by M. R. Carey
Might as well get the counter-rumour going, Devlin thought. It wasn’t going to be a secret for long. “Moulson killed Carol Loomis, Marcela. She just stood up in court and copped to it.”
Robbins’ eyes and mouth became three perfect circles. “Moulson? But there’s nothing to her! How did she…?”
“Must be ninja skills,” Devlin grunted. “Anyway, you heard it here first.”
He went to Goodall block. That was where he’d been going anyway, to check in with Grace, but now he had to see for himself. Robbins hadn’t exaggerated. He could practically taste it as soon as he pushed open the doors and walked out into the ballroom. Suspicion and fear tainting the air. The cons all clustered together in little heaving knots, the guards circling aimlessly, like sheepdogs without a cause.
Corcoran was the first screw he saw. As acting supervisor, she was right where she needed to be, standing by the main console that controlled all the cell block doors. A lockdown was unlikely, but it was a real possibility.
Corcoran was exhausted, wired and utterly pissed off. “They’re crawling up the walls,” she told Devlin. “We’re all on double supply and Scratchwell is pissing himself. You picked the right day to run escort, Dennis, I’ll tell you that much.”
Devlin shook his head and sighed. “I leave you alone for a few hours…” Corcoran laughed. She offered him the keys, but he wasn’t ready yet to take back the senior role. It suited him to be free to come and go until he had some idea what he was going to do. “Finish the shift,” he told her. “You might as well get the extra pay.”
Corcoran put the keys back on her belt. “I’d just as soon be shot of it,” she said. “They were barking like bitches when we unlocked and they’ve been barking like bitches ever since. Moulson’s in the mix but don’t ask me how. Either she killed Carol Loomis, or a warder killed her and Moulson saw it. They want the cops to come back in. They say they’re not going into their cells until someone’s been charged.”
“Who starts these things?” Devlin asked, straight-faced.
“It’s sweating out of the bloody walls, Dennis.”
And she was right, it was. Devlin ascended to Grace’s cell, feeling it everywhere around him. The air was bloated with some massy, heaving emotion. He knew right then that there was going to be trouble of a big, out-of-control kind. This much badness needed to be earthed in something.
Jilly Fish and a steroidal heavyweight with the unlikely name of Ashley had replaced Liz and Carol on the walkway outside Grace’s cell. They made a point of not noticing Devlin as he walked in, which right then was exactly the response he wanted to inspire.
“What kept you?” Grace asked. She was lounging on her bunk with an account book and a pencil in her hands, looking like she was above the fray and not worried about anything. But the music that leaked out of the speakers was “Für Elise”. Something of a giveaway.
“I just got back.” Devlin heard the conciliatory bleat in his own voice. Fuck that, for once. “We’ve got trouble,” he said in a louder, harder voice. “I mean, besides the obvious.”
Grace wedged the pencil in the book as a placeholder, set it aside and sat up. No disguises now. Her face was set in a scowl. “You didn’t get it?”
“The package is the least of our problems, Harriet. Moulson’s decided to get herself right with God, and she started off by telling the whole courtroom that she killed Big Carol.”
Grace shook her head, refusing to give that idea any headroom. “She didn’t kill Loomis.”
“It doesn’t matter whether she did or she didn’t! She’s in with the governor and the sniffers from Leeds and a matching set of piranhas. Right now. Spilling her guts. We’ve got to get our story straight or we’re completely fucked.”
He turned the music off. He wanted to make Grace understand how bad this was. Things were falling apart, everywhere and comprehensively. It was time to draw a line. It was time to draw all the lines that should have been drawn already.
“All right, Dennis,” Grace said, putting a hand on his arm and then on his shoulder. She drew him in close and kissed him – a big, generous kiss. “All right,” she said again when they separated. She sat him down on the bunk and sat beside him. Her hands were holding his, pressing them tight against her thigh. “What’s the worst-case scenario? It’s still just Moulson. Take her out of the equation and nobody knows anything about anything. It’s business as usual.”
It wasn’t business as usual. Not on Goodall. On Goodall, it felt like Armageddon was coming. But Grace’s body had its own gravity and her voice its own power. Devlin found himself calming.
“Unless she talked to Sally,” he said. “Between the two of them, they could join up a lot of dots. She was certainly cosying up to him last night.”
“They’d make a lovely couple,” Grace remarked with a throaty chuckle. And yeah, it was grotesque to think of those two together. Salazar with his Mr Potato-Head bulk and Moulson with her shiny, twisted face. Devlin laughed. Grace stroked his shoulder affectionately. “There’s my Dennis.”
They talked it through. Each of them knew and tacitly admitted that they could have handled this better, that there had been lost opportunities. If they’d steered away from Moulson in the first place, because of her known instability. If, after her first failure, they’d either left her alone or shut her down for good.
Grace reproached herself for the terrible sin of half-measures. She had thought she understood Moulson better than she did, in part because of a totally superficial resemblance, a coincidence of their two backstories. That their faces had been taken apart and remade. She had been conned and disarmed, for the briefest of moments, by her own child self.
Devlin admitted that he should have stayed on point the previous night. Should have been there himself, along with Lizzie and Carol, when Moulson came back on-block.
They forgave each other. And in the end they came up with a plan. It complicated things a little that the whole place was hanging on the edge of a riot. But as Grace said, the trick is to think of every threat as an opportunity.
85
Most of the questions came from the two detectives, and most of the answers came from the N-fold lawyers. They had magically become Moulson’s lawyers, insofar as the information she was offering touched on N-fold interests and N-fold property.
Jess said as little as she could. Her attention was a little distracted in any case. She was calling out to Alex in her mind – using that name because it was still the only one she had for him. But he didn’t answer and he didn’t approach.
He was the only reason she’d come back when the way out suddenly opened in front of her. The debt she’d once thought she owed to the real Alex Beech had dropped away, though her heart still ached when she thought about his wretched, lonely death. But this new Alex, who she’d trapped and dragged into her own tragedy without even meaning to… That debt was real and couldn’t be escaped. The ghost had saved her, and she’d failed him – no, failed her – in every possible way. Thinking she was helping, she’d stolen her from herself, erased her face, left her even more badly lost than she was already. This was her last chance to put that right.
But all she could do for now was to dig in and wait the detectives out. Her agenda couldn’t get underway until theirs was finished.
“Tell us again,” they ordered her.
She told them again. “I got out of the infirmary, and then out of the admin block. The nurse there must have been called away or something. And there weren’t any guards in the corridor.”
“How did you get out of the admin block?”
“The door had been left open. I just slipped through.”
“And what – you just slipped into Goodall?” Both detectives looked politely sceptical.
“Yes.”
“To find… what? Two inmates waiting there in the dark, on the off chance that you might stop by?”
It was a ridiculous story, but Moulson refused to add in any of the details that would h
ave made sense of it. She didn’t mention Grace, or Devlin, or Lovett, or Sylvie Stock. This wasn’t cowardice or even mercy. She just wanted to make sure she got to spend the night at Fellside with Alex. She was certain that if she told the truth, or anything like it, that wouldn’t happen. The detectives would widen their investigation, probably take her into protective custody. This way they might let her stay here rather than arm-wrestle with the N-fold lawyers who wanted Jess in Fellside so they could keep a toehold in the investigation.
“Are you protecting someone?” one of the detectives asked in exasperation. “Someone in here?”
Jess didn’t answer. Trying to, she thought. Trying very hard.
Eventually the detectives gave up. They were sure there was more to Loomis’s death than had come to light so far – that other people besides Moulson must have been involved. They were also sure that when they brought the big guns of the regional crime squad to bear, they could winkle Moulson out of Fellside in short order, and then they would see what they would see. One night wouldn’t make any difference. It wasn’t as though she was going anywhere.
They went back to the governor and made him agree to put Moulson in solitary for the night. They pointed out that if she were free to associate with the other prisoners, there was a real danger that they would then collude in a cover-up of some kind. It was much better not to allow that opportunity to arise.
Scratchwell agreed, very much aware that he was up against the wall. And he said he would make assurance doubly sure. He would assign to his most reliable senior supervisor the task of monitoring Moulson and keeping her safe and incommunicado.
Devlin was sent for, and arrived in due course.
“Yes, sir,” the Devil said gravely. And, “No, sir. You have my word, sir, the prisoner won’t have any contact with anyone at all. I’ll make myself personally responsible for her.”
Scratchwell took comfort from this, but he was far from a happy man. While the detectives were closeted with Moulson, the company lawyers had worked him over mercilessly. They had made it clear that if the Loomis investigation threw up anything that might embarrass the parent company, he was going to be asked to fall on his sword. When he said that he might be able to use his media contacts to put a positive spin on the situation, they told him bluntly not to go within a mile of a reporter. They said the company was battening down, not making itself into a target. They implied that if Scratchwell had heeded his original instructions to be discreet, the present situation wouldn’t be nearly so bad.
He didn’t tell them about the explosive atmosphere in Goodall. He was just too scared. He thought they might ask for his resignation right there and then if they knew there were other problems at Fellside besides Loomis’s murder.
So what with one thing and another, Save-Me was praying to God for a quiet night and hoping that Dennis Devlin could deliver.
But God wasn’t listening, and neither was the Devil.
86
Devlin didn’t even bother to talk to Moulson as he took her over to solitary. All that stuff he’d said before about letting her off the hook was part of Plan A. Now, after his talk with Grace, he was all about Plan B.
It was quite an eventful walk given how short it was. Moulson’s arrival on-block had a dramatic effect on every woman who saw her. Some of them shouted to her as she passed. A few curses, a scatter of accusations, but mostly questions. Did she do it? Did she see who did it? “Moulson, tell us!” That was Marge Todd’s voice, rising in an anguished wail. “If you protect them, they’ll only turn on you!” “Was the governor in on it?” Sam Kupperberg yelled. “Don’t say anything, Moulson, just nod!”
“Must be nice to be so much in demand for once,” Devlin commented.
Moulson ignored him. The uproar and unease among the Goodall inmates barely registered on her crowded thoughts. The one person she really wanted to see wasn’t there.
The solitary cell, an eight-by-eight-foot box, had been readied for her. A bedding pack lay on the bunk in its paper wrapping – no cellophane or plastic ribbon in solitary, because you never knew what innocent object might inspire a suicide attempt. Moulson’s name and number had been scribbled on the status sheet which slotted into a steel holder on the door.
On the way in, she glanced at the label on the next door along. ELIZABETH MARTINE EARNSHAW, 76123. Devlin saw her looking. “Yeah,” he said sourly. “You want me to arrange a sleepover, Moulson? I’m sure the two of you would have a lovely time.”
He pushed her into her cell and closed the door. Regular cell doors locked and unlocked from the master board, either individually or collectively. The doors in solitary had a board of their own, and even when it was set to the open position, they were default-locked. The closed doors could only be opened from the outside.
Jess fitted a bottom sheet over the bunk’s inch-thick mattress and threw the rest of the bedding pack on the floor. She lay down fully clothed.
“Alex?” she called again. She didn’t bother to raise her voice. She knew he could hear her: distance was meaningless where he lived. If he didn’t come, it was because he didn’t want to come (she kept trying to shift that pronoun from a he to a she, and it kept shifting back).
Something Alex had seen or remembered when he was right up in Earnshaw’s face had terrified him – and left Earnshaw more or less completely disconnected from the world. They’d touched for half a second and both of them had turned tail and run in opposite directions.
Jess kept on talking, hoping that Alex was close enough to hear her. “This will help you to find what you wanted,” she told him. “I know you’re scared. I know this is taking you back to when you were hurt, and you don’t think you can bear it. But I’ll be with you. We’ll bear it together.”
No answer.
“We have to go there, Alex. This is the only way you’re ever going to find your friend.” And yourself, she added silently. Because I put that face and that name on you, and how else am I going to get them off again?
Alex still said nothing. But Jess had all the time in the world and nothing to do with it but wait. There were no windows in the cell, just a shadowless glare from three parallel strip lights set into the ceiling, so she had no idea how much time was passing. After a while, it felt as though she’d been in that tiny little box for ever. Maybe the light was too strong for Alex, she thought despairingly. Maybe he hadn’t stopped running yet. Maybe he’d finally decided to hang out with somebody more his own age.
Of course, there was no telling what that age was. The ghost didn’t have to be a child any more than she had to be male.
Jess’s thoughts began to wander. She thought about her relationship with John Street and how it had ended. She turned it in her mind to look at it from different angles, trying to gauge how much it hurt. Not much at all really. Getting shot of him had cost her half her face, but she didn’t consider that too bad a deal. Ridiculously, she felt free now. Or closer to freedom than she’d ever been. She had the one debt to pay, and then she was done. Nobody had any claim on her after that, or any reason to reproach her.
What’s reproach?
Jess’s heart jumped like a stalling car, but she didn’t look up. She didn’t want to spook Alex, and in the bald radiance of the strip lights she probably wouldn’t be able to see him. Her. See her. “It means blame,” she said.
Did people blame you before?
“They blamed me for you.”
For the boy that burned.
“Sorry, yes. For the boy.”
Slowly, carefully, Jess raised her head. The ghost was just about visible, but too faint for her to make out any details – beyond the salient fact that it still had Alex’s face. There was no way of reading the expression that face wore.
“Will you come with me?” Jess asked.
Where?
“You know where. To visit Liz. The woman you met last night. I think maybe you remember her from… before. From when you were alive.”
I do.
&nbs
p; “And you’re scared of her?”
The vague shape that was the ghost heaved its shoulders, gave the ghost of a shrug. There was a long silence. As Jess finally opened her mouth to speak, Alex said, I think I’m scared of remembering.
I can understand that, Jess said. You can get used to being nobody. To having nothing. Then when you have to go back to a life of some kind, it’s frightening. It feels like it might be too much.
She felt ashamed suddenly. She’d just been celebrating her own imminent release – not from Fellside, but from the burden of her past. She’d been looking forward to exactly that weightlessness and emptiness.
It does feel like that, Alex agreed solemnly. But it’s stupid to be scared of the thing you want more than anything. Remembering was the only thing I ever wanted, until I met you and wanted to be with you. So I’ll do it. I will. As long as you’re with me, I think it will be okay.
It will, Jess promised.
She stepped out of her flesh again and took his hand in hers. It came naturally now. There was no uneasiness or sense of tearing.
They ran together away from the blazing strip lights into the night world and the seas of thought.
87
Salazar had spent most of that fraught and crazy day in the infirmary with the door locked. He had clinics in Franklin and Blackwell blocks, but he didn’t attend them.
He didn’t do anything else either.
He felt as though he’d been skating on a frozen lake and had fallen through, but all the ice water was inside him. In his brain. His brain was frozen solid, incapable of pursuing the smallest thought for more than a sluggish, hypothermic second or two.
Leah.
Leah and Devlin.
(Brown skin, glossy black blood, white toilet paper.)
Leah and Devlin intertwined, two halves of one thing.
