The Devil came into the infirmary right at the end of his shift, looking to talk to Dr Salazar. But Sally wasn’t in residence; there was no one in there but Sylvie Stock, tidying up the drug cabinet. She asked if she could help, but Devlin told her no. It was just a sore shoulder that he wanted Salazar to take a look at before he clocked off and headed home.
“I can give you some ibuprofen,” Stock offered. This was unfamiliar territory for her. Generally she had a strong sense of what was in her job description and what wasn’t. Tending the ailments of the staff fell into the wasn’t category, and normally she would have ignored Devlin until he left. But she was still riding out the waves of emotional turmoil from Moulson’s near-death experience and from Sally’s having seen what she’d done. Now she was leading a life of virtue in hopes of deflecting the shitstorm she thought had to be coming down on her.
“I’m fine,” Devlin said. “I’ll just wait.”
Which he did. In silence. It played on Sylvie’s nerves like a file on a fiddle string, and she got jumpier and jumpier as time went on. What was worse, though, was when Sally finally came back and saw Devlin sitting there. He turned to Stock without a second’s pause and told her to go home early. “I’ll finish here, Sylvie,” he said. “Don’t you worry about it. I’ll see you Monday.”
Stock protested weakly that she didn’t mind finishing what she’d started, but she could hardly complain about being let off the last half-hour of her shift. When Sally shooed her out, she had to go, even though she was convinced now that Devlin had come over there specifically to talk about her. She knew, with absolute certainty, that as soon as the door closed behind her, Devlin would turn to the doctor and say something like, “So what do you want to do about this business with Nurse Stock?”
She walked to her car feeling like an axe was falling on her in slow motion and she couldn’t move to get out of its way.
The staff car park was on the other side of the road from the prison in a little dip of ground that looked right out over Sharne Fell. There was a footpath going down, but, like most people, Stock just walked on over the verge and down the grassy slope.
This time, though, she kept right on going, through the car park to the much steeper drop on the far side. Four hundred feet below her, a waterfall as thin as a knife fell into a bowl of grey rock that it had made for itself over the space of a hundred thousand years or so. There was a split in the rock so that it really looked – from above, as Stock was seeing it now – like hands cupped to take the water.
She thought for a good long while about letting the cupped hands take her too. She liked to read salacious stuff, from the Daily Mail to True Crime magazines, so she knew to a nicety how the media treated wicked women, especially nurses. Kristen Gilbert. Genene Anne Jones. Beverley Allitt, the angel of death. Stock hadn’t done anything like what those women had done, but that wouldn’t stop them. Probably they’d give her a really catchy nickname – something like Allitt’s, only more melodramatic.
Her career would be over. She’d only ever wanted to help people but she’d be remembered as a sadistic maniac. All because of Jessica Moulson and her failed hunger strike. If the woman had been so set on dying, what had stopped her? It was as though Moulson had gone to all this trouble just to set a trap, and Stock had walked right into it. It was almost a relief when her despair turned into anger. Then the anger got so hot that it boiled away in its turn, leaving behind a strange calm and clarity.
If she survived this, if God gave her a second chance, she swore to herself that she’d never do anything bad again.
But if the roof fell on her, it would fall on Moulson too. She’d make sure it did.
Once Devlin was alone with Sally, he got right to the point. “Okay,” he said. “Grace is happy with how that first one went. You’re in. No more drops to your place though. You know Big Carol? Carol Loomis? The way it’ll work from now on is like this: she’ll bring the stuff to you every Thursday, right before you go over to Curie for your clinic. So make up a reason why she needs to keep coming, and write it up. Some kind of chronic condition. You’ll use the same drop-off as before, under the dais in the meditation room. Okay?”
Sally was bemused. “But… then…” he said. “What – somebody else is bringing the drugs into the prison?”
“You’ve got a mind like a steel trap, haven’t you, Sally?” Devlin sneered. “Yes, we’ve got someone else bringing the stuff in. All we need you for is to carry it past the guard post into Curie. Half the risk, but the same pay-off, so hooray for you. Now give me my prescription, I’m running late.”
Salazar handed over the pethidine and Devlin left without a word. The whole conversation had taken so little time that when he stepped out of the front gate, after signing himself off in the daybook, he could see Stock in the car park across the road, only just now walking to her car. She had her head down and her shoulders hunched, like someone walking through a downpour only she could see.
40
Brian Pritchard still considered himself to be Jessica Moulson’s solicitor in defiance of his client’s statements to the contrary. But he had stopped expecting any response to his requests for meetings and consultations as the deadline for appeal loomed and then passed. When Moulson finally changed her mind and said she wanted to lodge an appeal after all, and to schedule a meeting, he decided to proceed cautiously.
Moulson didn’t like him, and more importantly didn’t trust him. Whatever this change of heart meant, it was probably better for someone else to sound her out in the first instance. And he had a particular someone else in mind: his articled clerk, Paul Levine, who had from the first shown a very strong interest in Moulson’s case.
Given the arduous journey that would be involved, Pritchard apologised to his junior for the poisoned chalice. Paul said he didn’t mind at all. As low man on the corporate totem pole, he was obliged to say that, but it was also the truth. Or if it was a lie, it was only by omission. The full truth was that Paul was overjoyed when Pritchard told him where he was off to. He was hard put to it not to dance.
That crazy excitement stayed with him the whole way from London King’s Cross to Leeds City station. It grew, if anything, as he rode (in a taxi which smelled faintly of vomit) across the grandeur of Sharne Fell; as he walked through the gates in the fifty-foot barricade around Fellside prison; as the clanging, echoing doors opened one at a time and ushered him into Moulson’s presence. He felt like an ambassador to a foreign court. And he launched himself into the interview like a dam bursting, full of barely suppressed energy and barely comprehensible intensity.
It was just the two of them, in the interview room rather than the main visiting area. Attorney – client privilege guaranteed them absolute privacy, although Levine had a panic button on his side of the table in deference to Moulson’s high-security status. Not that she looked like much of a threat right then, only halfway recovered from the beatings that had followed her release into gen pop.
To Paul, she looked magnetic. Beautiful. He had fallen in love with Moulson during her trial, and, although he hadn’t seen her since, he still carried that torch. He would have been the first to admit that this was a weird infatuation. Moulson was a convicted murderer, a pariah, and her face, with its asymmetry and its inorganic texture, was about as far from any definition of beauty as you could get.