by M. R. Carey
His own voice, saying something (no words, just the rumbling rise and fall, the self-satisfied bleat), and Leah replying. “What’s that about, then?”
Naseem in the infirmary, but not for a clinic. Naz wasn’t sick. Naz was medicine.
What’s that about, then?
Leah. Oh Leah.
What’s that
What
What’s that about
It was me that killed her, Sally thought. Just me. Not the governor. Not Devlin, or Grace, although they were certainly part of the chain reaction that led to her lying there on the floor in the shower block, broken and thrown away. But they didn’t make Naz any promises. They just did what they were always going to do. Sally had killed her by going home to his wife and boasting about how he was going to make a difference, what a big man he was and how his conscience shone out in the dark.
“What’s that about, then?”
And Sally spoke a name. A name he’d promised to keep secret and safe. And Leah went and whispered it to Devlin, because why wouldn’t she? Something going on in G block right under his nose. Maybe she asked him what he knew about Naseem Suresh, whether he believed her, whether he knew any of the officers she was accusing.
And Devlin probably said no, nothing in it.
Then rose from her side and…
I’ve got to move, Sally thought. I’ve got to do something. I can’t just sit here until the world ends. It will take too long.
His hands were heavy on the ends of his arms. Every movement felt exhausting and wasteful of energy as he booted up his computer and opened a document. The confession was long and rambling, full of false starts and repetitions. It jumped backwards and forwards in time. Even the sentences had no structure. They were coming apart in much the same way Sally was. He attached all the sound files from his secret store, his spy tapes, but forgot to reference them in the document or explain what they were.
When the document was complete, or felt like it was complete, he spent another hour looking for places to send it to. Newspapers. TV channels. Online newsfeeds. Blogs. The more the merrier.
He hit SEND and a bar appeared in the centre of the screen. It showed 0% complete, and for a long time it didn’t change. Then the 0 ticked over into a 1. It was the sound files of course. They were colossal.
But he couldn’t wait for them to finish. There were so many things he still needed to do.
Signing out, first of all. In the middle of his shift. Marcela Robbins was incredulous. “But… what if it all kicks off over in Goodall? Didn’t the governor say everyone had to stay onsite?”
“Pharmacy,” Sally said. “We need…” – he dredged up some words – “Blood. Bandages. Toilet paper.”
“Toilet paper?” Marcela repeated.
Sally walked on, leaving her staring.
He drove to the Pot of Gold, where he ordered a pint of bitter with a whisky chaser – the first of many. He had to be drunk to do what he needed to do, but there were collateral benefits too. After three pints and three whiskies, his pain had a much duller edge to it.
It wasn’t fair to canonise someone, he thought, alive or dead. To make them the keeper of your conscience or the apple of your eye or the guarantee that you’d actually lived. And it wasn’t fair to hate them if they let you down. If his wife had needed to take six inches of solace from a brute like Devlin, that had to say as much about Sally as it did about her.
He felt as though he was spitting out dead parts of himself. The beer took away some of the filthy taste. He was having trouble standing now, but he didn’t want to sit down. He was so unused to serious drinking that he might just put his head in his hands and fall asleep. That wouldn’t do at all.
“Are you all right, love?” The barmaid, who was about twenty, was looking at him with pity and concern. Sally had no idea what she was reading in his face, but he tried to rearrange his features in a neutral configuration and told her he was fine.
He ordered another beer. Another whisky. As he drank, he looked around him at the early evening crowd. The pub was already filling up. It would take a long time to sift through so many strangers, even sober. There had to be a quicker way.
And there was, of course.
Sally stood and banged his empty glass on the counter. “On me,” he called out. “All of your drinks. On me.”
A few people looked at him, but only for a moment. One or two cheered. Most just turned away again, amused or contemptuous.
“I said it’s my round!” Sally shouted. When they still didn’t pay attention, he closed his hand on the glass he was holding. Squeezed it and squeezed it until finally it shattered, shards biting deep into his fingers and his palm as they slid and ground across each other. It hurt a lot more than he expected, but it did the trick. Everyone was looking now as the blood dripped down over his wrist and spattered on the counter.
The barmaid swore and backed away from him. She shouted out a name – the manager’s name, maybe – but there was no immediate response.
“I would love,” Sally said with ponderous dignity, “to buy you all a drink. That would be my privilege.” He shook his hand gingerly, flexing his damaged fingers to dislodge bloody pieces of glass, which fell on to the bar, the floor, his jacket. He took a deep breath and went on. “I’m celebrating, you see. A drug deal. Big one. Up at the prison. That’s who I am up there. Big man in the drugs. Smuggling. Get them in through the gate. Get them on to Curie… Curie block, especially. That’s my particular…” – he waved his bleeding hand – “… thing.”
He still had everyone’s attention. Some of them were whispering to each other, shaking their heads. One or two had taken out mobile phones and were either dialling or else filming him. The barmaid was gone, headed for the hills. That was fine. Sally didn’t mind being dismissed as a lunatic by everyone in the room who didn’t know what he was talking about. As long as there was someone there who did.
“Harriet Grace,” he said ringingly. “Harriet. Grace. You know who that is? I’m very, very friendly with Harriet Grace. She lets me in on all her little secrets. Dennis Devlin. Me and him are like… are like…” He tried to make his fingers connect. The blood was welling so freely now from his right hand that it made a constant pitter-patter sound on the wooden floor.
“Dennis is the one,” he summarised. “Makes it happen. If someone needs to go, like that Minnie Weeks, Dennis just waves his hand and it… happens. And it’s taken a long time, but I think I can honestly say I’m as big a man as he is. Important. Influential. Involved. All the way. All the way to the top. Enjoy your drinks and thank you for your… for your time.”
That will do it, Sally thought. Or else it can’t be done. Either way I’m dead so…
He staggered to the door, pushed it open with his elbow and went out. When the cooling evening air hit his face, he felt a wave of nausea rising inside him. He barely made it to the verge of the road before throwing up the entire contents of his stomach. The heaves were like someone’s arms gripping his abdomen and performing a Heimlich on him.
Drained and tottering, he made it to his car and got it open, cradling his injured hand against his chest. He slid into the back seat, the world rocking around him. He couldn’t drive in this state. He couldn’t go back inside either. There was vomit on his trousers and his shoes. He was filthy, a disgrace. He would give himself a few minutes and then stagger down the road to the bus stop. There was nothing else left to do.
Both of the car’s rear doors opened at the same time, and two men climbed in on either side of him. One was lean and hard and whippet-thin, with an army buzz cut. The other was huge, barrel-chested. Sweat made his shaved head shine like lacquered wood. He wore an apologetic smile.
They clicked the locks down on the car doors. The thin man wrinkled his nose at the sour smell of Sally’s vomit. The other, precisely and without undue ceremony, took a straight razor from his pocket and unfolded it. He turned a cool, blue-eyed scrutiny on Sally.
“Evening,�
� he said gravely. “My name’s Kenny. Kenny Treacher.”
“Is it?” Sally said. “Well. I do not give a flying fuck about that.”
“No?”
“No.” Sally started to shake his head, but had to stop at once as another wave of nausea sluiced through him. “You’re as bad as she is. As they are. Poison. Sell poison, and get rich from people dying. Bad as I am, probably. But are you bad enough, Mr fucking Kenny fucking Treacher? That’s the question. Are you bad enough to be any fucking use to me?”
“Well,” Treacher said, pressing the razor up against Sally’s throat, “I can only do my best. Tell me about this Devlin, yeah?”
88
While Devlin was waiting, he thought the waiting had to be the hardest part.
Three hours until lock-up, riding herd on six hundred women who were on the edge of rabid the whole time. He’d read in some tabloid once that women who lived together ended up going on the rag together. The image he’d conjured up in his mind when he read that article was something close to the way Goodall wing was right now. Whenever a warder even looked at a prisoner, it was a challenge. Every unguarded word flared up into a shouting match.
But lock-up rolled around at last. And that was the hardest part, no doubt about it. Forcing the rabid bitches back into their cells like ships into bottles. He kept thinking it was going to start, but time after time Corcoran was there to talk it down or bluff it out. The two of them went back to back. They kept poker faces, like nothing was wrong. Joked to each other and to the prisoners. Nonchalantly walked and waved and waltzed them through the doors. Nodded the count through.
Turned the keys.
CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK: done.
“Holy fuck,” Corcoran said, leaning back against the wall. “I am going home and drinking a whole bottle of Bacardi. Someone can pour the Coke into me after I pass out.”
“Bourbon any good?” Devlin said. And on her nod, “Follow me.”
They went to the second-floor guard station. There was a camera there, but it only showed the left-hand side of the room. Devlin drew up two chairs against the right wall.
“Here.” He took his hip-flask out of the first aid box, where he stowed it for use during night shifts, and handed it to her. They sat side by side, taking alternate swigs.
When Corcoran’s head was thrown back, gulping down the sweet whisky, Devlin punched her hard in the throat. It was meant to be a killing blow, but he didn’t hit hard enough. At the last moment, his mind wouldn’t let him commit to what he was about to do.
Corcoran went down, but she was still trying to breathe, and she struggled in his grip when she realised what was happening. Devlin had her arms pinned but she used her head as a weapon, slamming it into his face so hard that he saw fireworks. So hard he let go of her.
But he caught her again as she crawled towards the door, and this time she was on her stomach so it was a lot harder for her to defend herself.
It took a long, long time to get the job done, because she was still fighting and he had to make sure that no part of her flailing body crossed the invisible line that was the camera’s field of vision.
That was the hardest part. He cried the whole time he was killing her.
89
Physical distance didn’t count for much in the night world. Liz Earnshaw was only a few feet away from them in waking reality – was Jess’s next-door neighbour in solitary – but it still took her and Alex a long time to find her. When they did, Jess was surprised and disturbed at what she saw.
Earnshaw wasn’t an ocean and she wasn’t a tower. She was a ruin – inert and broken, the pieces of her mind lying in overlapping layers that hardly seemed to move or change. The trail that Jess and Alex had followed tasted of fury and violence and belligerence, but the ruin had none of those things. Emotionally, it was empty. Burned out.
Don’t think about fire, Alex warned Jess.
“I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”
You have to try, Jess. If you think about fire, you’ll get upset and you’ll change things the way you changed me. You’ll make everything look like what you remember.
She knew that was a real danger. She tried her best to calm herself – to pull her thoughts and emotions back inside her and lock them down. It was hard.
“Perhaps you should go in on your own,” she said.
No! Alex was dismayed, pleading. You said you’d stay with me. I’m not going unless you come too.
Faced with that ultimatum, Jess surrendered. Alex took her hand – she did her best to make it firm and solid and real – and they stepped inside.
Once they took that last step, once they were inside Earnshaw looking out, everything changed. From the inside, Earnshaw – like anyone – was vast beyond any reasonable measurement. They weren’t wandering in a ruin; they were lost in a world.
But they weren’t lost for long. Earnshaw was catatonic for a reason, and the reason was Alex. She’d folded herself like a fist around some buried thing, some memory, some part of her lived experience. That folding had left marks on every part of her. They followed the only path they could see through that endless, scarred emptiness.
To the dense, impacted core of Earnshaw. A vast blotch of something and nothing, yellow-blue like a bruise, beating like a heart in a sky of brass.
Jess and the ghost that wore the shape of Alex Beech walked out across that sky, ignoring the drop below them because it wasn’t real and didn’t merit their attention. The thing they were walking towards knew they were there and it threw out snaking tendrils of itself to whip in the air above them.
GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY, it shouted at them endlessly in Liz Earnshaw’s voice.
“No,” Jess said.
One of the tendrils lashed her across her face, exploded in her eyes in a flare of hate and rage. She flinched back, the pain taking her by surprise. A second blow hammered on her shoulders, and then a third in the exact same place. Earnshaw was trying to swat her out of the sky.
But Jess was pretty schooled up on pain by this point. After the fire, and the endless surgery to save her face, and what Stock had put her through with the needle, she was inoculated against random agony – especially if, like this, it was mostly “let’s pretend”.
“We’re coming in,” she said, trying to sound resolute and determined despite the tremor in her voice. “Nothing you can do will stop us, Earnshaw, but if you fight us, we might have to hurt you. It’s up to you.”
The bloated thing screamed and struck again – only against her, Jess noticed, not against Alex. Some of the tendrils hovered in the air over the boy’s head but they offered him no harm. And Jess ignored the blows, only ducking her head as though the lashing filaments were heavy rain.
She knew they had to make a breach in this thing that towered over them, and she thought she might know a way to do it. It was brutal, but she had no particular reason to be gentle.
“You see who’s with me, Earnshaw?” she shouted. “Does this face seem familiar to you? Maybe it doesn’t because she’s changed a lot since the last time you met. But I’ll give you a clue if you want one. I’ll tell you how you killed her.”
She gathered her strength and shouted as loud as she could. Not just with her voice, but with her mind.
“You cut off the fingers of her left hand. You sliced her cheek open. Her
You cut off the fingers of her left hand. You sliced her cheek open. Her right cheek, I think it was. You took her eye out. Then you stabbed her in the throat right cheek, I think it was. You took her eye out. Then you stabbed her in the throat and let her choke to death on her own blood. Is this ringing any bells?” and let her choke to death on her own blood. Is this ringing any bells?
Alex whimpered at Jess’s side. Clung to her arm like a castaway clinging to a spar.
She was describing the wounds he had told her about in their very first c
onversation. Told her about and – she knew now – tried to show her. He’d held up his hand, touched his eye and his cheek. But she had already been writing her own memories on to what she was seeing. The wounds were invisible to her because they didn’t fit with what she knew about Alex’s death.
The pulsing bruise above them made no response, but Jess felt that it was listening. The silence sucked at her.
“It sounds to me,” she shouted, “as though most of the time you were just hurting her for the sake of it. Did you only decide to kill her right at the end? Or were you trying to draw it out as long as you could?”
The great dark blotch clenched and then expanded, again and again, as though it was a monstrous bird trying and failing to take off, hammering the air with useless vestigial wings.
Jess tried again, with Alex’s own words this time. “You hurt her with sharp things. Cut her until she—”
The bruise screamed, and opened. For a moment it was everywhere. Pain and rage flooded the whole world. Then came the systole, the contraction, pulling it inexorably back into itself. Jess felt that furious anguish draw on her like a half-consumed cigarette, pull at her mind and her soul and what she wore by way of flesh.
Alex! she cried, wanting… what? To warn him? To reassure him? Just to remind him that she was there? It didn’t matter. Alex was gone. The returning current had dragged his hand from hers and carried him away.
Then it carried itself away too. Jess was standing alone in the night world’s vast nothingscape of endless shores and endless oceans.
90
First things first.
Devlin had a lot of work to do, but he had to do it systematically, in sequence, or else it was all going to fall apart on him.
The only reason he had killed Andrea Corcoran, who he liked as much as he liked anyone at Fellside apart from Grace, was to get at her keys. She was senior on-block, and the keys went with the job. If Grace hadn’t made Devlin run escort for Moulson, it would have been him who had the keys. He wouldn’t have been able to get away with this because all the inevitable concomitant shit would have come flowing back to him. Now it would flow to a dead woman in the second-floor guard station.
