“Then go clean up your mess,” Moulson said. “What are you waiting for?” But as Sylvie jumped up, Moulson pushed her down again – a violation that shook Sylvie to her core. “Wait. Leave me your keys. I’m locking the door. Nobody gets back in here until morning.”
“I… I can’t do that! I’m PD. Duty nurse. I’m meant to be here if anyone calls.”
“Then you’d better hope no one calls. Keys.” Moulson held her hand out.
Giving up the keys felt to Stock like surrendering the last shred of autonomy she had in the world. “You said one of the women was still alive,” she blurted. “If she’s hurt, I’ll have to have her brought here!”
“That would be your problem, not mine. You told me there was an infirmary in one of the other blocks. Is there?”
“Franklin. An aid station. There’s not much there apart from—”
“Make do.”
Stock had taken it as far as she could. She surrendered without another word.
75
Grace and Devlin didn’t realise right away that something had gone wrong with their Moulson trap, but they figured it out soon enough. They might have figured it out sooner if the Devil hadn’t been so concerned about keeping the whole transaction at arm’s-length. He’d escorted Loomis and Earnshaw down to that access corridor and unlocked the door, but he never had any intention of coming back for them. The deal was that they’d do what they had to do and then merge back into the general mêlée in the ballroom. The Devil would come in on lock-up and debrief them when he was doing the head count.
But they weren’t there for lock-up, so of course all hell broke loose. And it was out of Devlin’s hands from that moment. As soon as a single prisoner failed to answer to her name, a big machine was set in motion. Gates and guard posts were nailed down, search parties turned over the whole block and then – working outwards – the rest of the site. The next step would have been to call the regular police and put them on an emergency footing. Cue roadblocks and APBs, helicopters with 5K spotlights, dogs, summit meetings with the oversight board, contrite press conferences and a whole ton of pre-programmed damage limitation.
Things didn’t get that far, though. It only took seventeen minutes for one of the search parties to run into Loomis and Earnshaw.
Nothing doing for Loomis. The skull fracture that had killed her had left a visible dent in the left side of her skull. It was scarcely necessary to take a pulse. And there wasn’t much doubt about the murder weapon either, since the fire extinguisher was just sitting there in plain sight with a corresponding dent in it that made it look like the next jigsaw piece along. (No blood on it now though, and no fingerprints. Sylvie Stock had been and gone by this time.)
Lizzie was sitting up with her head buried between her knees. She was whining. Miserable, terrified sounds that she didn’t seem to have any control over. The guards who found her couldn’t get any actual words out of her, so they phoned the infirmary. A minute later, Stock got the message on her pager.
And came bustling along from nowhere at all, trying to look as though this was news to her. Devlin was already there. It was him who told her to check Earnshaw over and try to figure out what was wrong with her. He was keeping it together remarkably well, and that helped Stock to do the same, even though she felt like the next loud noise would make her break in pieces.
The first time she’d visited the access corridor to wash away the prints and Moulson’s blood, Lizzie had been lying catatonically still, with her face against the wall and her knees tucked up to her chest, like a foetus in Doc Martens. It was hard to tell whether the mewling sounds she was making now were an improvement.
Stock did all the obvious things – mainly ruling out concussion, stroke and drug overdose. And at some point in all this, Earnshaw quietened down again. She still wasn’t responsive – still hadn’t said a word – but she was calmer and she seemed to be marginally more aware of what was going on around her, sometimes following Stock’s movements with her eyes.
Devlin asked her what had happened, but she didn’t give any sign that she heard him.
“Looks pretty clear to me,” one of the other screws said. And really it did. It looked like Earnshaw had thrown a massive wobbly of some kind and hammered Big Carol flat in the course of it. Even knowing about the ambush and how it had gone wrong, Stock wasn’t sure if she could buy the idea of Jess Moulson bringing down these two big, powerful women. She’d have to be a ninja or something. Anything made of flesh and bone would hit Liz Earnshaw and shatter. But it was Lizzie who looked broken.
There was a lot of back-and-forth about what should happen next. Devlin was for sticking Lizzie back in her own cell overnight, which would have kept her in circulation for Grace to interrogate her when she started making sense again. But the other screws thought Dietrich block offered a better range of facilities for a dangerous and emotionally unstable inmate who might just have beaten another woman to death. The infirmary was mentioned, but it didn’t have many fans.
Then the governor rolled up and the answer turned out to be “none of the above”. Scratchwell was a few frayed inches away from hysteria, and he wasn’t hiding it very well. He regretted every one of those media interviews now. He’d made himself the face and the voice of Fellside so he was going to be tied to the stake now when this catastrophe hit the news, as it inevitably would.
His thoughts were so focused on his own survival that he saw the problem of containment as the most pressing one. He made the right noises (or some reasonable simulations) about Loomis’s tragic death, but he wanted to be in control of how and when it got reported.
“I think the safety of the other inmates is paramount,” he pronounced. “Put this prisoner in solitary.” In the heat of the moment, he forgot to use his own mealy-mouthed euphemism.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Stock piped up.
Save-Me gave her a ferocious look. “I’m sorry?”
Sylvie was sorry too, but she’d been trained as a nurse and for most of her life she’d acted like one. The blind spot she had for Moulson didn’t make her unfit for her job in other ways. “Earnshaw is really in a bad way right now,” she said. She nodded towards Exhibit A, who was rocking backwards and forwards a little, staring down between her knees. “That sort of thing – those involuntary movements she’s making – they’re called autistic gestures, and they’re generally an indicator of profound mental health problems. I seriously wouldn’t advise locking her up and leaving her unsupervised. That’s just asking for trouble.”
“What’s your name?” the governor demanded.
It was right there on Sylvie’s badge, but obviously Save-Me was a busy man and couldn’t be expected to read something just because it was right in front of his face. Or remember Stock from her job interview, for that matter.
“Stock, sir.”
“And are you a mental health professional, Stock?”
“No, sir.”
“No. And we have a large number of them right here onsite, in Dietrich. When I want my decisions to be second-guessed on mental health grounds, I’ll go to them. In the meantime, you should confine yourself to issues within your actual expertise. Mr Devlin, please take this prisoner to one of the punitive withdrawal rooms. And the… the body to… well, just put it somewhere safe and out of the way.”
Stock walked away quickly, shaking so hard that she thought her outline must be blurred. A lot of that was just anger at Scratchwell for being such a condescending, moronic shit-heel. She hoped he did move the body because then he’d lose his job for interfering with a crime scene.
All of this rage and indignation helped to quieten down the other voice inside her head. The voice that was saying, She’s dead she’s dead she’s dead. Oh God, you just got a woman killed.
And it wasn’t even the right woman.
76