by Caro Savage
The National Crime Agency, or NCA, were responsible for tackling organised crime on a variety of fronts, but they only dealt with really large and significant cases, underlining to Bailey that this operation could potentially lead into a major investigation.
‘And Alice?’
‘I want to make it clear right now, Bailey, that your priority is uncovering the drugs ring. Alice’s murder is being investigated by the police separately. Do you understand?’ He fixed her with a stern look and a raised eyebrow.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘The drugs ring is the priority. But I do also intend to find out who killed Alice.’
‘Well, as I was saying before in the pub, I think her murder was probably connected to her investigation of the drugs ring, so unlocking the identity of her killer is likely to be a key element in cracking this case and securing some serious convictions, and finding out who did it will probably form an integral part of your investigation anyhow.’
‘I figured as much. She must have been onto something serious.’
‘In case you’re not already aware, all murders in custody have to be investigated by the police, the Prison and Probation Ombudsman, the employer and the coroner. But, like I mentioned before, not a great deal of progress has been made in terms of finding out who killed her. But that’s where you, in your undercover role, might be able to shed some light on matters. However, the murder investigation team who are currently investigating her death will not be made aware that you are a police officer and you will not make direct contact with them in any way. Everything goes through me. Do you understand?’
‘That suits me just fine. So when do I start?’
‘The budget’s been signed off so you can start right away. We can get you in there almost immediately. I’ve already obtained the authorisation from your CID detective sergeant to get you released.’ He paused. ‘How’s this Thursday? ’
‘The sixteenth of May?’
‘Can you be ready by then?’
It was only three days away. Quite often in the past, undercover jobs would come up at short notice and Bailey had become used to rapidly dropping everything in order to accommodate them. Working undercover wasn’t a permanent job and it never had been. Whenever she’d gone on an undercover operation her regular casework had merely been put on hold until she had finished or had been redistributed to others to do.
A thought suddenly crossed her mind. ‘When’s Alice’s funeral?’
‘I don’t know at the moment. They’ve done the autopsy, but her body hasn’t been released to the funeral home yet. There’s got to be an inquest at some point and that always holds things up.’
She sighed. ‘Okay, well I guess this Thursday’s fine then,’ she said. ‘No point in delaying things.’
‘That’s what I like to hear,’ he said. ‘You know you’ll probably make a decent bit of overtime from this job.’
‘I’m not doing it for the money.’
‘Do you have a cover story you can use?’
She nodded. She knew the drill. Her cover story was her responsibility. Quite often, there was never any need to resort to it, as a lot of people just weren’t that concerned with hearing about your life. But then, other times, when infiltrating a criminal organisation, you encountered those who wanted to know every conceivable detail about you. So it was always best to have a solid background explanation to hand. ‘What about my exit from the prison when the operation’s over?’ she asked.
‘We’ll find a reason to have you “transferred” to another prison, so it’ll seem realistic when you suddenly have to leave. No one will ever need to know that you were a police officer.’
She nodded in approval.
‘We’ve done our best to keep it out of the news that Alice was an undercover police officer,’ he said. ‘To all intents and purposes, she was just an inmate who got murdered. That’s not to say that someone, somewhere in the prison, might have been aware of her true identity, which could be the reason she got killed. Either way, this time we don’t want to take any chances. So, to keep security really tight, I’ll be working directly as your handler. No one in the prison, not even the Governor, will know who you are. We can’t risk any kind of leak, especially considering that you’ll have no backup whatsoever.’
Part of what she liked about undercover work was not having someone looking over your shoulder, telling you what to do all the time. She liked the freedom of working on her own. Conversely, it meant that there was often no one to fall back on if things took a turn for the worse. You had to rely on your initiative and be able to think on your feet, and that could be scary, but it could also be exhilarating.
‘How will I contact you?’ she asked.
‘I’ll give you a number that you can call me on. It’ll be routed through to the switchboard here. Once you get through to Rita, she’ll put you through to me.’
In a soundproofed room off to one side of the office was the switchboard, operated by a civilian police worker called Rita. A former flight attendant from Essex who was now in her early fifties, she sounded like a generic secretary with her nasal sing-song voice and her brisk efficient tone. But her role was crucial, for the switchboard was the primary point of contact for all the different undercover police officers who were operating at any given time. When a call came through, Rita would answer with the name of whatever false company or organisation had been set up to provide a cover for that particular officer.
‘Is that how it worked with Alice?’
‘That’s how it was supposed to work with Alice. But, being Alice, she managed to get hold of a mobile phone, even though they’re illegal inside.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me. She was always very resourceful.’
‘She would use it to call and text me with updates. We recovered it along with her body. She must have been pretty panicked if she didn’t even have time to use it to call me for help. We downloaded all the data from it, but there was nothing on there of much help.’
‘I’ll see if I can get hold of one once I’m in there.’
Frank shook his head. ‘Uh-uh. I don’t want you doing that, especially in light of what’s happened to her. If the phone is stolen or confiscated, the information on it – the sent texts and numbers called – could compromise your security. So no mobile phones. Got that?’
‘Sure.’
‘You’ll call me via the public phones in the prison. We’ll set up a fake law firm to take your calls, so it will seem like you’re phoning your solicitor. It’ll provide an element of plausibility and it’ll also make it easier to clear the number with the prison as they have to approve all telephone numbers. Crucially, it also means that they’re not allowed to listen in on the calls like they can with normal numbers. We want to maintain maximum secrecy.’ He paused and tilted his head. ‘I’ll also come in and visit you from time to time,’ he said. ‘Just so you don’t get too lonely.’
‘As my lawyer?’
He shook his head. ‘It’d be too risky for me to pretend to be a lawyer in case I bumped into a real one in the waiting room. He’d soon clock that I was a fake. No, it’ll look better if I’m a family member. Like your brother or something.’
‘You don’t look anything like me. Your nose is too big for one thing.’
He snorted at her response. ‘I’ll be your half-brother. Same father, different mothers. That can explain the age difference as well.’
‘Am I expected to wear a wire?’
He shook his head. ‘It’d be too difficult getting it into the prison. And then you’d have to conceal it from your cellmate and also from the guards. There’s too much risk that it could get found.’
‘That’s a relief. I never liked wearing those things anyway.’
‘Your role, therefore, will be primarily to gather intelligence and to inform us about anything that might be going down. You’ll be our eyes and ears on the inside.’
‘And presumably at the critical point you’ll swoop in and make arrests.’<
br />
‘That’s right.’
‘So what kind of intel had Alice gathered so far? Do I have anything to go on?’
He grimaced and shook his head. ‘She hadn’t been in there long enough to identify any specific individuals or groups associated with the drugs ring. She’d been in there barely a few weeks before she was murdered.’
Bailey frowned. ‘Yet you said you thought that she was onto something big. And that’s why she might have been murdered.’
‘I can only think that she found something out very suddenly and was murdered before she had the chance to properly tell me about it. The last communication I had with her was a text message in which she refers to the source of the drugs. She says it’s well concealed, or not immediately obvious at any rate.’
‘Can I see it?’
He took out his own mobile and tapped on the screen a few times. He pushed it across the table to her.
She picked it up and looked at the message on the small screen. It was tantalisingly brief.
Source well concealed in prison. Investigating today. Will update later.
‘She never got to update me later,’ he said. ‘She sent this on the day she was killed.’
‘Do you think the source of the drugs is a member of staff, hence the “well concealed” reference?’
‘Could be. That’s why I want to make sure that nobody in the prison authorities suspects that you’re an undercover police officer. But then no one was supposed to know that Alice was a cop either, and that didn’t prevent her from getting murdered.’
Bailey sighed. ‘So no leads and very little information. I’m going in almost completely cold.’
‘Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. There is one possible lead. The murder investigation team interviewed Alice’s cellmate – a girl by the name of Melanie Clarke. But, by all accounts, she was a fruitcake and they couldn’t get anything coherent out of her. But I suppose you could always give it another shot.’
Bailey nodded and filed the name away for future reference.
Frank observed her gravely.
‘You’re going to have to be really careful on this one, Bailey. This is a dangerous job.’
‘What’s new.’
6
Amber White had only started working as a prison officer a few weeks previously and already she was finding out that the job was proving to be much more challenging than anything she’d covered in the role-plays and written exercises she’d done during training.
She was sitting in the meeting room in the administration block with the rest of the other prison officers waiting for the Governor to arrive and begin their daily morning briefing.
‘How long is it going to be before one of us gets murdered?’ Terry was saying. ‘That’s what I want to know.’
Terry Brinkle was one of the longer-serving prison officers and he also functioned as the staff union rep. A big man with an acne-scarred face and lidded eyes, he gave the impression that he was perpetually half-asleep, but Amber had soon realised he was an unusually alert and calculating individual.
As staff union rep he always seemed to have something to gripe about in the morning briefings, but in this particular case his concerns appeared to be justified. The other prison officers seemed to think so too, as there was a general murmur of accord in the room.
‘Yeah I don’t want to get stabbed up,’ she heard someone say.
‘They did more than just stab her up!’ someone else said.
‘We don’t get paid even remotely enough to face those kinds of risks.’
The murder in the laundry had happened not long after Amber had started and it had proved to be a particularly unpleasant introduction to life in the prison.
She swallowed nervously and adjusted her large thick-rimmed spectacles. She located a few loose strands of blonde hair which had escaped her tight bun and tucked them behind her ear.
‘Try not to let it scare you,’ whispered Maggie in her ear, attempting to reassure her. ‘This kind of thing is quite unusual and hopefully it’s just a one-off. Although, I have to say, it is a nasty one. No doubt about that.’
Maggie Cooper had been working in the prison system longer than Amber had been alive. Her face was etched with a multitude of deep worry lines around her mouth and eyes, and Amber had a horrible feeling that if she stayed in this job long enough she’d end up with a face like Maggie’s. But what Maggie lacked in the looks department she more than made up for with an abundance of seasoned experience and wisdom.
Amber had heard about how gory the killing had been. About all the blood everywhere. And apparently it had entailed some kind of horrible mutilation, the exact nature of which hadn’t been made clear yet. She’d done a control and restraint course as part of her prison officer entry level training at the Prison Service College near Rugby, but she was beginning to have doubts that it would be sufficient to cope with this level of violence.
‘So who do you think did it then?’ she asked apprehensively.
Maggie shrugged. ‘Could be gang-related. Could be personal. It’s hard to tell at this stage. I just know that in all my years here I’ve never seen anything like it.’
Terry had now moved onto one of his favourite topics – government cost-cutting. ‘As I keep saying again and again, this prison is horribly overcrowded, yet government cost-cutting means that we’re desperately understaffed, which means we’re expected to work excessive hours, yet when anything goes wrong we’re the ones who have to carry the can. No doubt we’ll end up getting the blame for this murder.’ He made each point with the blade of one meaty hand chopping into the palm of the other.
Amber hadn’t quite worked out if Terry griped because he was a union rep, or if he’d become a union rep in order to legitimise his need to gripe. He exerted a certain amount of influence over the other prison officers and relished any opportunity to whip up discontent whenever he could. But underneath his reactionary facade she suspected that he was basically a malingerer.
It still surprised her just how fractious the prison staff were, let alone the inmates. She was still on her probationary period as a New Entry Prison Officer and wanted to make a good impression by looking smart and professional, and she was determined not to succumb to the kind of cynicism which enveloped some of the more seasoned members of staff like Terry.
‘Don’t let Terry get you down,’ said Maggie. ‘There’s obviously a lot of truth in what he says, but this job is largely what you make it.’
‘I guess I should take a leaf out of Dylan’s book,’ murmured Amber, glancing over at Dylan Prince, who was sitting there with his foot up on his knee, whistling softly to himself, projecting an unconcerned easy-going demeanour. He noticed her looking at him, flicked back his sandy-coloured hair and shot her a wink. She smiled and looked away.
One of the other things that had surprised Amber, as a newcomer, was the relatively high proportion of male staff here, more than she would have expected in a women’s prison. Probably just under half of the staff were men. And that included the Governor.
As soon as he entered the room, the conversation subsided into a resentful silence and Dylan’s whistling petered out.
The Governor was a large man in his mid-fifties who, unlike them, was dressed in a suit rather than a uniform. He stood there in front of them and fiddled with his cuffs, confronted with a tone of sullen obedience; he might be their superior, but he wasn’t one of them and never would be.
He cleared his throat, his jowls shaking slightly, and spoke in his well-modulated Home Counties accent, looking at them uneasily, not wanting to meet their eyes. ‘Today you are going to carry out a full prison cell search in relation to the recent… uh… murder.’
A murmur of dissatisfaction rippled through the room. A full prison cell search would take a whole day to complete. It would mean no end of aggro from the inmates. All their contraband would be found.
A full prison search was usually not announced in advance. This was so that the inmates did
n’t have time to hide or get rid of anything incriminating. It also ensured that any guards with loose tongues wouldn’t let on about it, for in her short time here Amber had quickly come to realise that gossip formed an intrinsic part of life in the prison, both for the staff and for the inmates.
Normally, the Deputy Governor would have handled the logistics of a prison search, but she’d recently gone on maternity leave and apparently they’d had problems finding an interim replacement. In the meantime, the Governor himself was dealing with everything.
‘This is a full lockdown,’ he added. ‘Only essential services will continue – the kitchen and the like. Any inmates involved in those activities will need a full cell search beforehand. You’ll be looking for anything suspicious, anything out of the ordinary. It’s imperative that you keep an eye out for any weapons. The murder weapon has still to be recovered. All areas of wing accommodation will also need to be searched.’ That meant TV rooms and bathrooms in addition to cells.
‘This should have been done last week,’ whispered Maggie. ‘Probably too late to find anything by now. They’re closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.’
Amber could see Terry puffing up, ready to say something.
‘A murder weapon,’ he began. ‘By all accounts, this murder was particularly savage. Surely it is indicative of the rising levels of violence in the prison, no doubt exacerbated by overcrowding and spending cuts. Can I remind you that protection of staff should be paramount here? We need proper protection where use of force is necessary. Basic control and restraint procedures are just not adequate. As I’ve said many times before, what we need are side-handle batons.’
The Governor had adopted that pained look which he always took with Terry, who constantly seemed to find something to have a go at him about.
‘Look, we’ve covered this before,’ said the Governor. ‘It’s not going to happen. You’ll just have to make do.’