by M. R. Carey
He looked to the judges, who waved him on. The court clerk dimmed the lights a little, and the screen – a permanent fixture – folded down out of the ceiling. For a moment it showed a computer desktop with files and folders, because the image was being relayed through a projector from a laptop on the lawyers’ bench that Paul Levine was operating. Then it showed the front doors of Jess’s block of flats and the street outside. The angle was steep and the colours were muddy. Edge noise turned the image into a restless cauldron.
But John Street, when he emerged running, was unmistakable. He didn’t get very far. Levine froze the onscreen image just as Street slammed through the doors. Pritchard pointed to the time signature in the top left-hand corner of the screen. “23:00:58,” he said. “One minute past eleven.”
Levine unfroze the image. Street resumed his headlong run out of the burning building, but he slowed down as soon as he was out on the pavement. He was still moving, but with an asymmetrical lurch to his gait. His posture was unnaturally rigid. He was staring down at his hands, which he held at chest height, palms up and with the fingers spread. He looked as though he was cupping an invisible bowl, but actually he was in agony from his burns. He wore a bright blue shirt and red boxer shorts, hastily thrown on. He looked both absurd and pathetic.
“This is where you place the 999 call,” Pritchard said, off to Jess’s right. He moved across her field of vision to point at Street’s hands in the video clip – in motion now as Street laboriously fished his phone out of his pocket and held it in cradled fingertips, each stab at the keys followed by a violent, trembling recoil. The skin on his hands had all been burned away of course. Every contact must have brought a fresh jolt of pain.
“And this is where you wait,” Pritchard added in the same dry tone he’d used before. “Incidentally, Mr Street, I’ve watched this footage many times. I haven’t seen any point at which you check your watch. And you’re in full view throughout. It really is a mystery how you could be so specific about the time.”
Street mumbled something that Jess couldn’t catch.
“I’m sorry?”
“The stairs. I must have looked while I was on the stairs.”
“Running for your life? Through a burning building? Well, possibly. Shall we see?”
Street’s eyes widened. He started to speak, but choked on the first syllable, which was an ambiguous vowel sound. Pritchard seemed to enjoy the reaction. “Yes, Mr Street. Good news. Your role in this movie is a little bigger than a cameo after all.”
80
When Sally got to Fellside for the start of his shift, he found the car park full of police cars. Nausea twisted his stomach as he flashed his ID at the gate. “Something happen?” he asked the duty guard.
“Inmate was killed,” the guard said tersely. “Hell to pay.”
Sally felt dizzy, almost weightless. Blackness flickered behind his eyes for a moment. “Anybody know who?” he asked. Echolalia made him repeat who flew grew two new blue inside his mind.
“Loomis.”
“Big… Big Carol?”
“Yeah. Her.”
Sally went straight to the infirmary, walking as fast as he could, trying hard not to break into a run. But the place was empty, which told him nothing.
Moulson not being there was fine. If everything was running to schedule, her escort would have had her in a van and on the way to Leeds half an hour before. When he looked in the daybook to make sure that had happened, he found that a page had been torn out.
He looked for the missing page in the wastepaper basket, a little troubled now. He didn’t find it there, but he did find the release form that Stock had forged and then – on Moulson’s orders – torn up and thrown away.
It wasn’t a difficult jigsaw. She’d only torn the sheet into four pieces.
81
The overlap between night and day shifts at Fellside was two hours. Sylvie Stock thought she could spend that time hiding out at the aid station in Franklin block the way she had the night before, then scuttle for home. Maybe ask Ron to lead her in a prayer or two.
But Sally found her as easily as Devlin had.
He had the torn pieces of the release form in his hand. He shook them in her face. “Look at this!” he said. “What is this? You signed her back on-block!” He sounded ferocious, full of righteous rage. It would have been hilarious any other time. Any time when her job and her life weren’t hanging by a thread.
“She was fine,” Stock said. Shame and fear made her brutal. “Your diagnosis was bullshit. She didn’t have a concussion. The bruising wasn’t even fresh.”
“Sylvie, I told you—”
“You don’t tell me anything, Sally.”
“But I was trying to save her life. Grace wanted to hurt her. Probably to kill her. The only way to—”
“I said you don’t tell me anything!” The words came out in a breathless yell. Stock couldn’t help it. She’d been at snapping point all night, but the whole time she’d been hiding out, she hadn’t come across anything worth snapping at. Sally was catharsis in a pear-shaped package. “What, did she give you a hand job behind the screens? You like them well done with crispy bits, yeah? You’re not the fucking Pope. You don’t get to give sanctuary. And even if you did, not her! Not that! You side with that, you get what’s coming to you!”
She was right up in his face, spit from her rant flecking his cheek and his chin. Salazar backed away from her, speechless with shock. But not for long.
“What’s coming to me? What does that mean, Sylvie? That doesn’t sound like you; it sounds like Dennis Devlin. Did he put you up to this?”
Stock was exhausted by her own rage. She tried to push past Sally, but he outweighed her by a factor of two. “You have no idea what I sound like,” she told him through her teeth. “You know nothing about me, Sally. You don’t know anything about anything.”
She could have stopped there. There was no reason to carry on. And Sally probably would have stood aside and let her go. But his stupid, reproachful eyes were staring into hers as though he had some kind of a right to judge her. And she had to push him off that perch even if it meant fighting dirty.
“Dennis Devlin was doing a bayonet charge up your Leah for years,” she told him, not shouting now but measuring out every word. “He timed his shifts so he clocked off when you clocked on. He took photos of her with her kit off for bloody Fiesta Readers’ Wives, she was that besotted with him. You thought she pissed holy water, and for ten years you were getting Devlin’s sloppy seconds. If you were getting anything at all.”
Sally’s face registered blank astonishment. Then she could see him putting the pieces together – the cartoon shock of realisation.
“Devlin,” he said. Childish. Bewildered.
“Oh, now the penny drops.” Stock shook her head in bitter contempt. “You’re a real saint, aren’t you, Sally? A real Good Samaritan. Everybody loves the Good Samaritan. But have you ever noticed how little pussy he gets?”
It was easy to elbow her way past the doctor after that. Suddenly it seemed like there was a whole lot less of him.
82
With the image on the screen freeze-framed once again for ease of reference, Brian Pritchard told the judges and the CPS lawyers in exacting detail what it was they were looking at.
“This window here is Ms Moulson’s living room. And this one…” – he touched the tip of his finger to the screen, leaving no margin for error – “… this one is the landing in the building’s stairwell. We’re going to enlarge this portion of the screen in a moment, but before we do, I’d like to show you the layout of the space you’re looking at.”
He held up a badly framed, washed-out photo which had estate agent’s listing written all over it. It was a perspectiveless shot of the landing outside the door of Jess’s flat, exactly as it had looked before the fire and still looked in her memory. The drab space was dominated by a large mirror in an overly ornate frame.
“The mirror,” Pritchar
d said, “is the pertinent fact. I’m going to play another piece of footage, starting at time point 22:47:13. That is to say, thirteen minutes before the witness, Mr Street, claims to have woken up. There’s something very interesting there that escaped all of our notice during the first trial.”
Levine tapped at the laptop’s keys. The screen blacked out for a moment, then the same image came back – minus John Street, who had disappeared from his front-and-centre position on the pavement outside the block.
The shot was now devoid of life and movement. But as Levine ran the image forward in extreme slow motion, a flare of light appeared in the third-floor window that looked into the stairwell.
“There are two puzzling things about what you’re seeing,” Pritchard said. “One is place, and the other is time. Jessica Moulson’s flat is here, on the right-hand side of the stairwell and well out of our field of vision. The light is coming from the opposite side, where the flat is empty and boarded up. Any thoughts about that, Mr Street?”
Street said nothing. He looked sick and unhappy.
“No? Well, the mystery is solved when you consider the position of the mirror. We’re seeing the reflection in the mirror on the left of the landing of Jessica Moulson’s front door opening on the right.”
Pritchard paused and swept the court with his gaze. “Of course,” he said, “that opens up a larger mystery. Why was Jessica Moulson’s door opening at a quarter to eleven? Who was there to open it? In order to answer that, we’ll need to go in closer.”
Levine tapped keys. The image zoomed and adjusted, zoomed and adjusted until the window filled the visible area. It was just about possible to make out a figure standing out on the landing, framed in the light from Jess’s open door. The detail was largely absent, but the blue shirt and red boxers made identification a whole lot easier.
Jess stared, stupefied. This made no sense.
Street stood on the landing for most of a minute before going back inside.
Levine froze the image. The courtroom was full of electrified silence.
“Would you care to alter your testimony, Mr Street?” Pritchard’s voice rang out across the courtroom. “When did you wake up again?”
The prosecution lawyers started to rise at the question, getting into gear for another objection. But then they sat down again, conferring in inaudible whispers.
“When, Mr Street? What time was it?”
“I don’t remember,” Street said. He made it sound like a plea, or a protest. He’d stopped looking at the screen now. His eyes ranged across the faces in the public gallery as though he was trying to enlist them on his side.
“A long time before eleven o’clock, certainly. And you’re not running yet. That comes later. In fact, you’re going back into the flat, even though – by your own testimony – you woke up in the middle of an inferno. But there isn’t any inferno yet, is there? That comes later too.”
Street just stared – at Pritchard, at the prosecutors, at Pritchard again. “Let’s move on,” Pritchard suggested evenly. The onscreen image unfroze. The homunculus in the boxer shorts made a second sortie. This time when he came back, he was running. He sprinted right past the window and was gone.
“How do you explain this, Mr Street? What was the false start there? What were you doing going back inside?”
“I don’t remember,” Street repeated.
“I find that a little too convenient to be true.”
“I was high. I was out of my head.”
“On heroin?”
“Yes.”
“Having shot up at eight o’clock?”
“Yes!”
“But you didn’t take any heroin that night, Mr Street. So that can’t be it.”
“Objection,” one of the CPS lawyers cried out, up on his feet. Ever since that earlier false start, he had been hair-trigger, ready to jump in as soon as he saw a suitable target.
Jess objected too in the privacy of her own mind. What was Pritchard doing? Was he trying to say that she and Street had both lied? That there was some sort of conspiracy between them?
The prosecutor addressed the bench, terse and indignant. “Mr Street’s toxicology results clearly show the presence of heroin in his blood on the night of the fire.”
“Your Honours, I’m coming to that. Those results are entirely pertinent to my argument.”
The judges conferred, heads down and wigs bobbing. “Proceed, Mr Pritchard,” Judge LePlastrier said at last. “But get to the substantive point quickly, if you please.”
Pritchard bowed gravely. “Mr Street, let me rephrase that statement as a question. Did you take heroin that night, yes or no?”
Street’s eyes opened so wide they looked as though they were going to fall out of his head. “I… Jess herself…” he stammered. “You know what she said!”
“Yes, I do. Everybody here does. In her trial testimony, she said you both shot up. But of course, and as a matter of custom and practice, you injected her first. Her testimony as to what happened after that can’t be taken to be one hundred per cent reliable.” Pritchard turned his back on Street. On the judges too. He walked back towards his desk, where Paul Levine was holding up a sheet of paper. Pritchard took it en passant and waved it in the air, still with his back to Street.
“The two of you,” he said, “you and Jessica Moulson, were admitted to the same hospital. The same burns unit. At the same time. You both had your blood tested at the same time. You both tested positive for heroin, which at that particular juncture seemed like the salient fact. Nobody was exercised to enquire any further, particularly as there was no disagreement between you and my client as to the fact of your addiction. These are the toxicology results my learned colleague just mentioned. Your own, Mr Street, and Jessica Moulson’s. Do you know what they show?”
Street made no answer. Pritchard turned around to face him. He was overdoing the theatricals a little, Jess thought in some dim corner of her brain that could still think. Mostly she was just listening, her mouth hanging open, her hands gripping the brass rail in front of her. Letting the words pile up in her mind into the shape of some edifice still to be defined.
“Murder,” Pritchard said, drawing the word out, “is defined as the deliberate, willed and planned ending of another person’s life. At one stage I had intended to stand up in this courtroom and argue that Jessica Moulson was innocent because she’d only tried to kill you, Mr Street, and not Alex Beech. That her crime was manslaughter, mitigated by the fact that she’d missed her aim.
“But she didn’t, did she? She didn’t miss her aim because she didn’t take aim in the first place. You did.”
Street shook his head violently, but didn’t speak. Yells and gasps erupted in the public gallery. In a movie, the judges would all have drawn their gavels and started up a carillon, but the judges – and the crown prosecutors – seemed to have been caught off balance too. They only stared.
Pritchard talked right over the noise. “Exposure to heroin is measured by assessing the amount of free morphine in the blood,” he said. He glanced down at the sheet in front of him, ran his finger along the lines of text with a frown of concentration, as though he was parsing them as he went, although Jess was sure he had all this by heart. “For you, that amount was barely perceptible. The doctors who treated you recorded a level of 0.02 nanograms of free morphine per millilitre of blood. The term is ‘background positive’. Indicating a regular habit serviced in the not too distant past. Jessica Moulson’s free morphine level, however, was recorded as 130 nanograms. The disparity, the ratio, in case your maths skills aren’t up to it, is a factor of more than 50,000. Astonishing, if the two of you had taken an equal dose at the same time.
“But perfectly explicable if you bought two good hits and injected them both into my client.”
Jess was already sitting down, but it was as though she had just tripped and fallen. The breath was pushed out of her in a gasp of what sounded like – felt like – pain. Her hearing faded out, t
hen returned with a background hum that drowned the words. The CPS lawyers were arguing with the judges. The judges were arguing back. She fought to make sense of it.
“Would you care to rephrase that as a question, Mr Pritchard?” LePlastrier asked.
“Did you inject the whole of what you cooked into Jessica Moulson, Mr Street?”
“No!” Street yelled. “That’s bullshit. I did us both. Ask Jess! I did us both!”
“Then you weren’t trying to kill her? I think you were.”
“Objection.” This time the CPS lawyer sounded like a poker player checking to stay in the round. He didn’t even stand up. “No motive has been established for—”
“We have an abundance of motives,” Pritchard said. “Almost too many motives. Mr Street was now in another relationship, were you not, Mr Street? With one Nicola Saunders, well known to my client as well as to yourself. Do you deny that you and Ms Saunders are now lovers?”
“No, but that… that was after…”
“You’re under oath, Mr Street. And your mobile phone records make a liar out of you. But perhaps you’re just polyamorous. Many people are. I’m more inclined to see money as the salient issue. You took out joint life assurance policies only two months before the fire, so my client’s death would have been your pay day. A pay day you needed because you were in debt to the point where your credit wasn’t even good with your drug dealer.”
Pritchard was fairly in his stride now, and he’d abandoned the polite consultative tone altogether. He was a tidal wave of righteous rhetoric. Street was trying to speak up too to contest these points, but if anything was coming out of his open, working mouth, it could not be heard.
“So when Jessica Moulson refused to die of an overdose, you didn’t give up. There was too much at stake. You decided to stage an accident. To be fair, she helped you with the staging. She was sitting in the living room tearing up photos. Trying to excise you from her life, which is an impulse I can easily understand. And you knew that photographic paper was flammable. Not as flammable as film stock though, which was why you had to go back inside to coax the blaze along. In the end, you were obliged to use lighter fluid.”
