Once Jess Moulson had been released into Goodall (the natural habitat of all murderers and monsters) and the world hadn’t ended, his confidence in his ability to handle the situation metastasised. He forgot his earlier fears altogether. Requests for interviews from dozens of media outfits were stacking up on his desk; he decided to answer a few of them.
He was selective, or at least he told himself he was. No red-tops. No talk shows. No live interviews. He knew how important it was to stay in control of the message. He favoured one-to-ones with correspondents from broadsheet newspapers, but he would do magazines if they looked to be serious trade publications and radio if it was Radio 4.
In every interview, he stressed the two planks of the Fellside regime: its rigour and its fairness. “These are old-fashioned terms but they’re still the bedrock of good prison discipline,” he said dozens of times with minor variations. “Prisoners need to know that the same rules apply to everyone, without exception. As long as that’s true, nobody objects to the strictness of the regime. Time and again it’s when rules are inconsistently applied that you get resentment, unrest, incidents, even riots.”
Scratchwell thought he gave a pretty good account of himself in these interviews. He remembered what he’d been told about keeping a low profile, but he convinced himself that discreet briefings of this kind were within the spirit of that advice. If the oversight board had any reservations, they only had to tell him so and he would stop. But no emails came, so clearly he hadn’t overstepped the mark. Possibly N-fold were already seeing the advantages of having a celebrity (in a small and decorous way) in their stable.
Scratchwell was well aware that the same media outlets were sniffing around Moulson too. Messages turned up on the prison’s website every day which he was obliged to pass on to her, offering her interviews, book contracts, documentaries, even merchandise and licensing deals. Most of this stuff looked like scams and baited hooks of one sort or another, but by the law of averages some of it was probably on the level. It made no difference. Moulson ignored everything even-handedly. She seemed to feel she was already famous enough.
But even without her active participation, she and her crimes were very much in the public eye. There was a series on Channel 4 called Wicked Women where they told Moulson’s story as part of one episode in spite of the fact that she had an appeal pending. An actress played Moulson, checking that John Street was asleep before she set the fire (Scratchwell was sure that was an invented detail). There was also a charity that was set up for child victims of adult violence, the Angel Trust, that featured Alex Beech’s face prominently in its newspaper ads. Fame kept seeking Moulson out whatever she did or didn’t do.
The governor congratulated himself that he was navigating these difficult waters much better than she was. By engaging with the media, he ensured that he had a voice. He presented his own case eloquently. Moulson, on the other hand, was being carried along like flotsam in the turbulent tide of public opinion.
He quite liked that metaphor when it first came to him. He thought he might even use it, or some version of it, in an interview. But on further reflection, he saw it wouldn’t do. It suggested that Moulson’s concerns and his own amounted to the same thing – the massaging of their reputations.
He needed an analogy that had him disseminating good practice. Sharing his philosophy with the world. Becoming part of a dialogue in which people like Moulson lost their individuality and became examples.
Instances of lasting truths.
43
The documents Levine had promised turned up two days later. Nine boxes of them, making a stack that stretched from floor to ceiling of Jess’s cell. Buller was too awed to be indignant, especially when Jess sat down on the edge of her bunk, opened the first box and started reading through the contents.
Once she started, she didn’t stop. Levine had sent through the date for her hearing too, and it was only a week away. Jess had the sense that something big and heavy was rolling into motion, and that once it was properly underway, she would have very little power to steer it – might have no choice at all but to hang on tight. But the appeal was also the best chance she would ever get to discover more about what had happened to Alex on the night of the fire. The more she found out now, the better her chances were of using that opportunity when it came.
“She’s got some balls on her anyway,” Buller told Po and Kaleesha and a half-dozen other women one night in the ballroom. “She’s ploughing through that shit, hours on end. Makes you wonder…”
“Wonder what?” Po demanded.
Buller shrugged. “Whether she really did it.”
“This whole place is full of innocent people,” Kaleesha Campbell pointed out cynically. “And her balls weren’t on show when she chickened out of that hunger strike. Maybe she just wants the attention.”
“Right,” Buller agreed. “She wants the attention. That’s why she’s in here every night, doing the big I am.” That got a laugh all round. There was something faintly ridiculous about calling Moulson an attention-seeker. She spent most of her time in her cell. When she was out of it, she folded herself down so small you couldn’t see her.
And after the boxes arrived, she became even more of a recluse than before. She lived in those damn things. Thousands of pages of documents, tens of thousands, and after a while most of it was just repeating stuff she’d read before somewhere else. But she read it again anyway, because you never knew.
It became a standing joke on the wing. Then it became something else. The women of Goodall liked a trier, and they liked a story. Moulson was both. As her preliminary hearing got closer, she started to accumulate a capital of goodwill. She was completely unaware of it: out of all the Goodall inmates, she was the only one who had no sense of Goodall as a community. Its webs had started to weave themselves around her as far back as Shannon McBride’s first round of confabulation, but those webs were like Alex – so subtle that you couldn’t see them in daylight.
What sense of belonging she did have came from two directions: Alex and her Aunt Brenda. Alex was close at hand; her aunt far away – and she hadn’t responded at all to Jess’s letter about her change of heart. That might mean Brenda had finally washed her hands of her, which would be bad enough but hardly surprising. Worse would be if she was ill again and hadn’t got the letter. She might think Jess was already dead. Thinking Jess was dead might even be what had made her ill.
Jess tried phoning, many times. Paul Levine had topped up her commissary credit for precisely this purpose. She could withdraw up to two pounds a day in coins for the payphone – enough to make contact at least, if not to chat. She stood in line for one of the three phones in G block’s prisoner services room. Let it ring as long as she could. Then when Brenda didn’t answer, she went to the back of the line and waited all over again.
But even in the line she kept on reading. She didn’t have the luxury of standing around doing nothing.
She came back, again and again, to the autopsy report. She thought it had to be the key to everything else, if she could only see it. Cause of death: inhalation of smoke and carbon monoxide due to fire. Global charring. Significant quantity of carbon deposits in tracheobronchial tree. Soft tissues of face are largely absent, with exposure of partially heat-destroyed underlying bony structures. Pulmonary oedema extensive and marked…