Besides, anything that came out of his mouth, any promise he made, was automatically a lie. He was going to give in his notice as soon as he finished his shift tonight. Walk away from Fellside and never come back. Grace wouldn’t chase him. And Devlin wouldn’t inform against him once he was gone – not when there was nothing to gain and a risk that he might inform right back.
Grace studied the doctor’s face for a while before going on to outline what it was she wanted from him. “We don’t currently have many friends in Curie. None of the guards over there are on my payroll. That will change, but to start with we need someone who can go in and out freely and make drop-offs to my dealers there. It’s a seed crystal, really, that we can grow from. Have you got any questions about any of that?”
Sally shook his head.
Grace’s sunny mood took a slight dip. “You should have lots of questions. Where? When? What? Who? I haven’t given you any of the details. Are you even listening to me, doctor?”
“Yes,” he assured her.
“Then…?”
“I’d… like some details.”
I won’t do it, Sally told her in the safety of his mind. Talk all you like, it won’t make any difference.
But as he shouted that discreet defiance, his thoughts hit an image that momentarily derailed them. Water. Blood. Toilet paper. One upturned eye, whiter than bleached cotton, fixing him with a stare of reproach or warning. His throat constricted. He winced and closed his eyes, trying to drive the awful memory away. Grace and Devlin didn’t seem to notice.
Devlin was saying now that Sally’s drop-offs should be piggybacked on a weekly clinic in Curie – either a new one or one of the existing ones. “I like that,” Grace agreed. “But it shouldn’t be a straight handover.”
“Why not?” Devlin asked. “Why complicate things?”
You can’t make me, Salazar thought.
“If our dealers sign up for the clinic, week after week, their names are on a list. There’s a paper trail. And as an added complication, Sally – no disrespect, doctor – gets to see who he’s delivering to. Much better if he leaves the package somewhere for them to pick up later. Double blind means nobody is compromised. Nobody can trick up anybody else if they get caught themselves.”
I won’t do it.
“What about the meditation room?”
“Nice. I think we can make that work.”
They ignored Sally for a while, talking over his head about weights and dates and logistics. He waited to be dismissed, and in due course Grace told him he could go.
“Just one final point, doctor,” she said when he was halfway to the door. The Columbo moment. He wanted to be gone, to get the complicated process of fleeing underway, but he had to stop and turn around.
“Yes?”
“That previous time that we were talking about, when you tried to make trouble for me. You remember how it came out?”
“Of course.”
“You were still alive when it was all over. Not everybody was that lucky.”
“I said I remember.” A tiny, forlorn flash of irritation, gone as soon as it arrived. “I do, Grace. I remember.”
She nodded, unperturbed. “Well, the same thing would happen this time too. If you let me down again. The exact same thing.”
Salazar didn’t understand for a moment what it was she was saying. “But,” he said, “there isn’t anyone…”
“No. Nobody who’s directly involved. But I’m told that you and Nurse DiMarta have a nice little platonic friendship going. So I’d probably start with her.”
Salazar went back to the infirmary. It was empty that day: Moulson had been discharged the same morning. He sat at his desk with his hands in his lap, silent and still, as his mind fitted itself around the contours of his new role and terms of employment.
It was funny, in a way. If his life were a comedy, ending up as a drug mule was the one beat nobody would see coming.
And if it were a tragedy, likewise.
33
Jess was released into gen pop with as little fanfare as could be managed. A screw collected her from the infirmary and walked her across the rec yard to Goodall. It was Corcoran, the guard who had escorted her in the ambulance from Winstanley. She cautiously congratulated Jess on still being alive.
“Not according to plan, right? But there are some things you can’t really plan for until they happen. Or don’t happen. You know what I mean?” They walked along in silence for a few moments, then Corcoran said, “The truth is, this place can be awful if you make enemies. And IMHO, the worst enemy you can make is yourself.”
Jess was still purging the tramadol out of her system. She was as shaky on her feet as a two-year-old. She responded to this homespun wisdom with a weak nod of acknowledgement. She got the point. But that ship had probably sailed.
The usual way into the block was via the ballroom, but Corcoran’s brief was to ease Moulson into her new quarters without raising a ripple. She unlocked a door at the back of the building and they went in through a service corridor that led directly to the east stairwell. A sign on the door read: THIS IS NOT AN EXIT EXCEPT IN CASE OF FIRE.
Goodall wing had a bouquet which, after the antiseptic purity of the infirmary, was so rich and complex it was disconcerting. Jess tried to work out its ingredients. Air freshener. Institutional food. The hot-iron tang of sweat just before it turns sour and awful. Old sheets left folded for years at the back of an airing cupboard. People. Overwhelmingly it was the smell of people shut in together, rubbing each other smooth year after year like stones in a sack.
Corcoran held a door open for Jess, pointing the way up a metal staircase. The centre of each tread had been worn smooth and slightly concave by thousands of feet. Pritchard had said that Fellside was a recent build, but people were like oceans. When oceans set to work, mountains fall and are broken down to make beaches.
A babel of voices assailed Jess’s ears as they ascended, but Corcoran had worked out their approach with a view to stealth. Though close at hand, the ballroom was invisible. Only that wash of voices told Jess how near she was to a new universe.
Corcoran took her up to the second floor and along an open walkway. The ballroom was on their left, but they stayed close to the wall on the right. They stopped at a door marked 239, Lorraine Buller’s cell. Buller’s old roommate, Cyndi Souk, had been downgraded from high to medium security and transferred to Curie wing. “Might happen to you some day,” Corcoran told Jess. “If you keep your nose clean. Nice life in Curie. Unlimited visits. Access to the farm and the plant nursery. Even conjugals.”
Having painted this idyll on the noisy air, she said goodbye and good luck and left Jess to make her own introductions. Jess went into the cell, not sure if she should knock. A middle-aged woman with a blonde buzz cut was stretched out on the top bunk with the Penguin Classics edition of Middlemarch in her hands. She was dressed in the same yellow and black tracksuit that Jess was now wearing. Her heavily lined face looked like an artist’s rough sketch that had been overworked, every spare inch shaded in or cross-hatched. The pale blue lines of old tattoos peeped out at her wrists.
She glanced up from the book and gave Jess a nod, civil but distant.
“Moulson? I’m Buller. You’re bottom-bunking. And I get the sink first in the morning. I’ve got three years on you and that’s the way it works. I don’t like singing when I’m trying to read, and I don’t like bad farts that come without a warning. If there’s anything you don’t like, you’d better tell me now.”
Jess shook her head.
“What, there’s nothing you don’t like? Nothing at all? It was a serious question, love.”
“People laughing at their own jokes,” Jess hazarded. That had been John Street’s prejudice rather than hers, but it was something to say and it seemed to be acceptable. Buller made a face that translated as each to her own and returned to her reading. Jess sat down on the cell’s only chair, slowly and carefully so as to reduce the jarring impact when she settled herself on the mottled plastic seat.
“This is free association time,” Buller said. “Just so you know. It’s the one time when you don’t have to stick in the cell. You can go out on the yard or sit in the ballroom.”