But something was nibbling away in a corner of her mind, and after a minute or so she went back to the school report. She’d already noticed what was weird about it. Now she had to wait while that knowledge made its way from subliminal alleyways to the forefront of her mind. Her scalp prickled a little when the full realisation hit her. She sorted through the box’s contents looking for the rest of Alex’s reports. They were all the same.
It was probably nothing, she told herself. The dead boy had forgotten a lot of things about his past life. He’d even been a little vague about his name the first time they’d met. But this wasn’t forgetting exactly. And it didn’t feel like nothing to her.
Alex? she called inside her mind.
He didn’t come. He still didn’t like the daylight hours much, and as they got closer to midsummer, the hour of his arrival had slipped a little later each day. When the sun hit the top of Fellside’s outer wall, chasing the thin sliver of remaining sunlight across the exercise yard to the back of the refectory, that was when he would make his entrance, walking through the wall of the cell as though it wasn’t there at all – which for him, of course, it wasn’t.
“Walk,” a gruff voice said.
Jess turned at the sound to find the cell suddenly a lot more crowded. Carol Loomis and Liz Earnshaw had walked in together, but now they separated to stand on either side of the door, very much the way the warders did when they picked a cell for a random search. Carol was the one who’d spoken – to Lorraine Buller, not to Jess. She hooked a thumb over her shoulder to indicate in which direction Buller’s walk should take her. Out.
Buller climbed down from her bunk slowly, reluctance written on her face. “You going to hit her some more?” she asked.
“None of your fucking business,” Earnshaw rumbled. “Off you go.”
Lorraine headed for the door. But she stopped on the threshold. “You know she’s got her appeal coming up? If she goes into court looking like raw meat, the governor will come after you. He’ll have to.”
Carol Loomis gripped Lorraine’s shoulder and pushed her out. “We just want a word,” she said. “Don’t you worry about it.”
She shut the door, and the three of them were alone. Jess’s mind fizzed with terror. Her memories of Earnshaw’s unfettered violence were still very fresh. She backed away, even though neither of the women had made a move towards her.
Big Carol grinned and shook her head. “You know what your trouble is?” she said. “You always pick the wrong moments to piss yourself. We’re not here to hurt you. Just to pass on a message.”
Jess waited. She didn’t trust herself to speak. Losing control of her bladder again seemed like a very real possibility.
“You’re still employed, remember?” Big Carol said. “Grace covered this with you way back, so you must have known it was coming. Your appeal’s on Wednesday. Same arrangement as before. Middle cubicle, end of the day. You’re not going to fuck up this time, are you?”
Jess still didn’t say anything. Earnshaw tutted deep in her throat and took a step forward, but Loomis raised a hand. Wait for it. “You’re not going to fuck up, because if you do, you won’t live past dinner-time. You’ll peg out in the showers, after some high jinks that will make you glad to go. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Jess whispered.
“Of course you do. So there’s no need for any unpleasantness. You’ll do as you’re told and we’ll all be friends.”
She clapped a hand down on Jess’s shoulder and shook her affectionately. “You see? This is how it’s meant to be. All on the same side, all pulling together. We’re a team, Moulson. And being on the team is like being in love. It means never having to say you’re sorry. Not that being sorry would help you this time. Okay?”
The two women left, Loomis giving Jess a cheery wave. Jess sat down again, weak with self-disgust, with relief.
Buller didn’t return. Possibly she felt like she’d stuck her neck out far enough for one day. Jess sat in silence, her thoughts too scattered to go back to her reading.
If only the appeal was a bit further off. If only she had a little more time to keep working through the files with Paul Levine while the world stood off and waited. Instead she was being pushed towards a reckoning, or maybe more than one. She thought she would be strong enough to see this through – to stand up to Grace’s threats and to get Alex the answers he needed – but she wished that everything wasn’t happening at once.
Jess touched her ribs where they still ached from Earnshaw’s kicks. But whatever Grace said, whatever Loomis threatened, they surely wouldn’t kill her? Even in a place as corrupt as Fellside, there would have to be an investigation. Something would come out.
So it would just be another beating. A bad one, but not a fatal one. Unless Loomis didn’t manage to pull Earnshaw off her in time.
Jess told herself these things in a tentative way, to see if she actually believed them. It was difficult to reach any absolute conclusions. When Alex arrived, he found her lying on her bunk facing the wall, eyes open.
What’s the matter, Jess? he asked her anxiously. Did somebody hurt you?
There was no point in trying to hide her troubled mood. Her emotions were at least as loud to him as anything she actually said. “I’m worried because I have to go back into court,” she told him. “That’s all.” She sat up quickly, turned to face him. It was still too bright in the cell, even with its one little window, for her to see him clearly. He was a sort of vaguely boy-shaped movement. God, it would be so easy to set Alex loose on Earnshaw and Loomis. And so unforgivable. She had to steer him away from this dangerous subject – from the possibility of another Hannah Passmore.
“I want to show you something,” she said. Fortunately it was true, so she was able to sell him the non sequitur with some real conviction. She spread some of the documents she’d been reading across the table. The dead boy’s gaze ranged across them, impassive.
“You remember these? Your school reports?”
I remember being at school.
“Right. You told me a little bit about your school just after we met. But look at this, Alex.”
She tapped the top of the sheet. The school’s logo stood out there front and centre, darker and more clearly defined than the text underneath. It was penny plain and indefinably ugly. The letters PLS, in a spindly serifed font, running diagonally down and across an unadorned shield.
What’s PLS?
“Planter’s Lane School.”
She waited for Alex to say something. He looked at the report with his head slightly tilted, trying to see what she was getting at but clearly not very interested.
“What does dum spiro spero mean?” Jess prompted him.
“While there’s life there’s hope.” But it doesn’t say that.
“No. I know it doesn’t. That’s my point. You remember telling me about your blazer? Black with a red badge is what you said. And there was a goat and a flag. And the motto was dum spiro spero. Do you still remember those things?”
Alex glanced from the report to Jess and back again. His expression was guarded, as though he felt he was being lured into a trap of some kind.
“Do you, Alex?”
Yes.
“And it was definitely your blazer? Your badge? You’ve forgotten a lot of things about… before.”
You mean about when I was alive. He stared at her with something like reproach. You’ve been there, Jess. In the night world, he meant. In the flood of lives, the nakedness and fury of a thousand overlapping minds. I remembered everything at first. Then I forgot everything and I wasn’t anywhere at all. I was like a nothing that sort of knew it was a nothing. Then you came and I started to wake up again.