Then Salazar would make a show of listening to her heartbeat and her breathing before telling her she should keep up the exercises. Big Carol would say, “Thanks, doc,” put her kit back on and hit the road. All of this was for the benefit of whichever nurses were on duty, and if any of them suspected there was more going on, they didn’t say anything. Possibly they thought Salazar might be banging Big Carol, which few of them would have begrudged him.
The bottom line was that Grace’s system worked. It was fit for purpose. Carol would make the drop. Salazar would get the package out of the drawer as soon as he could do so unobserved, and transfer it to his doctor’s bag. Then at three o’clock in the afternoon he’d trot over to Curie and deliver it to the meditation room.
The circle of life went on.
As for Salazar’s guilt and horror at what he had become, it turned out that he could live with them. That was astonishing to him, but it was demonstrably true because he was still alive. Corruption – preying on the people he was meant to be helping – was the worst sin he could name. But he’d immersed himself in that sin so deeply that he couldn’t see the surface any more. And he’d done it for the simplest and basest reason: because he was afraid.
Not of losing his job. He felt he could cope quite well with public humiliation, arrest, imprisonment. But physically he was a complete and utter coward. He knew too much about how human bodies worked, or failed to work. Even death was a bearable thought, but the pain you might have to encounter on the way was another matter.
So he became the thing he most despised, and told himself that the threat of death (other people’s, not just his own) absolved him. He focused in on logistical decisions, on the short-term and immediate, and abandoned any train of thought that might lead him to more dangerous perspectives. He did what he was told.
But any system is only as good as its moving parts. And the Thursday after the day when Loomis and Earnshaw visited Jess Moulson in her cell, one of the moving parts failed to move.
It was Moulson of course, but Salazar had no way of knowing that. Neither Grace nor Devlin had any intention of letting him in on that side of the operation. Moulson had had her preliminary hearing, which had lasted all of twenty minutes. Mr Justice Foulkes – in his chambers, as informal as the criminal justice system ever got – listened to the tragic story of her hunger strike and said he was minded to waive the submission deadline in this instance. The Crown Prosecution Service, represented by a thin-lipped man who looked as though his grey suit was welded on to him like roofing felt, raised no objection. Moulson had leave to appeal.
After the hearing, she came straight home. She didn’t visit the toilets. Grace’s package stayed where it was.
That had all been on the Wednesday. So now Thursday morning came and went, and Big Carol didn’t make her scheduled visit to the infirmary – the first time she’d ever defaulted. Sally waited as long as he could, but he was scared to go off-schedule in case someone was watching. He walked over to Curie, did the clinic and walked back again without making the drop-off.
Then, because he didn’t have any idea what else to do, he went and found Dennis Devlin in the guardroom. Behind the guardroom actually, on a cigarette break. Half a dozen other screws were there along with the Devil, talking the sort of shit men usually talk when they get together. They didn’t pay much attention to Sally, who didn’t count as a man for these purposes, but Devlin saw him there and signalled for him to wait – a discreet gesture where his hand didn’t leave his side.
He finished his cigarette and stamped out the butt before coming over.
“What?” was all he said.
“There wasn’t a package.”
The Devil stared Salazar down, unamused. “All right. What did Big Carol say?”
“Big Carol didn’t come.”
Which told Devlin that something had gone wrong further up the food chain and he’d better get together with Grace as soon as possible. “Go back to the infirmary,” he told Sally.
“I’m meant to be—”
“Hey. Shut up. Wait for me in the infirmary. I’ll be back to tell you what’s what.”
He left the doctor standing there and hastened to his lover’s side. Big Carol stood alone at the door to Grace’s cell, arms folded and face full of a sort of brooding calm.
“She in there?” Devlin demanded.
“Yeah, but she’s got company,” Loomis said. “Let me tell her you’re here.”
“I’ll tell her myself,” Devlin said, and walked on past her.
He knew that was reckless – stupid, really – but he was always on his spiky dignity with Grace and her people. He felt it harmed his status to stand around and wait for her. He opened the door and walked inside, and right away he was sorry he had. The company was the kiddie cooker, Jess Moulson, one of the designated mules, who had clearly been summoned there because she had failed to perform according to instructions.
It was a harmless enough little tableau – Grace and Moulson sitting opposite each other in the two ladder-back chairs Grace’s cell boasted (real canvas backs and seats, and wooden frames, not ply and plastic). The only sinister touch was the music coming out of the speaker dock. It was classical, which meant that Grace was pissed off and needed her spirits soothed. Oh, and there was Liz Earnshaw, standing right beside Moulson and watching Grace’s face in case some hurting was needed.
In Grace’s cell, of course, hurting would be limited and bloodless. All the really life-changing violence happened at a safe distance. But this was a serious interview with serious things depending on it. Devlin knew at once that it had been a mistake to charge in here. He stood there for a second with his hand still on the doorknob, weighing up the possibility of backing out again without being seen. But Grace had already seen him and she beckoned to him.
Which of course made Moulson turn and see him too.
Her eyes got a little wider. He could sympathise, as far as that went. Him standing there was the visible sign that there was no cavalry coming.
“You’re talking to me,” Grace reminded her.
Moulson took her skittish gaze from Devlin’s face and gave it back to Grace. “Well, I think… I think it’s possible I looked in the wrong cubicle,” she said, sounding about as convincing as a schoolgirl explaining that the dog ate her homework.
“That doesn’t make any sense to me,” Grace said. “There are only three cubicles in that toilet. Which means there’s only one you can say is in the middle. I don’t see where the possibility of confusion comes in. Frankly, I’m disappointed.”
Devlin knew what it meant when Grace said something like that. Never anything good, often something sickening. The stupid bitch who’d blown her own hunger strike might get to be dead after all, he thought – which made him wish all over again that he’d been a bit slower in coming over here. He liked to keep up an arm’s-length sort of relationship with the bloodier side of Grace’s operations. Fingering Shannon McBride and then stepping out of the way so Grace could do what needed to be done was absolutely fine. Anything more than that made him sweat, not from squeamishness but from a healthy sense of self-preservation.
“People were in there with me,” Moulson pleaded. “The right-hand cubicle was locked and there was someone washing their hands at the sink. I think I just panicked.”
“And missed your aim when you were going for one of three doors right in front of you?” Grace shook her head. “I’m trying to see it, Moulson, but it’s not coming clear. Not at all.”
“I’m sorry,” Moulson said.
“Well, that’s fine as far as it goes. I would want you to be sorry. But sorry as you are, I’ve still got to deal with the mess you’ve made.”
She sighed loudly. Liz Earnshaw shifted her stance, sort of standing to attention, alerted by that sigh. It seemed likely that the verbal part of the interview was over and that something else was about to happen. But Grace shook her head and Earnshaw relaxed again.
“I’m assuming you took a lot of beatings when you got out of the infirmary,” Grace said. “I know Hannah Passmore had a smack at you. But she wasn’t the only one, was she?”