It was a world of dreams. Dreams with windows that let you look inside. Six-year-old Jess had mistaken the sleeping men and women she encountered for angels. By the time she might have been old enough to recognise them for what they really were, she’d had her passport to the night world revoked.
All of which led her to another disconcerting conclusion. Everything Alex had ever told her about the nocturnal adventures of the G block inmates was true. Not random invention but meticulous reportage. He was seeing – and walking – into the women’s dreams.
No wonder he’d lost so many of his own memories. He’d left them behind in everybody else’s.
50
“I had a weird dream,” Kaleesha Campbell muttered. Her face was buried between Po Royal’s breasts, but Po pushed her back so she could look right at her.
“What dream?”
“Well, first I was watching my dad shave in the bathroom at home with his old cut-throat razor. I used to hate him doing that. But then that kiddie-killer, Moulson, came walking right through the room. With a little blond boy. They were hand in hand. They didn’t say anything to me or my dad; they just went on through and out into the street. It was like she was taking him for a walk or something.”
“I dreamed that too,” Po told her.
“Fuck you did!” But Kaleesha could see from Po’s face that she wasn’t lying. She listened while Po told her her own dream. Not quite the same as Kaleesha’s, because Kaleesha’s dad didn’t show. And besides that, Po knew who the little kid was. She recognised Alex Beech from seeing his photo on the TV news. So she knew this wasn’t Jess Moulson out for a random walk. It was Jess Moulson replaying the crime that got her thrown into prison in the first place. Or else it was Moulson doing a Dante, with the boy she killed acting as her spirit guide (there was a Divine Comedy in the prison library, and Kaleesha had given it to Po to read once when there were no fantasy or horror novels in).
This business was creepy as shit, any way you looked at it. Po and Kaleesha did everything together so they could have written off that weird echo as the two of them being soulmates. In fact that was pretty much what Kaleesha did: she pushed the knowledge away and refused to talk about it. But Po went around the whole of that day asking people what they’d dreamed about the night before.
Mimi Acosta, Todd, Sharpe, O’Hanlan, Sam Kupperberg… The Moulson sightings kept piling up. She was in my bathroom at home, in the corner of the exercise yard, onstage at the Lexie, wherever.
Po tried to rationalise it. Why shouldn’t the whole of Goodall dream about Moulson? There were lots of reasons why she should be in their thoughts, starting with the massive media coverage of her crime and going right on through her botched hunger strike to her turbulent adventures in gen pop. The roots of coincidence were right there in plain sight. You didn’t need to invoke magic to explain it.
And if this was some supernatural harbinger, it didn’t harbinge anything very much. Moulson didn’t rise like thunder that day, or speak in tongues. She went creeping around like her usual quiet self, only with a split lip and maybe a tooth missing and definitely a limp.
“Who’s Moulson been playing bumper cars with?” Po asked Lorraine Buller. Buller had to know but she didn’t answer. She just told Po to mind her own business.
Po gave it up. It was some weird coincidence after all. Even so, she was bracing herself the next night as she lay down next to Kaleesha and closed her eyes. She was scared she’d meet Moulson in the dark, and that this time Moulson would talk to her. Say something prophetic that she couldn’t ignore.
But nothing happened. When she finally drifted off, it was into black nothingness. Moulson didn’t show. The kid did briefly, but he was a little blond scrap at the outer limits of her mind’s eye. An echo of the dream of the night before that barely registered and didn’t merit any special attention.
So there. Reason had triumphed, and it was all good. Po forgot about the Dante hypothesis and had a good laugh at herself.
The truth was Moulson was running scared. The discovery that the chaos realm Alex now inhabited was the Other Place of her childhood had shaken her badly. The boy was dead, not dreaming, but dreams were a gateway to that place. That was how she came and went, and presumably how she’d been able to sense Alex’s presence on her first day at Fellside. She was attuned to that weird night world from which he watched and listened to the living.
But then why hadn’t she met Alex before Fellside at the hospital or in the remand wing at Winstanley? If she’d had the talent even as a child, why had it taken so long for it to wake up again? Was it the drugs she’d been given, or just being so close to death herself?
Even more than Po Royal, she didn’t want to think about what all this meant. When she did finally go back into the dreamscape, it was because she had to.
51
After the court granted Moulson leave to appeal, Paul Levine visited her two or three times in successive weeks to talk strategy. But Moulson mostly wanted to talk about Alex Beech.
She’d been trawling through all those trial documents and depositions, looking for any clue as to who the nice girl and the nasty girl might be. There weren’t many quality candidates, but she’d kept at it and now she had a shortlist of sorts. There were quite a few teenage girls who’d lived in the same low-rise block or in one of its near neighbours and who had had a witness statement taken at the time of the initial investigation. They weren’t called at the trial because none of them knew Moulson or had anything particular to say about her, good or bad. But any one of them could have known Alex Beech.
She asked Levine to do some cross-checking. “Maybe some of them babysat him, or went to school with him. But it wouldn’t have to be that. Any history he had with girls who were older than him. Cousins, neighbours, anyone.”
It was easy to see that Paul was baffled. He’d already told her that the main thrust for the appeal was going to be attacking the conviction on the grounds of mental incapacity and poking at Street’s testimony to show that he could have done more to mitigate the damage. If they were very lucky, they might get the conviction overturned, but that was an outside chance. What they were really hoping for was to get a reduction of Moulson’s sentence by arguing that (a) there was a lack of intent and (b) she wasn’t solely to blame. But none of this required investigating the dead boy’s friends and enemies.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong, I want to help,” he said. And she knew he meant it. He’d been really alarmed by her fresh injuries, had insisted on taking photos of them. He wanted to put pressure on the governor to get her put into solitary for her own protection, but Moulson told him to leave it alone. He kept reassuring her of his good intentions, but she knew he was also trying very hard to shift her thoughts on to another track. “It’s just… we’ve only got a limited amount of time. Anything I do to chase up this stuff you’re talking about will take away from the time I give to… to the central planks of our argument.”
“You mean to the things that actually matter.”
“I mean that I need to do the things that will help you. That’s my job.”
“This will help me,” Moulson told him. “I can’t explain how, but it’s relevant. Please, Paul.”
She used his name consciously, tactically, remembering how it had felt when Alex used hers. She put her hand on his and stared into his eyes. She needed this. If leaning on Levine’s emotions a little would make a difference, she would do it, however shitty she felt about it afterwards.
“Can you give me a clue?” he begged. “What am I looking for?”