What he meant was: leave her out of the loop. Paul knew that, and he knew why. Most of the evidence that had condemned Jess had come from her own mouth – and at the end of the trial she’d wanted to change her plea to guilty, against the advice of her counsel. Then after that there’d been the hunger strike. “Martyr syndrome,” Pritchard called it. He saw Jess as a loose cannon who could easily sabotage her own appeal, either intentionally or by accident. And while it was her legal right to do just that, the partners on the whole preferred to win their cases when they were susceptible to being won.
So Paul was here to review one or two relevant portions of Jess’s testimony, and to give her the box as a consolation prize. But his timing was off, and the second part of that agenda torpedoed the first. He was too anxious, as always, to show her he was on her side. Jess opened the box and started to sort through the contents, seeming much more interested in Alex Beech’s past than in her own future.
Which, when you thought about it, pretty much proved Pritchard’s point.
“Can I just ask you to re-read this?” Paul said, thrusting a document out towards her and holding it in front of her face until she looked at it.
“What is it?” Moulson asked.
“Part of the transcript from your first trial. John Street’s testimony about the night of the fire. Could you read it over and tell me if there’s anything there you disagree with?”
Moulson read quickly and distractedly. “No,” she said. “It’s all correct.”
“The times? The sequence of events? Everything is accurate?”
“I think so, yes. Didn’t I already say that?”
“Yeah, you did. But we want to make sure nothing slipped through the gaps. Please, Jess, read it carefully.”
She did her best, her eyes flicking over the lines, most of her mind somewhere else entirely. “It all looks fine,” she told him.
“Okay. One more.” He handed her a second sheaf of papers: more transcripts, this time of her own testimony.
Moulson gave him a sour look when she realised what it was. “I’m not going to remember better now than I did at the time, Paul. If I disagree with anything I said back then, the clever money would be on the original version.”
Paul shrugged. “I’m just asking you to read it and tell me if that’s still how you remember it.”
He thought for a moment she was going to rebel even at that. Her mouth opened, then closed again. Scowling, she read the document. She gave it a lot more attention than she’d given to Street’s account. She read every line.
Then handed it back to him. “Yes,” was all she said.
“The timing. The sequence.”
“Yes. That’s how it is in my mind.”
“You both shot up at eight o’clock? You and John Street?”
“Yes. Or a little later, maybe. John went out and bought the stuff. We shot up as soon as he got back.”
“You don’t mention whether he went first or second.”
Moulson thought for a moment before she answered. “I went first.”
“Because you asked to, or just because?”
Another pause. “Because John was in charge of the needle.”
“That was something that was agreed between you?”
“It wasn’t something we ever…”
“Okay, so it was just assumed? Taken for granted?”
Jess nodded.
Paul asked her a few more questions about her memories of the fire, but didn’t go anywhere near Alex Beech. He was afraid to set her off again now when he needed to leave.
He kept a disciplined silence as he gathered his notes, shut down his laptop, stowed everything back in his briefcase. He made it all the way to the door, but as he reached for the handle, the temptation just got too strong to resist. He turned on the threshold and looked back at her.
“What would you do,” he asked her, “if you won the appeal? Where would you go?”
Moulson only stared. “Decisions, decisions,” she said after a few moments, trying to make it into a joke.
“Seriously, Jess, do you have a place to stay?”
“Seriously?” The good half of her mouth quirked and trembled a few times. For once he couldn’t tell what emotion it was trying to convey. “I think I’d have to check into a hotel somewhere. And then get thrown back in here again for bad debt. I suppose I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
“When you come to it,” Paul said, “you can stay with me. If you want to.”
He put the door between them before she could reply.
As he left the prison, Paul had so many contradictory emotions churning inside him that he thought he might be sick. He was still jubilant about what he’d found in the CCTV evidence. That had given him the confidence to say what he’d just said to her. But saying it left him terrified. He had exposed himself so blatantly! And then there was the guilt. He’d promised her that he’d try to find out about Alex Beech’s friends, and he’d been doing his best, but then – because of what he’d found – he’d had to leave her stranded. He was going to save her, but failing her still hurt.
61
Jess went from the interview suite to the phone queue, where she stood her vigil with the box of documents in her hands. There was no answer from Aunt Brenda’s mobile, and when it went to voicemail, the payphone pocketed her 60p. She queued again, struck out again and lost another chunk of her diminishing change. After that, she gave it up, deciding that she might have better luck if she tried again later. At 60p a shot, she would only get three tries each day.
She took the box back to her cell, which was already full of boxes. “Oh, fucking wonderful,” Lorraine Buller muttered when she saw it.
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. There’s still a land route to the sink.”
Jess was still thinking about what Levine had said as he left. She’d realised by this time that he had a sort of infatuation with her. Those heavy-handed hints that she was going to win her appeal were probably just wishful thinking – part of a romantic fantasy that ended with her falling into his lawyerly arms. That might have been a pleasant fantasy for her too, back before her face got ruined. Now – quite apart from her being damaged goods, bad news and hard work – her fantasies mostly centred on being in a place without any mirrors in it.
It was free association time, so she broke the box open right away. The lid was tight, and she had to tug a little harder than she’d expected. The box slipped out of her hands and the contents spilled across the floor. Lorraine Buller, who once again was reading on her bunk, complained about the mess but without much animation. It was too hot to get angry, and anyway it didn’t take more than a few seconds for Jess to scoop up the fallen papers, handful after handful, and stack them on the table.
She sat down and read. She started with the newspaper articles. They were written in a racier style than the notes and depositions, and they had pictures, so they leapt to the eye. But as she read, a different image kept catching the ragged edge of her attention. It recurred in a lot of documents, always in the same place – right at the top, dead centre.
Jess fished one of these documents out and flicked her eye down the rows and rows of little boxes filled with neatly typed platitudes. It was one of Alex Beech’s old school reports. C for English, B for Maths and Science, B for Art. Bland generalisations about skills attained or not attained. There were no insights here. Only, at the bottom, like a little white flag of surrender, his form teacher’s summary that “Alex is a quiet boy who pays attention in class but could be encouraged to participate more”.
This man or woman (the signature was a squiggle, something-something-Munroe) hadn’t known Alex Beech. Not at all. Or maybe the assessment had been an accurate one until the fire. Maybe it was death that had changed Alex from a cipher into an avenging angel who could walk into Hannah Passmore’s dreams and slap her senseless.
Jess put the sparse, unconvincing document aside and went back to the newspaper articles.