“You’d better not!”
Feel that? That’s me touching you. I’m inside you, Lizzie. You can cut your hand off, or your foot, or any bit of you, but you can’t ever cut me out, because I’m everywhere you are.
Earnshaw cried then. Great gulping sobs that Devlin, lying motionless on the floor and unable to see her face, mistook for grief. But it was the opposite of that. Earnshaw was so happy she felt it was going to burst out of her like a fire and burn the world up. She thought, I will never hurt anyone again as long as I live. Everyone should be like this. Everyone should always feel the way I feel now.
As part of that, part of the business of atonement that was going to take up so much of her time from now on, she picked up Moulson’s dead body and carried it out of Grace’s cell to the ballroom. It felt wrong to let her lie with the enemies who’d destroyed her, especially after Naz told her all the brave and kind things Moulson had done for her. How it was really Moulson who had brought them together again.
The riot was petering out into random skirmishes as more and more of Fellside’s manpower and womanpower was concentrated in Goodall, and more and more of the inmates were corralled into service corridors which could be locked and turned into temporary holding pens. The ballroom was still part of a tiny free republic though, and Earnshaw’s arrival there with Moulson dead in her arms caused something of a sensation. Or maybe the opposite of that. Everyone who saw Moulson had the wind whipped right out of their sails.
The dismay that struck them then was strange, considering how few of them had ever spoken to her, even in the casual coinage of good-mornings and how are yous. Every woman there had dreamed of her, and because of that each of them had come to think that she must hold some personal meaning for them and them alone. Now they felt, in a way that was even harder to define, that her death was a tragedy that touched them all.
Earnshaw set the body down on a table and kept vigil as the rioters surrendered to the warders or else went back to their cells to wait for the other shoe to drop. More than half of them were in tears as they went. Some hugged each other for comfort, or pressed hands on each other’s shoulders as though to offer condolence.
The guards watched in absolute silence, not wanting to say or do anything that might derail this fortuitous surrender.
And through the middle of it all, Devlin slipped away. It wasn’t easy. A riot makes good camouflage, but he was a mess and his appearance wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny. He had a broken wrist and a broken jaw. He could barely walk. He was covered in blood, most of which wasn’t his. If he was found now and taken to hospital, his body and his uniform would be teeming with evidence of one kind or another that would link him to the bloodbath in Grace’s cell.
He had to get out of Fellside on his own two feet, scrub himself sterile, ditch the uniform – no, burn it – and then deny everything that was deniable. The injuries would work in his favour, up to a point. He could say he was concussed. He’d wandered away from the prison without even knowing what he was doing. Had found himself at home, not knowing how he’d got there, and fainted because of the pain. Everything after that was a blur.
Playing up to that scenario, he walked past the duty desk without a word, ignoring the officers and secretaries on station there. Only one of them, Kate Mitchell, actually saw him; the rest were watching the riot play out on the CCTV feed from Goodall, which someone had finally managed to switch back on again. Kate called out to the Devil as he passed by like the walking dead, and getting no answer, she placed an emergency call. Ambulances were already on their way to Fellside, summoned by the governor when the first alarms went off, but she couldn’t leave the desk and she wanted to make sure that someone knew Mr Devlin was injured.
Devlin exited through the main gate and crossed the road to the car park. The silence out there was almost perfect, only slightly spoiled by the faint clamour of distant alarms. Ambulances, police cars, fire engines, journalists and camera crews would soon be swarming thicker than flies on shit, but for now he had a window.
He was thinking that driving one-handed was going to be a bitch, and that he’d have to stick to back roads so he didn’t meet that incoming armada. Have to take it really slow too, because he was hurting so much that he might actually black out from the pain.
He walked down the bank into the car park, too fast and off balance because he didn’t have the strength to check his forward motion and he couldn’t throw out his arms to stabilise himself: the broken wrist hurt too much.
As he reached the bottom of the bank, two men appeared from among the parked cars, one from either side of him. Hands closed on his arms.
“Minnie Weeks says hello, you worthless fucker,” Kenny Treacher said.
The two men just pushed Devlin along in the direction in which he was already moving. Gripping his arms and twisting them up behind his back – the pain made his breath stall in his throat – they accelerated him until they were running on either side of him and he was stumbling, almost falling, a prisoner of his own momentum.
To the edge of the asphalt. Across the narrow paved verge.
They gave Devlin the bum’s rush. Pitched him out over Sharne Fell, whose outstanding natural beauty he had about six and a half seconds to appreciate.
99
Dr Salazar’s body was found the next morning. Someone – probably not the doctor himself – had driven his car from the car park at the Pot of Gold to a quiet and secluded place a few miles out on to the fell and then killed him, execution-style, with a single bullet to the head.
The unexplained murder was driven into sidebars and filler spots by the more dramatic events at Fellside itself. But then the balance shifted as various news organisations began to process the information that Sally had posted along with his confession. Hold the front page, the nine o’clock news, the whole damn internet.
Sally’s whistle-blower emails were rambling and disjointed, but they were full of circumstantial detail. The drug allegations were exhaustively backed up by the sound recordings he’d made of his conversations with Devlin in the infirmary. Harriet Grace, her lieutenants and fixers, her retail staff and every bent screw in Goodall, they all got a mention one way or another.
Sally also offered a thrilling eyewitness account of Moulson’s near-death from tramadol overdose. Stock might still have scraped up a reasonable doubt or two if her accomplice, Lovett, hadn’t made a full confession as part of a plea bargain – revealing that having tried once and got nowhere, she’d conspired in the murder of Jess Moulson all over again.
Stock got twenty-to-life and as a supreme irony was sent to Fellside to serve it. Lovett got away with seven years on account of that plea bargain. If he was haunted by his past, he never gave any outward sign of it.
Sylvie Stock was haunted, in very short order.
It came on her first night as an inmate in the prison where she had formerly worked. The enormity of her reversal of fortune sat in her stomach like a slab of undigested gristle, and she didn’t get to sleep until well after midnight. She just lay in her bunk listening to her new room-mate’s snoring, and feeling somewhat bitter and unamused about most things.
When she did finally doze off, she slept fitfully and had unsettling dreams. She was struggling and sweating her way through the worst of these, in which she was performing open-heart surgery on herself in front of a live TV audience, when Naseem Suresh came strolling along and sat down next to her.
The laugh track tailed away into silence. The MC stopped commentating and the audience bowed their heads.
Could I have a word? Naseem asked Stock.
“Yeah, sure,” Sylvie said. “Do I know you?”