There was a window – quite a long interval actually – when she could have intervened. Tempered justice with mercy. Put a different spin on the evening’s entertainment. She was frankly just a little bit tempted. But where does that sort of thinking get you, really? More often than not, on the other end of that descending hammer.
There was even a moment when Liz Earnshaw, whose hands had never yet shaken no matter what grisly business they were engaged in, glanced across at Grace with a questioning frown as if she was looking for the order to stand down. Grace didn’t give it. She gestured to Liz to carry on, and Liz – after a near-subliminal hesitation – raised the hammer again and brought it down.
There wasn’t much further to go in any case. A minute later, two at the most, McBride threw up, keeled over and passed out from the pain. That was game over, lesson learned and sermon preached. Grace got up and walked out, deliberately not looking back or saying a word to anyone. She’d already said everything that needed saying.
She left the contents of the boxes where they were, scattered all over the table. But nobody took anything. That was part of the lesson too.
As soon as Grace was gone, with Big Carol and Earnshaw in tow, the Goodall women rose in a collective surge. Lorraine Buller took charge (which was no surprise), sending a couple of women off to get towels and water, a couple more to bring a bottle of TCP from her cell.
“Should we report an incident?” Pauline Royal asked. Po had been a civil servant out in RL and had earned a three-year stretch for writing large cheques to herself out of departmental funds. But now that she was in prison, as if to make up for those old transgressions, she was a stickler for the rules.
“Don’t be stupid, Po. We clean her up a bit first. And wake her up a bit. If we take her to the guard post now, she won’t have a clue what she’s saying.”
“All right,” Po muttered. “Keep your hair on.”
Buller’s anger was mostly at herself. She’d wanted not to be here. Had thought about organising a boycott of Grace’s kangaroo court, but as always she stopped just shy of open opposition to Grace. Buller was tough and almost fearless, a biker bitch in a previous life with more sins on her conscience than half the block, but she had children and grandchildren in the outside world: hostages to fortune. Grace knew no limits and respected no rules. If you stood against her, you had to lock down and take what came.
By the same logic, McBride couldn’t talk to a guard right now until she’d got her story straight. If she blurted out Grace’s name, she’d get into worse trouble. The kind of trouble that led to not getting up one fine morning because your throat had been excavated with a Stanley knife.
The other inmates had formed a sort of honour guard around the unconscious woman. Not that there was anything to protect McBride from now. The proceedings were over and Grace wouldn’t be coming back. But everyone who felt like Buller did, which was most of them, wanted to put down a belated marker to show that their hearts were in the right place even if the rest of their guts were deficient.
“She’s a mess, look,” Kaleesha Campbell muttered. “She could lose that finger altogether. This is just wrong.”
“Tell that to the Bride of Frankenstein,” someone else suggested.
“Lizzie Earnshaw’s not that fucking hard.”
No, Buller thought. Just hard enough, really. Hard enough and sharp enough to be a shiv in Grace’s manicured hand. Two or three women of the right temperament could take Lizzie down easy. And Grace would pick up another shiv and go right on cutting.
The women came back from their errands. They revived McBride with a sponge dipped in cold water. Wiped the grit and dirt out of her wounds as best they could, Po holding on to her while she whimpered at the sting of the disinfectant. They made sure she could count how many fingers they were holding up. They made sure she had something to say to account for the damage. And then Kaleesha went along to the guard post and told the duty officer, Mrs Lessing, that there had been an accident. A bad one.
Lessing took one look at McBride’s hands and called the infirmary, bringing Nurse Stock at a flat run. Stock could see that Shannon’s injuries were going to need more extensive treatment than the prison’s infirmary could provide. They were probably serious enough to justify calling Dr Salazar at home and getting him to authorise an immediate transfer to Leeds General, but Stock was a woman who enjoyed the reassurance of routine and hated to step outside it. She signed McBride into the main ward for the night. Salazar would be clocking in again at 6 a.m., which wasn’t that long, and he was paid more than she was precisely because his job description included making the tough decisions.
Stock took charge of McBride and led her away – with the aid of two female warders – to the infirmary, where she found that another patient had been admitted in her absence. This was Jessica Moulson, whose arrival had been the source of locker room gossip for weeks now.
The Inferno Killer. Only a few hours into her sentence and already hard at work on her escape attempt.
13
McBride was tripping a little, partly from the very powerful painkillers she’d been given and partly from the pain that they were failing to kill. She thought she was hallucinating Jess, whose reconstructed face shone in the light of the overhead fluorescents like a porcelain mask and whose eyes, after so many days without food, had the ghost-panda stare of a junkie on the morning after the bender that should have finished her.
Jess’s clothes were wrong too. She’d transferred from Winstanley wearing a remand prisoner’s grey cotton shirt over a white hospital gown – but that colour scheme was meaningless in Fellside, where your clothes were absolutely determined by your status. Like all the other women from G block, McBride wore high-security yellow with a black sewn-in waistband. Maybe the Goodall inmates were meant to look like wasps. They were definitely meant to remind anyone who saw them of things that were toxic and had to be handled with care.
So McBride found it hard to process this weird apparition. “Oh, are you fucking sick?” she muttered, addressing her own subconscious mind. Because it was as though she’d invented a sort of imaginary friend for herself, and she couldn’t understand why she’d made her be a botched ghost of a woman with a messed-up face.
Jess didn’t have any answer to that, so she went for a question instead. “What happened to your hands?”
McBride didn’t answer. She rolled over to face the wall, covering her eyes with her bandaged fingers. She fell silent apart from her shuddering, uneven breaths.
The exhaustion of the long journey overwhelmed Jess with unexpected suddenness. When she closed her eyes, she felt a jolt as though something heavy had slammed shut. She fell headlong into sleep.
Sometime in the night, McBride started to cry. The pain meds were wearing off and she knew she wasn’t going to get any more until morning. She was a known junkie and her word on matters of pharmaceutical need wasn’t good. But it wasn’t just the pain: it was the fear too, and the memory of her own helplessness. Even, a little bit, it was the shame of having stolen all those things from women she knew, many of whom had treated her well at one time or another.
The sound of her sobbing dragged Jess from a deep pit of sleep. But it only dragged her partway: a fug of unreality clung to her as she looked around her for the source of the sound. Perhaps she was dreaming again. She had the sense that she’d often had in her hospital room and in the remand cell at Winstanley that the room was a lot bigger than it should be.
Someone was crying. She convinced herself it was a boy’s voice. She must be back in her own bed, and Alex was out on the stairs, half naked in the cold. He was waiting for her but she hadn’t come.
The moment she moved, her mind began to reorientate itself. She knew, as she stood on shaky feet, that this wasn’t Muswell Hill but somewhere else. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was Alex who was crying and that he still needed her even though she’d let him down so badly.
The journey to the next bed was
only two steps. The hardest part was lowering herself down without falling. She could see the outline of a body in the dim glow that was filtering into the ward from the lighted reception area. She stroked Alex’s hair and whispered reassuring words. Just sounds really, just telling him she was there. When that didn’t seem to help, she took him in her arms and held him as he sobbed. She even sang to him. Whatever came into her mind: snatches of lullabies and hymns and pop songs.
The realisation that it was a woman she was holding came slowly. She might have pulled away, but by that time Shannon’s gulping tears were slowing and the convulsive movements of her chest were coming at longer and longer intervals. It seemed she was taking some comfort from the embrace.
So – even though this still didn’t quite feel real – Jess held the other woman until she slept. Then she lowered her back on to the bed as gently as she could. Her hands were shaking from the unaccustomed effort, barely able to take Shannon’s scant weight.
She had to sit for a minute or so, gather her strength, before she returned to her own bed and pulled the covers back over herself. The room still seemed too big, and too open. A breeze drifted through it: a breeze that carried no scents but was heavy somehow with the weight of its own journey. She could see the walls, but they looked as thin as curtains.
Shannon was aware of everything that had just taken place – of the singing, the warmth of an adjacent body, the soft hands stroking her hair. She had no idea who was doing it, and she accepted it mainly because it had to be a dream. A sweet voice shining through the hazy half-light of the fentanyl, wrapping itself around her pain so the sharp edges of it didn’t cut her any more.
A woman’s voice? Or a boy’s?
14
Sylvie Stock missed this show because none of her furtive glances into the ward coincided with it. There were a lot of glances though. She’d already seen Jess Moulson’s face when she brought McBride on to the ward, but she kept wanting to see it again. She was drawn to it by a prurient curiosity.
She’d followed Moulson’s case in the tabloids, on the TV news and on the Daily Mail website, where it had sparked dozens of discussion threads. The prevailing opinion there, which Stock had both expressed herself and “liked” when other people said it, was that Moulson’s face being burned off was proof that God cared about the fate of little children and that his justice was always working.
But she hadn’t really meant that even when she said it; it just seemed to be the right language to use when you talked about evil. Stock was a rationalist and an atheist. Most of the time she saw the world as a big machine where things just played themselves out. Anonymous forces, impersonal powers, action and reaction, cause and effect. It would be comforting to live in a world that had order and purpose in it, which she supposed was why so many people pretended they did.
If anything, that little boy’s suffering proved that there was nothing. Nobody watching over us or giving a shit. A loving God wouldn’t let that happen to a child. Stock’s husband Ron, who was Catholic, said that we were sent down into this world to make our own souls, which was why Jesus was a carpenter. Only our souls were made not out of wood and nails but out of the good or bad things we did. Stock wanted to know how that could work when some kid could be burned to death in his sleep before he had a chance to do anything, good or bad.
No, it was all just words. You lived. You died. You chose whether to be God or the devil to the people around you. By becoming a nurse, Stock had declared her allegiance. So had most of the people she treated here at Fellside, only they’d made the opposite choice.
Finally she gave in to the nagging impulse and went through into the darkened ward with her pocket torch, moving as quietly as she could. She didn’t shine the torch directly into Moulson’s eyes, but on to the pillow beside her face. Moulson was deeply asleep by this time, her features twisted into a slight frown, as though she was trying to remember something.
Seen from this close up, her face was deeply disconcerting. There was no one feature that stood out as ugly or wrong, but the assemblage just flat out didn’t work. And Stock had read that Moulson had had seven operations to get her to this state, so it made her mind reel just a little to think of what she must have looked like before. She noticed the high-gloss shine, so unlike the look of real, healthy skin. She felt an urge to touch it and see what the texture was like.
She suppressed that urge with difficulty. She suspected that if she were to touch Moulson’s face, the next thing she’d do was punch it.
She went back to her desk and her eventless vigil. But she was imagining the Inferno Killer sunk in peaceful, painless slumber.
It’s not right, she thought. It’s not right at all. Somebody should do something about that.
15
Liz Earnshaw didn’t dream.
She didn’t even know, really, what dreams were. When other people talked about all these stories that played out in their heads while they were asleep, she thought it sounded like bullshit. But any time when she was particularly troubled, she saw Naseem Suresh’s face behind her closed eyelids. It wasn’t a dream because Naz didn’t say or do anything. She was just there. And she seemed to still be there, somehow, after Liz woke up.
On the night of Shannon McBride’s punishment beating, this happened three times. Each time, Earnshaw sat up in the overheated dark, staring at the wall until the image faded. Each time, she muttered, “I’m sorry, Naz,” then lay down and closed her eyes again, trying to find her way back to the imageless void that was where she went to at night. It wasn’t McBride she was apologising for, obviously. And she didn’t kid herself that Naz could hear her.
Either way, when the wake-up sounded, Earnshaw’s eyes were already wide open.
She was very comfortable with violence, but mostly she hurt people in quick, furious, focused ways. The protracted torture of McBride had been unusual, unsettling, and now it was hard for her to put it out of her mind. She could summon the memory into the muscles of her right hand, like the ghost of a real sensation: the solid, shuddering impact of the hammer into McBride’s flesh and bone, again and again, changing gradually as the bones broke and the flesh was tenderised.
She kept her ears open at breakfast for news of how McBride was doing. A word or two would be enough. That she was coming back on block. That Dr Salazar had fixed her up and passed her as fit. That her pulped hands had been perfectly, seamlessly restored.
But there was no talk at breakfast. Not in Earnshaw’s vicinity anyway. Whenever she approached a table, all conversation muted, as though she was a living, walking volume control.
She had better luck in the yard, where earshot went further than eyeline. She could hear drifting clumps of conversation as she threaded her way through the crowd, but the clustered, informal debating groups seemed to have other things on their minds. Picking up a word here and a sentence there as she lumbered around, Earnshaw eventually pieced the story together – if you could call it a story.
Some woman with a weird face like a porcelain doll was up in the infirmary. Rowena Salisbury, the canteen trusty who took meals over to the women on the wards, said it was Jess Moulson. The Inferno Killer.
A few women swore or spat on the ground at the sound of that name. Most kept their own counsel. In the outside world, guilt and innocence tended to be seen as two completely separate things, like the on and off positions of a light switch. Earnshaw didn’t know much, didn’t think much about things she couldn’t touch or see, but like anyone who’s ever stood up in a courtroom and answered that question – How do you plead? – she knew instinctively that people’s consciences were tricky and complicated geography. Like an old canal that’s had so many things pitched into it over the years that you can’t see the bottom. It’s definitely not clean, but who’s to say which particular bit of junk belongs where?
So she didn’t say anything about Moulson or have an opinion on her. But she heard McBride’s name mentioned at last, and turned in that direction. She force
d her way into a ring of women who were in no way pleased to see her.
“So how is she?” she demanded. “McBride? Is she back on block?”
Everyone went silent and serious for a moment. As though maybe they thought Earnshaw didn’t have a right to ask. “Salazar has been Skyping Leeds General,” said Luanne Kingston. “He’s thinking they might have to drive her over there. Nobody’s heard anything else yet.” You would think to look at Luanne’s solemn, anxious face that she’d never cosmetically rearranged her husband’s bit on the side with a broken bottle. You would think Luanne was a saint.
“Nobody’s heard?” Earnshaw repeated. “Then why were you talking about her?”
Another short, frosty silence before Luanne caved again. “Jess Moulson sang her to sleep. So Shannon said, anyway. She told Rowena about it when she brought the breakfast in.”
“Moulson? The murderer?” It sounded unlikely, and McBride was known for her stupid stories. This was probably just more of the same. “Moulson sang to her?”
“Apparently, yeah.”
“And who gives a fuck?”
Luanne’s face took on the expression of someone who’s holding back from saying a lot of different things. “Nobody,” she said.
“Right,” Liz agreed, and moved on.
She couldn’t settle to anything. This wasn’t one of her on-call days but she checked in with Grace to see if she might be needed. She wasn’t. Dima Juke and Roz Jacobs were already propping up Grace’s door, and since this wasn’t a day when anything was coming in from outside, Grace was unlikely to find herself short-handed. Earnshaw went in and asked anyway, getting the answer she expected.