That was about as bad as it got. There wasn’t any sustained vendetta against Jess, which was what Governor Scratchwell had been afraid of. It was only too easy, he knew, for a group of people crowded into an inadequate space and kettled up together for years on end to find themselves all thinking the same thing at the same time, and then all doing it. That was how riots kicked off. One person cracks but everyone else is ready and waiting, right there and totally up for it when the moment comes.
With Moulson, though, there was a collective distaste rather than a collective hatred. It would have been different if she’d abused Alex Beech for fun or profit, but she hadn’t. She’d burned him up when she burned her own life up, and that was different. Many of the Goodall women thought she was a piece of shit. A whole lot more of them thought she was a screw-up who deserved their pity, or that losing her face and being banged up in Fellside had gone some way to balancing the scales for what she did. Nobody had warm feelings for her, but nobody had much of an axe to grind.
Well, almost nobody. Hannah Passmore was still taking Moulson personally, and found more than one occasion to slip in a smack or a shove. There were a few other women who followed her lead, although with less venom. And there were a few more who catcalled when they saw Moulson in the commissary or the ballroom.
And one day, ascending one of the stairwells, she met a woman coming down who filled the narrow space and blocked her way completely. The two of them stopped dead, and neither spoke.
The other woman was very tall, with long, rangy limbs and badly mottled skin. Older than Jess, but not by much. The lines on her weathered face seemed to have been carved there by temperament rather than time. She had cut the sleeves off her prison-issue tracksuit top, which was a violation and would have got most women written up. The muscles on her arms moved over one another as she flexed her big hands.
Jess stood aside to let this apparition walk on by. She certainly wasn’t going to try to push past her. But the other woman didn’t move at all. “You go ahead,” Jess said at last. When that got no answer, she made an “after you” gesture. She couldn’t even tell if the woman was looking at her. Her eyes seemed weirdly unfocused.
“That’s a fucking ugly face,” the woman said at last. She forced the words out between her teeth, which stayed clenched together.
“I was… burned,” Jess faltered. “There was a fire.”
“A fire?”
“Yes.”
There was a long silence. “I used to like sitting by the fire,” the woman said at last. “In the summer.”
“In the winter,” Jess corrected automatically. The woman’s eyes came back from the horizon to fix on her. “Summer,” she said. “In the summer. We had a barbecue. Were you there?”
“N-no,” Jess stammered. “I don’t even know your—”
The woman’s face was suddenly an inch away from hers, the eyes boring into her own, slightly sour breath hot against her cheek. “Then don’t tell me when it was,” she growled. “All right?”
“All right.”
“Don’t know you’re born, do you? Don’t know to put yourself out when you’re on fire. How fucking stupid is that?”
Jess said nothing. The woman’s anger had come from nowhere. It didn’t seem to have any object; it had just bumped up against her because she was there. If she was very still, maybe it would roll on by and bump against something else.
The woman breathed out through her mouth: a heavy, world-weary sigh. Then she went on down the stairs, her bony shoulder slamming into Jess’s chest as she passed by.
Jess carried on up to her own level and into the cell. Buller was lying on the top bunk, not reading this time but writing a letter. Her tongue sat on her lower lip as she wrote.
“Can I ask you a question?” Jess ventured.
Buller grunted. “If it’s a short one.”
“A very tall woman who… who may have something missing. Dark hair, bad skin, bare arms…”
“Liz Earnshaw.”
“Does she?”
“Does she what, love?”
“Have something missing?”
Buller put her notepad down.
“Oh,” Jess said. “I don’t want to disturb you.”
“But now that you have,” Buller said, “you may as well listen. Stay away from Lizzie. She’s a troubled soul, but she’s also very dangerous. Has she got something missing? Yes, she has. But probably not in the way you mean.”
“What’s the story?” Jess asked. “I mean, if it’s something you can talk about.” She wasn’t even sure why she was asking. There was just something about the tall woman that had stayed with her. Something that frightened her but fascinated her at the same time.
“I don’t do stories.”
“Do you know anybody who does?”
Buller laughed shortly. “Oh yes.”
Jess visited Shannon McBride in her cell because she only had the cell number to go on (Buller didn’t do descriptions either, or introductions). But as soon as she stepped inside, she knew she’d seen the young woman with the anxious bleached-out features before.
McBride knew Jess too, and was thrilled to receive the visit. “I was the first person in Fellside who even saw you,” she said once they were both sitting down – Shannon on the bunk, Jess in the place of honour on the chair. “The first prisoner, I mean. Obviously some of the guards saw you. And some of the nurses. But nobody else. Do you remember that you sang to me?”
Jess didn’t. That had gone, along with most of the memories of her first days in Fellside, lost to the meds and the near-coma she’d gone into afterwards. But Shannon didn’t mind. In fact she was very happy to fill that gap and told Jess the whole story, repeating some parts of it out of a sincere conviction that once wasn’t enough.
“I heard your voice through the pain,” she said. “It was so soft, and so gentle. It was like you had a magic power.”
“I don’t,” Jess said quickly. “I don’t at all. But I’m glad I was able to help.”
“And now you want to know about Lizzie Earnshaw. So you come to me.” Shannon’s hands were clasped to her knees. She was practically hugging herself. “Of course! Of course I’ll tell you! But I can only tell you about Liz if I tell you about Naseem Suresh too. It’s like they’re two halves of the same story.”
Naz had been the youngest woman on the wing, Shannon said, and in many ways the most trouble. She was only there at all because Fellside had landed a contract for dealing with female prisoners who were due to be deported after they’d finished their sentence – mostly trafficked women, but in a few cases asylum seekers who’d blotted their copybooks while their status was still pending. Naz didn’t fit either of those categories, but her parents were illegals and her mother had given birth to her in the course of a two-year odyssey from Uttar Pradesh to the British Midlands. She had spent her whole life in the UK, but she was officially stateless. When she was caught in a raid on an East London brothel, she made the mistake of clocking a police officer and running for it. Only an eighteen-month sentence, but she was automatically classed as maximum security because of the flight risk.
“She was cheeky,” Shannon said. “Cheeky to everybody. That sounds like a little thing, but in here, respect is very important. Naz didn’t have any time for that. She was fearless. If she saw something she didn’t like, she just came right out and said it. Which got a lot of people’s backs up. The lifers especially.” There was envy in McBride’s voice. Jess guessed that her own personality tended a lot more towards compromise, and that she wished she could be different.
“So was Earnshaw one of the people Naseem rubbed up the wrong way?” she asked. It seemed to be an obvious inference.