Devlin delivered Liz Earnshaw to one of the half-dozen solitary cells on the top floor of Goodall. (There was a similar set-up in each of the five prisoner blocks, but G block’s was the only one where you needed to book early to avoid disappointment.) Earnshaw went as quiet as a lamb.
When he got back down to ground level, the Devil found everyone still standing around waiting for someone else to tell them what to do. Even the governor, whose job it was to do the telling.
Devlin took Scratchwell off to one side. He said that while the governor called the West Yorkshire police (the governor started at this – he hadn’t even thought of it until then), he felt that he himself, as senior on-block, should stroll around Goodall a little and make sure that everything was as it should be. The governor thanked him profusely and gave that plan his blessing. God forbid there should be any more nasty surprises waiting to be discovered.
So Devlin got to make an after-hours visit to Grace’s cell. He couldn’t go inside without opening up from the main control panel, but the two of them had a whispered conference through the cell door’s Judas window. Grace was shaken when Devlin told her Loomis was dead, but when she heard about Earnshaw’s mental collapse, she was utterly appalled.
“What the bloody hell happened?” she demanded. “Moulson didn’t do this. No way did that scrawny little bitch do this. So who did?”
“Maybe Loomis and Earnshaw just fell out,” Devlin said, voicing the majority opinion.
“My arse, they did! What about your man? Did he see anything?”
“Lovett? No, he dropped Moulson off and ran like shit.”
“So where is she now? It’s your prison, Dennis. Don’t tell me you don’t know.”
“Best guess is she scuttled straight back to the infirmary. I know for a fact she wasn’t signed back on to block. I wanted to ask Stock, but there were too many people around. And I can’t go over there to check. Not with the whole place on full alert. We’ve got to clean up after ourselves, Grace. If she talks, what evidence is there that they can pin to us?”
“Nothing,” Grace said at once. And then, “Well, nothing except that last package. We’ve got to see if she picked it up, and if she didn’t, we’ve got to fetch it. With that gone, everything else is just her word against ours. That’s for you to do, Dennis. You and nobody else. See to it.”
“Courthouse is closed now.”
“I know. You get yourself put on the escort run tomorrow. Go in with her. There’s nobody else we can trust it to.”
No blowjobs this time (although to be fair, the door would have got in the way). She just gave him his marching orders. In the general stress and strain, the niceties were falling by the wayside a little.
Devlin went down to the duty desk where he wrote himself on to the next day’s escort run to Leeds, transferring Andrea Corcoran to the Goodall ballroom as acting senior. After that, he walked back over to G block in a gloomy and restless mood. Normally after a late shift he would have the morning off, but tomorrow he’d have to be here at 8 a.m. for an 8.30 start. And there was no way he’d even be leaving tonight until the sneaks and geeks from Leeds had finished poring over Loomis’s dead body. He was looking at a maximum of four hours’ sleep, assuming he could get to sleep at all.
As he walked across the yard, he looked up at the windows of the infirmary. They were dark. It pissed him off to think of Jess Moulson probably already asleep up there, snoring obliviously through the shitstorm she’d caused. She hadn’t taken out Carol Loomis: that would have been ridiculous. But she’d slipped out of the trap somehow, and the trap had fallen in on itself. Loomis and Earnshaw must have had some kind of an altercation just before Moulson got there, and the sound of them fighting had alerted her in time to save her bacon.
Temporarily.
But in the fullness of time, he and Grace would see to her properly and appropriately. That thought consoled him.
77
In fact, Jess was very much awake. She was still sitting at Dr Salazar’s desk, where she’d been sitting when Sylvie Stock left her two hours earlier.
She was waiting for Alex Beech to come back and talk to her. Except that she wasn’t thinking of him as Alex Beech any more. She’d had plenty of time by then to think about what it was she’d done when she climbed out of the abyss and found him. And she knew that found was the wrong word.
She’d made him. Made him wear that face and be the thing she wanted most to see. Dr Carter may have been clueless about a lot of things, but she was right about that. The imagination is a plastic power, Mrs Moulson. A shaping power. We make the things we need. Even as a child, Jess had just had a gift for that. She made what she needed out of whatever raw materials came to hand, including other people.
There was something that had made its home down there in the dark, but it had only become Alex Beech when she looked at it. It had forgotten its own face by then.
Not it. She.
I think I was a girl until you came.
Until Jess put a yoke on her and harnessed her to the laden wagon of her own guilt. Here, pull this for a while, kid. You look young enough, and strong enough.
So who was she when she started out? The solution to that mystery was as far away as ever. But the answers to the ghost’s questions were maybe becoming a little clearer. Jess had seen the expressions passing across Liz Earnshaw’s face when Earnshaw saw Alex standing there, blocking her path. Something like terror. Something like astonishment. Something else she couldn’t identify at all.
And not just that. Earnshaw had said something. Not out loud, because she didn’t have enough breath left to push it out past her teeth, but Jess was sure it was a name.
Where Jess saw Alex, Earnshaw had seen a different face entirely. And she had known who she was looking at.
Alex had seemed to share that moment of recognition. He didn’t panic and run away like that for nothing. He’d always been drawn to the other Goodall women. Had hovered around them and made up stories about the things he saw in their dreams and memories. So what had he seen in Liz Earnshaw?
That was a rhetorical question, obviously.
He’d found his nasty girl. That was why he ran. And that was why Earnshaw could see him when nobody else could. It was Earnshaw he was meant to be haunting in the first place, before Jess ambushed and redecorated him. Because it was Earnshaw who had killed him.
The night passed slowly, and Alex didn’t come. Jess called out aloud to him every few minutes, but got no answer. Finally she screwed up her courage and stepped out of her body into the night world. She thought if she just went a little way, she might be able to catch a glimpse of him. But she had no idea where to look, or how.
She only realised then how much she’d relied on him in their previous excursions. She’d thought she was starting to find her way in this place, but without Alex at her side, she was as lost as ever. She wandered from mind to mind, from one sensory tempest to the next, shouting out his name. But there was no response.
No, that wasn’t true. Of course there was a response. No answer from Alex, maybe, but in the dreamers she walked through there was alarm and perturbation, moans and starts and interrupted sleep. Jess left a wake behind her, and the wake was nightmares.
It wasn’t anything she could help. Her mind was full of Carol Loomis’s death and her own almost-death when Liz attacked her. Those things – the fear and the pain and the claustrophobic panic of being shut in with her killers – were still standing at the very front of her thoughts, vivid enough that everything they touched took their colour. It was a ripple effect, spreading out from Jess in all directions.