Grace wedged the pencil in the book as a placeholder, set it aside and sat up. No disguises now. Her face was set in a scowl. “You didn’t get it?”
“The package is the least of our problems, Harriet. Moulson’s decided to get herself right with God, and she started off by telling the whole courtroom that she killed Big Carol.”
Grace shook her head, refusing to give that idea any headroom. “She didn’t kill Loomis.”
“It doesn’t matter whether she did or she didn’t! She’s in with the governor and the sniffers from Leeds and a matching set of piranhas. Right now. Spilling her guts. We’ve got to get our story straight or we’re completely fucked.”
He turned the music off. He wanted to make Grace understand how bad this was. Things were falling apart, everywhere and comprehensively. It was time to draw a line. It was time to draw all the lines that should have been drawn already.
“All right, Dennis,” Grace said, putting a hand on his arm and then on his shoulder. She drew him in close and kissed him – a big, generous kiss. “All right,” she said again when they separated. She sat him down on the bunk and sat beside him. Her hands were holding his, pressing them tight against her thigh. “What’s the worst-case scenario? It’s still just Moulson. Take her out of the equation and nobody knows anything about anything. It’s business as usual.”
It wasn’t business as usual. Not on Goodall. On Goodall, it felt like Armageddon was coming. But Grace’s body had its own gravity and her voice its own power. Devlin found himself calming.
“Unless she talked to Sally,” he said. “Between the two of them, they could join up a lot of dots. She was certainly cosying up to him last night.”
“They’d make a lovely couple,” Grace remarked with a throaty chuckle. And yeah, it was grotesque to think of those two together. Salazar with his Mr Potato-Head bulk and Moulson with her shiny, twisted face. Devlin laughed. Grace stroked his shoulder affectionately. “There’s my Dennis.”
They talked it through. Each of them knew and tacitly admitted that they could have handled this better, that there had been lost opportunities. If they’d steered away from Moulson in the first place, because of her known instability. If, after her first failure, they’d either left her alone or shut her down for good.
Grace reproached herself for the terrible sin of half-measures. She had thought she understood Moulson better than she did, in part because of a totally superficial resemblance, a coincidence of their two backstories. That their faces had been taken apart and remade. She had been conned and disarmed, for the briefest of moments, by her own child self.
Devlin admitted that he should have stayed on point the previous night. Should have been there himself, along with Lizzie and Carol, when Moulson came back on-block.
They forgave each other. And in the end they came up with a plan. It complicated things a little that the whole place was hanging on the edge of a riot. But as Grace said, the trick is to think of every threat as an opportunity.
85
Most of the questions came from the two detectives, and most of the answers came from the N-fold lawyers. They had magically become Moulson’s lawyers, insofar as the information she was offering touched on N-fold interests and N-fold property.
Jess said as little as she could. Her attention was a little distracted in any case. She was calling out to Alex in her mind – using that name because it was still the only one she had for him. But he didn’t answer and he didn’t approach.
He was the only reason she’d come back when the way out suddenly opened in front of her. The debt she’d once thought she owed to the real Alex Beech had dropped away, though her heart still ached when she thought about his wretched, lonely death. But this new Alex, who she’d trapped and dragged into her own tragedy without even meaning to… That debt was real and couldn’t be escaped. The ghost had saved her, and she’d failed him – no, failed her – in every possible way. Thinking she was helping, she’d stolen her from herself, erased her face, left her even more badly lost than she was already. This was her last chance to put that right.
But all she could do for now was to dig in and wait the detectives out. Her agenda couldn’t get underway until theirs was finished.
“Tell us again,” they ordered her.
She told them again. “I got out of the infirmary, and then out of the admin block. The nurse there must have been called away or something. And there weren’t any guards in the corridor.”
“How did you get out of the admin block?”
“The door had been left open. I just slipped through.”
“And what – you just slipped into Goodall?” Both detectives looked politely sceptical.
“Yes.”
“To find… what? Two inmates waiting there in the dark, on the off chance that you might stop by?”
It was a ridiculous story, but Moulson refused to add in any of the details that would have made sense of it. She didn’t mention Grace, or Devlin, or Lovett, or Sylvie Stock. This wasn’t cowardice or even mercy. She just wanted to make sure she got to spend the night at Fellside with Alex. She was certain that if she told the truth, or anything like it, that wouldn’t happen. The detectives would widen their investigation, probably take her into protective custody. This way they might let her stay here rather than arm-wrestle with the N-fold lawyers who wanted Jess in Fellside so they could keep a toehold in the investigation.
“Are you protecting someone?” one of the detectives asked in exasperation. “Someone in here?”
Jess didn’t answer. Trying to, she thought. Trying very hard.
Eventually the detectives gave up. They were sure there was more to Loomis’s death than had come to light so far – that other people besides Moulson must have been involved. They were also sure that when they brought the big guns of the regional crime squad to bear, they could winkle Moulson out of Fellside in short order, and then they would see what they would see. One night wouldn’t make any difference. It wasn’t as though she was going anywhere.
They went back to the governor and made him agree to put Moulson in solitary for the night. They pointed out that if she were free to associate with the other prisoners, there was a real danger that they would then collude in a cover-up of some kind. It was much better not to allow that opportunity to arise.
Scratchwell agreed, very much aware that he was up against the wall. And he said he would make assurance doubly sure. He would assign to his most reliable senior supervisor the task of monitoring Moulson and keeping her safe and incommunicado.
Devlin was sent for, and arrived in due course.
“Yes, sir,” the Devil said gravely. And, “No, sir. You have my word, sir, the prisoner won’t have any contact with anyone at all. I’ll make myself personally responsible for her.”
Scratchwell took comfort from this, but he was far from a happy man. While the detectives were closeted with Moulson, the company lawyers had worked him over mercilessly. They had made it clear that if the Loomis investigation threw up anything that might embarrass the parent company, he was going to be asked to fall on his sword. When he said that he might be able to use his media contacts to put a positive spin on the situation, they told him bluntly not to go within a mile of a reporter. They said the company was battening down, not making itself into a target. They implied that if Scratchwell had heeded his original instructions to be discreet, the present situation wouldn’t be nearly so bad.
He didn’t tell them about the explosive atmosphere in Goodall. He was just too scared. He thought they might ask for his resignation right there and then if they knew there were other problems at Fellside besides Loomis’s murder.
So what with one thing and another, Save-Me was praying to God for a quiet night and hoping that Dennis Devlin could deliver.
But God wasn’t listening, and neither was the Devil.
86