He fished in his pocket and handed it to her without turning around. He didn’t want her to see him soiled and disgraced.
He counted her footsteps as she walked to the infirmary door. Heard the key turn in the lock there.
Just a gesture, really. A superstition, almost, like throwing salt over your shoulder or touching wood. It wasn’t the door that would keep Devlin and Grace out (Devlin was senior on-block, he had a master set). It was the logistics. The awkwardness. The infirmary being where it was, in the broad human thoroughfare of the admin block. You couldn’t commit a murder here. It would be madness.
But you couldn’t live here either. Not for ever. And in Sally’s case, not past eight o’clock. That was when his shift ended.
69
Devlin went back to Grace’s cell and told her what had happened. That he’d had Moulson right there in front of him but couldn’t bring her away. He wasn’t happy about having to say it, and he was even less thrilled with Grace’s reaction, which was of course to blame him.
“Salazar?” she echoed. “Salazar sent you packing? The man’s a frigging meringue, Dennis!”
There was no gainsaying that. Soft and paunched though the doctor was, there had always been something brittle about him. A meringue was exactly what he was. But a thing can be easily breakable and still be a bastard to deal with. Ice is brittle, but try walking on half an inch of it. Devlin didn’t bother to make that point: Grace would have accused him of making excuses. Instead he said, “I’ll deal with Sally when the time comes. The question is what you want to do about Moulson.”
“Nothing,” Grace said. She picked up her iPod and fidgeted with it, scrolling rapidly through its menus. Devlin knew he was about to hear something heavily orchestral.
“Nothing? Are you serious? She’s laughing at us!”
“Maybe she is. But nobody touches a hair on her head until I find out whether she’s got that package.”
“And if she hasn’t?”
“Then someone has to go and get it, like last time.”
She slammed the iPod back down into the dock. Keening violin chords oozed from the speakers.
“Someone? Don’t be shy, Grace. Say it. You mean me.”
“Of course it’s you,” she said. “We went over this. Anyone else we send gets to see how the connect works. You don’t want that any more than I do.”
“Okay, but I’m not going tonight. I’m on duty. There’s no way I can go off-site for that long.”
“Well, first things first. Let’s see what madam has to say for herself. What time does Salazar’s shift end?”
Devlin carried all the work schedules in his head. “Eight o’clock,” he told her at once.
“And he’s not down for any overtime?”
“Nope.”
“Then he’ll be out of the way by quarter past. Who’s the night nurse?”
“Stock.” He got where Grace was going and answered the next question too. “I know her pretty well. I think maybe we can get her on board.”
“Really? In spite of the risk?”
“I’ll talk the risk right down. And obviously I won’t tell her any more than she needs to know. Afterwards she’ll keep her mouth shut because she’ll be neck-deep in it. She won’t have any choice.”
Grace nodded, her eyes flicking back and forth as she thought out the details. “It’s worth trying anyway. Doesn’t give us much time before lock-up. But the light will be starting to go – that’ll help.”
She told Devlin what she had in mind. Obviously the hardest thing to do would be to winkle Moulson out of the infirmary and back on-block. Stock (assuming she was amenable) would be well placed to do that as soon as Salazar was off the scene. Lizzie and Carol would take delivery at the Goodall end. All that was needed was a guard to play piggy-in-the-middle, and that couldn’t be Devlin because Moulson knew not to trust him.
Devlin liked the plan very much – especially the part about him not being directly involved. He told Grace he approved and would do the necessary.
“Good to hear it,” Grace said. Devlin thought there might be a trace of sarcasm in her voice, but this wasn’t the time to vent hurt feelings. Grace knew she needed him. Maybe she was shocked that he’d allowed Sally to get away with treating him like that, but let her judge him by what happened to Sally next.
He took his leave of her and went looking for Sylvie Stock. He ran her down in Franklin block, where she was pretending to check and resupply the first aid post. What she was really doing was hiding from Jessica Moulson and from the terrible prospect of spending a whole night in her company.
“I need you to do me a favour,” he said bluntly.
“I’m not in a giving vein right now,” Sylvie warned him. But when he told her what the favour was, she changed her tune.
70
Up in the infirmary, Sally told Jess Moulson how Naseem Suresh had died.
He’d never told anyone else, and he didn’t set out to tell her. It just happened. They were sitting up there together with the door locked against the world. Sally had ordered in dinner from the commissary and dinner had come – one bed filled, so one meal, which they shared.
Being back in the infirmary reminded Moulson of her first day at Fellside. The siege conditions placed them both inside each other’s guard. They sat side by side on one of the beds in the quarantine ward, and they were honest with each other as if they were bound by some childish pact. Spit on your hand and swear.
“I wasn’t ever brave,” Sally said. “I think to be brave you’ve got to know what you’re up against and carry on anyway. Being stupid or arrogant… that’s not the same thing. I was about as stupid and arrogant as it’s possible to be. So when Naz came to me and said she wanted to blow the whistle about the rackets that were being run in G block, I told her I’d help her in any way I could.”
“Why did she come to you?” Jess asked.
“I had a name in those days. To be honest, I was a bit of a troublemaker. In a good cause. I complained about things. Made a noise about bad conditions when I found them, or sloppy systems. I thought I had a mission here. Holistic health. Mind and body and spirit and everything, no limits. A lot of the warders hated me, and I didn’t mind that at all. Word got around. It was natural enough that she’d come to me.”
He shook his head in sorrowful amazement. “It didn’t seem impossible at all. That we could fix the whole prison. I know it’s hard to believe when you look at me now.”
“You just sent Dennis Devlin packing,” Jess reminded him. “That’s what you’re like now.”
But Sally was still reliving the past. “Now Naseem…” he said. “Naseem was brave. She was seeing things in Goodall that reminded her of the shit she’d lived with on the outside. She’d been pushed into prostitution by an uncle. Someone her father owed money to. She was turning tricks at fourteen to pay her family’s debts – can you imagine that?
“Then the police raided the brothel and she thought she’d been rescued. But they arrested all the girls. Treated them like they were the criminals. They said the trafficked women were going to be deported right back to where they came from. The rest would do time. That was when Naz assaulted one of the officers. Hit him with a bedside lamp and broke his jaw.”
“She sounds like a real piece of work,” Jess said, half appalled and half admiring.
“Oh yes,” Sally agreed. “Well, Liz Earnshaw loved her. That speaks to her robustness, doesn’t it? But she had… I don’t know. A strong sense of how things ought to be. She hated unfairness. Bullying. Cheating.
“And one day she came to me and said she was ready to blow the whistle. She had chapter and verse on every bent screw in Goodall and every racket that was being run. She wanted me to talk to the governor and set up a deal.”