She’d read somewhere about flagellants, religious zealots who mortified their own flesh by whipping or torturing themselves. Earnshaw was like that, except that she chose other people’s flesh to work on. It wasn’t sadism, or at least the look in her reddened face didn’t suggest any kind of fetishistic pleasure: it was as though she took the lid off some internal pain and it came out of her in a torrent, her flailing fists and boots just conduits for something that was ripping a hole in her as it came.
Once again Carol Loomis called Earnshaw off, with a gentle, indulgent “Hey, Lizzie. Fuck it, come on.” Earnshaw stood back, panting and sweating like a boxer, blowing air past her bared teeth. Jess looked up at her through eyes that were swelling shut. She didn’t move or speak or even cry. It was impossible to tell what might start the process off again, and she didn’t think she’d survive round two.
Big Carol took charge of the situation, lifting Jess up by her shoulders and dragging her over to the bunk. “Congratulations, by the way,” she said as she wedged Jess into a more or less stable position – one where she wouldn’t just fall back out on to the floor. “On the appeal, I mean. You might get away with killing that kid yet, Moulson.”
Their footsteps receded, but there was no sound of the door closing. Of course they wanted her to be seen since she was an exhibit illustrating an important principle. You didn’t fuck with Harriet Grace, or else this would happen to you too.
For a long while she lay alone. Then Buller came in very quietly, inspected the damage and got to work. She wadded up handfuls of toilet paper to dab at the places where Jess was bleeding. For the bruises, there wasn’t anything much to do.
“You’re a mess, love,” she muttered as she worked. “But it’s not broken bones or anything. And that eye will probably be fine when the swelling goes down. You’ve just got a bit of a burst blood vessel there, I think. Here, press this on your cheek.”
Jess did as she was told. Buller left the cell briefly and came back with a couple of plasters. The antiseptic she already had to hand from when she’d used it to wash Shannon McBride’s wounded hands all those weeks ago. She didn’t suggest going to the infirmary and Jess didn’t bring up the possibility either. As with the earlier beatings, this was something that hadn’t officially happened.
“Lizzie gets carried away once she gets going,” Buller said, dabbing carefully at Jess’s cuts. “I did tell you to stay away from her.”
Jess didn’t bother to say that she hadn’t been given any choice. Her lip was shredded where it had impacted against her teeth: it was easier not to say anything at all.
When lock-up sounded, Buller helped her stand up long enough to shuffle to the door and be counted. If the warder with the click counter noticed the condition she was in, he didn’t feel it was worth commenting on.
48
Devlin went and fetched Grace’s package from the courthouse, using up a favour or two by getting one of the clerks there to let him in through the side door. He would have preferred not to be seen by anyone at all, but you couldn’t get into the back of the building, where the prisoner toilets were, unless you passed through security. So now he was on record as being somewhere he had no business to be, with no more of a cover story than that some other guard had left his cap behind. He hated everything about this.
But what choice did he have after Grace went down on him? If he’d said no, it would have felt like he was throwing that intimacy, that gift right back in her face.
He knew he was being played, of course. He wasn’t stupid. But the relationship he had with Grace still seemed to Devlin to be something special, something unique. They might have come together in the first place purely for mutual profit, but after that they’d found each other, found a kinship that wasn’t just about the money or the convenience. They worked well together. So it was okay, he told himself, if once in a while she manipulated him. She would still respect him in the morning. She knew what they had as well as he did, and needed it more. And it had been her down on her knees, not him.
And much more in the same vein.
It was past nine when he got back to Fellside, and his shift had finished at eight. That made things more than a little awkward. The Fellside regime, a leaky ship in a lot of ways, was incredibly strict and exacting about logging staff movement. Signing in and signing out was mandatory, and was meant to occur within fifteen minutes of the start and end of your shift. Devlin had slipped out without signing the daybook, courtesy of a stiff bribe to Donaldson, the officer on duty. Now he had to go back on-block when he had no fucking business being there, and pay Donaldson for his trouble all over again. Fortunately, one of Devlin’s duties was to maintain the shift register. The first thing he did was to write himself in for two hours’ overtime.
With his arse covered, he went to the infirmary. He found it locked up. Fucking Sally, reliably unreliable. But as he turned away the door was unlocked from inside. It opened about an inch, Sally peering through the gap like a rabbit looking out of his hole.
Devlin pushed the door wide and shouldered past the doctor into the room. He threw the package down on the table. “Is there some fucking reason you’re playing hide-and-seek?” he grunted.
“The room’s meant to be locked when nobody’s in here. Patience is still on-shift but she’s over in Blackwell, and I didn’t know when you were going to—”
“Sally, I asked but I don’t care. There’s your stuff.”
Salazar stared at the package with open disgust. “Well, it can’t stay here,” he said. “Not until next week.”
That struck Devlin as a really stupid thing to say. The place was full of drugs, wasn’t it? But it didn’t matter in any case. “Find somewhere to stash it overnight,” he said. “Tomorrow you do the clinic again and make the drop-off. We need to keep this moving.”
Sally had an objection to this too, inevitably. Lots of objections. It made no sense to run the clinic twice. He didn’t have a room booked for a Friday session, he didn’t have appointments. He didn’t have a bastard clue, was what he meant.
Devlin was suddenly sick of humouring him. It had been a shitty, stressful day even in spite of the blowjob. He’d been made to do something he’d promised himself he wouldn’t ever do. He wasn’t harbouring any resentment against Grace: he didn’t allow himself to go too far along that road. But he was full of a sort of unfocused indignation about how the world worked. Right then, having to stomach a big sloppy dose of Salazar on top of everything else felt like God taking unnecessary liberties.
The table was covered in all kinds of medical bullshit: Devlin pushed it to one side and off on to the floor. Tearing open the zip-lock, he spilled the contents on to the table. It was what he’d expected to see. A cling-film-wrapped block of cannabis, a smaller zip-locked bag of heroin and another of crack. Some pastel-coloured pills, looking as innocuous as the Swizzels sweets Devlin used to gorge on as a kid, were probably MDMA.
He broke open this last bag before he’d even thought about what he was about to do, his hands running ahead of his furious mood. Sally’s passive-aggressive bleating was feeding that mood somehow. Devlin had come in here more or less on an even keel, just a little bit frustrated by the locked door, but the longer he had to look at that sad, kick-me face, the more he wanted to take a poke at it.
In the old days, of course, he might have taken a poke at Sally’s wife Leah instead. He’d had an understanding with her for many years, and it had even lasted some way into her terminal illness. But alas, that well-travelled avenue was now closed.
He shook out a single pill, a yellow one, and pushed it across the table with his thumb. “Here you go, Sally,” he said. “Free sample. Don’t say I never give you anything.”
Salazar stared at him in silence for a moment, then turned and headed for the door.
The Devil got there before him and headed him off. “What, you’re not going to break bread with me?” he said. He smiled widely, knowing what kind of effect that would create. He wasn’t really out of control, but it amused him to let the mewling little prick think he was. “Yeah, you are. You swallow that down or I’m going to take it personally.”