The judge’s summing-up to the jury was short and to the point. “The Crown’s opting to try Jessica Moulson for murder may seem puzzling or contentious to you, given that she never intended to kill Alex Beech. The argument is that she formed the intention to kill somebody – her partner, John Adam Street – and therefore that she cannot offer in mitigation the fact that she killed somebody else. Her actions, if you accept that they were her actions, led directly to the wished-for outcome, except that the fire she set consumed the wrong life. There are a great many legal precedents for calling Alex Beech’s death an accidental manslaughter rather than a willed murder. But changes to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in its most recent incarnation allow the court to frame it as a murder. That is not a paradox. It is the law as it now stands.”
The jury stayed out for the whole of one day and part of the next, but when they came back the verdict was unanimous. Guilty.
Jess was way ahead of them, as far as that went. When the terrible word was spoken, her first thought was, What took you so long?
4
Brian Pritchard came to Jess’s remand cell to say goodbye. She was allowed to receive visitors in her cell because her injuries put her in the category of disabled prisoner. The lawyer sat in the cell’s only chair while his clerk, Levine, had to stand.
Jess was lying on her bunk. She didn’t try to get up. She felt at this stage as though even a slight movement like that was more of a commitment to life than she wanted to make. She was conscious of Levine’s eyes on her the whole time, except when she looked back at him. Then his gaze would shoot away in a random direction. Pritchard hardly looked at her at all: just the occasional glance, after which his eyes would go back to the floor or to his own hands, folded in his lap.
“For the record,” he told her, “I still think we could have won.”
“Really?” Jess asked tonelessly.
“Yes, Ms Moulson, really. With a different jury. With Street chained to the witness stand. With you in a different frame of mind.”
Jess couldn’t sympathise with his regrets. She had none of her own, at least as far as the verdict went. It was hard even to be patient with him. “If justice was served, where’s the problem?” she demanded.
Pritchard tutted. “Justice? Justice is even more problematic than truth. It’s an emergent property of a very complicated system.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Jess said wearily.
She was trying to shut the conversation down before it got started, but Pritchard clearly wanted her to understand. He raised his hand, tilting his flat palm to left and right. “It means that it’s neither an ingredient in the pie nor the pie itself. It’s the smell that rises up out of the pie if you’ve cooked it right. We don’t aim for justice, Ms Moulson. We perform our roles and justice happens. You didn’t perform your role very well, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
Jess thought she was done with emotion in the same way she was done with words, but anger surged inside her and she couldn’t push it down. Pritchard seemed to blame her for the outcome of the trial – as though everything she’d said and done had been intended purely to inconvenience him. To a lawyer, everything was sideways on and skewed by parallax. There was no point in trying to make him understand how simple this was to her. But the words came out of her anyway.
“I killed a child.”
“You don’t know that,” Pritchard said.
“I do know it. They proved it. And Alex…” That was as far as she got. His name dragged her under, and she had to fight for air. The clerk, Levine, took a step towards her, but there was nothing he could do besides stand there and look concerned.
As an addict, she’d lived for so long in a place where nothing mattered, where she had no anchor. If there was any real feeling in her life at all, it had been that tenuous connection, that futile compassion for the scrawny kid on the stairs who’d barely spoken to her. Killing John would have been bearable. Understandable. Killing Alex Beech was a different thing altogether. There was no coming back from that. She wouldn’t even want to live in a world where you could come back from that.
“Pending your appeal, Ms Moulson,” Pritchard said, “I’d like you to take it as a working assumption that nothing has been proved yet.”
“I’m not making an appeal.”
Another gesture, this time waving the inconvenient words away. “Well, I believe you’ll change your mind on that, once you’ve got past this current crisis of self-loathing. You haven’t seen Fellside yet.”
Fellside was the titan prison up in Yorkshire to which she was now being sent, freeing the remand cell at Winstanley for its next resident. Jess knew nothing about the place apart from its name. Unlike Wormwood Scrubs, say, or Dartmoor, or Pentonville, it was a name that carried no associations for her.
“Is Fellside so terrible?” she asked Pritchard, trying for an ironic tone.
“All prisons are terrible,” Pritchard answered with po-faced seriousness. “High-security prisons are generally more terrible than the rest. And private prisons are the worst of all. Profit and public service make very bad bedfellows.”
He told her a lot more about Fellside – explaining why, to him, it did count as an especially terrible place. Jess barely listened.
“I’ll be fine,” she assured him. If Fellside was terrible, Fellside was where she belonged.
Pritchard picked at a loose thread on his jacket, his mouth tugging down at the corners. “It’s your decision in any event,” he said. “I can’t lodge an appeal against your wishes. But it’s my duty as your legal adviser to tell you that you have excellent grounds for an appeal and it would be a mistake not to lodge one.”
“I think my biggest mistake was to let you represent me,” Jess said. She was being rude to make him leave, him and his last-puppy-in-the-pet-shop-window clerk, but it didn’t have any immediate effect.
“We’re not obliged to like one another, Ms Moulson,” the lawyer said. “I’m your legal representative, not your friend. And I’m aware that you didn’t choose me. But I’ll fulfil my role as I see it until such time as you discharge me from—”
“You’re fired,” Jess said. “Thank you. For everything. But now you need to go away.”
“That’s not a decision to make on the spur of the moment,” Pritchard observed.
“I’m not making it on the spur of the moment. I made it when I saw you in court. I don’t want you to be my lawyer any more. If I decide to make an appeal, I’ll go with someone else. A different firm. I won’t use you.”
Pritchard gave a heavy sigh. He stood, still calm but a little on his dignity. “Well then,” he said, “I believe that concludes my business here. But please let me know if you change your mind.”
“I won’t.”
Levine knocked on the door. He was still darting glances at her. Pritchard bowed his head like a man in prayer as he waited in silence for the guard to come and let them out.
After they were gone, Jess lay very still on the bunk with her eyes closed, trying not to panic. She’d thrown away her parachute deliberately: she didn’t want to be tempted to try to use it. But it was still frightening to lie there in the dark and feel so very much alone.
5
Throughout this time, Jess’s sleep was still disturbed. Whenever she closed her eyes, she felt her tiny cell dissolve away, leaving her lying out in the open in a place that was vast and endless. An unseen multitude moved in front of her closed eyelids: shadows so faint you could barely see them, but so many that they coalesced into an endless darkness. At the limits of her vision, everything broke up into turbulence and chaos.
And still there were the voices. The whispers that had troubled her at the hospital were louder than ever now. She had always assumed they were talking about her, but when she could actually make out the words, she didn’t feature in them at all. They were fragments of wishes, regrets, laments.
I shouldn’t have
if he
my only
never even saw
Jess’s dreamscape contained no actual dreams. The last time she’d dreamed anything she could remember on waking, she must have been six or seven years old. But now her troubled sleep was strewn with the jagged shards of other people’s broken lives.