“It sounds to me,” she shouted, “as though most of the time you were just hurting her for the sake of it. Did you only decide to kill her right at the end? Or were you trying to draw it out as long as you could?”
The great dark blotch clenched and then expanded, again and again, as though it was a monstrous bird trying and failing to take off, hammering the air with useless vestigial wings.
Jess tried again, with Alex’s own words this time. “You hurt her with sharp things. Cut her until she—”
The bruise screamed, and opened. For a moment it was everywhere. Pain and rage flooded the whole world. Then came the systole, the contraction, pulling it inexorably back into itself. Jess felt that furious anguish draw on her like a half-consumed cigarette, pull at her mind and her soul and what she wore by way of flesh.
Alex! she cried, wanting… what? To warn him? To reassure him? Just to remind him that she was there? It didn’t matter. Alex was gone. The returning current had dragged his hand from hers and carried him away.
Then it carried itself away too. Jess was standing alone in the night world’s vast nothingscape of endless shores and endless oceans.
90
First things first.
Devlin had a lot of work to do, but he had to do it systematically, in sequence, or else it was all going to fall apart on him.
The only reason he had killed Andrea Corcoran, who he liked as much as he liked anyone at Fellside apart from Grace, was to get at her keys. She was senior on-block, and the keys went with the job. If Grace hadn’t made Devlin run escort for Moulson, it would have been him who had the keys. He wouldn’t have been able to get away with this because all the inevitable concomitant shit would have come flowing back to him. Now it would flow to a dead woman in the second-floor guard station.
He took the keys off Corcoran’s belt. He was still sobbing, blinking tears out of his eyes. Having met so many murderers and found them on the whole a pretty contemptible bunch, he hadn’t expected murder to be so very hard.
He went to the main security panel and used the keys to unlock all the cells. He trusted in human nature to do the rest. The women of G block were foaming at the mouth already. Now they were foaming at the mouth and free as birds. Probably an hour kettled up in their cells had fermented their paranoid frenzy very nicely, but to encourage them to cast aside the last of their inhibitions, Devlin turned off the CCTV cameras.
He walked out of the block just as the shit was hitting the fan. Yells of jubilation, anger and alarm were sounding from all the walkways as the inmates checked out the full implications of that loud click in the middle of the still night.
Sally first, then Moulson. Locked up tight in a solitary cell, which wouldn’t open on the general release, Moulson wasn’t going anywhere. So Sally first.
But the infirmary was locked when Devlin got there. No sign of Sally or anyone else. He couldn’t afford to be seen waiting there.
He still had Corcoran’s keys, which like all the master sets worked for central admin as well as for the specific block they were issued for. He let himself into the infirmary, swiped a bottle of surgical alcohol, a pair of disposable gloves and some dressing pads, and was about to slip away again when another thought occurred to him. He smashed open the medicine cabinet with his nightstick and swiped a shitload of pethidine. When he did catch up with Sally, he was going to close that supply line permanently, so he might as well stock up while he could.
In the meantime, Moulson was now promoted to item number one.
The alarms were already ringing as he descended the stairs from the infirmary. Other officers were jogging along beside him and past him, having just been transferred from administrative duties to riot control.
The yard was a lot busier now. Warders were running from the other four prisoner blocks towards Goodall. The skeleton crews left behind, instead of staying on post, had come to the doors of the other blocks and were watching the shit-storm with troubled fascination. Riots were bad news for everybody. Warders had been known to die in riots. Scores were settled and debts were paid. Afterwards there were public inquiries that sometimes led to mass sackings. Despite the paid overtime, nobody was enthused.
The governor was standing in the middle of the yard, shouting orders that nobody could hear over the jangling alarms. Devlin walked past him without slowing.
He found Goodall in a very satisfactory state of chaos. Guards and furious women were brawling through the corridors, and the ballroom was like a rock concert in a war zone. Nobody spared the Devil a second glance. Po Royal, who didn’t move out of his way fast enough, got a tap from his nightstick that she either wouldn’t forget or wouldn’t live to remember. Apart from that, he got through the mêlée without making a ripple.
The next thing he needed to do was to cover his arse. He fought his way up to the second floor, locked himself in with Corcoran’s corpse and put the gloves on. He cleaned all around the guard station with the alcohol and the dressing pads. His fingerprints had been on the door, the hip-flask, the handle of the first aid cupboard and the chairs. Now they weren’t. He didn’t think they were on Corcoran’s throat – he’d used his nightstick to choke her, not his hands – but he wiped her down anyway to make doubly sure. He’d have to remember to do the same thing with her keys when he was finally done with them, and to find a place to drop them that would seem plausible when people with some degree of expertise picked over the pieces of this.
He unlocked the door again and peered out. The alarms were still clamouring. The air was thick with screams, and hundreds of running feet made the walkways twang like tuning forks.
Devlin stuffed the bottle of alcohol and the pads into his trouser pocket. He was going to be needing them again soon.
He unshipped his nightstick again and went on up the stairs to solitary, to kill Jess Moulson.
91
Jess was in the night world when she saw Devlin coming. In that place where emotion stood in for physics, his fixed concentration on her was a field that bent the landscape around it. She felt it as a shifting of forces and volumes. Something was moving towards her and focusing its will on her as it came, projecting hate and malevolence and grim purpose.
The emotions were a vector she could follow. Jess turned to face them, listening with every inch of her skin. She silenced her own mind and let those other thoughts rain down on her, taking their measure and their meaning.
She recognised Devlin. She read his intentions.
Alex! she screamed. But this crisis was all hers. There was nothing Devlin could do to hurt the dead. All he could do was send Jess to join them.
There was no answer. No trace or echo of Alex’s presence. Jess waited a few seconds longer, then ran headlong back to her waiting flesh.
92
Every prison riot is a chaotic system, tending to break down into its component parts but artificially sustained and concentrated by the narrowness of the spaces involved. It can seem to be petering out, to be dying down to nothing, and then surge again without warning into unpredictable and motiveless violence.
Devlin had uncorked this bottle with full knowledge of its toxic contents. He didn’t even flinch when he stepped over Keith Lovett’s sprawled body. Didn’t stop to check whether Lovett was dead or only unconscious. Dead would be preferable, all things considered, since he was another potential loose end.
On the fourth-floor walkway, three guards were desperately trying to prevent a group of determined women from getting access to the stairs. Devlin walked on by quickly before anyone could call on him for help.