Jess hesitated. How to explain the two parts of this, the friend and the torturer? She couldn’t. So she went for the simpler part of the explanation, the one where there might be some actual physical evidence. “If Alex was being abused… I don’t mean sexually, but if he was being hurt by someone close to him, someone who knew him…”
No. It still made no sense. Paul’s expression stayed the same, pained and puzzled. “I think there was another witness,” Jess said, trying another tack. “Someone who was there when Alex died and didn’t come forward because she was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“That this other stuff would come out. That she’d be caught and get into trouble.”
“Okay,” Paul said. “But what would that mean for us? I mean, unless you’re saying she incapacitated him so he couldn’t get out when the fire started…”
“Yes.” Jess jumped on this suggestion eagerly. “Maybe that’s what happened. And then in the end Alex would still have died from the smoke, not from the other injuries. The forensic evidence would still make sense.”
“But you know we don’t have a shred of evidence for this?”
Jess nodded. “Yes. Of course I know that. I’m asking you to find some.”
Paul looked almost despairing. “Jess, I don’t want to dismiss any possible avenues, but Mr Pritchard will be looking over my shoulder, and he has to sign off on my time sheets. I don’t see any way I can put serious effort into this if I can’t explain to him why I’m doing it. And he won’t take a simple maybe as an explanation. He’ll be looking for something more solid than that.”
“Just do what you can,” Jess begged him. Begging was all she could do. It wasn’t as if she was paying him.
“I’ll ask around,” Paul told her. “But would you please just tell me one thing: what makes you think this girl exists?”
For a wild moment she considered telling him the truth – that she was keeping a promise she’d made to the boy she killed. But if Levine thought she was mad, he’d be much less likely to help her. Then she thought about lying, but she couldn’t come up with a lie that would serve. “I can’t explain,” she said.
Paul smiled weakly. “Just ‘sources close to Jess Moulson’, then? All right, I’ll do what I can. But it might not be much. We’ve got three weeks before the appeal comes up, Jess, and vast amounts to cover if we’re going to have any kind of a chance. You know that’s got to come first, right?”
“Yes,” Jess said. “Of course. Of course it does. Whatever you can manage then. Thank you. Thank you, Paul.”
“Is there anything else I can do for you?”
He said it in an almost ironic tone, but there was. “My Aunt Brenda. My mother’s sister.”
“What about her?”
“I can’t get through to her. All I’ve got is the phone and letters and she’s not answering either one. She’s… she was sick recently. She had an operation. I want to know she’s all right.”
“Where does she live?” Paul asked. He’d already put his notebook away in preparation for leaving, but he took it out again. Jess gave him the address and he wrote it down. “Okay,” he said. “That’s not too far. I’ll go round there.”
Paul knocked on the door for the guards to let him out. While he waited, he turned back to say goodbye to her. Moulson, still sitting at the table, was looking up at him, the swelling of her bruised cheek changing the topography of her features so that one of her eyes was thrown into shadow. Her face had become a kabuki mask, painted black and white.
There was an urgency in her lopsided stare, as though she was waiting for him to get out there and do his stuff and she would keep on waiting in exactly that place, exactly that pose, until he came back.
Their relationship was just as lopsided. It was even exploitative in a way. Well, it was if she knew how he felt about her. Mr Pritchard had warned him about that possibility. “Everybody works the resources they’ve got to hand, Paul. Prisoners have very limited resources so they work them very hard. If you’re going to become a resource to Ms Moulson, go in with your eyes open.”
Paul’s eyes were wide open and he knew exactly what he was doing. He wouldn’t fail her.
52
The word got out over breakfast, a day or two later, that Hannah Passmore had tried to kill herself by chewing through her own wrists. It got out through Debbie Ochs, Passmore’s cellmate.
“I woke up in the night, yeah? There was something dripping on my face. I thought Hannah had pissed the bloody bed, but it got on my lips and it wasn’t piss. It was blood. I shouted until the warders came. It was lights-out, wasn’t it, so I couldn’t tell what she’d done to herself. But when they put the lights on for the warders, I could see it all. She’d opened her frigging wrists up and everything. Christ, she was a mess. It was all over me, all over the bed, on the floor… Couldn’t have been much left inside her, I’ll tell you that much.”
Now Hannah was in the infirmary and nobody knew if she was going to live or die. Debbie wanted to be in the infirmary too. She was shit-scared she might have caught something from drinking Passmore’s blood – AIDS maybe, or hepatitis. And she didn’t think it was the slightest bit funny that everyone on the corridor was calling her Vampirella.
Debbie hadn’t exaggerated though: Passmore had lost enough blood to leave her as white as the sheets she was lying on. As failed suicide attempts go, she had come close to sealing the deal. Dr Salazar gave her three pints of full and one of serum. The only reason she stayed in the infirmary rather than being transferred directly to the intensive care unit over at Leeds General was that she was too weak to be moved.
And it was no secret who was behind this. Every woman in Goodall had heard by now about what Passmore had said to Moulson in the refectory a few weeks before. What did you do to me? And they remembered what Passmore had looked like when she’d said it. Or if they didn’t remember, they heard it all over again from Shannon McBride, who was only too delighted to have a new verse or two to add to the ballad of Jess Moulson.
Passmore had been very quiet since that outburst at breakfast. Not peaceful quiet but ominous quiet. Mostly if you spoke to her, you’d get a wild stare and no answer, and then she’d take herself away to somewhere else where she didn’t have to deal with you. There had been something not right with her, that was for certain.
A crowd of people were talking this over in the ballroom when Moulson herself came over. She’d heard Passmore’s name and she wanted to know what was going on. She looked anxious, strain showing in her face like she was asking the radiologist what that shadow on her lung was.
“Piss off out of it,” Marge Todd suggested.
“Has something happened to Passmore?” Moulson asked again. “Please just tell me and I’ll go away.”
She turned from Todd to Shannon McBride and said it again. “Just tell me!” Shannon stared back at her, blank-faced. She was smack in the middle of a great Moulson story, but for once it was a story that had Moulson as the villain of the piece. Moulson appearing in person made the words dry up in her mouth.
“I—” she said. And got stuck there.
“Hannah tried to kill herself,” Po Royal said. “Bit her wrists and bled out. But Ochs raised the alarm and they took her to the infirmary.”
“Does anybody know why Passmore would do a thing like that?” Moulson asked, looking from one of them to the other. “Was something bothering her? Did she get bad news?”
“Nobody knows anything,” Todd said. “What’s it to you anyway? Hannah smacked you up and down the corridor your first night out of solitary. If you want to have a nice gloat, Moulson, go and do it somewhere else.”
But whatever Moulson was doing, it wasn’t gloating. She looked scared.