“It’s hard for me,” she said. It wasn’t said to her but it was loud enough for Stock to hear. “It seems to go on for ever.”
There was someone walking next to Moulson, and that was who she was talking to. This second person wasn’t there until Stock turned to look at him, but then it felt as though he’d been there all along. She thought at first it was the boy Moulson had killed, but it wasn’t. It was someone else entirely. Someone who kept his face turned away, either out of anger or because he didn’t want to be recognised. The other person answered, but all Stock heard was a mumble.
Still, that’s how close Moulson came to her. How close they both came.
In the dream, Stock didn’t hate Moulson, and she wasn’t afraid of her. They just passed each other by. Close enough to talk, but neither of them said anything, and it didn’t even seem to Stock that Moulson noticed she was there.
It was a missed opportunity, she thought as she woke up. Not a real one, obviously, but the melancholy of that thought stayed with her for hours afterwards as the atmosphere of a dream sometimes can.
57
Grace was a victim of her own success.
Her expansion into Curie wing went almost unchallenged, and it turned out there were more customers there than she’d ever imagined. She’d always thought that people on longer sentences, and especially lifers, would be more likely to turn to chemical consolations. The opposite seemed to be the case. The Curie women, so much closer on average to getting back out into the big wide world, seemed to have stronger links to it, along with more disposable income and more ingrained habits.
Habits which it was now Grace’s job to service. And that meant higher turnover, which meant more product coming through.
“Well, it goes one of two ways,” Devlin told her in the course of another après-sex summit conference in her cell. “Either the couriers have got to carry more each time, or there’ve got to be more pickups.”
Grace didn’t waste a lot of thought on that conundrum. “Maybe we could slip a little more into the packages, but we’d be talking a gram here and a pill there. There just isn’t any leeway, Dennis. You know what will happen if any of those women shows a bulge where they shouldn’t.”
“Who’s going to look? If they’ve been under supervision the whole time they were out…” But Devlin ran out of steam mid-sentence, thinking about all the checkpoints the women had to walk through when they came back on-block. Not even Grace could bribe every guard along the way.
“So we need more couriers,” Grace summarised, as though the Devil hadn’t spoken at all. She stroked his chest to soften the blow. “Get me a list. Anyone who’s got an appeal pending or any kind of a medical condition. Get Sally to authorise more trips to Leeds. X-rays. Consultations. Whatever the fuck. He can make up the paperwork as he goes along.”
“There’s something else,” Devlin said, looking hangdog.
“What? Don’t tell me Scratchwell is going back to random searches.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s Kenny Treacher.”
Treacher had slipped to the back of Grace’s mind, but Devlin assured her that it wasn’t mutual. “We knew he wasn’t going to like being pushed out of the picture. He’s still mixing it with Dizzy, and he’s still talking to Hassan and Weeks.”
“Talking?” Grace’s tone had a dangerous edge to it.
“I think maybe supplying.”
“Fuck!” Grace threw off the blanket and got out of bed. Devlin watched her pace for a while. His frank admiration for her well-toned body was tempered by his unease at how tense and edgy she was. These were dangerous waters. “We can’t let that go by,” she said at last. “They’re dealing again? Seriously?”
“A little bit, yeah. You want to come back in here? I can warm your—”
“Dennis. We’ve got to do something.”
She stared at him, waiting for him to do his usual thing. Raise half-arsed objections, be argued down, finally accept the obvious.
“Yeah,” Devlin agreed wearily. “I know we have. Look, the warders I bought off when we arranged that fight, they’re still onside. This will cost more because… well, because of what it is. But I can do it. You just say the word, I’ll make it happen. Pay them to pay someone else to pay someone else, et cetera, et cetera. Long distance, no bounceback to us.”
That was the crucial factor, of course. He was okay with this, more or less, because it wouldn’t be him taking any of the risks. Grace got back in beside him, took his head in her two hands and kissed him, long and hard. “I knew I could count on you, Dennis,” she said. “Nobody gets me the way you do. Make it good, yeah?”
And it was. The price was steep, but Devlin made sure that Grace got plenty of bang for her buck. Two days after that conversation, Hassan and Weeks slipped in the shower, and kept on slipping every time they got up again. Hassan was hospitalised with a broken collar-bone. Dominica Weeks wasn’t so lucky. That was one very slippery shower.
The news of her death took the wind right out of Devlin’s sails. He’d thought he was buying a beating, hadn’t counted on a murder. “What does it matter?” Grace asked him. “It got the job done, didn’t it? It’s not like it’s your first, Dennis.”
Devlin knew what she was referring to, and shook his head. “Suresh was different. All I did was clear the way that time, I didn’t hand over any money. Jesus, Grace, Weeks is dead. There’s going to be an investigation. There’ll have to be.”
“It won’t come anywhere near you,” Grace promised. “It will die on Curie.”
Which it did, eventually. There were detectives and uniformed cops on-block for a few days, going over the crime scene and taking statements. But part of Grace’s outlay had been to a lifer named Stephie Monk, whose terms – five thousand in used bills to her daughter Agnes in exchange for a full and circumstantial confession – were very reasonable. The investigation was a three-day wonder.
That wasn’t the end of it, though. Not entirely. A few weeks after that, Devlin started to hear stories about suspicious strangers showing up at the Pot of Gold, the pub at the bottom of the long road that led across the fell to the village of Ireby. A lot of the warders drank there at the end of their shifts, especially the ordinary turnkeys. Supervisors and above favoured the Mason Arms in Wigton or the Sun Inn in Keswick.
The strangers were cheerful in their manner and open-handed to a fault. They were happy to get rounds in for the Fellside screws, and to listen to their stories about the rigours of their shitty job. Moreover, they were willing to pay big money for a name: the name of Harriet Grace’s mule.
When he heard about this, Devlin immediately took it to Grace. But Grace wasn’t concerned at all. “It’s Treacher,” the Devil told her. “These are Treacher’s people. He’s still after us.”
“Of course it’s Treacher,” Grace agreed. “He had a hard-on for Dominica Weeks and he’s taking it personally that she died. But he’s got no foothold here now. Hassan and Weeks are out of the picture and nobody else is going to deal for him after what happened. He wants to hit back at us, but he doesn’t even know what he’s looking for. He thinks we’ve just got the one courier bringing our shipments in. Let him go piss in the wind for as long as he likes.”
Devlin was less sanguine. He got Grace’s point about her massively decentralised network. It was very clever. But to his mind, the problem with a system where everyone knows a little bit about a big thing is that there are an awful lot of people holding clues as to how that big thing works. Treacher was groping in the dark right now, but it wouldn’t take very many loose words to bring him illumination.