But Earnshaw was still on her feet, and so was Grace. Earnshaw was pounding away at Devlin with the nightstick. She looked as though she was never going to stop. She’d found a home at last for all the pain and sorrow that was inside her, and she was busy repatriating it.
Grace looked up from Moulson’s sprawled body with the shank in her hand and a glove made of blood. One problem solved, and the shortlist getting shorter.
She made a run at Liz, who was intent on what she was doing and didn’t see her coming.
Something crazy happened. Liz’s left hand lashed out and knocked Grace head over heels. Grace was already stabbing out with the shank when the blow connected. The blade grazed Earnshaw’s side, low down, but then Grace was on her back and the shank was rolling away across the floor.
Jess watched it happen – through dimming eyes, but still she knew. It wasn’t Earnshaw who was responsible for that lightning defence. It was Naseem Suresh playing tail gunner. Naz in Jess’s mind had only ever been a tourist. In Hannah Passmore’s, a burglar. In Earnshaw’s mind, she fitted like a piece of jewellery or a musical instrument into the case that was made to protect it. She was comfortable there. And she had the run of the place.
Grace tasted blood and raised her hand to explore her split lip – spreading a whole lot more blood, most of it Jess’s, across her lower face.
Earnshaw turned to find out what her left hand was doing. She saw Grace sitting on the floor a few feet away. Saw the fallen shank, and Moulson on the bed with blood still welling sluggishly from her opened throat.
“What?” Earnshaw croaked. “What’s happening? Naz, was that you?”
Yeah, said Naz. Oh baby, I’ve got something else to show you. It’s gonna hurt you, but you need to see it. You too, Jess.
Another vision blinded Jess and deafened her, dragged her away from herself. This time she wasn’t sorry to leave.
The ballroom again. Naseem elbowing her way through an indifferent crowd, anxious to avoid being seen.
Hurrying along one of the lower corridors.
Ducking into a shower room. Hiding in one of the cubicles, pressed flat against the tiles as though she wanted to sink into them. She peered through the gap in a plastic curtain, making sure she hadn’t been followed.
But she had. Three women stepped in out of the corridor, their movements unhurried and casual. Two were strangers. The last one closed the door, then turned and put on a perfunctory smile. “Come on out, Naz. I just want to talk to you.” It was Harriet Grace.
Grace’s grim-faced bodyguards – clearly the Earnshaw and Big Carol of these olden days – took hold of Naseem and held her in place. She was a child again in their grip, just as she had been in Earnshaw’s embrace. One of the two had an arm around her throat. Each of them held an arm, and had a leg hooked around one of Naseem’s legs, locking them at the knees. They’d made themselves into a human torture frame.
Grace took something from the pocket of her tracksuit. Jess, still watching this scene from a queasy, bodiless perspective, recognised it at once because it was the same shank that Grace had just used on her: a workmanlike tool made from the metal hinge of a door, honed to an exquisite edge and embedded in a slightly tapering piece of wood that might once have been a drumstick.
“So,” Grace said, “you wanted to have a conversation, is that right?”
“If you touch me, Lizzie will kill you.” Amazingly, Naseem sounded arrogant as well as scared – as though she thought she had some kind of immunity that protected her even here. “You should drop this, Grace, before you—”
Grace put the shank to Naseem’s cheek. She incised a short line there, the tip of the blade grazing the edge of Naseem’s eyeliner. A red teardrop trickled down from Naseem’s eye – which widened as she realised she wasn’t invulnerable after all.
Earnshaw gave a bellow of anguish and tore herself free from the vision, in good time to see Grace crawling across the floor towards the fallen shank.
Liz got there first. Her hand clamped down on Grace’s wrist and held it, an inch or two short of the weapon it was groping for. Grace looked up, and when her gaze met Liz’s, something sudden and silent passed between them. A renegotiation.
Grace lost that battle, much to her amazement, but she tried it on anyway. “I made you,” she reminded Liz, through clenched teeth. She tried to pull her hand free, but couldn’t move it even an inch against Liz’s implacable grip. “I picked you up when you were falling apart. The life you’ve got now – you owe that to me!”
“Yes,” Liz agreed. Her voice was hoarse, breathy, full of jagged edges. “I owe you that. And what you took away from her, Grace. From both of us. That’s what you owe me.”
Grace lunged for the shank with her other hand, but Liz kicked it away.
Grace tried to get her thumb up into Liz’s eye, but Liz dislocated her arm, slowly and remorselessly twisting it out of its socket.
Jess saw very little of what happened after that. She was dying, her throat filling up with blood and her mind emptying.
But she caught the gist.
97
Jess felt strong, gentle hands lifting her to her feet. Drawing her into an embrace that was warm and welcoming but stranger than anything she’d ever felt. It didn’t begin or end at her skin. It was like being hugged by the sun.
She surrendered to the joy of it and to the sudden release from her body’s many pains. She knew that the reason they were gone was because her body was gone. She was dead.
She pulled back at last, but only so she could look at Naseem face to face. It was the first time they had ever met like this, but they knew each other so well.
Naz had a scar on her chin, and a pitting of rough skin on one cheek, just as she had when she was alive. But when she smiled, as she did now, these blemishes fell below the horizon of Jess’s attention. It was like the alchemy of her own ruined face, but in reverse. Naz’s smile joined the dots of her features into a whole that was unexpectedly beautiful.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” Jess muttered. She raised her hand to check that her throat was whole. It was reassuring to find that she had both, a hand and a throat, to a reasonable level of resolution. She seemed to have made the transition into death pretty well. But then she’d had a lot of practice.
Involuntarily she looked over her shoulder, as though she might find the cell there. Find her own body, and Grace and Earnshaw working out their differences without weapons or distractions. But they were in the night world now. Memories and echoes were their only companions.
Jess let her shoulders droop. If she’d had a breath to let out, she would have released it in a long-drawn-out sigh. Mostly what she felt was weariness and desolation, but she was surprised to find that there was some relief in the mix too. To be dead. Finally to be dead and done with. It didn’t feel, right then, like anything she couldn’t cope with. At least she had friends here.
“You did it,” Naz said. “Jess, I don’t know what to say to you. You found her and brought her back to me. Or me to her. Both. Everything I forgot, it’s all here now. It’s all…” She faltered into silence. She was staring at Jess in mute dismay.
The penny’s just dropped, Jess realised. She thought I’d slipped away from the fight of my own free will. Now she knows. Somehow. Just by looking at me.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s fine. Well, most of it is fine. If I regret anything, it’s… him, Alex. He had such an awful life. I wanted to help him. I wanted that so much. And now I know for sure I’ll never see him again.” She felt a welling-up in her throat that wanted to be tears. She groped for more words that wouldn’t come.