“Then give yourself the benefit of the doubt,” the pastor suggested. It was exactly what Brian Pritchard had told her to do, only he’d been referring to things in the past, and Sarah Afanasy was talking about the future.
Which made Jess wonder for the first time whether she – or Alex, for all the seeming finality of death – might actually have one.
28
Another night, another dream. A banal and ordinary one this time. Jess was playing hopscotch in the playground of her primary school. She was her nine-year-old self, acutely conscious of the dental braces she was wearing and the new shoes she was supposed not to scuff.
She woke to find Alex sitting cross-legged at the foot of her bed. Actually he wasn’t quite touching the bed. He hovered an inch or so above it, casting no shadow on the crisp white coverlet.
Something dark and curdled rose in Jess’s mind where her unbelief touched her fear, and both refused to dissolve. If Alex was a figment, just her own guilt wearing a dead child’s face, then she was mad and lost. If he was real, then she was penned in with a monster, something utterly impossible and wrong.
No, I’m the monster, she told herself. Not him. Anyone who hurts a kid is a monster, whether they meant to do it or not. Cling to that. If there was one wrong, sick, unnatural thing in this room, it was her. And whether Alex was real or not, this was her penance, dangling within her reach. She could grab for it or she could go down into the ground as she had intended, with nothing done. Nothing changed or atoned for.
I like your uniform, Alex said. He said it loudly, even though he wasn’t speaking aloud. She had the sense that he was trying to change the subject, though not a word had been spoken. I had a black blazer with a red badge. There was a goat and a flag and dum spiro spero underneath.
In her dream, Jess had been wearing the blue blazer and skirt of Heathcote Road County Primary.
“I want to help you,” she said in her rusty, closed-for-repairs voice. “I don’t know if I can, but I’ll try.” She was eliding a lot of things, including I have no idea if you’re really here or if any of this means anything but maybe, if there’s a God, he sees me trying and that somehow counts. She could have said those things but it seemed easier to let them slide for now.
The dead boy smiled. Thank you, Jess!
“You want to know… what happened before the flats burned down? This woman who hurt you – you want to know who she was?”
A vigorous nod. And why she hated me. And where my friend went.
“Your friend? You never mentioned…”
It was something else I only just remembered. There was a girl who was my friend and another girl who hated me.
“A girl, or a woman?”
Alex frowned, visibly turning that question over in his mind. I don’t know, he admitted at last. I remember it lots of different ways. I think before I forgot it I dreamed it a lot, and where I live now dreams are the realest thing. I see her as a woman and I see her as a girl.
“Your own age?” Jess hazarded.
How old am I?
“You were ten when you died.” Putting it into words made her mind rebel all over again against the craziness of it all. She was diving down the rabbit hole with her eyes wide open. There might not be a bottom.
Then probably older than me. But I don’t know.
Which was hardly surprising, Jess thought bleakly. If he was a child, or the remnant of a child, then his perspective was limited by a child’s understanding of the world. If he was a fantasy of her own making, then everything he said was meaningless and it all came down to some happy daydream of making amends. Either way, she was on her own.
Or maybe not. Not entirely. If she reopened contact with her lawyers, told them she’d changed her mind about lodging an appeal, there might be a way to get them to take another look at the events that had brought her here: the fire, and Alex’s death.
It was better to believe, she realised, suddenly and all at once. If she believed, then she would have Alex with her, for a while at least. She’d have that solace, and perhaps another chance to prove that she could be the friend he needed. All she’d lose, even in the worst-case scenario, was her mind, and what the hell else was she using it for?
Pastor Afanasy’s words came back to her, and now she could open up her arms and embrace them: this was a much better deal than dying.
Wherever it might lead, she decided she would take it.
29
Dennis Devlin was very unhappy about the collapse of the Jessica Moulson book. Grace had tasked him with keeping track, through Salazar, of the stages of Moulson’s decline so that she could adjust her spread of odds accordingly. The Devil had done his best to meet this brief, and had had to work hard at it on account of Salazar’s reluctance ever to call a spade a fucking spade. When Moulson lived, it seemed to Grace that there had to be a problem with the quality of her intel.
Devlin felt much the same, only where Grace blamed him, he blamed Salazar. And in due course he paid the doctor a house call. He found Sally up in the infirmary with Sylvie Stock, Sally filling in order forms for his pharmacy while Sylvie changed bedsheets. He was no judge of atmosphere, but he was pretty damn sure he hadn’t interrupted a love-in.
“You’re wanted in Franklin,” he told Stock. “Stay there a good long while.” She took off without a backward glance. As soon as she was gone, Devlin told Sally how unhappy he was with how the Moulson thing had worked out.
Sally was apologetic, which was right and proper, but he was defiant too. “It was a miracle,” he said. “A little way outside my remit, Dennis.”
“No man can serve both God and Mammon, Sally. Moderate your fucking language.”
“Well, what would you call it?” the doctor demanded, slightly wild around the eyes. “She was right there, on the edge. Her weight had dropped to five stone. She had a thready pulse and her blood glucose was about one third normal. Below that, even. I would have said she had a day left at best before either her diaphragm gave out or she went into cardiogenic shock. And then—”
“Don’t say a miracle happened,” Devlin warned him.
“Well, something happened. And it’s not something I can explain. She came back. Looking at her vitals now… it’s like it’s not even the same person.”
Devlin felt that something I can’t explain equated to something that’s not my fault, and he didn’t agree at all. “I went on your word, Sally,” he said, grabbing hold of the doctor’s lapels and pushing him back against the racks of the drug cabinet. Bottles of pills and tubes of unguent spilled on to the floor as Salazar tried to squirm sideways out of his grip. “And I passed your word along to Grace. Now look at this. We’re all out of pocket because you can’t do your job.”
“I told you,” Salazar protested. “I told you I couldn’t give you a definite yes or no.”
“You told me you might be out by a day or two. You didn’t say she might live to draw her fucking pension!”
Salazar was about to say something, maybe something about Moulson not being out of the woods yet, but Devlin didn’t let him. He slammed his fist into the doctor’s stomach.
Salazar sank to his knees with a hiccup of shock and pain.
Devlin could get behind the shock at least. He was shocked too. He had no idea until he did it that punching Sally was even an option. But he hadn’t minded how it felt at all, and he was ready to repeat the experience if Sally offered him a good excuse.
Gripping a handful of Salazar’s hair, Devlin tilted his head back so they could go on talking face to face. “You let me down,” he said, his voice level despite his drunkenly sloshing emotions. “I asked a simple favour, Sally, and you messed it up. Just so you know, we’re not friends any more.”