Some woman with a weird face like a porcelain doll was up in the infirmary. Rowena Salisbury, the canteen trusty who took meals over to the women on the wards, said it was Jess Moulson. The Inferno Killer.
A few women swore or spat on the ground at the sound of that name. Most kept their own counsel. In the outside world, guilt and innocence tended to be seen as two completely separate things, like the on and off positions of a light switch. Earnshaw didn’t know much, didn’t think much about things she couldn’t touch or see, but like anyone who’s ever stood up in a courtroom and answered that question – How do you plead? – she knew instinctively that people’s consciences were tricky and complicated geography. Like an old canal that’s had so many things pitched into it over the years that you can’t see the bottom. It’s definitely not clean, but who’s to say which particular bit of junk belongs where?
So she didn’t say anything about Moulson or have an opinion on her. But she heard McBride’s name mentioned at last, and turned in that direction. She forced her way into a ring of women who were in no way pleased to see her.
“So how is she?” she demanded. “McBride? Is she back on block?”
Everyone went silent and serious for a moment. As though maybe they thought Earnshaw didn’t have a right to ask. “Salazar has been Skyping Leeds General,” said Luanne Kingston. “He’s thinking they might have to drive her over there. Nobody’s heard anything else yet.” You would think to look at Luanne’s solemn, anxious face that she’d never cosmetically rearranged her husband’s bit on the side with a broken bottle. You would think Luanne was a saint.
“Nobody’s heard?” Earnshaw repeated. “Then why were you talking about her?”
Another short, frosty silence before Luanne caved again. “Jess Moulson sang her to sleep. So Shannon said, anyway. She told Rowena about it when she brought the breakfast in.”
“Moulson? The murderer?” It sounded unlikely, and McBride was known for her stupid stories. This was probably just more of the same. “Moulson sang to her?”
“Apparently, yeah.”
“And who gives a fuck?”
Luanne’s face took on the expression of someone who’s holding back from saying a lot of different things. “Nobody,” she said.
“Right,” Liz agreed, and moved on.
She couldn’t settle to anything. This wasn’t one of her on-call days but she checked in with Grace to see if she might be needed. She wasn’t. Dima Juke and Roz Jacobs were already propping up Grace’s door, and since this wasn’t a day when anything was coming in from outside, Grace was unlikely to find herself short-handed. Earnshaw went in and asked anyway, getting the answer she expected.
“We’re fine, Lizzie,” Grace told her. “You just relax and have a day off.”
Which sounded great but wasn’t really in Earnshaw’s repertoire. She didn’t read. Didn’t do drugs or religion. Wasn’t in film club or AA or the farm rota. Hadn’t had a girlfriend since Naz died. She had no leisure activities except remembering, and she really didn’t feel like remembering right then.
“I could tidy up a bit,” she suggested.
Grace looked at her as though she had offered to do an exotic dance. But maybe she saw something in Earnshaw’s face, because she nodded. “All right, go on. If you want to. But keep it quiet while I meditate.”
Grace meditating looked like Grace sprawled on a chair with her legs open and her eyes shut. Liz tiptoed around her, half-heartedly moving things from one end of a table or shelf to the other and then putting them back again. There was nothing to tidy. Grace had a place for every item she owned.
Liz started to slip into the past. She didn’t want to, but she did. She saw red. Blood soaked into streamers of trodden-down toilet paper. A crêpe-paper heart. The knuckles of her own hand, raw and ruined, after she’d punched the wall of her cell a hundred times.
“What did you say?” Grace asked.
Earnshaw’s thoughts scattered. “Nothing.”
“I thought you said you were sorry.”
“No.”
Grace sighed. “All right, Lizzie, enough of this. You’re not my maid. I’ve got a better job for you.”
“What do you need, Grace?”
Grace went over to the bookcase and took out a notebook. A fancy Moleskine that looked like a real book out of a library. “Last page,” she said, handing it over to Liz. “Bad debts. Go and see how many you can turn into good ones.”
Liz took the book with a big surge of relief and gratitude. “I’ll shake them up a little,” she promised.
“I’m sure,” Grace said.
“Grace?”
“Yeah?”
“Will McBride’s hands be okay?”
“Of course they will. McBride’s half-Irish, Lizzie. She was raised on that shit.”
The lilt of Grace’s voice and the grin that went with the words told Liz that that was a joke, so she laughed. And laughing about it made some of the bad feelings recede. She went out with a much lighter heart to do Grace’s bidding.
16
The next morning, the infirmary was in top gear. Dr Salazar was there for his early clinic and Patience DiMarta – “no nonsense on either side” – was back on as duty nurse.
Completing McBride’s transfer to Leeds was Salazar’s first order of business. Her hands were in a horrendous state, and she was likely to lose at least one finger, maybe two. Even splinting so many broken and pulverised bones went way beyond Sally’s expertise. Beyond Sylvie Stock’s too, very clearly: Sally undid her barely adequate dressings carefully and replaced the splints and bandages as best he could, but it was only a stopgap. McBride had to be moved, and quickly.
“And this was an accident?” he asked her. His tone was incredulous. He couldn’t help it.
“A table fell on me,” McBride mumbled.
Salazar turned her right hand – the worse of the two – very gently, so they could both see her knuckles. “These marks,” he said, pointing, “look like separate impacts. And they’re not even coming from the same angle. If a table—”
“It was just an accident, Sally,” McBride said. “My own stupid fault. Lots of people saw it.”
Salazar let it go. Once he would have pushed further. Taken the names of the other women who were supposed to have witnessed this accident and then questioned some of them to see whether their stories agreed. He might have filed an incident report. Even gone to the governor and asked for an investigation.
He didn’t do any of those things any more. Experience had beaten all that right out of him. But he still thought about doing them, as if to remind himself how big a gap there was between where he was and where he ought to be.
After the prisoner escort arrived and took McBride away, Salazar asked DiMarta to make up the quarantine room while he questioned Moulson (in one of her brief periods of full consciousness) about things like what day of the week it was and where she’d been born. He had to establish that she was of sound mind because otherwise – by some weird logic that had a lot more to do with law than medicine – her decision to kill herself couldn’t be allowed to stand.
Moulson passed on all counts. Salazar felt he didn’t do too badly either, in that he maintained his best bedside manner the whole time he was talking to her. Moulson’s face was like nothing he’d ever seen. Just like Sylvie Stock the night before, he tried to imagine what her injuries were like before she was operated on. They must have been terrible because reconstructive surgery had become something pretty close to magic in the last decade or so. You could grow new skin from stem cells and restore muscle function with microvascular transfers. If Moulson had received all these treatments and still looked the way she did, her face must have been burned to the bone.