by Caro Savage
‘Just like we always have to make do?’ Terry shook his head in disgust. ‘The police have them.’
‘You’re not the police.’
‘Exactly. Our job is so much tougher than theirs is, yet we get treated so much worse. Every minute of our working day consists of dealing with violent, suicidal, mentally ill and substance-addicted criminals. All they have to do is arrest them. In terms of contact time, we have to interact with these people on a much more frequent basis.’
‘While I understand these objections,’ said the Governor, ‘I don’t want them to be getting in the way of the current police investigation. I want you to give the police your fullest co-operation.’
Since the murder, police detectives had been in the prison conducting an investigation, but as far as Amber had heard, they hadn’t made much headway into solving the case.
‘Bloody coppers,’ muttered someone behind her. ‘Coming in here. Walking around like they own the place, like they deserve some kind of respect. Well, we’re the ones who deserve respect. More than them.’
There was another disgruntled murmur of assent among the assembled prison officers.
‘That’s enough whinging,’ snapped the Governor. ‘The sooner you help them clear it up, the quicker they’ll be out of your hair. And the sooner they’re out of here, the better because it’s not the kind of thing that looks good in the newspapers.’
Amber knew how much the Governor cared what people thought of him. She’d been in his office one time when she’d first started and remembered seeing a big framed photograph on the wall depicting him standing next to the current Home Secretary with a proud grin on his face.
‘One more thing,’ said the Governor. ‘I should also remind you that with this murder the inmate was mutilated… scalped. The scalp was missing from the crime scene and still hasn’t been found. This is also something you need to look for when you carry out the cell search.’
There was a chorus of groans and whistles of disgust.
‘Scalped?’ whispered Amber. ‘Why on earth would someone do something like that?’
Maggie shuddered. ‘Beats me.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ said Terry. ‘We’re looking for a human body part?’
‘That’s correct,’ replied the Governor uneasily.
‘It’s not part of our job remit to be looking for human body parts,’ huffed Terry. ‘There are hygiene issues for one thing. We haven’t received adequate training to deal with this kind of situation. We’ll see what the union has to say about this.’
‘Just get on with it!’ snarled the Governor and turned and marched out of the room.
7
The cell was fitted out in exactly the same way as almost all of the other cells in the prison – two metal-framed bunks, a stainless-steel sink, a mirror, a toilet, a small table in the corner and a single barred window seemingly designed to let in only the most miserly amount of light.
Sharon Finn lay on her bunk looking up at the springs of the empty bed above. Her cellmate had been released two days earlier. Sharon had had a number of cellmates over the past few years and she knew she’d probably have quite a few more as she still had another three years to serve. Three had been released, two had been transferred, one had escaped and one had died of cancer. She wondered what the next one would be like and how long they’d be hanging around.
Sharon was an addict of sorts and her addiction had got her into trouble. She wasn’t addicted to substances. No, nothing as crude as that. She was addicted to secrets. Other people’s secrets. And that was why she had been locked up.
In her mind, she hadn’t committed a crime. In her mind, an injustice had been done by locking her up in here. Sure, someone had ended up killing himself as a result of her actions. But that had been his decision. He shouldn’t have got himself into that kind of situation in the first place. She’d merely discovered that he’d been having an affair. She’d merely threatened to tell his wife. Everything would have been fine if he’d merely agreed to pay her the money she’d asked for.
She hadn’t expected him to kill himself.
He had implicated her in his suicide note, and that, plus subsequent evidence of their correspondence, had been enough for the court to convict her.
Making unwarranted demands with menaces with a view to making a gain. That was how the judge had phrased it.
Blackmail. That was the shorter way to describe it.
Still, nine years seemed a bit excessive in her opinion.
The fact that her victim had been a high court judge might have had something to do with her heavy sentence now she thought about it. He’d probably had friends in high places. He’d probably been private-school chums with the judge who’d sentenced her.
She sighed and shifted on the bunk. Life just wasn’t fair. She’d launched a number of appeals, but they’d all been unsuccessful.
Anyhow, prison wasn’t quite as bad as people made out. In fact, she’d found that she actually quite enjoyed it. The main problem that most inmates suffered from in here was boredom. But that was only because most of them lacked the internal resources to amuse themselves. She, on the other hand, found the inmate population to be an almost inexhaustible source of entertainment. There were more than enough dark and dirty secrets in here to keep her occupied for a lifetime.
A metallic clank jerked her out of her reverie as the door to her cell opened. She looked up. A prison officer was standing there accompanied by an inmate she hadn’t seen before who was holding a pack of sheets and prison-issue clothes and her plastic cup, plate and cutlery.
She suddenly remembered that today was when her new cellmate was due to arrive.
The prison officer was called Maggie Cooper. She was a big, lumbering woman. Solid, sensible and honest. Boring, in a nutshell. If people were books to read, Maggie would be the equivalent of the telephone directory.
The inmate, by contrast, looked like she had potential.
Sharon immediately sat up, like a hungry animal sniffing out the possibility of new food. She was pleased to have a new cellmate, to have someone to talk to, to find out about.
Maggie cleared her throat before speaking. ‘Sharon, this is your new cellmate. Her name’s Bailey Pike.’
Sharon’s first impression was that the inmate was shy and wary, half hiding behind the fringe of hair which hung down over one side of her face. Mind you, a little apprehension was to be expected on her first day in prison.
With that brief introduction, Maggie left the cell. Sharon lay there and openly watched Bailey as she began to settle in. She took in her details. Brown hair. Some freckles scattered across the nose. Fairly slim. Looked like she kept herself in shape. Nothing out of the ordinary. Sharon had almost formed the opinion that Bailey was quite pretty, but then she noticed the scar.
As Bailey was placing her stuff on the bunk, her fringe fell back as she lifted her head, revealing a nasty jagged white scar which ran down the side of her face and neck. It definitely marred her looks.
Sharon realised then that Bailey’s reticent demeanour wasn’t so much due to shyness as a desire to conceal the scar behind the lock of hair which she evidently wore loose for that very reason. She obviously felt self-conscious about it.
Sharon was instantly intrigued. Her enquiring mind began to whir like clockwork as she wondered how Bailey had acquired the scar. Had it been an accident? Had she been the victim of some form of violence?
‘So why are you in here then?’ Sharon asked by way of greeting. After all, in her mind it was one of the most important questions you could ask in here.
‘Fraud.’
‘What? Like stealing money?’
‘Yeah. I embezzled some money.’
She seemed a bit cagey. Sharon wondered if she still felt guilty about her wrongdoing even though she’d already been caught for it.
‘A lot of money?’
Bailey paused unpacking her items and looked down at Sharon. Sharon found herself staring
into an intense pair of grey eyes.
‘Enough to put me away for four years.’
‘Four years huh?’ Sharon nodded, impressed. ‘Must have been a decent wad. Who’d you nick it from?’
‘I’m…’ Bailey checked herself. ‘I was an accountant. I stole the money from my employers.’
Fiddling the books. A fairly dull crime, thought Sharon. But she was a little puzzled nonetheless. The girl didn’t quite look how Sharon imagined accountants to be. She didn’t look boring enough. And she was certain that she could detect a seam of hardness just beneath the surface, a steel which she wouldn’t have expected in a mere accountant. Or maybe she was imagining it.
She stared at the scar. It compounded her growing sense that there was more to Bailey than met the eye. How did she get that scar? Sharon would find out sooner or later. Over the course of the long hours spent in the cell together, you found out virtually everything there was to know about your cellmate. And, who knew, there might even be something to gain out of it.
Sharon lay back down on her bunk, smiled like a shark and flexed her fingers, cracking her knuckles one by one.
‘So why are you in here?’ asked Bailey.
Sharon sighed. ‘I’m just too inquisitive for my own good.’
Bailey nodded and continued arranging her items on the bunk. Sharon continued to observe her. She could tell that Bailey was slightly ill at ease under her blatant scrutiny, but she didn’t care. She’d found that the longer you stared at people, the more you noticed those little cracks that revealed who they really were.
‘You know, Bailey, I’m glad to have your company to be honest.’ She paused for effect. ‘What with the murder and everything.’
Bailey froze. She turned to look at Sharon once more. ‘What murder?’
‘You haven’t heard about it? Silly me. Of course you haven’t. It’s your first day. Well, I didn’t see it or anything. But I heard all about it. Everyone’s talking about it. Really vicious. Lots of blood. Bits cut off. That kind of thing. They did a big cell search yesterday. Looking for the murder weapon. But I overheard them saying that they were also looking for…’ she dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, ‘…a human body part.’
Bailey’s face screwed up in disgust and alarm. Sharon was enjoying shocking her on her first day. It gave her a pleasant sense of superiority.
‘Who got murdered?’ said Bailey.
‘Some girl. I never met her. Never even knew about her until she ended up dead.’
‘Who murdered her?’
That was a very good point, thought Sharon, frowning to herself. She hadn’t really thought about it up until now, and now she did think about it, it did somewhat bother her that whoever had done this was still around. Sharon wasn’t the type who scared easily, but there was something about this particular murder that kind of got to her.
‘I have no idea who did it,’ she said. ‘And I guess that means you want to be watching your back.’
8
Night had fallen and Bailey lay awake on her bunk in the dimness listening to the sounds of the prison – muted sobbing, a distant clang, the gurgling of pipes, a solitary shout, the creak of springs as her cellmate shifted position on the bunk below.
She was knackered, but she couldn’t get to sleep as her buzzing mind was still processing her first day in prison.
The whole procedure had begun eleven hours earlier in the local Crown Court. She had been taken in handcuffs to a holding cell underneath the courtroom to make it seem as if she had just come directly from being sentenced. After spending three hours in the holding cell, she had been transferred to a prison van to be taken to HMP Foxbrook.
The drive to the prison took just under an hour, and as the van lurched into the prison complex, she caught a glimpse through the tinted window of the huge perimeter wall looming up, cold and forbidding, topped with thick coils of razor wire.
Stepping out of the van, she had looked up at the four huge house-blocks towering above her, their grey Victorian brickwork peppered with hundreds of tiny windows, each one denoting a cell. Whether it was just her imagination or whether it was real, she felt as if hundreds of eyes were watching her from the windows, judging her, forming opinions, already making decisions about her. An edging fear had begun to gnaw at her for she was only too aware that somewhere behind those walls was the person or persons who had killed Alice and that very soon she would be trapped in there with them.
Once inside the prison, she had been moved from room to room for each step of the processing and induction procedure. First, her details had been taken by the prison officers and her personal items had been taken away, logged and put in plastic bags, to be returned to her when she was released. Then she had been strip-searched and issued with prison clothes – a grey tracksuit – and a reception pack, consisting of blankets, soap, toothpaste, basic toiletries and a plastic cup, plate and cutlery for when she needed to eat anything in her cell. She had undergone a brief health check by the prison doctor and asked about any allergies she had that might need special requirements. Then she’d been given some psychometric questionnaires to fill out for the benefit of the prison psychologist. Finally, she’d been assigned a six-digit prison number and allocated a cell.
Naturally, she’d had very little say in anything during the whole procedure. The tone of it had been slightly shambolic, with the staff appearing bored and inattentive, which was perhaps unsurprising seeing as they did it day in day out. No one volunteered much in the way of information, after all she wasn’t one of them, and she got the impression that she’d have to pick it up herself in due course.
After she had been processed, they had taken her to her cell. And that was when she got her first taste of what the prison was really like on the inside.
The four house-blocks of HMP Foxbrook were arranged like the spokes of a wheel around a central hub and atrium area. It was the classic panopticon layout, designed by the Victorians for optimal surveillance in an era before the invention of CCTV. They were five-storey galleried wings, the tiers of cells towering up above her, reaching almost to the ceiling high above. The green paint flaking off the ancient brickwork combined with the feeble daylight filtering through the distant, grimy skylights gave the place a dingy claustrophobic feel.
The whole place echoed with the noise of chatter, the clump of feet trudging up the flights of cast-iron stairs and the clank of doors opening and closing, and beyond the disinfectant smell lay the faint whiff of illicit drugs.
In the central atrium, inmates of all ages and ethnic backgrounds, dressed mostly in prison-issue grey tracksuits and trainers, were standing and sitting around in small groups on the plastic benches and tables, which she noticed were bolted to the floor.
Accompanied by a female prison officer, she was marched through the atrium and up the metal stairs to her cell, passing the inmates as they lounged on the landings and leant on the banisters, chatting and watching each other, some of them breaking off their conversations to observe her as she walked by. Most of the gazes were flat and impenetrable, others were curious, some were downright hostile. As she passed by one group of inmates, she heard one of them mutter something she couldn’t quite make out, which got some sniggers in response. She knew it had been directed at her, but she kept her head down and avoided eye contact.
She felt that familiar gut-twisting fear return, that they would somehow see through her and see her for what she actually was – a serving police officer. But despite that, she found herself falling back into her undercover role with an ease she hadn’t been expecting, especially considering what had happened on the previous job. And, what was more, on the crest of the fear, she felt that old buzz, the reason she’d started working undercover in the first place. Only now, after her extended absence from this kind of work, did she realise just how much she craved it.
As for her cellmate, Sharon, her cover story seemed to have done the trick for the time being. Sharon seemed affable enough, but Bail
ey didn’t trust her one inch. She had that familiar animal cunning that so many criminals seemed to possess. As a policewoman, Bailey had encountered it innumerable times. Although not necessarily intelligent as such, these people had an innate deviousness that it was well to be wary of and fatal to underestimate.
The undercover training course had emphasised that it was always best to try to keep your cover story as true to life as possible. The more you lied, the more you were at risk of holes showing in your story. And the more you tried to be what you weren’t, the more likely people were to see through you. Criminals were paranoid people by their very nature, and often on the lookout for anything suspicious. So it had been no lie about the accountancy. Bailey really had once been an accountant. For about five minutes. She’d studied it at college, thinking that it would make a good solid career. But as a job, she’d found it so boring that she’d quit after two months and applied to join the police instead, something she’d wanted to do ever since she was a kid. The upshot of this, however, was that when it came to financial records and bookkeeping, spreadsheets and payroll, she could talk with some authority and sound natural.
And that was important, because maintaining a cover story required discipline and the ability to stay on the ball all the time, however tired you were. One thing the training course had emphasised was that the effort of sustaining a facade, the pressure of having to lie, and the consequences of making mistakes could take a heavy psychological toll, especially over an extended period of time.
But the central tenet that had been drilled into them incessantly was that, whatever the circumstances, you had to maintain your cover, however tempting it might be to reveal the truth, however much someone might claim that they knew you were a police officer.
Never break cover.
Never admit that you’re a cop.
Never. Break. Cover.
9
Bailey stood under the jet of water, her eyes closed, massaging the prison-issue shower gel over her body, working up a lather. The shower gel smelt cheap and harsh and left her skin feeling dry and sensitive and she made a mental note there and then to check if the prison shop stocked anything of a slightly better quality.