There was a window – quite a long interval actually – when she could have intervened. Tempered justice with mercy. Put a different spin on the evening’s entertainment. She was frankly just a little bit tempted. But where does that sort of thinking get you, really? More often than not, on the other end of that descending hammer.
There was even a moment when Liz Earnshaw, whose hands had never yet shaken no matter what grisly business they were engaged in, glanced across at Grace with a questioning frown as if she was looking for the order to stand down. Grace didn’t give it. She gestured to Liz to carry on, and Liz – after a near-subliminal hesitation – raised the hammer again and brought it down.
There wasn’t much further to go in any case. A minute later, two at the most, McBride threw up, keeled over and passed out from the pain. That was game over, lesson learned and sermon preached. Grace got up and walked out, deliberately not looking back or saying a word to anyone. She’d already said everything that needed saying.
She left the contents of the boxes where they were, scattered all over the table. But nobody took anything. That was part of the lesson too.
As soon as Grace was gone, with Big Carol and Earnshaw in tow, the Goodall women rose in a collective surge. Lorraine Buller took charge (which was no surprise), sending a couple of women off to get towels and water, a couple more to bring a bottle of TCP from her cell.
“Should we report an incident?” Pauline Royal asked. Po had been a civil servant out in RL and had earned a three-year stretch for writing large cheques to herself out of departmental funds. But now that she was in prison, as if to make up for those old transgressions, she was a stickler for the rules.
“Don’t be stupid, Po. We clean her up a bit first. And wake her up a bit. If we take her to the guard post now, she won’t have a clue what she’s saying.”
“All right,” Po muttered. “Keep your hair on.”
Buller’s anger was mostly at herself. She’d wanted not to be here. Had thought about organising a boycott of Grace’s kangaroo court, but as always she stopped just shy of open opposition to Grace. Buller was tough and almost fearless, a biker bitch in a previous life with more sins on her conscience than half the block, but she had children and grandchildren in the outside world: hostages to fortune. Grace knew no limits and respected no rules. If you stood against her, you had to lock down and take what came.
By the same logic, McBride couldn’t talk to a guard right now until she’d got her story straight. If she blurted out Grace’s name, she’d get into worse trouble. The kind of trouble that led to not getting up one fine morning because your throat had been excavated with a Stanley knife.
The other inmates had formed a sort of honour guard around the unconscious woman. Not that there was anything to protect McBride from now. The proceedings were over and Grace wouldn’t be coming back. But everyone who felt like Buller did, which was most of them, wanted to put down a belated marker to show that their hearts were in the right place even if the rest of their guts were deficient.
“She’s a mess, look,” Kaleesha Campbell muttered. “She could lose that finger altogether. This is just wrong.”
“Tell that to the Bride of Frankenstein,” someone else suggested.
“Lizzie Earnshaw’s not that fucking hard.”
No, Buller thought. Just hard enough, really. Hard enough and sharp enough to be a shiv in Grace’s manicured hand. Two or three women of the right temperament could take Lizzie down easy. And Grace would pick up another shiv and go right on cutting.
The women came back from their errands. They revived McBride with a sponge dipped in cold water. Wiped the grit and dirt out of her wounds as best they could, Po holding on to her while she whimpered at the sting of the disinfectant. They made sure she could count how many fingers they were holding up. They made sure she had something to say to account for the damage. And then Kaleesha went along to the guard post and told the duty officer, Mrs Lessing, that there had been an accident. A bad one.
Lessing took one look at McBride’s hands and called the infirmary, bringing Nurse Stock at a flat run. Stock could see that Shannon’s injuries were going to need more extensive treatment than the prison’s infirmary could provide. They were probably serious enough to justify calling Dr Salazar at home and getting him to authorise an immediate transfer to Leeds General, but Stock was a woman who enjoyed the reassurance of routine and hated to step outside it. She signed McBride into the main ward for the night. Salazar would be clocking in again at 6 a.m., which wasn’t that long, and he was paid more than she was precisely because his job description included making the tough decisions.
Stock took charge of McBride and led her away – with the aid of two female warders – to the infirmary, where she found that another patient had been admitted in her absence. This was Jessica Moulson, whose arrival had been the source of locker room gossip for weeks now.
The Inferno Killer. Only a few hours into her sentence and already hard at work on her escape attempt.
13
McBride was tripping a little, partly from the very powerful painkillers she’d been given and partly from the pain that they were failing to kill. She thought she was hallucinating Jess, whose reconstructed face shone in the light of the overhead fluorescents like a porcelain mask and whose eyes, after so many days without food, had the ghost-panda stare of a junkie on the morning after the bender that should have finished her.
Jess’s clothes were wrong too. She’d transferred from Winstanley wearing a remand prisoner’s grey cotton shirt over a white hospital gown – but that colour scheme was meaningless in Fellside, where your clothes were absolutely determined by your status. Like all the other women from G block, McBride wore high-security yellow with a black sewn-in waistband. Maybe the Goodall inmates were meant to look like wasps. They were definitely meant to remind anyone who saw them of things that were toxic and had to be handled with care.
So McBride found it hard to process this weird apparition. “Oh, are you fucking sick?” she muttered, addressing her own subconscious mind. Because it was as though she’d invented a sort of imaginary friend for herself, and she couldn’t understand why she’d made her be a botched ghost of a woman with a messed-up face.
Jess didn’t have any answer to that, so she went for a question instead. “What happened to your hands?”
McBride didn’t answer. She rolled over to face the wall, covering her eyes with her bandaged fingers. She fell silent apart from her shuddering, uneven breaths.
The exhaustion of the long journey overwhelmed Jess with unexpected suddenness. When she closed her eyes, she felt a jolt as though something heavy had slammed shut. She fell headlong into sleep.
Sometime in the night, McBride started to cry. The pain meds were wearing off and she knew she wasn’t going to get any more until morning. She was a known junkie and her word on matters of pharmaceutical need wasn’t good. But it wasn’t just the pain: it was the fear too, and the memory of her own helplessness. Even, a little bit, it was the shame of having stolen all those things from women she knew, many of whom had treated her well at one time or another.
The sound of her sobbing dragged Jess from a deep pit of sleep. But it only dragged her partway: a fug of unreality clung to her as she looked around her for the source of the sound. Perhaps she was dreaming again. She had the sense that she’d often had in her hospital room and in the remand cell at Winstanley that the room was a lot bigger than it should be.
Someone was crying. She convinced herself it was a boy’s voice. She must be back in her own bed, and Alex was out on the stairs, half naked in the cold. He was waiting for her but she hadn’t come.