“Blonde, Dennis. With big wide eyes. People who look like angels get an easy ride.”
Dead on the forty-five-minute mark, Devlin stepped out of Grace’s cell, walking between Earnshaw and Loomis, who stood facing front like the Beefeaters at theTower of London. He adjusted his tie and checked the hang of his trousers to make it very clear he knew that they knew what had been going on inside the cell, and that he didn’t give a shit. Then he strolled away with his accustomed swagger.
Big Carol mimed the act of fellatio until Earnshaw’s blank stare unsettled her and she stopped.
19
News about the murderess who’d decided to die spread quickly around Fellside.
And quickest of all in G block, where Shannon McBride (back from Leeds General with nine fingers, splints and pins all over her painstakingly repaired hands, and at least a month’s exemption from work details) provided the perfect vector of transmission. She felt as though Moulson was her property, at least on a narrative level, and it hurt her to think of other people building where she had the initial stake. So she told anyone who’d listen to her about how Moulson had sung her to sleep, and how Moulson’s voice had this weird hypnotic power. It was an old story by now, but it still had some currency – especially from the horse’s original and genuine mouth.
Shannon told it in the commissary to add some spice to a bland corned-beef hash. Her audience was drawn from the second floor of the block, her cellmates and posse. Po Royal was there, and her girlfriend Kaleesha, the G block librarian. So was Hannah Passmore, the only lifer on the second floor. Hannah didn’t really belong in this peaceable and literary bunch, but she had bunked with Po back in the day and they still looked out for each other.
“Maybe that’s how she killed that kid,” Po said. “Sang him to sleep and he never woke up.”
McBride thought that was pretty amazing, and normally it would be something she’d be very happy to weave into her story. But it made Moulson into a monster. When she thought back to that terrible night, what she remembered most of all was the way the pain had seemed to be unbearable right up until Moulson touched her, and then it had faded right away.
Well, that and the fact that she’d sort of mistaken Moulson for a boy at one point, or thought there was a boy in the room, or something. But that part was confusing and it didn’t seem to go anywhere, so she left it out.
Shannon thought about stories she’d heard when she was a kid about scary women who sang, where the power was in the singing and you were much better off not listening. Sirens and selkies and suchlike. She didn’t want to put Moulson in that company. But maybe Moulson could have some of that power without being bad.
“She does have a really weird voice,” she admitted. “It sort of gets into your bones and vibrates.”
“If she’s got a vibrator, I want twosies,” said Kaleesha. That comment got her a dig in the ribs from her cellmate and lover. “You stay bloody clear of it, you dirty bitch!” Po admonished her.
Hannah Passmore shook her head sombrely. “Singing,” she said with distaste. “What’s she got to sing about?”
“Maybe she can’t help herself,” McBride suggested. She was embellishing freely now. “Her eyes were sort of glazed over. It was like she was in a trance or something. Like the song was just going to come out of her no matter what she did.”
“What did she sing?” Po asked her. There had been lots of things, but the only one Shannon could remember was “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper. That bathetic detail just fell to the ground and lay there, and she made a mental note to make it something different next time she was asked. The song really wasn’t the point, when all was said and done. The point was the story – or rather, getting a reaction to the story. She was more than happy to adjust the finer details to meet her listeners’ needs and preferences.
What Shannon liked about stories was the attention they got her, and the way the stories kept on going around after she’d started them. It made her feel like she was plugged into the life of Goodall wing – like she was the belle of the ballroom. In other ways, she knew, she was strictly marginal. She’d been that way long before she got to Fellside. Her family had disowned her as soon as she got herself arrested – well, as soon as they found out the charge was drug dealing – and her fiancé had dropped her like a shitty stick. Nobody ever visited her and she never got any letters. The space she’d left behind her in the world outside had closed again without her in it. So she told stories, and for as long as she had an audience, she convinced herself she had friends.
Then after the night of the Q box trial, she suddenly did. Women who’d never had time for her before were stopping by her cell to talk or offering her a game of Connect 4 or gin rummy in the ballroom. So she offered up her stories, which were really all she had in the way of conversation, and rubbed herself up, purring, against the luxury of an audience.
Moulson was a good story and Shannon polished it to a high gloss with many iterations. She could never be entirely certain, though, what response she was going to get. Very few of the Goodall women took the tabloid verdicts on the Inferno Killer at face value. But they knew a child had died, and they didn’t take that lightly. For Moulson to die in her turn seemed like a reasonable outcome.
Some people, of course, were a lot more pragmatic about the whole thing. Harriet Grace, for example. Word was that she’d opened a book on how long Moulson would last. For anything longer than six weeks, the odds topped off at a hundred to one. But there wasn’t anyone in Fellside who took that bet.
Shannon really hoped that Moulson would change her mind and live. She wanted that for a lot of reasons. It would give her a chance to say thank you to her for helping her through those dark hours.
And being so very unlikely, it would make a much better ending.
20
Another week went by, and Jess stuck to her guns.
She was dying by inches and ounces. But she’d crashed through the pain barrier in the third week, and now most of what she was feeling was coming to her dulled and deadened. Apart from when she swallowed or tried to talk, which was agony because of the fungal infection under her tongue.
“I can treat that,” Dr Salazar had told her when he turned the edge of her tongue with a depressor and found the livid, swollen flesh. “There’s no reason why you have to suffer.”
He’d actually said it more than once. The last time, he’d almost pleaded. Jess could tell that it distressed him to sit by and watch pain that he could do something about. But she didn’t know how strong her willpower was. Worse things would be happening soon. If she said yes to treatment now, how could she trust herself to say no later? And if she stopped being able to say anything, would she have set a precedent without meaning to?
It was better to just ride it out until none of it mattered any more.
The tramadol helped, not so much by easing the pain but by erasing whole stretches of time. The effects of the drug had intensified as her body mass got less and her system got weaker. Now, whenever Salazar or one of the nurses gave her a shot, it was as though she were a cork being shoved deep into black water. She would rise again slowly, slowly, to find a different nurse on duty and half a day gone.