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.
Finally he reached the top floor. It was deserted, as he’d hoped. The inmates from the lower levels had for the most part headed straight down to the ballroom as soon as their doors had opened. Devlin made his way along the walkway, down the short row of solitary cells. Moulson was in the furthest, number 5.
He took one last look up and down the corridor. There was nobody in sight way up here at the top of the stack. Screams and impact sounds echoed from the ballroom below, where sixty or so officers were struggling to contain six hundred women.
Devlin also remembered to double-check the camera at the angle of the walkway, just to make sure that nobody had turned the CCTV system back on again. No red light on the fascia, so he was fine.
Devlin unlocked the steel cabinet on the wall and used Corcoran’s keys again to release the doors of the solitary cells, but they still weren’t fully unlocked. The doors were on a one-way latch, needing somebody on the outside to open them. He turned the handle of Moulson’s door and stepped inside.
He was surprised to see Moulson still asleep. He thought the noise from down below would have penetrated this far and woken her. But the soundproofing was very effective. As soon as he stepped into the narrow space and pulled the door to behind him, all external sounds faded almost to nothing.
Moulson was curled up in what looked like a foetal position under the single blanket, only the top of her head showing. She didn’t stir even slightly as the Devil approached the bunk. He’d given some thought to the question of how he was going to kill her. Throttling her, as he’d done Corcoran, would be easiest and quickest, but he didn’t want to work to a pattern. It would be bad news if anyone got to think that the two deaths were linked in any way. So he’d decided on suffocation as the least worst option.
He bent and picked up the pillow from the floor where it had fallen. Which brought his head down almost to the level of the bunk.
Jess kicked out with both feet. She’d returned from the night world a few seconds before, had barely had time to take up the reins of her body again, but she knew the danger she was in and she put everything she had into that kick.
Devlin caught it full in his face. He was slammed back hard against the opposite wall
of the narrow cell. Something – his nose possibly, or maybe part of his jaw – crunched under Jess’s heel. He slumped to the floor, stunned.
Jess jumped up as he went down. Two steps brought her to the door. If he had closed it all the way, she was dead. She knew there was no handle on the inside. As soon as Devlin found his feet again, he would dismantle her, and in those close quarters she’d have no chance at all.
Her clawing fingers found the edge of the door and it opened. She fled.
But she skidded to a halt almost at once. Alex was still here. Inside Earnshaw, swallowed whole by her rage. Jess wasn’t thinking right then about the meaninglessness of miles and yards and inches in that other world: she just knew she didn’t want to leave him after swearing to him that she wouldn’t.
Fighting her own panic, she tried the handle of Liz Earnshaw’s door. It gave. Her hand shook as she eased it all the way down and pushed the door open. She stepped inside, moving quickly and quietly. Then, as Devlin had done, she pulled it closed again as far as she dared, almost but not quite all the way, the latch a trembling thousandth of an inch away from shooting home.
A metallic boom told her that Devlin had thrown open the door of her cell and stepped out on to the walkway. She held her breath. His steps went by Earnshaw’s door, but then slowed and stopped. He must be looking around, trying to get a sense of where Jess might have gone.
Or maybe he was looking at the door, seeing the tell-tale line where it failed to sit flush with the jamb.
Movement behind Jess made her turn her head, very slowly, terrified that a rustle of cloth would betray her.
Earnshaw had sat up on the bunk and was staring at her. The sheet fell away from her naked body, the harsh light of the neon strips shining down on a latticework of short, wide scars that covered her entire torso. Her jaw worked as though she was trying to swallow something. It was impossible to tell from her expression whether or not she was seeing what was in front of her. Jess stayed absolutely still and – vaguely remembering that this was how you survived a confrontation with a wild animal – kept her eyes averted and slightly downcast.
Earnshaw swung her legs around and let them slide to the floor. Ponderously, inexorably, she climbed to her feet.
Devlin’s boots clattered right outside the door. Jess braced herself. If the door opened, she would be caught between them. All she could do was fight until they put her down, which wouldn’t be long.
Devlin’s footsteps receded. A second later, she heard them clattering on the steps that led down to the next level.
So now there was only one homicidal maniac to deal with. Jess looked around for a weapon, but why would there be one in a solitary cell? Everything here was designed to be as little use as possible if a prisoner decided to try to hurt herself or anyone else.
Earnshaw strode towards her. Jess held her ground. “What have you done to him?” she demanded. “Where is he?”
Earnshaw put one massive hand on Jess’s upper arm and moved her aside with no visible effort. She pulled the door open. Jess grabbed her wrist and tried to drag her back into the cell. Earnshaw ignored her, and she was carried along by the other woman’s irresistible strength, jarring her shoulder against the door jamb.
“Alex!” Jess shouted. “Where are you? Talk to me!” Her feet slid and scrabbled on the steel walkway as she tried to get some traction and bring Earnshaw to a halt, or at least slow her down. And finally Earnshaw did stop.
But only to set her hand in the middle of Jess’s chest and push her away with such force that she staggered and almost fell.
The wild animal comparison came back into Jess’s mind, because that was what Earnshaw looked like right then: something that wore a human shape but had never learned speech and would rip your throat out if you crossed it.
She lumbered on and didn’t look back.
Jess didn’t try to close the gap with her again. She just followed her to the end of the walkway and down the stairs, staying a few paces behind all the way.
On the next level down, she found out what all the noise was. There were women throwing furniture and personal effects from their cells, or more likely other people’s cells, into the ballroom below. They were screaming abuse at the warders down there, who were laboriously clearing the big central space by advancing across it in a double line.
Earnshaw didn’t let anything slow her. The women who got in her way she violently pushed aside.
Jess moved in Earnshaw’s wake, staying close to the wall to keep from being seen. But nobody was looking her way in any case. Their minds were taken up with the fighting. There was a warder who did see her and recognised her, and decided to strike a blow for incinerated children everywhere. He strode straight at Jess, his nightstick in the ready position. Jess had about half a second, seeing him coming, to throw up her hand in a futile defence.
Lorraine Buller barged into the man head-on and pitched him over the railings into the suicide nets. She gave Jess a nod, and then she was gone too. It was a passing courtesy in the middle of the chaos, from one cellmate to another.
Jess speeded up a little. The closer she stayed to Lizzie, the less likely she was to be molested. She was calling Alex’s name in her mind, but there was no response. And now she realised with a sickening of the heart where Earnshaw was going. Not down into the ballroom, but left, and then straight along to the end of the level-three corridor.
To Grace’s cell.
The two women on guard at Grace’s door turned when they saw her coming, and moved into a defensive phalanx. Earnshaw slowed to a stop, and for a moment they faced each other without a word.
“I need to talk to her,” Lizzie said. Her voice was raw, low, but it carried over the distant shouts and screams.
“She said not to let anyone through except Dennis,” Jilly Fish said. She didn’t say a word about Liz’s nakedness, or the ridged, glossy lines of old scars that covered her from neckline to crotch.
Earnshaw twisted her neck to the left, then to the right, and flexed her fingers. “I need to talk to her,” she repeated.
“What’s it about?” Fish asked.
“It’s private.”
For a moment or two nobody spoke. Fish interrogated Earnshaw’s stern, serious face and came to a quick conclusion.
“Time for our fag break,” she said to her companion. “Come on.”
“But Grace said…” The other woman, a tall blonde with a bodybuilder’s overdeveloped physique, faltered into silence. Fish was already walking away, and now Lizzie was coming straight on. The blonde was the same height as Lizzie but out-massed her by twenty or thirty pounds. The muscles of her arms were like sculpted stonework.
She held her ground almost to the last moment, then threw up her hands and backed away. “Private,” she said. “Fair enough.” She turned and ran.
Grace was washing at the sink when Earnshaw walked into the room. Jess slipped in behind her, flattening herself against the wall.
Grace raised her eyebrows at the sight of them but then she welcomed them in with an ironic sweep of her arm. She walked around them to kick the door to, shutting out the worst of the noise from outside.
“I don’t know what it is with this one,” she said to Earnshaw with a nod of her head in Jess’s direction. “I keep telling people to kill her and she keeps coming back into my field of vision not dead. Do me a favour, Lizzie, please. Put us all out of her misery.”
Earnshaw didn’t seem to have heard. “I had… a really awful dream, Grace,” she said in the same rasping voice as before. She bowed her head into her own clenched fist. Pressed it hard against her forehead, grimacing with effort, as though she was trying to push through and grab hold of something in there. “I want to talk to you about… something that happened.”
“Later, love,” Grace said. “This is a busy time. Let’s get the chores done first.” But still Lizzie didn’t move.
Grace turned to glance at Jess, her lips pressed into a thin line. “Well, I’ll give y
ou ten for balls and one for brains,” she said in the same conversational tone. “What did you think? That you were on a roll after winning your appeal? That you could talk me into not killing you? You can’t.”
Jess didn’t bother to answer. Grace seemed like an irrelevance right then. She was much more scared for Alex, trapped in Liz’s dark heart, than she was for herself. She spoke only to Earnshaw, who was struggling in the grip of some emotion that was close to panic. “Earnshaw,” she said. “Tell me who she was. The girl you killed. What was her name?”
Earnshaw didn’t seem to have heard. Her shoulders twitched and twisted. “Please, Grace,” she moaned. Her voice seemed to be on the brink of dying away altogether now, a broken instrument driven by inadequate breath. “I dreamed she came back. But now I’m awake and she’s still here. She didn’t go away when I woke up.”
Grace looked perplexed. “Later,” she said again. “Come on, Lizzie. You’re no use to yourself like this. Clock that bitch and be done with it.”
Earnshaw turned and took a step towards Jess, her big hands reaching out. But then she stopped as though she’d forgotten what it was she was meant to do.
“What was her name?” Jess shouted. “Who was she?”
“Why?” Earnshaw demanded in that same voice of agony and exhaustion.
“Because she deserves to be remembered! Nobody remembers her right now. She doesn’t even remember herself. But you know who she was.”
“It’s not my choice,” Earnshaw rumbled. Jess realised then that Earnshaw wasn’t talking to her, or to Grace for that matter. She was talking to a voice inside her own head.
To Alex.
Jess laughed – a strangled sound of surprise and relief. He was still there, in Earnshaw’s fractured soul. Still fighting.
Grace walked right up to Earnshaw, took her by the shoulders and shook her. “Come on, Lizzie! What do I pay you for? Sort her out!”