Sally could use his own stock so long as he didn’t use his own packaging – the box would have a batch code that would lead right back to him. But that wasn’t a problem, since Devlin invariably threw away the box before he left the infirmary, leaving the tiny white pills safely anonymous to a casual glance.
Three easy stages would do it. One: peel back the foil on the container, take out the pethidine tablets, replace them with a doctored alternative. Potassium cyanide would be quickest, but would also be quite hard for Sally to source without leaving a trace. Much better was Conium maculatum. Hemlock. There was a clump of it growing in full view in the horticultural gardens at Cholt Hey. A dozen leaves, mashed and boiled and dried and powdered, would be more than enough. Complete respiratory collapse in a couple of minutes at most if he got the concentration right. Devlin would think he’d got something caught in his throat right up until the paralysis set in.
Two: replace the foil. And then three: remove his fingerprints from every last centimetre of the foil strip and the plastic blister pack. He would need to do a few dry runs to get his hand in, but he had interned in a pharmacy and he was sure he could make it work.
He was equally sure that he never would. This pleasant stroll through the logistics had made him aware of the one piece of equipment he was lacking. He just didn’t have a killer instinct. Even playing the murder out as a fantasy left him queasy. There was no way he could bring himself to do any of this in real life.
He tested himself, just to be sure. He imagined killing Devlin face to face, using every method he could think of. Gun. Knife. Blunt instrument. Strangling cord. Hand grenade. Even in the ideal theatre of the mind, he couldn’t close the deal. Just couldn’t. There was a hole where his bloodlust should be. He hated Devlin enough to kill him a hundred times over, but it seemed the first step was always going to be too steep for him.
So what did that leave?
He could go to the governor with what he knew. But he had put his eggs in that basket once before and the bottom had fallen right out of it. There was nothing to hope for from the governor except disaster.
Go to the papers? Panorama? The World Wide Web? But with what? All he had was his bare word. And he wouldn’t even have that for very long because Devlin or Harriet Grace would kill him for certain as soon as he opened his mouth.
The doctor raced around this little rat-run in his mind until he thought he was going crazy with it. All his hatred was focused on the Devil. He didn’t resent Grace much at all. Criminals doing criminal things? That didn’t count as news. Devlin was different. Devlin was meant to keep order in Fellside, and instead he was a vector for evil and chaos. Devlin controlled him and humiliated him and terrorised him on a daily basis. Sally couldn’t live with it any more.
But there didn’t seem to be any way to take Devlin down that didn’t lead to self-immolation. And Sally wasn’t under any illusions about his courage or his moral fibre. Not any more. He’d proved time and time again that he wasn’t built to be a fighter or a martyr. So what he needed was a way to strike at Devlin from cover and never be caught.
One thing he did have was money. Every drop he made brought another envelope full of grubby, crumpled, non-sequential banknotes, which Devlin had warned him not to even think about taking to the bank. Sally’s vices were cheap ones – Indian takeaways and DVD box sets – so the money was just piling up in a kitchen drawer, which was getting a little hard to open.
Sally invested some of it in a very expensive, very high-spec gadget that called itself a Spycam Super-Pro. It was about the size of his thumbnail, but was miraculously capable of recording video with full sound. The receiver was a lot bigger but looked innocuous, a flat black box that might hold a socket wrench kit or a set of steak knives. It had sufficient range to be left in Sally’s car, drawing power off the 12-volt socket, while the camera sat in the infirmary underneath a framed photo of Sharne Fell, safely hidden in the flame’s shadow. A day’s footage took up about five per cent of the receiver’s hard disk space.
Once Sally had installed the camera, he took pleasure in coaxing Devlin to say incriminating things about their joint enterprise in front of it. He would ask leading questions about Grace, their expanding client base in Curie wing, the timing of the drops. Devlin usually told him to mind his own business, but even these equivocal responses made it clear what the two of them were doing. And every once in a while, the Devil would make a slightly longer speech, mostly out of a desire to put Sally in his place: there were lots of circumstantial details in those.
Each night Sally would review the day’s footage, meticulously extract, label and save the files he wanted to keep, transfer them to his home computer and trash the rest. He was building up a pretty impressive archive. But he could never get Devlin to tell him anything about the other side of Grace’s operation – how the drugs got into the prison and who carried them. He tried to lay out bait in the form of general statements, thinking aloud about the logistics of the drops and pickups, but Devlin just ignored him.
It was all sky-pie, in any case. Sally didn’t have a clue what he was going to do with any of this stuff. Leave it to someone in his will, maybe. Even a revenge he wouldn’t be around to see would be some comfort. But in the meantime, he drew a little strength from the knowledge that he had something in his back pocket that the Devil knew nothing about.
Two things actually.
“I’m going back home to Portugal,” DiMarta told him one evening when they were clocking off together. “I’m giving in my notice tomorrow. But I wanted you to know first.”
“Your mother?” Sally guessed.
Patience nodded. “She’s finding it much harder to move about. And there’s a vacancy at Dona Estefania. Shift work, just like here. I think I could make a go of it.”
“I’ll miss you,” Sally said, meaning it. “But you should be with her. No doubt about it.”
60
Jess was distressed to hear about her Aunt Brenda’s relapse. Then delighted when Paul handed over her new number. Then distressed all over again when he told her that he couldn’t help her any more. “Directly, I mean. With your own… investigations.”
He knew he sounded evasive. He couldn’t help that: he was evading her. Hoping to forestall questions, he lifted the cardboard box from his lap and pushed it across the table. Seven thousand pages of documents, exempted from quarantine by the magic of lawyer – client privilege.
“I want you to have this,” he told her. “It’s everything I could find on the case that wasn’t in the evidence boxes. There’s newspaper articles, our own internal notes, a few other bits and pieces that I picked up along the way. I went through all of it at least once, but maybe you’ll see something I missed.”
Jess was dismayed. “But I need you to keep working on this,” she said. “It’s relevant to my appeal. I already told you—”
“We’re taking a different tack with the appeal, Jess.”
“What tack? Tell me.”
Yeah, well, I would if I could, Paul thought glumly. It was less than twenty-four hours since he’d sat in front of the partners in one of the boardrooms and tried to make a case for letting her in on the secret. He’d been a lone voice.
“I’d prefer not to at this stage,” Brian Pritchard had told him. “We’re still researching your find, and we need to be absolutely sure of our facts before we finalise our strategy.”