Fellside

The facts are in the outside world. You can verify them with your senses or with objective tests. The truth is something that people build inside their heads, using the facts as raw materials. And sometimes the facts get bent or broken in the process.

Evidence is evidence, Your Honour. Like water, it finds its level.

Qui tacet consentire. If you don’t say no, you just said yes. He

Justice? Justice is even more problematic than truth. It’s an emergent property of a very complicated system.

I’ve got to do something. I can’t just sit here until the world ends. It will take too long.

It’s a strange thing to wake up not knowing who you are.

Nothing goes on forever. If it did, there wouldn't be anything else, would there?

Jess wasn't religious. Not even a little bit. She thought all gods were basically big bully-boy cops dreamed up by people who wanted the laws they liked on Earth to be true everywhere else.

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.

Rough edges were what you needed because they were what you sharpened yourself against. Nobody ever got sharp from lying in a feather bed.

And private prisons are the worst of all. Profit and public service make very bad bedfellows.

Justice? Justice is even more problematic than truth. It's an emergent property of a very complicated system... It means that it's neither an ingredient in the pie nor the pie itself. It's the smell that rises up out of the pie if you've cooked it right. We don't aim for justice, Ms Moulson. We perform our roles and justice happens.

He didn’t do any of those things any more. Experience had beaten all that right out of him. But he still thought about doing them, as if to remind himself how big a gap there was between where he was and where he ought to be.

The universe was a badly written soap opera where every plot twist strained credibility just that little bit further.

Nothing is quite clear from the drug-fueled night when a blaze set in her apartment killed the little boy upstairs. But when the media brands Jess a child-killer, she starts to believe it herself.

Unless by hating something you straightaway started to turn into it. As though your hate was a sort of magnetic field, turning you around like a compass needle, dragging you into a new shape like iron filings. Jess’s

All prisons are terrible,” Pritchard answered with po-faced seriousness. “High-security prisons are generally more terrible than the rest. And private prisons are the worst of all. Profit and public service make very bad bedfellows.” He

Holy fuck,' Corcoran said, leaning back against the wall. 'I am going home and drinking a whole bottle of Bacardi. Someone can pour the Coke into me after I pass out.

But a thing can be easily breakable and still be a bastard to deal with. Ice is brittle, but try walking on half an inch of it.

He'd stopped cutting when he went to university because he'd become afraid that he would never be able to form a relationship with another human being that was as meaningful as the one he had with his own skin and the blood that flowed underneath it.

Pritchard tutted. "Justice? Justice is even more problematic than truth. It's an emergent property of a very complicated system.

it took three years for Paula to die. Four rounds of chemo, three operations, an endless drip-drip-drip of bad news followed by worse news followed by outright disasters. Jess had never regretted her decision. She was with her mother at the end and her being there made a difference. Everything Paula did – moving, talking, blinking, breathing – brought a little gasp of pain, but she didn’t die alone and she didn’t die afraid. She went into the dark with Jess holding her hand. Holding it so tightly that for hours afterwards it felt as though they were still touching. Still together. So no regrets, ever. But

In fact it took three years for Paula to die. Four rounds of chemo, three operations, an endless drip-drip-drip of bad news followed by worse news followed by outright disasters. Jess had never regretted her decision. She was with her mother at the end and her being there made a difference. Everything Paula did – moving, talking, blinking, breathing – brought a little gasp of pain, but she didn’t die alone and she didn’t die afraid. She went into the dark with Jess holding her hand. Holding it so tightly that for hours afterwards it felt as though they were still touching. Still together. So no regrets, ever. But

That was when her mother got sick. Not-ever-getting-better sick. Sick with cancer – first of the liver, then of the everything. Seriously? Barry floats his organs in sixty per cent proof, and Paula’s liver goes? Clearly there was no God, no justice, nobody at the switchboard. The universe was a badly written soap opera where every plot twist strained credibility just that little bit further.