She’d seen the same phenomenon at work a few nights before, but it was still too new to her, and the logic was too strange. She didn’t know she was spreading poison just by being there and remembering.
Every woman in Fellside dreamed of blood and violence that night. The ones Jess touched directly dreamed Carol Loomis’s death – dreamed themselves smashing her head in with the fire extinguisher, the heavy heft of it and the sudden stop. The grating vibration, subtle and quick, as the raised rim on the extinguisher’s base caught on some piece of impacted bone. The sound of Loomis’s body as it fell and the grateful surrender as the heavy steel cylinder dropped from their numbed fingers.
There was a warder in those dreams too. Jess didn’t know Lovett well enough to remember his face, but his uniform showed out strong and clear in her mind – and so did the moment when he had picked her up, helpless, thrown her into the darkness and slammed the door.
The women further away from Jess’s fruitless searching saw and heard and felt some of the same things, but got them piecemeal. They experienced the manhandling and the panic and the shattering of Loomis’s skull as a sort of semi-abstract jumble, a slew of unconnected impressions. They woke up choking, panicking, tasting blood from their own bitten tongues.
And slept again, still unsettled, to pass a diluted distress on to other women even further away.
It was like ink spreading through water. Except that the ink was murder, first-person shooter style.
78
Devlin got a kick out of seeing Moulson’s face when Ratner brought her out through the checkpoint to the vehicle yard and she saw him waiting there. She actually stopped dead for a moment until Ratner gave her a push in the middle of her back and told her to get a move on.
Devlin held open the van’s rear door, smirking as she went by. She didn’t see it, though: she didn’t have the guts to look him in the eye. “All aboard that’s going aboard,” he said cheerfully.
Well, he hoped it sounded cheerful. He was feeling like he’d lain down in front of a road roller. Those four hours of sleep he’d promised himself had turned out to be three hours of being horizontal with his eyes closed. The detectives from Leeds, two real charmers with pretty-boy good looks and Ermenegildo suits, had had a million questions. Some of them were even good ones. How was the corridor where Carol Loomis died reached from inside the block, and from outside it? How was access to it controlled? Who had keys to the intervening doors, or a staff ID that would swipe them open? Who saw the dead woman last, and where was she then? Who were her known associates? One of them even made a connection to the last death at Fellside. “Dominica Weeks. We closed off on that, right? Did she and this Loomis know each other?”
By the time they finally went away to have a one-sided chat with Liz Earnshaw in solitary, Devlin was physically exhausted and emotionally wired. He drove home stewing in a potent mixture of worry and anger.
Actually he didn’t drive straight home. He went to Salazar’s house first. He was scared the evidence trail might lead back to the infirmary at some point, and he wanted to make sure Sally had a clear grasp of what he could and couldn’t say to the nice men from the detective division.
He knew the way, of course. Being there brought back old memories. Leah in the window watching for him to arrive so she could open the door without him having to knock. Leah on all fours opening herself up for him while her husband was away off in Fellside changing bedpans. The time they’d used his handcuffs, which had been the best time by a country mile.
Now Leah was dead. That was a strange thing when he thought about it.
He knocked a few times, then rang the doorbell once. No answer. And he couldn’t hammer on the door in the middle of the night without rousing a posse of nosy neighbours. He had to admit defeat at last and walk away, which did nothing at all to improve his temper.
But maybe it was just as well, he thought now, as he climbed in next to Moulson and swung the door to. Sally brought out the worst in him, no doubt about it. The mood he’d been in last night, he might have gone too far and killed the gutless bastard.
He’d tried to get through to Stock, too, with no better results. The infirmary was closed and locked when he left, but he called her mobile four or five times. She wasn’t picking up.
So he was still completely in the dark about what had happened the night before, and how Carol Loomis had ended up dead. But he couldn’t see any scenario in which Moulson had killed Carol and then walked away from Liz Earnshaw in one piece.
All he wanted from Moulson was an explanation as to what the hell had gone wrong with the package. Not even that, really. As long as the drugs were still in the toilet cubicle (and he was pretty sure they were), then that little matter was done and dusted. They wouldn’t use Moulson again obviously, because she was sod-all use for anything, but bygones would be bygones at least until the cops went away. Moulson just needed to understand that if she talked to anyone – anyone at all – about anything other than the weather, then she would find out very quickly why silence was golden.
“Strap in,” he said to her now, giving her arm a sharp nudge with his elbow.
Moulson said nothing. She just did as she was told and then sat with her hands limp in her lap. She looked as ragged as Devlin felt.
“Is she always this talkative?” Devlin asked Ratner. Ratner pursed her lips and said nothing. She was on Grace’s payroll too, of course, and had a lot of reasons to be unhappy about the police setting up shop in Fellside.
The three of them kept that silence up all the long way across the fells to Leeds. And once they got to Oxford Row, they wouldn’t have been able to hear each other speak in any case. The lunatic fringe were out in force today, waving their banners and shouting their stupid rhymes – complaining about the shape of the world, Devlin thought, because it was easier than getting your finger out and actually changing it.
Inside the courthouse, he got straight down to business. “I need to take a shit,” he muttered to Ratner. “Look after Chatty Kathy, yeah?”
He went through security into the restricted area at the back of the building. He stalked along the corridor, past the gents’ toilets and into the women’s. That carried a small risk but there was nobody around to see him do it. All eyes were on the circus outside the front door.
But his day started to go downhill again as soon as he locked himself in the middle cubicle and reached up behind the cistern. There was no package there. Whatever Moulson had done, she’d taken the drugs away with her. So why hadn’t she just handed them over? As far as Devlin knew, she didn’t have a habit – and even if she did, anybody sane would just grab a little tiny helping of their favourite flavour and hope they didn’t get caught out. Was it possible she was thinking she could sell the drugs on elsewhere and keep the money?
“Shit,” he muttered.
He thought about checking the other cubicles. But there wouldn’t be any point. This was a well-established routine and it always went like clockwork. The drugs had been here and now they weren’t.
“Shit!” he said again, more loudly and more bitterly. He’d really believed until then that this time was the same as the last time. That Moulson had chickened out of making the pickup, and then chickened out of owning up to it through fear of the inevitable reprisals.