So she keeps on fighting and trying to make him stop. But he’s winning, and she remembers him winning before and that makes her weak. She can’t do anything.
The last thing is she tries to cry, but she can’t do that either. She hasn’t got any eyes. And then the man throws her face down on the floor and a dog comes and eats it.
Jess sat up in the dark. It wasn’t perfect dark: there was an orange safety light at one end of the ceiling’s strip light that turned the bunk, the table and the seatless toilet bowl into vague, fluid masses with shadows hanging off them like growths. Alex was visible in a different way, and by his own rules. He looked the same by night as he did by day: perfectly clear and distinct. And he didn’t cast a shadow.
“Was that story about Passmore?” Jess asked him, fully awake now. “Is she the Hannah you mean? The one who hurt me?” She kept her voice to a whisper, although she’d never known Buller to wake before the bell chivvied her up out of her bunk.
Yes, the boy said. Her.
“But… Alex, that’s horrible.”
Yes.
“You shouldn’t…” Jess groped for words. “You don’t have to be angry with her because she hit me. You don’t have to hate her.”
After all, she thought, when all’s said and done, she was putting in a vote for you. With the toe of her boot. Siding with the victim against the woman who burned him.
I don’t hate her.
“Then stop.”
Stop what?
“Stop telling these stories. Or… or give them a happy ending.”
I can’t.
“Yes, you can, Alex.” Jess heard a tremor in her own voice and realised she was shivering. Not from cold, obviously, because this was sweltering summer. It was the sense of his alienness, which she suddenly felt very acutely. That was ridiculous, she knew. She was talking to a ghost and taking that for granted, then getting freaked out because he was telling her scary stories.
But she wanted to protect him. She wanted him to keep his innocence, stuck here among the guilty. He’d brought her back from the abyss, from the mouth of the grave. She owed him everything and he owed her nothing except arguably a life for a life and a tooth for a tooth.
So she tried again. “Make up a story about what happens to Passmore after she gets out of here. Where will she go?”
I don’t know. And she’s not going anywhere. She’s a lifer.
“But you can pretend.”
Alex considered this in solemn silence.
I’m not very good at pretending, he said eventually.
Jess thought he was being way too hard on himself there. “Stories are like wishes, Alex,” she said, aware that she was trying to put something huge into small words. “You should only wish for things that you really want to happen.”
Alex nodded to show he understood, but he looked doubtful – and unhappy, as though in attacking his fantasies, she was attacking him. She was quick to reassure him. “Everybody has moments like that, when they want bad things to happen to people they don’t like. And I suppose, as long as it’s only a story, it does no harm. But it’s better to think about people you love, isn’t it? Wishing for their lives to be happy and full of good things.”
I suppose. Yes.
She still felt she’d hurt him. She opened her mouth to say something else. But right then was when the morning bell sounded. On its first strident yell Buller jumped down in between them, already hawking up mucus from the back of her throat as she headed for the sink. Like a bad wipe in an old movie, she airbrushed Alex Beech out of the room.
36
“I’d say we’re in a good place,” Grace told Devlin, about a week after he first brought Sally to her.
They were in Grace’s cell, and Earnshaw was doing Grace’s hair. Earnshaw was surprisingly good at it, her massive hands working the various stylers and straighteners with exquisite care. Grace was the only one she would ever do it for though. Of course, she was also the only one who dared to ask.
“A very good place,” Devlin agreed. “Sally’s working out great, isn’t he?” Grace only grunted. She’d already given the Devil his due where that was concerned – told him that bringing the doctor in was an excellent idea, and given him a finder’s fee in addition to his usual cut. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life palpating Devlin’s swollen ego.
But her temper stayed sunny for the most part. The hostile takeover of C block was progressing very well. She had hopes that it would be a bloodless coup, apart from the odd drop already spilled here and there.
Dizzy – Ruth Disraeli according to her birth certificate – had been released on 13 May, having served six of the ten years she’d been given for drug offences. Exactly a week before that, there had been an incident in the yard, a fight that got out of hand. Nobody was seriously injured, but two of the women involved, Ajique Hassan and Dominica Weeks, were found to have weapons on them. Hassan had the classic – you could even say stereotypical – shank made from one half of a Wilkinson Sword razor blade stuck in the end of a beheaded toothbrush. Minnie Weeks more imaginatively had a pair of nunchuks made from two sawn-off bits of a chair leg joined together with a length of bedsheet. Both women were given a month’s worth of punitive withdrawal, with the possibility of an official deferment of their parole rights.
Goodall wing had its own yard. The other wings, Curie included, shared a bigger space way over on the other side of the prison and up against the outside wall. It hadn’t been easy for the Devil to arrange that fight, or those finds, in neutral territory. He’d had to lay off payments to two C wing warders and one prisoner, and make the weapons himself, because sourcing them from inside Fellside would have been seven kinds of impossible. Not that people didn’t have them – just that nobody who had one would ever admit it or hand one over to a screw, even a bent screw like Devlin, whatever he promised them. The possible consequences were just too enormous.
But anyway, it had worked. Hassan and Weeks were off the scene, Dizzy was in the wind and Curie’s supply of recreational oblivion was hanging by a thread. Enter Dr Salazar, stage left.
It was simple, and it was elegant. Grace was pleased. Not only was Salazar a perfect mule, he was also a known quantity. If he’d ever had it in him to take a stand on a matter of conscience, that time had been long before, and it had ended with his falling back into line completely and unconditionally.
He was very easy to manage now.
The first drop was textbook smooth and went entirely according to plan. Salazar’s phone rang at ten o’clock. A voice he didn’t know told him what to do. “Wait ten minutes. Then open your door. Don’t come out before then. Measure it by your watch.”
Sally lived in a narrow cul-de-sac at the shabbier end of Fletchertown. He couldn’t quite bring himself to go to the window and keep watch, but he listened for the sound of a car engine. In the still, stagnant night, it would have carried a long distance and been impossible to miss.
Nothing. But at the end of the ten minutes, when he opened the door and poked his head out, the package was there on the mat. It was an open cardboard box with an old issue of The Watchtower on top of it, presumably to deter further inspection. Sally picked it up and took it inside, amazed at how light it was.