Salazar was trying to splutter out explanations and protests and more explanations. He wasn’t making too much sense, and in any case, Devlin wasn’t listening. Suddenly, coming out of nowhere in the same way that sucker punch had come, he’d had an idea. A really big one. It filled his attention wall to wall for a few seconds.
He’d cut loose on Salazar in a moment of weakness, his frustration getting the better of him. Perhaps it went deeper than that though. Perhaps he was trying to prove something to himself – that he was as big a man in his domain as Harriet Grace was in hers.
But thinking that through reminded him of Grace’s little problem with regard to Curie wing. He had been using Sally all this time as a personal and private resource, deliberately keeping him out of Grace’s eyeline. No matter how well he and her ladyship got on, he preferred for Grace not to know about his other little solace, the pethidine, and where he sourced it from. The day he put his balls in the palm of anyone’s hand and invited them to make a fist would be the coldest day hell ever saw.
But Sally as a drug mule had an almost irresistible appeal. The doctor could go wherever he liked, whenever he liked. He mostly preferred not to, of course – left it to the nurses to run the satellite clinics in the prisoner blocks while he sat up here in his little make-believe ER and counted bedpans – but he could change all that whenever he chose to.
When you came down to it, who was better suited to dropping off drug shipments than a doctor? It was genius – the solution to Grace’s short-term problem, and in the longer term, the kind of asset you could build an empire on. Sally would kick, of course, but he didn’t have it in him to kick hard. Not these days.
Devlin let go of Sally’s hair and stood back. Sally scrambled to his feet.
“Fix yourself up,” Devlin told him brusquely. “Go on. You’re a fucking mess. What time do you finish your shift?”
Salazar wiped away tears with the heel of his hand, which was shaking. Devlin watched him work out the not-so-complicated sum of what he would do next, the correct answer being nothing. He couldn’t complain about what the Devil had just done to him because that doctored-by-a-real-doctor invoice was a hostage for his good behaviour. He couldn’t wield the axe because it would bounce back in his face and split him in two.
“What time do you finish?” Devlin repeated. “Are you deaf?”
“S-six o’clock,” Sally said.
“Come over to Grace’s cell when you’re done. No, wait. Come over right after lunch. Write it up as a medical visit. Say she’s got menstrual cramps or something.”
Salazar didn’t seem thrilled at this prospect. He groped around for an excuse, came up with exactly the sort of feeble bullshit he was generally known for. “With menstrual cramps she’d just come into clinic.”
Devlin breathed out through his teeth – half of a laugh bolted on to half of a sneer. “Something else, then. Dealer’s choice. Just be there.”
“For what?”
“A job opportunity.”
“I’ve already got a job!”
“Yeah.” Devlin conceded the point. “You do, for now. And if you want to keep it that way, Sally, you’ll do what you’re told and whistle while you do it. If you make me come and get you, I’ll be in a really shitty mood.”
Devlin headed for the door, but he stopped to look into the quarantine ward. Moulson was sleeping there, her breathing low and steady. Her cheekbones still stood up like the poles of a collapsed tent, but there was some colour in the skin around them.
“Clueless little bitch,” Devlin growled. “She can’t even kill herself right.”
After Devlin had gone, Dr Salazar tucked his shirt back in and tried to hide the fact that Devlin had torn a button off it.
He was still crying. He couldn’t make himself stop, even though he knew that Stock might come back at any moment and see him. Every time he managed to wipe his face dry and get his features composed, it would just start up again.
It was the humiliation more than the pain. And the fear, which of course was the most humiliating thing of all.
He knew he didn’t have a choice. Some fights you’d lost before you ever got into them. Devlin and Grace. If you tried to touch one, you were bound to get both on your back. They held each other up like some scary religion with two mighty pillars.
Salazar could remember not being afraid of them, or of anything. But then two tragedies had fallen on him out of a clear sky. Two deaths. The first was an inmate, but his thoughts shied away from that now as they always did. The second was his wife, Leah. She had been his courage and his wisdom and his strength. She had all those virtues, and when Sally walked out of Fellside each night into her arms, he had bathed in them and got his own supplies all stocked up.
Sally was open-eyed about his idolatry. He’d known Leah was seeing someone else in the last years of their marriage, and though it had hurt him, he’d got over it. He was nobody’s idea of the perfect lover, or the perfect husband. Whatever she was giving (or taking) elsewhere, she’d always given him everything he needed. One of his deepest regrets was that he’d never thought to wonder what she needed until it was too late to ask.
30
Governor Scratchwell wasn’t the kind of man to overplay his own authority. He was well aware that Moulson recovering consciousness was a huge deal-changer, and therefore not a situation he should treat as a freestyle event.
He called the legal expert on the number she’d left for him, and got a different legal expert with a much more abrasive manner. When Scratchwell told expert number two that Moulson was awake, he said he was aware of that. His tone suggested it was somehow Scratchwell’s fault, but his words were more equivocal. “You did everything in your power to give Moulson a painless and dignified death. Now she’s reconsidered and you’ll respect that too. Release her into gen pop.”
“But… is that wise?” Scratchwell ventured. “She’s very high profile now, because of all of this. And the nature of her crime…”
“Which is murder.”
“The murder of a child.”
“With no sexual assault. We’re not seeing her as a high risk to your normal running, Mr Scratchwell. Not any more.”
Because it’s not you that’s risking it, Scratchwell thought bitterly. He couldn’t explain about the book that had been run on Moulson’s survival. Officially he didn’t know about it, because knowing about it would have required him to shut it down – to push against an aspect of Fellside’s ecosystem that he kept well away from. But he knew that it had happened, and that as a side-effect it had kept Jessica Moulson as a trending topic in the prison throughout the six weeks she’d been on death watch. To release her now, with everyone watching, with the rumour mills spinning at maximum velocity, felt like tempting providence.
But his corporate bosses weren’t exactly giving him a choice. He was going to have to cut Moulson loose and live with whatever happened next.
The one thing Scratchwell could do was to have a word with the most experienced supervisor on Goodall. Tell him to keep an eye on Moulson in case she made trouble or had it made for her.
Half the male screws at Fellside were perverts or incompetents, and any Venn diagram would show a large overlap between the two. But Dennis Devlin was a man you could rely on.
And Jessica Moulson would be as safe in his care as in God’s own pocket.
PART THREE
STATE OF GRACE
31
Everybody had their own version of Harriet Grace’s origin story. Like thunder or earthquakes, she seemed to require an aetiological myth. Shannon McBride’s was the connoisseur’s choice though. She’d stolen it wholesale from Mr Devlin, who she’d overheard in conversation with two of the G block guards, and she preserved all his idioms and intonations. It was far and away the best thing in her repertoire, but she was careful about when and where she told it. If word of her recitals ever got back to Grace and Devlin, the Devil would probably hurt her worse even than Grace would, because he’d have his own hurt coming in due course.