She looked in vain for injuries that didn’t come down to the simple summary: he breathed smoke, suffocated and burned. She didn’t find any, but she learned enough along the way to realise they could still have been there. A body that had been incinerated to that extent might still show deep-tissue injury, but cuts to the skin could be confused with damage due to natural drying and cracking of the burned tissue. It wouldn’t always be possible to tell what came before from what came after.
Alex Beech stood at her shoulder, showing solidarity every so often by touching the tips of his fingers to her cheek, her neck, the back of her hand. Had he been so patient and uncomplaining when he was alive, or did death do that to you? Either way she was grateful. When she was running on empty, each of those fleeting touches flooded her with a little short-lived energy. Alex was like a car battery, jump-starting her again and again.
At night, though, he had mostly got into the habit of doing his own thing. Jess was sleeping more regularly now and Alex never slept at all, so he got bored and wandered. Sometimes she’d wake and find him missing, always with an ache of dismay.
It scared her how much she would come to need him in so short a time. How much she relied on his being there. She was profoundly alone in Fellside – or felt she was. She might have reached out now and got a very different response from the one she had received a few weeks before, but she didn’t know that. And most of the time her isolation didn’t trouble her: it was a lot better than the beatings had been. But the more withdrawn she was from the life of the prison, which boiled all around her like soup in a pressure cooker, the more she needed the dead boy as a featherweight counterbalance.
The third night after the documents arrived, with four days still to go before her hearing, she asked Alex to tell her everything he could remember about his friend. Partly she was looking for clues to what might have happened to him on the night of the fire, but mostly, she knew, she was just trying to keep him by her bedside.
She was nice to me. She loved me.
“Was she the same age as you? Older?” She had asked him this question before, but his answer had been vague.
Older. I think.
“What did she look like?”
I don’t remember.
“Did she live with you? Or close by? Somewhere else in Orchard Court?”
He thought about this for a long time. I think she lived with me. Or stayed with me. At least sometimes. I remember falling asleep with her. Her hair smelled nice. We curled around each other. I was on the inside because I was smaller.
“But you don’t remember her name?”
No.
“Or what she looked like?”
No.
“Anything you can tell me might help me find her, Alex. Even a very little thing.”
She was clutching at straws, she knew. There hadn’t been so much as a whiff of this at her trial. The nice girl. The nasty girl. Alex had been a ten-year-old boy with no sisters or cousins. There weren’t that many girls in his life. A girl who was used to staying over, and who shared a bed with their son on the night of his death, ought to have got a mention somewhere. If she didn’t, it might be because she was part of a bigger story that the Beeches had decided not to share.
Maybe the psycho with the sharp implements was in that story too.
“Anything,” Jess said again, trying to keep the desperation out of her voice. “Anything at all.”
She wasn’t scared of the nasty girl.
“No?”
No.
“Why not, Alex?”
She was very brave. Always. And she told me to be brave too. She said nothing could ever hurt me because she’d be there watching.
And that had ended well. “So she knew the nasty girl?” Jess pursued.
She… yes… yes. She did. I think she did. But she always said that, about not worrying. That I had to never be scared because nobody would ever get past her to get to me. She always wanted to give me presents. Making me not be scared was one of them.
“Pretend she’s here now,” Jess suggested.
Why?
“Because it’s nice. It was nice to be with her, wasn’t it?”
Yes.
“Then pretend. Close your eyes and think about her.”
Alex met her gaze for a moment, looking unhappy and almost suspicious. Had he been tricked once with that kids’ joke where you told someone to close their eyes, hold out their hands and make a wish – and then dumped something disgusting into their cupped palms or else just punched them and ran away?
He closed his eyes. He sat there in perfect silence, his lips tightly pursed, his forehead furrowed.
“Is she there?” Jess asked at last. Keeping her voice low, trying to impinge on his thoughts as little as possible.
No.
“Then try to—”
But I remember what it was like. Being with her.
What was it like, Alex? This time she didn’t speak at all. She just let the words form in her mind. Email for the dead.
It was like being a baby again. She was so much bigger and stronger than me. She could have hurt me, but she never did. She held me as though she was afraid of letting me fall.
This time Jess waited out the silence. It was hard. She was fine with keeping her mouth shut, but she was trying not to think at Alex too – trying to keep her thoughts from hardening into words and distracting him.
People thought she was stupid because she didn’t talk. They didn’t know her. Nobody knew her except me.
And you loved her.
Of course I did. Better than anyone.
Better than your mum and dad, even?
Much better.
Because she was so kind to you.
Yes.
And it was like being with your mother, when she… when she held you?
Alex’s eyes opened and he stared at Jess hard.
No. She wasn’t like my mum even a little bit.
“But you said—”
No, I didn’t. I didn’t say she was like my mum. I wouldn’t say it because it wasn’t true.
“All right.”
And you shouldn’t say it either.
“I won’t,” Jess assured him quickly. “I won’t say it again, I promise.” It was the most emotion he’d shown since the night they talked about Hannah Passmore and the stories he made up, and once again it was anger, anger at her. She’d hurt him somehow with that comparison. She’d walked right through whatever card tower of memories he’d been building, and now it was gone. Blown away.
And a second later, Alex was gone too.
44
The day before Moulson’s preliminary hearing, Big Carol and Liz Earnshaw paid her a visit in her cell.
It had been a while since she’d taken a beating, and she’d got out of the habit. She cringed back into the angle of the bunk and the wall, making herself as small a target as she could, covered her face with her hands and braced herself for the storm.
Earnshaw watched all this with her usual poker face, but Big Carol found it highly amusing. “We’re not here to hurt you, you daft mare,” she chuckled. “Get up out of there.”
But Jess stayed where she was so Big Carol had to squat down, with a grunt of effort, to talk to her. “You’re off to court tomorrow for your preliminary hearing,” she said. “Oxford Row in Leeds. Mr Justice Foulkes. Nod if you’re getting this.”
Jess nodded.
“Well, while you’re there, you can do us a little favour. There’s a package needs picking up and bringing back. Stand up. Come on. I want to show you something.”
Jess did as she was told, but she was tensing to run or fight if this turned into something worse than a beating. Nobody had tried to kill her yet, but she knew it was a possibility, and these two huge, burly women had something of an executioner’s look about them. The story about picking up a parcel could be just that – a story to keep her docile and unsuspecting until the shank went in.
Big Carol lifted up Jess’s shirt, and Earnshaw handed over something she’d been holding down at her side – a bulky zip-lock bag about six inches by seven. It had a criss-cross of duct tape across it, the four loose ends sticking out about two inches from the sides. Carol pressed the bag against Jess’s stomach. Jess flinched a little: the big woman’s hands were unexpectedly cold.
Carol smoothed down the duct tape tabs and stepped back.
“Tuck your shirt in again,” she said.
Jess did. She could feel the package hugging her stomach, the tug of the stretched tape, but nobody looking at her would have been able to tell it was there.