He kept expecting to come up against something hard and heavy at some point – something solid enough to push off against so he could say no and mean it. But it was just an endless trickle of easy surrenders. Desperately ashamed though he was, and disgusted with himself for going along with Grace and Devlin’s schemes, nothing had been troublesome at all so far. Even the threat against Patience DiMarta had made things easier for him because it allowed him to tell himself he was doing this for her. For her husband, who was a bin man for the county council, and for their three kids, who were the apple of Patience’s eye and the bulk of the contents of her wallet (far more photos than money in there, most days). This wasn’t cowardice, it was selflessness. Philanthropy. Quiet heroism.
Sally set the box down and examined the contents. Inside, under the magazine, he found a smaller container that had once held surgical gloves and looked as though it still could. It didn’t. It held what Sally guessed to be heroin, ketamine and cannabis resin, all in their own zip-locked bags and carefully packed so there was no space wasted. It sat on the table next to him as he ate his dinner of scrambled eggs on toast and frozen Birds Eye peas. Knowing what was in the box made the food taste strange to him, as though it was contaminated. He washed it down with most of a bottle of red wine that had no taste at all.
I’m not going to do this, he told himself again. Trying out the words. Knowing they were lies.
The guards at the checkpoint were meant to search all packages entering or leaving the prison, but as Devlin and Salazar were both aware, they were apt to be fairly casual with people they knew. Mostly they waved staff through and kept their powder dry for visitors.
Sally took out the package and showed it at the checkpoint anyway. The guard there, barely out of his teens, didn’t even seem to want to touch it, maybe out of fear that germs from infectious prisoners might somehow magically be clinging to it even though it was on its way into Fellside rather than out. The doctor had left an obviously used pair of surgical gloves dangling halfway out of the package to foster this response.
Later that day he took his first back and joint clinic in Curie wing. Being a novelty, the clinic was well attended, mostly by older women who had plenty of aches and pains to report and took a certain relish in talking about them. The two hours went by like treacle running down a rope. When they were done, Dr Salazar went down to the meditation room, unlocked the door with a key that Devlin had given him and stepped quickly inside. He left the package inside a hollow wooden dais that was almost but not quite too heavy to lift. He was in there for less than a minute, then he hurried back out, locked the door behind him and was on his way.
He didn’t see anyone waiting or watching, but then he wasn’t intended to.
About half an hour later, Devlin brought word to Grace that the drop had gone to plan. Sally had passed his fieldwork test. That was the phrase he used, and they both had a good chuckle at the thought of the doctor doing his cloak-and-dagger routine.
Sally would have been amazed to learn how much of this production had been mounted for his sole benefit. That package ended up in a wastepaper basket right outside the meditation room, where Jazz Sullivan (one of Grace’s three designated sales agents in Curie) dumped it in spite of being told to take it apart and leave the pieces in three separate places. The whole thing had been a dry run, with talcum powder and builder’s putty in place of actual narcotics, mainly because Grace wanted to see how the doctor handled himself under pressure. He did okay, but then, as the Devil pointed out, he’d had plenty of practice with drug-running on a modest scale back when his wife was dying.
In the normal run of things, Grace’s drugs never went anywhere near that checkpoint. It was just unfeasible, given how often the staff rotas changed at short notice and how many people she would need to keep on payroll in order to make it airtight. She had a completely different system in place, and Sally would be inducted into it – the parts that concerned him anyway – soon enough.
But all things in their season. Around midnight, an envelope dropped on to Dr Salazar’s doormat. He was still awake, listening to a Deutsche Grammophon recording of The Threepenny Opera. In the middle of the “Solomon Song”, with Lotte Lenya satirically mourning the uselessness of beauty, courage and wisdom, he heard it arrive.
He went and opened it. Counted thirty well-used ten-pound notes on to the bookcase in the hall. From a framed photo, dead Leah looked down with an incongruous smile, as though she blessed this illegal pay-off and its suspect source.
Sally had a nightmare that night, which drew its imagery from his Jewish religion. Leah’s religion, rather, since Sally was never observant until he met her and fell in love with her. For Leah’s sake, he went to synagogue on the high holy days, kept milk and meat in their separate corners when he cooked for her and even fasted on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
Sally’s dream that night had a Yom Kippur theme to it. There was a point in the service for that day where the rabbi would read aloud from a medieval document known as the “Unetanneh Tokef”. The passage was always the same. It talked about the book up in heaven in which all of God’s decisions are recorded. “Who shall die by fire, and who by water. Who by sword, by famine, and by the depredations of beasts…” And so on, at great length.
It sounded pretty bleak and fatalistic, but Sally and Leah’s rabbi insisted that it really wasn’t. The point of the passage was not that God has got your number, but that he keeps an open mind as long as you do. You seal your fate by your actions. If you repent, if you atone, if you try to throw things in the other scale to balance out the bad stuff you’ve done, then he will keep on giving you the benefit of the doubt. But once you pass the point of no return, once you pile up so many sins that atonement isn’t possible any more, then HaShem will wash his hands of you. One day your name will go in that book and then it will be too late. Nothing you do after that time will make a damn bit of difference.
Sally dreamed that his name was being written in the book. He saw an angel take the volume down off a shelf, carry it over to a table, open it up and riffle to the right page. The angel was crying all this time. Bitter, bitter tears. This was another human soul gone to hell, and the angels hate that. They mourn for what you might have been. But in this case, as she dipped her quill in the ink and wrote Sally’s name, the angel was crying for another reason too.
The angel was Sally’s dead wife, Leah. She was crying because she was never going to see him again.
37
Moulson endured the catcalls and the occasional violence for a little while longer. But then, very suddenly, her situation changed.
For some unexplained reason, across all the wings of Fellside both Friday lunch and Friday dinner were always fish meals. Governor Scratchwell was probably making some kind of religious point – a vague, ecumenical flailing around, because he wasn’t Catholic. Anyway, it won him no friends in G block, where the prevailing opinion was that if you liked the taste of fish, you didn’t have to walk too far to find it.
One Friday lunchtime, only a week or so after Jess Moulson’s arrival on-block, Hannah Passmore pushed her cod fillet aside, stood up and walked the full length of the canteen to the lepers’ corner where Jess was sitting.
Jess had her head down. It was a tactic she used a lot in Goodall’s common spaces, whenever she had no choice but to be there. For a moment or two she didn’t even realise Passmore was there.
When she did, she let her eyes climb up Passmore’s solid form an inch at a time. She stopped when she got to Passmore’s face – which was twisted into a really alarming expression. Passmore was pushing sixty years old, but she was as tough as a twist of wire. You didn’t screw around with her if you had the brains God gave a guinea pig.
“What did you do to me?” she demanded now.
The best Jess could come up with was “I’m sorry?” She didn’t want a scene. More than that, she didn’t want to be beaten up again.