by Caro Savage
Undercover work was where the danger and the kudos lay. And that was where she’d found her calling, running considerable risks on behalf of the law with the exhilarating feeling that she was really making a difference.
It had been great… until it hadn’t been great.
And so she’d left, never to look back. That was why she’d deleted Frank’s details from her phone. That was why she was sitting here in this office counting down the minutes until the end of the day.
But if she was so keen to put all that behind her then why had she agreed to meet him?
She knew his call could only mean one thing: that he needed her help. But whether she was ready to give it was another matter entirely.
She curled the lock of hair around her fingers and let it slowly uncurl.
She stared at the cryptic crossword.
The answer jumped out at her.
Rite.
The answer was ‘rite’.
3
If she had a bad feeling about the meeting, Frank’s choice of venue only increased her misgivings. Although she’d walked past it many a time, she’d never actually been inside the Pig and Whistle. It just wasn’t her kind of place. It was a huge, brightly-lit sports pub with shiny fittings and a big TV screen on every wall blaring out the football highlights. She’d have much rather been in a dojo right now doing her jiu-jitsu grading, but she’d cancelled that to be here and it was too late to change her mind about it now.
She stood inside the doorway for a few moments and scanned the room from under the brim of her baseball cap, taking in the old men sitting by themselves staring vacantly at the football on the TV screens. She found the scene depressing and wondered why he’d chosen this pub when there were nicer and quieter places situated just as close to his office as this one.
Outwardly, it would have been hard to guess that she was a police detective, for she was just dressed casually in jeans and a suede-fringed cowboy jacket, her long brown hair tucked up under her cap, apart from the bit hanging down over the left side of her face.
The pub wasn’t particularly busy and it didn’t take her long to spot Frank sitting at a table in the far corner, his back to the wall, nursing a pint of lager. In his late forties, he had cropped red hair turning to grey and the kind of pasty countenance that made him look ill even when he wasn’t. With his grey suit and black Oxfords, he could have passed for some kind of sales rep sinking a pint after a business meeting in town. For him, Saturday was a workday, no different to any other. It was the nature of the work he did, and she knew just how committed he was to it.
He’d already noticed her and was watching her with a thin smile on his face, dashing any notion she might have had of turning around and leaving. She walked over to his table. He stood up and they engaged in a perfunctory and slightly awkward embrace. She put her bag down and sat in the chair opposite him.
His smile, just as she remembered, was purely a permutation of the muscles around his mouth. It didn’t extend upwards to the rest of his face. His pale blue eyes were, as ever, dead, watery and penetrating.
‘Vodka and blackcurrant?’ he said.
‘You’ve got a good memory.’
‘It’s only been six months.’
She watched him as he went to the bar to get her a drink, his profile illuminated by the blue light of the TV screens. Although his cold-fish demeanour could put a lot of people off, she felt a measure of affection for him as her former mentor. She’d learnt a lot from him, not least that you often had to think like an outlaw in order to catch one.
He came back from the bar and placed the drink down in front of her.
‘How’s the job?’ he asked.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Working towards my sergeant’s exams.’
‘You’ve got rings under your eyes.’
‘I don’t sleep so well these days.’
‘I hear warm milk before bed is good for you.’
‘I’ve tried everything.’
He nodded slowly and looked away.
They filled up the minutes with small talk, him asking her questions but seemingly only half-interested in her responses, his eyes flickering around the pub all the while.
She waited until they reached a natural pause in the conversation and raised her eyebrows at him expectantly. ‘You were never one for casual chit-chat, Frank, so let’s get to the point.’
He nodded slowly. ‘I have some bad news for you. I thought it better to tell you in person.’
‘I knew there was something wrong.’
‘Alice is dead.’
A dagger of shock knifed through her. ‘Alice Simms?’
‘I know you two were quite close.’
She blinked and nodded stiffly. She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. An unsolicited flood of memories and emotions threatened to overwhelm her. She bit them back. She didn’t want to appear weak in front of Frank. She didn’t want to break down in public and certainly not in a place like this.
Taking a deep breath, she steadied herself.
‘We did undercover training together and you know how tough that is. We became really good mates.’
‘I’m sorry to be the one who had to break it to you.’
‘You could have chosen a slightly nicer place to do it in.’
He shrugged apologetically.
Alice had been one of Bailey’s closest friends when she had been working undercover. The bond they had forged whilst operating in such a challenging environment had been particularly strong. They’d first met on the undercover training course and their friendship had rapidly grown beyond work to the point where they’d ended up sharing a flat together, an arrangement that had ceased when Bailey had quit that line of work. To hear that Alice was now dead left Bailey stunned.
‘What happened?’ she whispered.
‘She was murdered last week. In the line of duty.’
‘Doing what exactly?’
He glanced around. The TV screens blared. They were showing a replay of a penalty, the ball hitting the back of the net again and again from various angles. No one appeared to be paying the slightest bit of interest in them. She realised now that Frank had chosen this pub because it was big enough and noisy enough for them to chat without anyone overhearing.
He turned back to face her and lowered his voice slightly. ‘She was working undercover in a women’s prison. She was going under the name of Alice Jenkins.’
Bailey raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘A prison? I’ve worked in some pretty dicey places but never anything quite like that. Which one was she in?’
‘HMP Foxbrook. Know it?’
She nodded. ‘I’ve driven past it a few times. Big old Victorian place. Public sector. It’s pretty grim-looking, like something out of Dickens.’
‘She’d gone undercover there to investigate a drugs ring. It’s a very lucrative business, selling drugs in prison. It’s a captive market. Quite literally.’
‘Someone found out she was a cop?’
The very prospect of it filled her with horror. She could envisage all too clearly the reaction of a mob of prisoners suddenly discovering a copper in their midst.
‘She was deep cover. Not even the prison authorities knew she was a police officer. And they still don’t. And we want to keep it that way for the time being.’
‘So what happened?’
‘We don’t know, but it’s quite possible her cover got blown somehow. Maybe she slipped up in some way. But it’s proving very hard to get to the bottom of it. The inmates are being extremely uncooperative, not surprisingly, and the staff aren’t much better.’
‘Forensics?’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing of any specific value. And in the context of a closed environment like a prison, there’s too much cross-contamination for DNA analysis to be reliable.’
Bailey shook her head. ‘I can’t believe it. Alice was good. She was always top of the class. I’m really surprised that something like this happened to her.�
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‘It seems she underestimated what she was up against. It was pretty brutal what they did to her. Her body was found in the prison laundry. She’d had her throat cut…’ he hesitated for a moment, ‘…and she’d been scalped.’
Bailey sat there numbly absorbing what he was telling her. She finished her drink and placed the glass back on the table. She regretted not asking for a double.
‘What about CCTV?’ she said hoarsely. ‘Surely that must have caught something.’
He shook his head. ‘No cameras in the laundry. It’s not considered to be a “high-risk” area. That’s probably the reason why they chose to do it there.’
‘They…?’ she echoed.
He shrugged, opening his palms, welcoming an answer to her question.
‘You want me to come back and work for you, don’t you?’ she said.
But it wasn’t really a question because she’d known that this had been the whole point of the meeting all along.
‘I want to find out what happened to her. I’m certain she was onto something and I’m pretty sure that was the reason she was killed. I want to know what she found out.’
He fixed her with his watery, penetrating gaze.
‘Are you ready to come back, Bailey?’
4
‘Spyros!’
Bailey wrenched awake, twisted in the sweat-soaked sheets, alone in her bed, gasping the name that she had been screaming in her dreams.
For a few moments, she just lay there, shrouded in the greyness of pre-dawn, her heart palpitating in her chest, and waited for the horror to slowly subside.
She’d tried prescription medication of all types – from sleeping pills to antidepressants. She’d gone for counselling. She’d even tried alternative medicine. Anything to make the nightmares go away. But none of it had been any good. Each and every night, a slightly different iteration of that last undercover job played out, and each time was no less horrific than the last.
She’d thought that quitting undercover work would make things better. But it hadn’t. If anything, the nightmares had been getting worse.
Turning her head, she saw that the glowing digits of her bedside clock read 4.05 a.m. She knew that she would be unable to get back to sleep.
Pulling aside the sheets, she got up out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom. She switched the light on. Blinking in the harsh unflattering glare, she looked at herself in the mirror of the bathroom cabinet.
Jesus she looked like shit. Like some kind of zombie. Her skin was grey. Her eyes had dark rings around them. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a good night’s sleep.
She ran a hand through her hair, spotting yet another white strand amongst the brown. She was only twenty-nine and she already had white hairs appearing on a regular basis. Damn nightmares. She pulled the offending strand out with a snapping sound and dropped it in the sink.
Opening the cabinet, she took out a box of beta-blockers. She popped two of the tablets out of the blister pack and tossed them back with a mouthful of water directly from the tap.
She wasn’t planning on going back to bed. No point lying in the darkness ruminating over things. She decided to go into the living room to watch whatever crap was showing on TV at this time in the morning, anything to distract her from the bad dreams, the stupider and more mundane the better.
Wandering into the living room, she sat down on the sofa and switched on the TV. It was showing a long American infomercial advertising an ultra-intensive workout programme that promised to transform flab into rippling muscle. She’d seen this one many times before. It was on most nights, most of the time, on most of the channels so it seemed. But she sat there and watched it again.
As she slouched on the sofa in the flickering light of the TV screen, she thought again about the decision she’d made the previous day. She’d said yes to Frank because of Alice. And later that evening she’d mourned alone for her friend in the privacy of her flat, resolving through tears and gritted teeth to find out what had happened to her. But now, after awakening from the nightmares, she wasn’t so sure about her decision any more. Had it been a really bad idea?
Surely, she had to be crazy to want to plunge herself back into that same world which had chewed her up and left her like this.
A surge of black panic suddenly overwhelmed her.
It had been the wrong decision. She couldn’t do it.
She picked her mobile phone up off the coffee table. The small screen glowed as she activated it. She dialled Frank Grinham’s number. It began to ring.
Brrring… Brrring… Brrring…
She ended the call before he could answer. Switching off her phone, she tossed it aside, angry at her brief lapse in resolve. She realised now that her mistake had been quitting undercover work in the first place. It had left her too much time on her hands to think about stuff.
And some things it was just better not to dwell on.
5
Considering that it was the nerve centre for some very delicate and high-stakes undercover operations, the office came across as kind of poky and a bit disorganised, with messy stacks of papers lying everywhere on the desks next to the computers. However, despite the apparent disorder, Bailey knew that there was a system of sorts in place.
‘It’s been a while since you’ve been here,’ said Frank over his shoulder as he led her through the desks towards one of the side rooms.
It was true. Previously, when she’d been working undercover, she’d seldom needed to come to headquarters, apart from the occasional briefing for the bigger or more sensitive jobs. More often, a job would just come through directly on the mobile phone she’d been issued with especially for that purpose and she’d take it directly from there.
Numerous black filing cabinets lined the sides of the rooms, containing files going back years relating to past cases. Noticeboards on the walls were adorned with mugshots linked together by lines tracing the connections between the various individuals within criminal organisations who were the subject of ongoing operations. There were several maps of the UK, including a big one of London, which were dotted with a plethora of coloured pins. All in all, it wasn’t as slick or as high-tech in appearance as people might have expected. But then, at the end of the day, undercover work was primarily about human beings rather than technology.
She followed Frank through the office into a side room that contained little more than a table and two chairs. Through the window, she could see that it had started drizzling outside, the London skyline receding into a grey foggy murk.
He closed the door. They both sat down and he scrutinised her in silence for a few moments.
‘I got a missed call from you the other night. Is everything okay?’
‘Everything’s fine.’ He didn’t need to know about the nightmares.
‘Are you sure you’re up to it? You know, I didn’t actually check the records to see if you’d been signed off as psychologically fit to return to undercover work.’
‘The shrinks all said I was fine.’ But she hadn’t told them the half of it. She just hadn’t been able to bring herself to.
He smiled and nodded slowly. ‘You miss the rush, don’t you? There’s nothing quite like it.’
She knew he spoke from bountiful experience. Frank had worked in undercover roles on countless operations over the years before eventually taking over the reins. He had an ex-wife and a kid he never saw who were casualties of his relentless dedication to the job. And to that end Bailey knew first-hand what a hard taskmaster he could be.
He was right, though. She did miss the rush of working undercover. It made her feel alive like nothing else, especially when normal life made her feel as if she was dying inside. But the buzz wasn’t the only reason she was here. Not by a long stretch. Alice was the main reason.
‘So what’s the deal?’ she said.
The smiled faded. He cleared his throat.
‘As you may already be aware, drugs in prison are a major social issu
e and a political hot topic. They’re worth up to four times their street value inside and it’s estimated that the drugs trade in the UK prison system is worth around a hundred million pounds a year.’
‘Big business,’ she murmured.
‘We’ve been aware of the problem at HMP Foxbrook for a while now and this operation forms part of the Government’s overall initiative to clamp down on drug use and drug dealing within the wider prison system.’
‘So just how big is the problem at HMP Foxbrook?’ she asked.
‘Well, we know that drugs get into the prison through all kinds of means. Visitors smuggle stuff in. Corrupt staff smuggle stuff in. Stuff gets chucked over the wall. Stuff gets hidden in packages posted to prisoners. Stuff gets flown in by drone. But that’s all small fry. What we’re concerned about here are much larger quantities. We suspect the existence of an organised drug smuggling and distribution ring who are working at scale.’
‘Where’s the budget for this operation coming from?’
‘The operation is being funded by the Metropolitan Police, more specifically the Basic Command Unit which covers the borough that the prison lies in. Drugs detectives from that BCU will be overseeing the operation and they’re also in charge of the budget. They’re the ones I’ll be reporting back to with any intelligence that you gather.’
The Metropolitan Police was divided up into a number of Basic Command Units, or BCUs, each assigned to a specific geographical area of London.
‘So basically the whole thing’s being run by the local drugs squad,’ said Bailey.
‘That’s more or less correct,’ Frank agreed. ‘They want you to uncover how the drugs are entering the prison and they want to identify the key players involved. Once we’ve nailed the perpetrators, we should be able to find out who on the outside is behind the supply of drugs to the prison. We think that a major organised crime group is responsible. When we reach that point, the NCA will probably want to step in, so they’re very interested in the outcome of this operation.’