Corcoran had stood in the doorway this whole while. She retreated back into the reception area now, after telling Jess to call if she needed anything. “Not that I can give you anything. But I can stand around and commiserate.”
She pulled the door to, and things went really quiet. Most rooms have some sound in them, a hum of air conditioning or gurgling in the pipes, which you’re not aware of until silence lets it through. The infirmary was truly silent. It was restful at first: Jess closed her eyes and tried to sleep.
But she opened them again almost at once. She had a weird sense that somebody had just come into the room. The silence was different now: it had become the non-sound of somebody standing very still, holding their breath.
“Hello?” Jess murmured. She thought it might be Corcoran coming in to check on her, but if it wasn’t, if she was imagining things, she didn’t want to drag the guard away from her book and look like an idiot. Nobody answered.
But she couldn’t settle after that. The feeling that she was being watched stayed with her. It was a little like the feeling Jess associated with her dreams – except that this wasn’t a multitude, it was only a single presence. And unlike the dream women, it was definitely watching her. The sense of focused attention was disconcerting, almost claustrophobic. And it intensified the longer it went on. She didn’t know how much more of it she could bear. She was going to have to sit up, although she wasn’t sure she had the strength to do that. She was going to have to see for herself that she was alone.
But the spell was broken very abruptly. A commotion started up in the reception area outside. Raised voices. A woman sobbing, another telling her to hold still. Corcoran’s voice said, “Holy fucking Jesus!” and the crying rose to a wail before it fell away into half-vocalised moans.
Nothing after that for a long while. Then Corcoran held the door open and a woman was led through, supported by a nurse who wasn’t DiMarta. “You’ve got some company,” Corcoran told Jess. She said it lightly, but her mouth was set in a tight line.
The woman the nurse was supporting was the first Fellside inmate Jess had met. She was a strange sight in a lot of ways. She wore a bright yellow tracksuit, cinched at the waist with a wide black belt that was sewn into the fabric all around. Her face was pale but suffused with red blotches, her short blonde hair plastered to her cheeks with sweat. She walked with a slight stoop, head ducked below her rounded shoulders. She looked a fair bit younger than Jess, but her face was etched with old traumas and tragedies. Her hands, held out stiffly in front of her, were encased in massive boxing gloves.
No, not boxing gloves. They were thick bandages wrapped many times around something rigid, probably splints, that kept the hands flat.
The woman was on the short side, but the nurse was shorter still and as thin as a rake. Her pinched face showed she was carrying most of the weight here. She walked the woman past Jess’s bed to the next one along, where she laid her burden down. She pulled the blankets back and brought a cotton gown from a cupboard.
“You want me to help you undress?” she asked, still a little breathless. She hadn’t looked at Jess up to that point, but now she did – with a slightly aggrieved expression as though to say, “You see how hard other people have it?”
“It still hurts,” the blonde woman whimpered.
“The painkillers haven’t kicked in yet, McBride. It will get better. You want me to help you undress?”
“I – I think I’ll just lie down for now.” The blonde woman rolled on to her side and curled into a ball, but with her hands held out so they didn’t touch the rest of her body.
“Okay then,” the nurse said. She transferred her attention to Jess. There was a second’s pause before she turned, a sort of gathering of herself. “What about you?” she demanded. “Any problems here?”
Jess shook her head, carefully and slowly, because sudden movements made it ache.
“Good,” the nurse said, flexing her wrists like someone who’d just come out of one stand-up fight and was about to wade into another. “Let’s not have any.” She stepped back through the double doors, which swung to behind her.
“Sleep well, ladies,” Corcoran said, and followed her out.
The blonde woman moaned low in her throat.
12
Shannon McBride’s big mistake had been to rip off the Q box.
It wasn’t that there was anything worth having in there. There really wasn’t. It was stuff that had been brought in as gifts for Fellside inmates but had then fallen into a sort of unofficial escrow either because the inmate in question had been released or because the visitor’s name had dropped off the approved list.
None of that really mattered. What mattered was that by custom and practice, the stuff in that box was earmarked for Harriet Grace. Grace sat at the top of Goodall wing’s food chain where most illegal enterprises were concerned, and she policed her borders with a certain judicious fanaticism. So nobody ever touched the Q box, even though it sat out in the open in the visitors’ room where a lot of people could get to it.
Grace had no personal use for the tawdry little gewgaws in the box – a sorry flotsam of hair slides, chocolate bars, shampoo bottles, out-of-date magazines and homemade cakes. Her credit at the commissary was infinite and her cell was a cave of wonders. But there was a principle at stake, and when Mr Devlin, the shift supervisor, told her that the box had been rifled, she took it personally. “Get me a name, Dennis,” she told him. “I’m not letting this lie.”
The Devil was in Grace’s pocket, and in a number of places that were even more compromising than that, so he went away and did as he was told. He got his snitches to ask around, not about stuff that had been stolen – the whisper line usually shied away from fingering people for specific crimes – but about stuff that had been given. Who was suddenly being way too generous? Who felt snubbed because she’d seen some cool stuff being handed out and hadn’t got a share?
Shannon McBride’s name popped up like underdone toast. An impromptu search turned up about two thirds of the stolen bits and pieces stowed in all kinds of random places around her cell. In her locker, under her mattress, inside her mattress, in a scraped-out place under a loose tile – everywhere.
Devlin wrote up the theft in the daybook and told McBride to expect a spell of punitive withdrawal, which meant solitary. That was the euphemism introduced by Governor Scratchwell as part of a drive to improve morale by giving unpleasant things innocuous names. But solitary was the least of McBride’s problems now.
Grace didn’t sit on the matter for long. That was never her way. At six the same evening, the ground-floor corridor was closed off at both ends, and the Devil sent the duty officer off to the fourth floor’s solitary cells to check all the locks and light circuits for an invented fault.
And Grace held court, right there in front of everyone, in the big open space at the heart of the building’s ground floor. The ballroom.
A lot of people there felt that McBride deserved some kind of comeuppance. All the same, they were nervous. They read Grace’s mood and it was volatile in the extreme. It was never safe to be around her at times like this, and if it hadn’t been a three-line whip, enforced by Big Carol Loomis and the even scarier Liz Earnshaw, they would all have been somewhere else.
McBride was brought in and she stood before Grace, who had set up her judgement seat right in front of the TV. Normal service was clearly suspended for the duration.