Fellside

by M. R. Carey

  Moulson said nothing. She just did as she was told and then sat with her hands limp in her lap. She looked as ragged as Devlin felt.

  “Is she always this talkative?” Devlin asked Ratner. Ratner pursed her lips and said nothing. She was on Grace’s payroll too, of course, and had a lot of reasons to be unhappy about the police setting up shop in Fellside.

  The three of them kept that silence up all the long way across the fells to Leeds. And once they got to Oxford Row, they wouldn’t have been able to hear each other speak in any case. The lunatic fringe were out in force today, waving their banners and shouting their stupid rhymes – complaining about the shape of the world, Devlin thought, because it was easier than getting your finger out and actually changing it.

  Inside the courthouse, he got straight down to business. “I need to take a shit,” he muttered to Ratner. “Look after Chatty Kathy, yeah?”

  He went through security into the restricted area at the back of the building. He stalked along the corridor, past the gents’ toilets and into the women’s. That carried a small risk but there was nobody around to see him do it. All eyes were on the circus outside the front door.

  But his day started to go downhill again as soon as he locked himself in the middle cubicle and reached up behind the cistern. There was no package there. Whatever Moulson had done, she’d taken the drugs away with her. So why hadn’t she just handed them over? As far as Devlin knew, she didn’t have a habit – and even if she did, anybody sane would just grab a little tiny helping of their favourite flavour and hope they didn’t get caught out. Was it possible she was thinking she could sell the drugs on elsewhere and keep the money?

  “Shit,” he muttered.

  He thought about checking the other cubicles. But there wouldn’t be any point. This was a well-established routine and it always went like clockwork. The drugs had been here and now they weren’t.

  “Shit!” he said again, more loudly and more bitterly. He’d really believed until then that this time was the same as the last time. That Moulson had chickened out of making the pickup, and then chickened out of owning up to it through fear of the inevitable reprisals.

  Now he had to wait until the end of the day to get the truth, and the package. And he had to find a way to talk to Moulson in private here, or else winkle her out of the infirmary once they got back to Fellside. None of it would have been easy, even without the Leeds detectives sniffing around.

  In the past, Devlin had always managed to convince himself that his connection to Grace was invisible and deniable. That wasn’t true any more, if it ever had been. There was a trail, and it wasn’t made out of fucking breadcrumbs. It had Moulson in it, and Salazar. Sylvie Stock. Liz Earnshaw. That prick Lovett, and of course Grace herself. He had to sort this. He had to hold his nerve and sort it.

  He rejoined Ratner. She’d brought Moulson through into the waiting area, where the two of them were now sitting. There might still be time for a little informal debriefing with Moulson before things got rolling, but this wasn’t a safe place to do it. Anyone could walk past. Even if they didn’t, the acoustics were amazing. You could eavesdrop from halfway around the building.

  It irked the Devil to be right next to Moulson and not to be able to question her. The only consolation was that she too looked very far from her happy place. She was sunk in on herself, thoughtful and quiet and distanced from everything that was going on around her.

  She really had been hoping to sell the drugs on, he decided. That was why she was so scared now. She was wondering if it was too late to scramble back out of the pit trap she’d dug for herself before someone filled it in and buried her alive.

  Yeah, he thought. It really is. But it seemed like a bad idea to have her walk into the courtroom desperate and terrified. She had a big fucking audience here and she might get the idea into her head that she could use it. He opened his mouth to say something – a threat, a warning, maybe even a phoney reassurance – but right then the clerk of the court walked up. “We’re ready to start,” he said.

  “On your feet, prisoner,” Ratner said briskly. “Come on.” They led Moulson over to the door and through it, Ratner on Moulson’s right side and the Devil on her left.

  The steps of the courthouse had reminded him of a circus, but what they had here was the eager audience come to see the clowns and the fire-eaters. The public gallery was packed, with the front two rows staked out for the media – reporters with notepads, artists with sketchbooks. The crowd behind them all had church faces on, but you could practically smell the excitement.

  Moulson stopped for a second in the doorway. Less than a second actually, because Devlin and Ratner bore her onwards, hands pressing firmly against her shoulders. Ratner put her in her seat and gave the clerk a nod. Over to you. Then she and Devlin went back to their station by the door.

  Courtrooms were normally really dull places for Devlin, and for the first hour or so this one was no exception. Just endless blather, endless talking. Men with whiny voices trying to look clever by saying the same thing a hundred different ways. Moulson’s lawyer, Pritchard, was a jumped-up little prick about the size of a pint pot. The CPS men were robots who only came alive when the judge asked them if they had anything to add, as though they were frigging voice-activated.

  Intent. Mental capacity. Motive. There was a consensus forming, and though they were taking their own sweet time, they were gradually coming to an agreement about the blindingly obvious.

  But then Pritchard said something about calling a witness.

  In a fucking court of appeal? What was this?

  The clerk called John Street, who apparently was Moulson’s former boyfriend. He came to the stand, and from that moment everything began to change.

  In Devlin’s opinion, it did not change for the better.

  79

  For Jess, the second day of the appeal was much worse than the first. It was a kind of death by a thousand cuts.

  Everything that was being said about the night of the fire took her back there again and again, and she didn’t want to go. On the first day, the proceedings had been wrapped in a thick, protective layer of legalese. But she’d been shielded from it in a deeper way too, by Alex’s belief in her innocence. Now she knew that Alex wasn’t Alex. She couldn’t fool herself any more into thinking she’d been forgiven by the one person who had the right and the power to do it.

  She stood alone, and the blows of memory rained down on her.

  John Street was the hardest to bear. This was a man she’d loved, and then hated. The man who’d walked her down the dark road that had a dead child at the end of it. Even to look at his face was painful. It was a reproach to some part of her that went deeper even than conscience.

  This was the first time she’d seen him since her original trial. She was surprised at how bad he looked. She’d taken it for granted that time inside was much harsher than time out in the world, but nobody looking at John could assume that the time he was doing was easy. There were hollows under his eyes and he was thinner than she remembered. He looked like a man who did most of his sleeping standing up.

  His hands had healed a lot better than her face though.

  “You understand why you’re here, Mr Street?” Pritchard asked in the slightly solicitous tone of a doctor who’s about to talk you through your X-rays.

  Street nodded.

  “Nonetheless, I’m going to explain it so that you have an opportunity to question me or to state any objections you may have. In Jessica Moulson’s original trial, you gave evidence for the prosecution. But your cross-examination by me as defence counsel was never completed. I intend to complete it today. Do you consent to this?”

  It was a trick question, obviously. The CPS lawyers would have explained to Street that if he said no, there would have to be a full retrial. He nodded again. “Yes. But I’ve told you all I remember.”

  “I’m sure you have. All the same, if you’ve no objection, I’d like to walk you through some
of the pertinent points in your original testimony. To make sure the court is fully apprised of their significance.”

  “Fine,” Street said. “Sure.” His eyes stole across to Jess for the first time, and shied away again almost at once. But that at least didn’t particularly hurt. She got the same reaction wherever she went, and she was hardened to it.

  “On the night of the fire, you arrived at Ms Moulson’s flat at or about eight p.m.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Having left there two hours earlier to buy some drugs from an acquaintance, Gavin Matthews, known to you and to my client as Buster. The drugs in question were for your own and Ms Moulson’s use?”

  “Yes.”

  “And just to be clear, the drug we’re talking about is heroin?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much heroin, exactly?”

  “Not a lot. Just enough for two good hits.”

  Pritchard affected polite surprise. “Was it normal for you to buy in such small quantities?”

  “No,” Street said. “But our credit wasn’t good. That was all I could get.”

  “The trials and tribulations of addiction,” Pritchard sympathised, without any hint of irony that you could actually point to. “Mr Matthews has confirmed that account. ‘Two good hits’ were his exact words, in fact. Now, what happened after that, according to your original deposition, is that you and Ms Moulson injected the heroin. Then, after a while, she went through into the flat’s living room while you remained where you were.”

  “Yes.”

  “In the bedroom.”

  “In the bedroom, yes.”

  “And at some point you fell asleep.”

  “Yes.”

  “Obviously you wouldn’t be aware of when exactly that was, so there would be no point in asking you. When you slip from a waking state into a doze, even without having taken a narcotic drug, the mind becomes gradually fogged. Perceptions lose their clarity.”

  One of the CPS lawyers, who had been scribbling in his legal pad, looked up at this point and tapped with his pen as though it was a judge’s gavel. “Objection,” he said.

  The judges conferred and nodded. “Don’t tell the witness what his mental state was, Mr Pritchard,” Judge LePlastrier said.

  “I beg your pardon,” Pritchard said urbanely. “Let us assume, by all means, that Mr Street’s perceptions were clear throughout these events unless he himself states otherwise. In fact, as we’ll see, he’s admirably precise about a great many things. For example…” – he consulted his notes – “He tells us that he woke at eleven o’clock. Is that true, Mr Street?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you verify that? Was there a clock in the bedroom?”

  There wasn’t. Jess could have told him that. She remembered going around the bedroom with a pillowcase in her hand, bundling the clock, the speaker dock, the bedside lamps into it all on top of each other. That had been a regular feature of their lives back then: turning household objects into cash, and then into smack. Junkie alchemy.

  “I looked at my watch,” Street said, sounding faintly irritated. It seemed to Jess that Pritchard was needling him on purpose with his dry delivery and exaggeratedly formal tone.

  But the lawyer didn’t press any harder on that point. “Very well then,” he allowed. “At eleven o’clock, as verified by your watch, you woke up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perceptions clear? Muzzy?” The CPS lawyers looked up from their annotations again, but Pritchard raised a hand to forestall the objection. “Merely to build a picture, Your Honours. Not to cast doubt on the witness’s testimony.”

  “Muzzy,” Street admitted. “I didn’t know where I was for a moment.”

  “Perfectly understandable. Perhaps we can pick up the story at that point.”

  Street frowned as he summoned the memory. “I didn’t know what was going on, but there was a terrible smell. Really sharp. Like, chemicals and burning. Then I saw all this smoke hanging in the air and I thought, ‘Oh my God, the place is on fire’.”

  “And was that in fact the case?”

  “Yeah, it was. Of course it was. The smoke was from the carpet, and the sheets on the bed. They were already on fire, and the hallway outside the bedroom… you… you couldn’t see a thing out there, just the smoke and this light like a big orange spotlight. The whole flat was going up.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “I jumped up and I started to… you know…” Street held up his hands and paddled them in the air.

  “You tried to put out the fire with your hands?” Pritchard interpreted.

  “Yes.”

  “And how did that work out?”

  “I got burned. Really badly.”

  “Badly is a relative term,” Pritchard said. “My client lost half her face in that same fire. And Alex Beech, of course, lost his life. Can you show us your injuries, Mr Street?”

  Street held up his hands. “They healed up, mostly. You can see the shiny bits where they did the skin grafts, but they look almost normal now.”

  “Indeed,” Pritchard agreed. “Photographs were taken at the time though. Perhaps we can refer to them in support of your testimony.” Paul Levine handed Pritchard a small stack of photographs – eight by ten, full colour. Pritchard left the desk and strolled across to the witness box where he showed them to Street, holding each one up to him for a few seconds before flicking to the next. “Here they are. Your Honours have copies labelled 1 through to 9, although I’m sure the witness doesn’t need to have his memory jogged. Would you please confirm, Mr Street, that these photographs show the state of your injuries on the night of the fire.”

  “Yes. They do.”

  “Second- and third-degree burns to your hands and your forearms. Very severe on the right hand particularly.”

  Street nodded wordlessly.

  “But now here you are, a great many skin grafts later. You’ve made a wonderful recovery. In your own eloquent phrase, almost back to normal.” Street considered this and seemed about to make some reply, but Pritchard was holding up one of the photos again. “I’m curious about this one,” he said. “This burn mark here, this very angry one on your forearm just above your right wrist, in a crescent shape. What do you think that was?”

  Street stared dumbly. “I have no idea.”

  “Well, it’s a trivial detail. Possibly you brushed against something. It’s mainly significant because it’s on an area of otherwise undamaged skin. Separate and distinct from the other burns. It suggests you touched your hand against something hot at some point. Not a particularly unlikely event in a house fire, of course.” Pritchard walked back to the desk and put the photos down. But then he turned to face Street again. “And that was all the damage your body suffered that night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Apart, of course, from the damage that was self-inflicted.”

  There was a moment’s silence. “I don’t know what you mean,” Street said, stony-faced.

  “Your blood showed positive for heroin. Trace amounts but still, positive is positive. Remind me, Mr Street. How long have you been an addict?”

  “I’m straight now.”

  “My apologies. How long were you an addict?”

  “Almost three years.”

  “And after three years, what counts as a good hit?”

  “I don’t know. Hard to say. You judge it by eye; you don’t measure it.”

  “But bigger than when you started out?”

  Street gave a hollow laugh. “Only about twenty times.”

  “Because the body habituates to heroin, and it takes larger and larger doses to produce the same effect. I’m sorry, I interrupted your account. There you were, beating at the sheets to very little purpose. What then, Mr Street?”

  “I got up and ran,” Street said.

  “Ran where?”

  “To the door. The front door of the flat.”

  “Did you try to find Ms Moulson? Your girlfriend?
You must have been surprised to wake up and find her gone from the bed. You must have been concerned for her, given that you’d woken up in the middle of this inferno.”

  Street shook his head, but he wasn’t disagreeing. He seemed to be trying not to see what was in his mind. “I shouted out Jess’s name,” he said in a low voice. “Again and again. Lots of times. But I couldn’t see her. There was too much smoke everywhere. And she didn’t answer me. In the end, I thought she must have already got out.”

  “So you did the same.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And then you called the emergency services. You told them there was a fire. Asked them to come and put it out.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then?”

  Street didn’t answer. He just stared at Pritchard, who was staring back at him with a look of polite enquiry. The silence lengthened. Pritchard let it.

  “How do you mean?” Street asked at last.

  “After the phone call, Mr Street. What did you do next? Obviously you knew by this point that your girlfriend had not, as you’d hoped, escaped from the flat. You might also, quite reasonably, have had concerns about the other residents. So tell us what you did.”

  Another pause followed, and again Pritchard did nothing to fill it.

  “I waited,” Street said. “For the fire engines.”

  “Quite right,” Pritchard said encouragingly. “You did. We know this from the CCTV footage that was admitted in evidence during my client’s original trial. Let’s look at it now, shall we? With Your Honours’ permission…”

  “Proceed, Mr Pritchard,” one of the judges said, sounding bored.

  “A moment, Your Honours.” One of the CPS lawyers was on his feet – the same one who’d objected before. “Mr Street is not on trial here. If the drift of this questioning is to establish that he could have done more to mitigate the harm that arose from Jessica Moulson’s actions…”

  “No,” Pritchard said. “That’s not at all what I’m trying to establish. But Mr Street’s statement of his movements is absolutely key to establishing the actual sequence of events.”