“Why couldn’t Alex have relatives in Nottingham?”
“Have had relatives, you mean? I suppose he could.” Paul shook his head, as though he was disowning his own words. “But it’s in the Bridgeside. A really broken-down estate. Almost a slum.”
“Do the Beeches strike you as upwardly mobile?” Jess regretted the comment as soon as it was out, but something about the way this conversation was going had unnerved her, and she was responding with aggression. She smiled and shrugged, trying belatedly to turn the crude jibe into a joke.
“I think they’re what politicians call the squeezed middle,” Paul said mildly. “But that’s not the clinching argument.”
“Good.”
“The clinching argument is that Bishop Borley is a girls’ school.”
Jess blinked, caught out. “But… then…” she floundered. “Isn’t there…?”
“What?” Paul’s tone was still neutral, but there was weariness and maybe resignation in his face. “Any evidence that it used to be mixed? Or that Alex had had a sex change? No, Jess. I didn’t find anything like that. And since you’ve never really been honest with me about what it is you’re looking for, or why, there wasn’t much else I could do at that point.”
Jess cast around for an answer. It was no more than the truth. From the moment she’d detected Paul’s interest in her, she’d used him to get what she needed. She’d barely given a moment’s thought to him outside of that. I believe you have a defocusing effect on Mr Levine.
Impulsively and suddenly, she hugged him. He was the only person she knew besides Alex who might actually welcome her touch, but in that first second he stiffened, taken by surprise. A shudder went through him. Then he melted into it, pressed his cheek against hers – against her bad side, where the flesh had been rebuilt – and made a sound that was like a sob.
From behind them, Ratner swore. “No fucking way!” A hand came down on Jess’s shoulder, but not roughly. “Hey,” Corcoran said. “Come on, Moulson. Mr What’s-your-name. I don’t think this was meant to be a conjugal.”
Ratner slid the van door open and Corcoran stepped back to let Jess climb inside. For a second longer, she held her ground.
“Thanks, Paul,” she said. “Thanks for everything. I’m sorry if you think I’ve used you. No, I have. I have used you. I didn’t mean to, I was just… trying to get something done. To keep a promise.”
“Well, you’re fine,” Paul said, utterly flustered. “I mean, it’s fine. It’s fine and you’re welcome.”
“Enough of this fuckery,” Ratner said.
She stepped in between Jess and Paul, forcing him to retreat. Then she put a hand on Jess’s arm and turned her. Jess climbed into the van, still in Ratner’s grip. Corcoran followed.
“Try and get a good night’s—” Paul called after her. But the closing door cut him off.
65
All the way back to the prison, across the stark beauty of the fells, Jess didn’t say a word and didn’t look up from her lap.
Alex had asked two things of her – that she reunite him with his friend and that she find out the name of his enemy. He wanted to know them both, the girl who’d loved him and the girl who’d hurt him. Jess had failed completely in both goals. She had nothing to give him. Nothing to say to him.
And the package taped to her stomach was a burden almost equally big. Instead of clues, answers, revelations, what she was bringing back to Fellside was hard drugs for Harriet Grace’s dirty little empire. How far from redemption could you get in a single jump?
She couldn’t find a way to sit comfortably with the package. Folding her hands hid it from view but maybe drew too much attention to it, accentuating the straight line ruled across her midriff under the yellow tracksuit top. Leaving her arms at her sides was more casual but made her feel naked and defenceless. She was oppressively conscious of the package’s bulk, the squareness of its corners, even its weight, which had seemed slight at first but was now harder and harder to bear.
She felt as though she was being carried bodily towards a decision she wasn’t ready to make. And once she got back to Fellside, it would be taken out of her hands as soon as she found herself between the rock that was Liz Earnshaw and the hard place represented by Big Carol Loomis.
The high wall of Fellside reached out to them and took them in. They parked up, and Jess was hustled through secure transfer. There were three separate gates to pass through. At the outer gate, Corcoran signed them all back in on a log sheet. At the inner one, Jess’s return was registered manually by a guard and electronically by one of the secretaries on the duty desk.
“Can we have a different van tomorrow?” Ratner asked. “That one smells of piss.”
“Shouldn’t piss in it then,” the secretary pointed out. She broke into chuckles. Corcoran joined her, Ratner kept a stony face.
The two guards walked with Jess across to Goodall, where there were more gates to pass through. Finally they opened the main door into the Goodall ballroom, where Jess expected to be left to her own devices. She stepped away from the guards and back into gen pop like a fishing boat disengaging from a couple of tugs. But it didn’t take. Ratner tapped her shoulder and pointed to the stairs.
“Keep walking,” she said.
Jess didn’t obey. For a moment she didn’t understand what she was being told to do. “It’s free association,” she pointed out. “I think I’ll just… stay here.”
“No, you won’t,” Ratner said. “Mr Devlin’s orders.”
Jess still didn’t get it, although she was starting to. “But—”
“You’re confined to your cell while the appeal’s on. You know how popular you are, Moulson. Someone might think you’ve got a chance of getting out early and decide to do something about it. So you stay indoors and tuck yourself up warm.”
Ratner’s hand gripped Jess’s forearm now and turned her bodily, just as she’d done at the courthouse but with a lot more insistence. “Give me a hand here,” she said to Corcoran.
Corcoran seemed uncertain. “Dennis said this?”
“Yes, he did. Come on, take her other arm.”
“Sorry, Moulson,” Corcoran muttered. She did as she was told, and although her grip was a lot lighter than Ratner’s, Jess was now trapped between them. They propelled her firmly towards the stairway. Ratner made the pace, which was a quick march. Jess almost stumbled as she was propelled up the stairs towards the next landing.
The women in the ballroom had turned to look at her, with speculative rather than hostile faces. To most of them, by this time, Jess Moulson felt like personal business. She had been in their dreams a lot lately.
Jess was almost too stunned to think but there wasn’t much thinking that had to be done. This wasn’t a random act of management – it was Grace: Grace needing to make sure that Jess delivered the goods this time and not trusting her to do it on her own. Earnshaw and Loomis would be loitering near her cell and would step in as soon as the guards left.
That thought hardened her resolve. She might have sleepwalked into submission all by herself, driven by fear or pragmatism or some kind of special pleading about staying alive so she could do right by Alex. But now she had something solid to push against. She did it without thinking.
Ten steps up, halfway between the ballroom floor and the level one landing, she accelerated and leaned back at the same time. Her feet kept climbing the steps, her body’s weight sank back into the arms of the two guards.
She kicked and went over backwards.