Dr Salazar was dosing her with tramadol, because moving and swallowing was starting to hurt her now. The tramadol dulled the pain but it also made her dizzy and nauseous whenever she moved her head even slightly. It skewed her time sense too, unless that was a side-effect of not being able to see the sky any more.
Doing time, she thought inconsequentially. As though time were a drug.
If it was, she might have dosed herself more carefully.
18
“So this piece you’ve got in the infirmary,” Grace said to the Devil. “Moulson. What’s going on with that?”
She’d only just finished Devlin off about five seconds before and he was still out of breath, but he was used to Grace snapping back into business as usual right after sex, so he rolled over and lay back with his hands behind his head as she lit herself a cigarette. He could afford to relax. Liz Earnshaw and Big Carol Loomis were on duty at the door, and nobody was going to come in and interrupt them. Even if another warder came looking for him, they’d know better than to look under Grace’s skirts.
“She’s killing herself,” he told Grace with massive distaste. “The one way she can do it without any kickback. A hunger strike. We’ve just got to sit and watch, apparently.”
“It’s a protest?” Grace demanded, ignoring Devlin’s bitching as she usually did. The man had a lot of grievances. He lived in a world where everyone he met was keen to cheat or insult or disrespect or disobey him, or at all events to get away with something. He was, in his own mind, the bastion of order and the bastion of not taking any shit. Grace found him pliable to a fault as long as she didn’t attempt to challenge this cosmology.
That was part of what she liked about Devlin – or approved of, at least. There was almost nothing to him that you couldn’t take in at a glance. Thug was the first thing you would think when you saw him, and you weren’t likely to see anything later that would make you doubt your judgement. He was big and broad across the shoulders, kept his bullet-head meticulously shaved. More than anything else, he was hard. That was the impression he gave anyway; as though if you cut into him you’d find the same solid, massy substance all the way through.
That was the one place, though, where appearances did deceive. Devlin was a bully all right. Bullying, in Grace’s opinion, was a big part of who he was. But he had a sentimental streak too. He liked to believe that his junior warders were loyal to him, that the inmates respected him, that he was an emotional pivot for people he mostly treated with brusque disregard. To be loved and understood was the core of his fantasy life, which maybe went some way towards explaining how things worked between him and Grace. He saw an intimacy where she saw an alliance.
He considered Grace’s question and shrugged – not irritably, because he was still comfortably post-coital, but dismissively. “No. She doesn’t think she was hard done by. Her lawyer asked if he could come in and talk to her about an appeal, and she said she didn’t want to see him.”
“Then what is she doing?”
“I don’t know. Got a bad conscience probably. She pleaded not guilty, but she fell apart at the trial and pretty much admitted she killed the kid.”
Grace didn’t have anything to say to this, but privately she thought that anyone who’d let themselves get destroyed by a sense of guilt was probably better off dead, and certainly wasn’t worth wasting any sympathy on. Guilt was one of the things she knew about but didn’t understand. It seemed to be as much use as hen’s teeth. If something was done, it was done. If you didn’t intend to do it, it wasn’t on you; if you did, you lived with your choice.
So Moulson was a queasy curiosity to her. But that was all she was, and the talk soon turned to other things. Grace had three new couriers to train up for drug runs, all with court appearances in the next couple of weeks. She wanted Devlin to arrange pick-ups for them. It was a lot of work, and it involved a lot of arguing back and forth about names, dates, times, locations and amounts. It was a pity they’d already had sex. This stuff got them both cheerful and excited again. But Devlin had a shift handover to deal with and he’d been in Grace’s cell for forty minutes already. Forty-five was a limit they’d agreed on a long time ago, and they stuck to it.
Devlin put his uniform back on, Grace giving his cock a squeeze before he put it away. Mixing up business and pleasure again, she let him in on a thought she’d had. “I think we could afford to up the volume.”
Devlin was far from enthusiastic. Grace had known he would be: that was why she’d waited until he was leaving to say this. The Devil preferred a quiet life in which money and gratification came to him easily, without his having to reach for them. “Where?” he demanded. “We’ve got the whole block to ourselves now. There’s no competition, Grace.”
“I’m not thinking of Goodall – I’m thinking of Curie. Dizzy gets out in two weeks. There’s an opportunity there.”
She waited for Devlin to start nit-picking. She knew what the objections were, and she had answers for all of them.
He started out with the most obvious one. “What about Hassan and Weeks?” Those two were Dizzy Disraeli’s prison daughters, and they were almost certainly planning to pick up her distribution network after she was released.
“That’s why we’re having this conversation now,” Grace said. “I’m thinking that Hassan and Weeks might get themselves into some trouble. Bad enough so you have to throw them in solitary for a week or two…”
Devlin smoothed out his shirt while he thought this over. “That’s going to take a lot of arranging. Don’t get me wrong – I can do it. But it will cost. And who’s going to sell for you? If I shut Dizzy’s tap off, yours has got to be up and running or there’ll be blood on the walls.”
“I’ve got some people in mind.” Grace ran through the names she’d come up with – Ellen Heinz, Sue Calvie, Jasmin Sullivan, a couple of others. But she could see from Devlin’s face that he was still more focused on the spanners than on the works.
“You’ll need someone to carry the stuff in,” he pointed out. “I can’t walk into Curie. Not regularly. Not with a pound of black up my shirt.”
“That’s the big issue,” Grace agreed. “Do you know any Curie screws we should be talking to?”
Devlin shook his head emphatically. The six prisoner blocks at Fellside were independent republics and the rackets mostly didn’t run between them. Grace could understand his reluctance to play recruiting sergeant: that kind of conversation would require him to show his before the other parties showed theirs, which would be a substantial risk.
And speaking of risk, Devlin now named another one. “What would we do about Kenny Treacher?” Treacher was Dizzy’s supplier – a man with a very bloody reputation. Grace had seen the man a few times when he came in to visit Dizzy. She thought he looked like someone who would kill you without changing his facial expression, which even at rest was like a crab-apple that had tried to eat itself.
Treacher had known Dizzy before she went to jail, but his most intense relationship was with Dominica Weeks, Dizzy’s daughter, who he’d met while she was inside and according to rumour was going to marry as soon as she was out. He couldn’t be bought off or brought on board. He would already have plans in place to ensure a smooth regime change once Dizzy passed the baton. Taking Hassan and Weeks out of the equation would leave him temporarily with no handholds, so he couldn’t stop someone else moving in and stealing his customers. But he wouldn’t like it much, and he might try to stir up trouble afterwards if he thought he had a chance of undoing the done deal.
“You let me worry about that,” Grace said lightly. The truth was that any reprisals Treacher launched would most likely be confined to the lowest rungs of the ladder. She was happy to accept collateral damage there. “You just think about mules. Ask around if you can. It’s really got to be a screw who carries the stuff through. One with a few years on her too, if we can manage it.”
“Want to specify hair colour?” Devlin grunted.