“No,” Moulson muttered.
“And before that, you were trying to starve yourself. And before that, you almost baked yourself alive. So a few more bruises here and there, probably you think they won’t be so much to worry about. And probably you’re right. They won’t be.” Grace smiled, but only for a fraction of a second, waving goodbye to that cheery perspective. “But we’ll do it, so we can say we did, and then we’ll move on. Carol and Lizzie will take you back to your cell in a minute or two, and they’ll lay into you very seriously. They’ll leave marks. Visible ones, because this is about making a point. Then you’ll curl up under the blankets and put yourself together again and everything will get back to being much the same as it was. For the most part.”
Grace leaned forward and stared into Moulson’s eyes – a hard, appraising stare. “That hunger strike,” she said. “You went all the way to the edge and you looked down, but you didn’t jump. That’s a hopeful sign.”
She brushed a stray hair away from Moulson’s face. It would have been a gentle gesture anywhere else, but here and now it implied one thing and one thing only: ownership. “What happened at the court today?” she asked. “You got leave to appeal?”
Moulson nodded.
“Good for you,” Grace said. “Well then, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to put you back in the mix when your appeal date comes up. Mr Devlin over there will tell me when that is. And if you ever let me down again, Moulson, I’m going to kill you. There won’t be any warnings, or any more second chances. I’ll make arrangements, things will happen, you’ll pop your little clogs. Please notice that I’m not telling Liz to twist your arm or pull your hair back while I’m saying this. I don’t want you to be distracted. I want you to take these words away and think about them. Will you do that for me?”
Moulson was still staring into Grace’s placid, motherly eyes. She didn’t seem to realise she’d been asked a question. Until Liz Earnshaw nudged her shoulder, and she blurted out a “Yes!”
“Off you go then,” Grace said.
Moulson got up to leave. Her gaze shifted to Devlin again. As a signifier of Grace’s power and reach, he couldn’t have been better placed.
“What are you looking at?” he asked her belligerently. Moulson looked away.
She was shaking visibly as she walked past him, eyes on the ground. Liz Earnshaw followed her, and Big Carol fell in behind the two of them.
“You need me for anything?” Devlin asked Grace.
She looked at him like he’d just asked her what two and two made.
46
After Moulson left, Grace turned her mind to damage limitation. There were steps that needed to be taken to prevent this from getting any worse, and unfortunately some of them seemed to require a redrawing of her contract with Devlin. “You’ll have to go to the courthouse,” she told him, “and pick up that package.”
“Tonight?” Devlin was appalled.
“Yes, Dennis, tonight. We’re still building up our business in Curie, and that fucker Kenny Treacher has been sniffing around. The first thing that happens after Weeks and Hassan get out of solitary is he’ll reach out to them and try to get a shop-front up again. If we’re solid, we can keep him out, no trouble. But we need brand loyalty. If we let the tap run dry, we’re just inviting him in.”
Devlin went over to the door, closed it and set his back to it. His expression was strained and unhappy. “I don’t handle the drugs,” he reminded Grace, lowering his voice. “I don’t go near them.”
“In the normal run of things, no. This is an emergency.”
“I can pay one of the drivers to—”
“No.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“For two reasons,” Grace said. “Think, Dennis.” She took his hand and pulled him away from the door. He came docilely enough, but there was still tension in his rigid stance. She pushed him down on to the chair Moulson had vacated and stood over him with her hands on his shoulders, holding his gaze. And she spoke in her warm, persuasive voice rather than her robot drone. “There’s no run scheduled, so a driver doesn’t have a reason to be there.”
“Neither do I!”
“And the way we’ve divided it up, the drivers don’t see the packages. Only the cons do, and the cons do what they’re told because they know which way the wind blows. This particular package is full of every good thing schedules one and two have to offer. If your driver takes a look inside, he’ll shit bricks and broken hearts. We’ve got to keep this between the two of us.”
Devlin still wasn’t happy. He kept on blathering about how this went against the way they worked together, and what it would mean if he were caught with all those drugs in his hands.
Grace knew she could convince him, but there wasn’t much time to waste. She could see two quick ways of getting him over the finishing line. Either she could elevate him to full partner (which he probably already thought he was) by giving him the numbers of some of those bank accounts, or else she could give him a sexual favour she’d held back until now.
She mulled that little riddle over for a full two or three seconds, which for Grace counted as serious indecision. Then she knelt down and unzipped Devlin’s flies. Either of these courses was going to shift the balance of power between them, but she could easily rinse away the taste of his cock: telling him where the money was meant giving hostages to fortune forever.
“I know it goes past what we agreed, Dennis,” she murmured, sighting past his crotch at his guarded, uncertain eyes. “But sometimes it’s good to go outside your comfort zone. Let me show you, baby.”
It didn’t trouble her. It would only have troubled her if her marriage of convenience with Devlin had grown into something more. Since it hadn’t, one lever was as good as the next.
Something was sticking in her mind, though. After she’d brought Devlin to his climax, done a little hugging and murmuring and pushed him out through the door, she meditated for ten minutes to try and get her head straight. It didn’t work. She kept seeing Moulson’s face.
The trouble with Moulson’s face was that it reminded Grace of her own. Not the one she had now, but the one she’d been born with, disfigured by the facial cleft that had turned her childhood into a perpetual hell. Grace had fought hard to distance herself from the false start heredity had given her. Moulson was like the ghost of that false start come back to haunt her. She told herself that the resemblance was superficial. She had been born with her disfigurements and triumphed over them. Moulson had come by hers through weakness and self-destructive stupidity. The two of them were poles apart.
She pushed away the treacherous temptation to be merciful by rethinking it. Rough edges were what you needed because they were what you sharpened yourself against. Nobody ever got sharp from lying in a feather bed.
47
Jess lay as still as she could under the beating. Afterwards, lying still was easy because it hurt to move.
“A few more bruises here and there…” Grace had said. But there would be more than a few. Earnshaw and Loomis rolled over her like articulated trucks. Earnshaw in particular went at her with a wild, joyless enthusiasm that was like nothing Jess had ever seen.