by M. R. Carey
“This is bollocks!” Street wailed. “I didn’t even know there was any lighter fluid left! I’d given up smoking months before!” And nothing he could have said would have sounded more like a confession, Jess thought in scalp-prickling wonder. It was such a tiny thing to cling to. If you were innocent, you’d say, I couldn’t have for so many reasons besides the logistical ones.
In the charged silence, Pritchard sighed long and loud. It was as though, after the thrill of the chase, he took no pleasure at all in the kill. “Which brings us back to your injuries,” he said. “Not caused by beating at the sheets obviously. You seem to have been up and about long before the fire spread to the bedroom, so that little piece of fiction simply isn’t tenable any more. It never was really, given the absolute absence of smoke damage to your lungs. You didn’t wake up in a room that was already on fire. That was a preposterous claim.
“But a necessary one, of course. You needed an explanation as to how your hands came to be burned, and you couldn’t really tell the truth, which was that you had an unfortunate accident while you were pouring lighter fluid on to the burning photos in Jessica Moulson’s waste-bin.”
“No,” Street said. “No, I didn’t do that.”
“Objection,” said one of the CPS lawyers – the same one as before, the poker player. “Phrased as—”
“Withdrawn,” Pritchard snapped. “Temporarily. Let’s talk about wounds, Mr Street. Yours were very consistent. Third-degree, full-thickness burns to most of your hands caused by direct exposure to flames. Extensive damage to subcutaneous tissues, destruction of nerves, complete evaporation of the subdermal fat layer. But on your right hand, you had a mark that looked like this.” He held up a photo – the same one he’d shown earlier, showing the curved red-black line on Street’s wrist.
“This is an oddity frankly. The tight, contained pattern of skin damage identifies it as a contact burn. You held your hand against something that was already very hot, and the damage was limited to the small area where that contact occurred. It’s much more superficial damage too, because when we’re taken unawares, by pain we’re not expecting, our reflexes cause us to break contact with the source of the pain very quickly.” He traced the line with his finger. “Part of a hollow circle. The rim of an object, clearly. An object of radius 28.2 centimetres, made of a substance that transmits intense heat while holding – at least temporarily – its original shape.”
Pritchard held out his hand and Paul Levine, ready and waiting, put one more photo into it. “There was such an object in Jessica Moulson’s flat,” Pritchard said quietly. “Only one. It was this.” The photo was of Jess’s wastepaper basket. “You really need to be more careful when you’re setting a fire, Mr Street.”
There was shouting.
A lot of shouting.
People were on their feet in the public gallery as though they were going to rush the witness box. Uniformed security guards ran in to block their way.
Pritchard was still declaiming, but nobody could hear the words.
John Street was crying, the whole of his face drooping and distorting like the burned side of Moulson’s.
The image on the screen now showed Porky Pig from the Looney Tunes cartoons doing his “Th-th-th-that’s all, folks!” wave. This inappropriate levity on Paul Levine’s part was seen by nobody except Jess in the last moment before she closed her eyes.
It wasn’t quite fainting. She’d fainted when she heard about Alex Beech’s death. This was different. She closed her eyes and the world went away for a while to an inaccessible distance. She was alone. As she’d been alone in the pit beyond the night world until Alex had plucked her out of the air and saved her. (Not Alex. The ghost. The ghost who wasn’t Alex.)
But this was a kind of aloneness she’d never experienced before. She wasn’t even there herself. There was just a blankness. She felt as though she’d stepped out of her own life, leaving everything she’d ever known lying behind her like a discarded skin.
If the fire was a lie, if Alex was a lie, then so was everything. She was born in that moment, her past annulled.
Nothing as pure as that could last of course. Jess knew even as she stood in that empty, anonymous place that she could never truly be wiped clean. She was Janus-faced. Her burned side watched the past and would never be able to look away from it.
A ringing in her ears brought her back to a sort of consciousness. She was hunched over, her eyes an inch from the brass rail of the dock. There was a fingerprint there, not her own, perfectly clear and distinct. It was like the footprint on Crusoe’s island. It meant she was back in a world that had people in it.
She took in a breath. Then another. After that, gradually, it got easier.
John Street was sobbing on the witness stand, hands clenched as though he was trying to bury his face in them but had frozen halfway. Paul Levine was smiling at her. What did I tell you? The woman at his side, the intern, was already tidying away the stacks of papers into arch files and cardboard boxes.
Pritchard was up at the bench, arguing with the judges and the CPS lawyers about times. Places. Procedures. The lawyers were nodding a lot but not saying very much. From the look of things, whatever Pritchard said was fine by them. Jess could only just hear him over the continued yelling from the public seats. And was that weeping? Was someone crying back there?
“Today,” Pritchard was saying for perhaps the third time. “Now. I’m sure everyone here understands the workings of habeas corpus. If the conviction falls, you don’t have any right to hold her.”
No. No no no. She couldn’t let that happen. She couldn’t be free while Alex was still trapped in Fellside – locked behind someone else’s face and name. She had promised him. If she didn’t come back, he’d be alone again, probably for ever, and lost to himself.
The judges were leaning in together, speaking too low for her to hear. Her fate was being decided. She had to say something, and the truth was no use at all. The truth was broken and unserviceable.
But perhaps she could salvage some pieces of it. Put them to use.
She stood on shaking legs.
Nobody noticed her at first. Then one of the judges did, the woman, but she said nothing. It was only when all three of the judges and the CPS lawyers and Pritchard turned to face her that the hubbub died down far enough for her to be heard. Not completely. Not at first. But as she opened her mouth, cleared her throat, the last few voices faltered and tailed off. Only the sobbing was still audible. A woman’s voice. Jess didn’t turn around. She knew it was Mrs Beech who was crying.
“Can I speak?” she asked. “I’d like to speak if I’m allowed to. It’s relevant. To the case.”
The female judge, LePlastrier, nodded permission. “That would appear to be the very least you’re owed,” she said. She sounded sad, or perhaps just tired. Her job must hold few surprises, and almost no pleasant ones.
Jess nodded thanks to her. But it took her a few moments to scrape the words together in her ransacked mind. Her voice sounded hoarse and strange to her. “I didn’t think I’d ever see… this,” she said. “I didn’t think it was possible. I believed what everyone believed. That I set that fire and killed Alex. That it was right for me to be where I was.”
She had to stop and suck in a breath. She thought there would be more yells, more protests and curses. There was nothing. Almost no sound at all. Even the crying had stopped now.
“People said I was a monster, and I… I thought they had to be right. For a long time. Then I started to think they were wrong, but I never thought…”
She shook her head. It was all coming out twisted, ridiculous, but she had to push on anyway. She wanted Pritchard and Paul Levine – especially Paul – to understand what she was about to do. “I never thought the truth would… that anyone could ever find it out. And I’m so grateful – so very, very grateful – to Mr Pritchard, and Mr Levine, for proving…”
She went on, forcing the words out. “I thought I’d done a thing
that couldn’t be forgiven, and I didn’t. I’m free of that now.”
She looked across at Paul. A last, beseeching look. This was going to hurt him. She wanted him to know she didn’t do that lightly.
“But I am a murderer. Last night I was in a fight with another woman. Another inmate at Fellside prison. I beat her to death. I broke her skull in with the end of a fire extinguisher. So send me back to Fellside. Please. That’s my home now and it’s the place where I belong.”
That was all she had to say. She sat down again and waited for the pandemonium to start. She turned away from Levine now, afraid of what she might see in his face. Unfortunately, that left her staring across the courtroom at Dennis Devlin.
Devlin’s arms were folded across his chest and he didn’t move them. But he slid the raised thumb of his right hand from right to left across the skin of his throat.
You’re dead.
83
When it was finally over – when all the arguing and grandstanding and horse-trading had narrowed down to one anticlimactic nod of consent – the two guards took Jess Moulson away. Paul sat stunned, unable to process what had just happened on any level.
Moulson kept her head down as she walked by, but he would almost swear she smiled.
He stood.
“I could do with a hand here,” Susannah Sackville-West said, hefting stacks of paper in both hands. Paul ignored her. He walked across the courtroom floor to the door through which Moulson had just made her exit. He caught it as it closed and slipped through.
“Jess!” he shouted. The female warder turned and stared at him. He pushed right past her. The man must have gone ahead to make sure the prison van was waiting where it should be.
He was a second or two behind Moulson as she walked down the corridor towards the back door. He ran to catch her up.
“Hello, Paul,” she murmured. Her good eye was wet, her drooping one bone dry.
“Just tell me why,” he said. He sounded angry, which was fine, because he suddenly realised that he was. He was almost crying too. “After everything we did, you just… what? Are you scared, Jess? Are you just scared of being free, is that it?”
“No.” She shook her head. She didn’t turn to look at him and she didn’t stop walking. They were through the doors now and out in the little yard where the prison van waited. The male guard loomed up and put a hand on Paul’s shoulder to pull him back. Paul spun round and smacked the hand away.
“You want to assault me?” he asked the guard. The man towered over Paul and most of his mass was muscle, but that didn’t seem to matter much right then. “I’m a lawyer. I’m her lawyer. Back off or lose your job.”
He turned his attention back to Moulson without waiting for an answer. “What?” he asked her. “What then?”
She looked desperately unhappy, but he couldn’t tell if that was for herself or for him. “I’ve got things to do in there,” she said, her voice so low he almost couldn’t hear it. “In Fellside. If I come out now, I don’t know if I’ll ever get back in.”
“Things to do?” He was appalled. “You can say your goodbyes by post, Jess. Or go back on visiting day. You just threw away…” – he flailed for words – “… everything.”
“No,” Jess said again, calm now, or almost calm. “That’s not true. You got my verdict overturned. I’m free now. That’s what you gave me. But if it’s a gift, you don’t get to say what I do with it.”
“I love you,” he told her. It came out before he could even think. He only heard it in retrospect, when the echo of it was hanging in the air.
“No,” Jess said. She smiled. A sad, bleak smile that was there and gone in a heartbeat. “You don’t, thank God. Why would you want to? I’d just mess your life up and set your things on fire. But you’ve been a good friend to me when I haven’t done anything to deserve it. I’m going to ask you one last favour.”
A lot of answers, most of them sarcastic, boiled up in his throat. He only said one word. “What?”
“Tell Brenda what happened. I don’t know what I’m going back to now. What’s going to happen to me. It might be bad. Tell her—”
“That you’re innocent.”
Jess nodded. “Yeah. That. And that I love her very much. And that… I didn’t throw myself away. I’m answering to myself, the way she said I should. Not to anyone else.”
“I’ll tell her.”
Jess leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek.
Then stepped back quickly, out of his reach. For ever.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for everything. I won’t forget you.”
She climbed into the van and the doors slid closed between them. She looked away from him, then down into her lap.
He stood there for a long time after the van drove away.
Eventually Brian Pritchard came and stood at his side. Put a hand on his shoulder.
“Take your triumphs where you find them, Mr Levine,” he said gently. “You’ll never have to look far for a tragedy.”
“She was…” Levine said, and gave it up. If he said any more, he was going to start crying in front of his boss.
“Our client,” Pritchard finished. “Look. Look at me.”
Paul turned. The older man held up his hands, side by side, and then folded the palms in together.
“Case closed,” he said.
PART FOUR
WE MAKE THE THINGS WE NEED
84
There was no way to talk to Moulson with the driver only a few feet away from them, so Devlin didn’t try.
He wasn’t sure what he’d say now, in any case. He’d been hoping he could still sort out this shit, get the drugs back and keep the lid on it all, but there was no lid. Not any more. Moulson’s confession had thrown the lid up into the air and blasted it to pieces with a shotgun.
He didn’t even know where she was going back to. The infirmary? G block? A padded cell in Dietrich? She’d just had her appeal upheld and then gone ahead and owned up to a murder. He didn’t envy the governor, because whatever call he made, it was bound to be the wrong one.
So Devlin sat and brooded, and wished with all his heart it had gone the other way. If Carol Loomis had bashed Moulson’s brains out, the world would be a much sunnier place. Next after that, he wished he hadn’t let Moulson see him in Grace’s cell. This could all have been Grace’s problem, but he’d let her make it his.
Where the hell was the way out of this? The Leeds detectives would still be onsite, hoovering Loomis’s corpse for DNA. A quick stroll over to admin and they’d have their sweaty hands on Moulson as soon as she touched the ground. They’d probably want to take her out of Fellside altogether and bang her up in one of their own remand cells, out of reach of anything he or Grace could do. That would put the last nail in a whole long row of coffins, with his own at the head of the parade.
He had to stop Moulson talking. So he had to give her some kind of incentive for keeping her mouth shut. He had no idea what that could be.
But once they were through the gates of Fellside, pulling into the vehicle yard, he snapped out of his daze. It was time to take charge and maybe salvage something out of this mess. “I’ll sign her through,” he said to Ratner. “You go grab a coffee or something.”
Ratner looked surprised, but she could see from his face that it was a bad moment to argue the toss. She muttered a quick thanks and was gone. As they went in through the first checkpoint, Devlin slowed his steps and put a hand on Moulson’s arm to force her to keep pace with him.
“You’ve really got a death wish, haven’t you?” he said in an undertone. “Listen, what happened to the package?”
“I flushed it down the toilet,” Moulson told him, not bothering to keep her voice down.
Five or six thousand quid’s worth of sweets. Jesus shitting Christ! Devlin nodded, taking it on the chin and trying to look on the bright side. “Well, then, there’s no evidence,” he said. “Anything you say about me or about Grace, you won’t be able to p
rove it. And you’ve seen what she can do. If you grass on her, you won’t last a week. She’s got friends out in the world as well as in here. You just keep your mouth shut and we’ll call a truce. We won’t try to use you again.”
He had to stop talking when they got to the duty desk. He scribbled his name in the day book, distracted and clumsy. He did it one-handed, keeping a grip on Moulson’s arm with the other, as though he still had a sporting chance of defending his claim to her.
But he really didn’t. The whole scampering pack came around the corner at a dead run before he was even done signing in. Governor Scratchwell, the pretty boys from the Leeds constabulary and a team of lawyers from N-fold head office, who exuded an air of quiet, deadly proficiency. They swept down the corridor, seizing hold of Moulson in passing and carrying her away with them. They barely acknowledged Devlin’s existence.
So now the fat was in the fire and there was no doubt in the Devil’s mind what his next stop had to be. He pushed the day book back across the desk to the secretary, Marcela Robbins, who had watched this little command performance with big, hungry eyes. “Is Moulson mixed up in this too?” she asked him.
“I only know what I’m told,” Devlin said, shutting her down with a cold stare. Then he registered what she’d said. “Mixed up in what?”
“They’re saying Goodall’s going to riot. It’s been crazy over there all day. Everybody’s being pulled in for overtime.”
“A riot?” Devlin felt an atavistic chill at the word, as any screw would. But he was also bemused. “About what?”
“There’s a rumour it might have been a warder who killed Carol Loomis.”
“Is that what they’re saying?” It was so wide of the mark, he almost laughed.
Robbins nodded. “In Goodall they are, yeah. They’re running around like headless chickens. Standing out on the walkways and shouting at the guards. Saying they want police brought in from Leeds to guard the block. Save-Me was going to cancel free association, but he was scared that might just spark them off.”
