“Some kind of plea bargain, you mean?”
“No, not that. Not that at all. Just a guarantee that if she talked, she’d be protected all the way to the trial. So she’d get to give evidence. And I said of course she would. But I didn’t really know how to make good on that, so I was cautious. Or I thought I was. I went to Scratchwell. No names, no pack drill, but I put a question to him. If an inmate did come forward, what sort of systems would he put in place to keep her safe while he heard her out?”
“And?”
Sally’s shoulders sagged and the corners of his mouth turned down. “Naseem died the same night. They murdered her in the third-floor toilets in G block. And Dennis Devlin came in here to tell me that if I ever said a word to anyone about Naz’s little fantasies, he’d tell the governor I stole drugs out of my own cabinet.”
Moulson frowned, not getting it. “But how did Devlin know? About Naseem, I mean. Did the governor…?”
“The governor is a fucking idiot. But I don’t know. I asked him not to speak to anyone, and I didn’t give him Naz’s name. He said I could rely on his discretion. He said he wouldn’t talk to anyone inside the institution. Anyone at all. It’s hard to believe he would have gone straight to the senior warder in G block and told him that G block might be rotten.”
“Did anyone else know?”
“No. Nobody. So it must have been Scratchwell. He must be even stupider than he looks. I suppose he said ‘an inmate’, and Devlin knew who that meant. Maybe Grace was already watching her.”
Sally looked as though he was about to cry. Jess put a hand on his shoulder. “Either way, it doesn’t sound as though it was your fault.”
“I don’t know. I could have gone to the papers first. Made it public so they would have thought twice about…” He shrugged, slowly and massively. “That’s not it anyway. That’s not the worst of it.”
“What, then?”
He did cry now. Fat, greasy tears, chasing each other silently down his cheeks. “I could still have done it with what she’d already told me. I could have spoken up, and I didn’t. I didn’t say a word. I realised, after Devlin left… the… the only reason they didn’t kill me was because they had the drugs as a handle to use on me. That was all it was. Otherwise I’d have gone the same way.”
The doctor wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. It just made them redder. “I can’t tell you what it was like,” he mumbled. “I saw her. Saw what they’d done to her. And instead of thinking they had to answer for it, I thought, That could have been me. That could still be me.”
His hands were moving, describing in the air something he could see in his mind’s eye. “She was… They didn’t just hurt her, they disrespected her. Her body was wrapped in toilet paper, to say… to say, this is a piece of shit. A nark. So nobody would speak up for her afterwards. Nobody would mourn her.”
“Earnshaw mourned her.”
“Earnshaw went mad. I’m not sure that’s the same thing. You know what? I wish now it had been me they took into the shower block.”
“Sally…”
“No, I don’t mean I wish I was dead. It’s not self-pity, it’s… I’m thinking of outcomes. If I’d died, Naz would have gone on and done what needed to be done. She wouldn’t have let them scare her into line. Things could have turned out… very different.”
They sat in silence for a while, and then Jess told Salazar about Alex Beech. The mystery she’d been set to solve. She didn’t say she was keeping a promise to a ghost, but she told him that this was why she couldn’t be Grace’s errand girl. “I’ve got too much to lose. If I’m innocent of this, of the murder, but then I’m guilty of helping her bring the drugs in…”
Sally told her he understood. It was a half-truth, like when she said that Naseem’s death wasn’t his fault. Each of them was aware that the other was trying to climb up out of a pit. They gave each other what they each craved the most right then, and what both Brian Pritchard and Pastor Afanasy had prescribed: the benefit of the doubt.
At eight o’clock, Sally had to leave. Off-shift, off-site – that was the rule. If he didn’t sign out, he’d be looked for. But he said he’d find Nurse Stock, who was in charge of the night shift, and make sure she knew about Moulson’s status. “Nobody will move you before the morning. You can go to the court from here, and I’ll be on duty again before you get back.”
Jess thanked him, and briefly hugged him. It caught Salazar by surprise, and he didn’t know how to respond. He patted her on the shoulder, one-handed, embarrassed.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he promised. And went off to find Stock.
Jess locked the door again behind him and lay down on the bed on top of the covers. She breathed in and out, shallowly, gathering herself.
Then she stepped out of her body and went to find Alex.
It didn’t frighten her any more to wander through the spray of memories, along a beach where the tide was the past endlessly returning. If she felt anything, she felt relief. A sense of coming home, or at least coming back to a place that knew and welcomed her: coming back in a way to a childhood haven, like a tree-house or a pillow fort. The Other Place.
She saw her own face reflected in the world she walked through, ghost echoes of her floating in the air that wasn’t air or drifting in the water that wasn’t water. That was the Fellside women thinking of her. Most of them weren’t even asleep yet, but they turned their inward eyes on Moulson as she passed by the little windows of their souls. As she walked abroad in the night where they all really lived.
You hurt yourself, Alex said. He had fallen in beside Jess without her noticing. She smiled as she turned to welcome him, but the dead boy’s face was stern.
A little. You saw?
No. I’m seeing it now because you’re remembering it. You fell down the stairs. It was dangerous, Jess. You could have died.
Says the dead boy. She put on a playful tone, trying to reassure him. But there were things weighing on her. She found it hard to hold his gaze. She knew he hated to be pressed, and she was going to have to press him. Either that or back away, as Salazar had backed away two years ago, from a truth that had become too awkward to negotiate. It worked anyway, she told him. It got me out of Grace’s way for a while.
Really? Alex raised his eyes to hers, touched the back of her hand. It looked a lot more like a real hand now: she was starting to acclimatise.
Really, she promised him.
She told him a little about her adventures that day. Crossing the moors to Leeds, sitting in court while lawyers had a big argument about her future. It was displacement. She was putting off the moment when she confronted him with what she knew.
And if you win the argument, then you get to go away? he asked her.
Yes. Maybe. There are other things that could happen. Like they could say I was guilty of a smaller crime. Manslaughter instead of murder.
What does that mean?
It means I killed you, but I didn’t mean to. If they decide that’s what happened, then they might send me back but cut my sentence. Let me out in a year, or two years, or five.
Alex had been looking at her all this time, but now he looked away again and fixed his gaze on what passed for the ground. His face had a sort of trembling blankness to it. After you get out, will you come back and see me?
I’ll find a way to take you with me, Jess told him firmly. Alex, I will. I already promised. I don’t think we found each other by accident. I think it was meant to happen. And whatever happens, I’m going to do what I said I’d do.