge with his elbow.
