Devlin didn’t even bother to talk to Moulson as he took her over to solitary. All that stuff he’d said before about letting her off the hook was part of Plan A. Now, after his talk with Grace, he was all about Plan B.
It was quite an eventful walk given how short it was. Moulson’s arrival on-block had a dramatic effect on every woman who saw her. Some of them shouted to her as she passed. A few curses, a scatter of accusations, but mostly questions. Did she do it? Did she see who did it? “Moulson, tell us!” That was Marge Todd’s voice, rising in an anguished wail. “If you protect them, they’ll only turn on you!” “Was the governor in on it?” Sam Kupperberg yelled. “Don’t say anything, Moulson, just nod!”
“Must be nice to be so much in demand for once,” Devlin commented.
Moulson ignored him. The uproar and unease among the Goodall inmates barely registered on her crowded thoughts. The one person she really wanted to see wasn’t there.
The solitary cell, an eight-by-eight-foot box, had been readied for her. A bedding pack lay on the bunk in its paper wrapping – no cellophane or plastic ribbon in solitary, because you never knew what innocent object might inspire a suicide attempt. Moulson’s name and number had been scribbled on the status sheet which slotted into a steel holder on the door.
On the way in, she glanced at the label on the next door along. ELIZABETH MARTINE EARNSHAW, 76123. Devlin saw her looking. “Yeah,” he said sourly. “You want me to arrange a sleepover, Moulson? I’m sure the two of you would have a lovely time.”
He pushed her into her cell and closed the door. Regular cell doors locked and unlocked from the master board, either individually or collectively. The doors in solitary had a board of their own, and even when it was set to the open position, they were default-locked. The closed doors could only be opened from the outside.
Jess fitted a bottom sheet over the bunk’s inch-thick mattress and threw the rest of the bedding pack on the floor. She lay down fully clothed.
“Alex?” she called again. She didn’t bother to raise her voice. She knew he could hear her: distance was meaningless where he lived. If he didn’t come, it was because he didn’t want to come (she kept trying to shift that pronoun from a he to a she, and it kept shifting back).
Something Alex had seen or remembered when he was right up in Earnshaw’s face had terrified him – and left Earnshaw more or less completely disconnected from the world. They’d touched for half a second and both of them had turned tail and run in opposite directions.
Jess kept on talking, hoping that Alex was close enough to hear her. “This will help you to find what you wanted,” she told him. “I know you’re scared. I know this is taking you back to when you were hurt, and you don’t think you can bear it. But I’ll be with you. We’ll bear it together.”
No answer.
“We have to go there, Alex. This is the only way you’re ever going to find your friend.” And yourself, she added silently. Because I put that face and that name on you, and how else am I going to get them off again?
Alex still said nothing. But Jess had all the time in the world and nothing to do with it but wait. There were no windows in the cell, just a shadowless glare from three parallel strip lights set into the ceiling, so she had no idea how much time was passing. After a while, it felt as though she’d been in that tiny little box for ever. Maybe the light was too strong for Alex, she thought despairingly. Maybe he hadn’t stopped running yet. Maybe he’d finally decided to hang out with somebody more his own age.
Of course, there was no telling what that age was. The ghost didn’t have to be a child any more than she had to be male.
Jess’s thoughts began to wander. She thought about her relationship with John Street and how it had ended. She turned it in her mind to look at it from different angles, trying to gauge how much it hurt. Not much at all really. Getting shot of him had cost her half her face, but she didn’t consider that too bad a deal. Ridiculously, she felt free now. Or closer to freedom than she’d ever been. She had the one debt to pay, and then she was done. Nobody had any claim on her after that, or any reason to reproach her.
What’s reproach?
Jess’s heart jumped like a stalling car, but she didn’t look up. She didn’t want to spook Alex, and in the bald radiance of the strip lights she probably wouldn’t be able to see him. Her. See her. “It means blame,” she said.
Did people blame you before?
“They blamed me for you.”
For the boy that burned.
“Sorry, yes. For the boy.”
Slowly, carefully, Jess raised her head. The ghost was just about visible, but too faint for her to make out any details – beyond the salient fact that it still had Alex’s face. There was no way of reading the expression that face wore.
“Will you come with me?” Jess asked.
Where?
“You know where. To visit Liz. The woman you met last night. I think maybe you remember her from… before. From when you were alive.”
I do.
“And you’re scared of her?”
The vague shape that was the ghost heaved its shoulders, gave the ghost of a shrug. There was a long silence. As Jess finally opened her mouth to speak, Alex said, I think I’m scared of remembering.
I can understand that, Jess said. You can get used to being nobody. To having nothing. Then when you have to go back to a life of some kind, it’s frightening. It feels like it might be too much.
She felt ashamed suddenly. She’d just been celebrating her own imminent release – not from Fellside, but from the burden of her past. She’d been looking forward to exactly that weightlessness and emptiness.
It does feel like that, Alex agreed solemnly. But it’s stupid to be scared of the thing you want more than anything. Remembering was the only thing I ever wanted, until I met you and wanted to be with you. So I’ll do it. I will. As long as you’re with me, I think it will be okay.
It will, Jess promised.
She stepped out of her flesh again and took his hand in hers. It came naturally now. There was no uneasiness or sense of tearing.
They ran together away from the blazing strip lights into the night world and the seas of thought.
87
Salazar had spent most of that fraught and crazy day in the infirmary with the door locked. He had clinics in Franklin and Blackwell blocks, but he didn’t attend them.
He didn’t do anything else either.
He felt as though he’d been skating on a frozen lake and had fallen through, but all the ice water was inside him. In his brain. His brain was frozen solid, incapable of pursuing the smallest thought for more than a sluggish, hypothermic second or two.
Leah.
Leah and Devlin.
(Brown skin, glossy black blood, white toilet paper.)
Leah and Devlin intertwined, two halves of one thing.
His own voice, saying something (no words, just the rumbling rise and fall, the self-satisfied bleat), and Leah replying. “What’s that about, then?”
Naseem in the infirmary, but not for a clinic. Naz wasn’t sick. Naz was medicine.
What’s that about, then?
Leah. Oh Leah.
What’s that
What
What’s that about
It was me that killed her, Sally thought. Just me. Not the governor. Not Devlin, or Grace, although they were certainly part of the chain reaction that led to her lying there on the floor in the shower block, broken and thrown away. But they didn’t make Naz any promises. They just did what they were always going to do. Sally had killed her by going home to his wife and boasting about how he was going to make a difference, what a big man he was and how his conscience shone out in the dark.
“What’s that about, then?”