And then I was here. I was here for ages, by myself. It wasn’t too bad at first. Some of the dreams were like TV shows that I could be in. It was exciting. I’d live in one for a while, then go and find another one I liked. But I started to forget. A little bit at a time, until most of me was gone. That was when you came. Jess, you have to stop thinking so hard.
She started to ask him why, but she saw what he meant before she got a single word out. She had tried to push down her thoughts of Harriet Grace and the drug package, of Liz Earnshaw and Carol Loomis. All she’d done was suppress the words. The images were still bubbling at the bottom of her conscious thoughts.
And they were being echoed on all sides. Wherever they walked, Grace’s face loomed out of the dark in a thousand fractured reflections. Duct-taped packages crunched under their feet. The dreams they walked through had taken on the tenor and pattern of her fears.
“Are they… Is everyone dreaming this?”
I think so. But they won’t all remember. At least if we think something else, or go away. The longer we stay here, the more they’ll remember when they wake up.
They kept moving, but the desultory conversation petered out. Jess tried to make her thoughts range over a lot of different things, to keep them from coming back to the one thing that haunted her. Finally she gave up the unequal struggle. The two of them made their way back through the night world to the place where her body lay. They lingered there a while, on the doorstep of Jess’s physical self.
“Are you still worried about me going away tomorrow?” she asked Alex.
Yes. But so are you.
“Actually, I’m more worried about what happens when I come back. But you can come with me if you want to. Then you’d know I wasn’t going far and you’d know we were still going to be together.”
But I don’t know the way.
“Okay, but if we leave at the same time… if you follow me…”
She didn’t finish the thought. She was going to be taken in a van across the moors. Was it even possible for him to ride with her? Was that something ghosts could do? And if he lost his way, how would he ever find it again? There were no road signs where he lived, no maps. She realised for the first time that the entire geography of Alex’s world was made out of people. The only way he could see walls or ceilings, or trees or rivers or mountains, was if somebody else dreamed about them or remembered them.
If Jess took him away from the prison, out on to the moors, and lost him there – in a place where people mostly didn’t come – he’d be alone and functionally blind. He could be lost for ever.
“No, you’re right,” she said quickly. “Much better if you wait for me here. I’ll be back very soon.”
You promise?
“I promise, Alex.”
And will you always come back?
That gave her pause. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “If they set me free, I won’t really have any choice. But if I do get out – if I ever really get to go away from here – I promise I’ll find a way to take you with me. I won’t leave you alone again.”
The ghost stared at her wordlessly for a moment or two.
I know you won’t, he said at last. You’re my friend, Jess.
“I’ll always be your friend.”
Another silence.
I don’t think you killed me, he ventured at last, but if you did…
“If I did?”
Then I’m glad.
Jess was appalled. “Glad? Alex, why would you say that?”
Because otherwise we might not ever have met.
64
The first day of the appeal hearing was exactly what Levine had promised. Long, baffling and deadeningly dull.
There was excitement enough in getting there though. Even before they reached the outskirts of Leeds, the driver was talking on the radio and passing nuggets of news on to the two guards, Ratner and Corcoran, who were with Jess in the back of the van. “There’s protesters,” he said. “All the way along the street. They said to bring her through to the back bit. There’ll be someone waiting to open the gates for us.”
“There’d bloody better be,” Corcoran said.
When they turned on to Oxford Row, they were forced to slow to a crawl, inching their way through a dense crowd of people who hammered on the van’s armoured sides as it passed. Jess thought she recognised a few faces from her first trial. Certainly she recognised the slogans on their placards. YOU’LL BURN LATER, accompanied by a cartoon graphic of hellfire; WHAT THOU HAST DONE UNTO THE SMALLEST OF MY CHILDREN, THAT THOU HAST DONE UNTO ME; and everywhere the same photo of Alex Beech, smiling at the camera, with the bend sinister of a Christmas tree branch bisecting the background.
The van nudged its way through the throng in painful slow motion. Jess knew that the security windows shut out any view of the van’s inside, but the flushed, angry faces still seemed to be shouting directly into hers. She flinched back from them: she couldn’t help herself.
“Idiots everywhere,” Corcoran told her, seeing the look on her face. “Just got too much time on their hands, that’s all.” But it’s not that, Jess thought bleakly. They were angry because a child had died and the engine of justice was still spinning its wheels. She couldn’t blame them.
They turned off on to a side street but the crowd knew who was in the van and they came along too, still shouting and banging on the windows. Fifty yards down, there was a gate which led through to an enclosed area behind the courthouse. Two small wedges of uniformed policemen pushed the crowd away from the gate as it opened to admit the van and then closed again behind it. A roar of frustration and protest followed them.
In a courtyard roofed in by anti-suicide netting and razor wire, Paul Levine stood in a small patch of sunlight waiting to take her inside. In his black suit, he looked for a moment like a shadow that had lost its owner.
Jess stepped out of the van and walked straight over to him. He had his mouth open to say something – a greeting, most likely, or something about the appeal. She didn’t have time for that.
“Did you get my letter?” she asked him quickly. She hoped that the answer would just be a yes or a no, but Paul responded with a non-committal gesture. “We’ll talk inside,” he said.
Corcoran and Ratner took an arm each and hurried her away through a door marked COURT OFFICERS ONLY. They led her along echoing institutional corridors to a bare waiting room, where they sat her down. Ratner told her sternly to stay put. She unhooked a clipboard from the wall and scribbled in it, then took it away somewhere.
“Are you all right here?” Corcoran asked Jess. “Do you want a glass of water or anything? Cup of tea?”
Jess shook her head. “I’m fine,” she lied.
Footsteps sounded in the corridor. Jess turned, expectant. But it wasn’t Paul Levine; it was Brian Pritchard. He greeted Jess with a polite handshake and then turned to Corcoran.
“Can I have a word in private with my client?” he asked her.
“Have several,” Corcoran said equably. “My colleague has sneaked off for a gasp. I’ll go and breathe in her second-hand smoke for a bit. Remind myself why I quit.” She gave Jess a nod as she walked away.
“Has Paul explained what’s going to be happening today?” Pritchard asked her when they were alone. He’d sat down on the bench that ran the length of the waiting room, but Jess was too nervous and too wired to sit next to him. This was the first time they’d spoken since her original trial.
“Yes,” she said. “Today is procedural submissions.”
“Chief among which is that we don’t believe a charge of murder is applicable to a death that was never intended. There’s a chance we might make that one stick, but it’s not a very good chance.” He gave her an austere smile. “Are you sure you don’t want to sit down?”
“I’m fine as I am,” Jess said. “Thank you.”