by Caro Savage
She didn’t particularly enjoy communal showering and had been apprehensive about exposing her scars but knew that she would have no choice in the matter. She was self-conscious about them at the best of times, and in here she didn’t quite know what reaction they would elicit.
The one down the side of her face was what most people saw, if they noticed it beneath her hair, but that was the least of them, for they stretched in an extensive zigzag lattice down across her breasts, shoulders and back, interspersed here and there with a number of small round burn marks.
As it turned out, in the shower she’d got a few glances of interest and several double-takes though no one had actually said anything. Maybe in an environment like prison, scars weren’t such a big deal. If anything, the other inmates had given her a slightly wider berth, and she realised that her disfigurement constituted a useful asset as it seemed to confer on her an aura of criminal credibility that she wouldn’t otherwise have had.
Looking around her, she was amazed by the number of tattoos. She’d never seen so many in one place. Some of the artwork was quite impressive, but for the most part it was pretty tacky, the kind of thing she’d seen on sex workers she’d encountered in the course of upholding the law.
Bailey herself had no tattoos. She’d never seen the point in getting one. Once upon a time, if anyone had asked her why, she’d have responded by saying that tattoos were an identifying feature – not necessarily a good thing if you were an undercover police officer. People remembered things like tattoos, and at some point down the line, on a different job, under a different cover, you might bump into someone from a former job who might otherwise not have recognised you were it not for your distinctive tattoo and who might then realise that you weren’t who you claimed to be. But now she had the scars, all of that seemed immaterial, for they were probably even more of an identifying feature than a tattoo.
The girl next to her, slim and boyish, ran her hands through her bleached blonde hair, slicking it back, and as she did so, Bailey noticed the track marks running along the insides of her forearms. The ugly puncture wounds dotted along the paths of the veins were clear evidence of intravenous hard drug use and they looked recent.
‘What are you looking at?’ said the girl, fixing Bailey with a hostile glare.
‘Oh nothing,’ said Bailey, backing off with a placatory smile. Although she was curious to find out more, the shower probably wasn’t the best place to start asking questions.
She hurriedly finished up, towelled off and headed back to her cell, reminding herself to pick up some decent shower gel from the prison shop.
In the reflection of the small plastic mirror above the sink, she could see Sharon lying on the bunk behind her, engrossed in a Mills & Boon novel.
Bailey had just finished drying her hair, and she now started to apply some moisturiser to her face. As she was doing so, she couldn’t help but notice the beginnings of crow’s feet around her eyes. Age crept up on you. A wrinkle here, a wrinkle there. She thought wistfully of the Clarins eye serum she kept in her bathroom cabinet at home. She couldn’t imagine the prison shop stocked it.
Despite these small vanities, she had never been a big one for make-up. A bit of lip gloss was the most she’d stretch to if she wanted to do herself up. And, what with the scars, there seemed even less of a point bothering with that kind of thing these days.
She noticed Sharon watching her from her bunk. Her cellmate had put her book down and was looking at her curiously.
‘Have you got a boyfriend?’ Sharon asked.
Bailey shook her head.
‘Surely there must be someone?’
‘Yeah… there was. But it didn’t work out.’
‘Why not?’
Her last boyfriend had been called Mark. He was a detective in the CID. She’d lived with him for just over two years. He had wanted to settle down, get married and start a family. He’d seemed more concerned with her biological clock than she was. But she wasn’t interested in having children. She valued her independence too much. So it had fallen apart.
More than that, she feared the quiet oppression of suburbia. A pebble-dashed house. Kids. A normal life. A suffocating prison. Worse than a real prison. She’d rather be here than there. And here she was…
‘I guess we wanted different things,’ she said.
‘You probably had incompatible star signs,’ Sharon replied knowledgeably. ‘I’m a big one for star signs. I’m a Virgo myself. What sign are you?’
Bailey met Sharon’s eyes in the mirror. ‘Aren’t Virgos supposed to be intuitive by nature? Why don’t you try and work it out?’
Sharon smiled at the challenge. She scrutinised Bailey’s meagre collection of belongings. Bailey had brought little into the prison – a few books of cryptic crosswords and Sudoku, and an iPod full of eighties power ballads, her one guilty pleasure.
‘Mmm…’ Sharon stroked her chin. ‘Not a lot to go on. You like puzzles. That means you’re analytical. Probably good with numbers. I’d say you were… a Capricorn.’
Sharon was correct.
‘Well done. Not bad at all.’
Sharon grinned proudly. ‘So what kind of guys do you like? Tall, dark and handsome?’
Sharon held up her romance novel for Bailey to see. Bailey glanced over her shoulder to look at it – the cover depicted an airbrushed picture of a tall, dark handsome man with a glistening muscled torso. The novel was called The Billionaire’s Secret Cinderella.
Bailey snorted a laugh.
‘Actually, I prefer blonde hair and blue eyes.’
‘You like the Teutonic look, eh? I’ve got one over there called Seduced by the Surgeon. The bloke in it is this rich blonde doctor. You can borrow it if you want.’
‘No thanks.’
‘Suit yourself. So have you been getting much action since… what was his name?’
Since the end of that relationship, it had been a case of going out every once in a while when the mood took her – putting on a bit of lip gloss and her favourite suede-fringed cowboy jacket, going to a bar, hitting on some guy, bringing him back to her place, and then ejecting him once business was done.
But then she’d got the scars and they had put an end to that. Intimacy was no longer something she felt comfortable with in the wake of that last undercover job. More than that, the wounds from the violations she’d been subjected to went far deeper than any physical injuries she’d suffered, and unlike the scars they were still raw and painful. No – she couldn’t see herself getting intimate with anyone again anytime soon, and perhaps not ever.
Bailey snapped the lid closed on the bottle of moisturiser and placed it back on the shelf by the mirror. She turned around and forced a smile at Sharon.
‘I’ve got some stuff to get done.’
And she turned and left the cell.
10
She walked out onto the landing. There were plenty of inmates hanging around, some by themselves, many in groups, and the air was filled with their murmured conversations.
It was free association time and the inmates could move around the prison as they wished, although many just remained in their cells, watching TV or playing computer games.
Free association seemed to work out at around two to three hours a day and inmates were legally entitled to spend one hour of it outside in the fresh air in the yard if they chose. The actual times for free association varied from day to day. Bailey had realised that this time provided the best opportunity for her to conduct her investigation and she was determined to make the most of it. Her plan was to keep herself to herself and conduct her activities as discreetly as possible.
She figured that at some point she should probably try and track down Alice’s cellmate, Melanie Clarke, to see if she could extract any useful information from her, but at the moment she was unsure of the best way to go about finding her. She definitely wasn’t going to ask Sharon. Sharon was way too nosey and she was already asking too many questions. Not to worry. Ba
iley was confident that she’d locate this Melanie Clarke eventually. It was just a matter of time. Meanwhile, she had other avenues in mind.
She made her way down the landing, heading for the stairwell that was situated halfway along, consciously veering wide of the various clusters of inmates, hoping that no one would pay her too much attention.
Talk broke off as she passed by. Cold suspicious looks over the shoulder, followed by furtive whispering. Gossip was the lifeblood of a place like this where people had too much time on their hands. If only she knew what they were talking about. Judging by the general vibe, she was certain Alice’s murder wasn’t far from their lips.
Her efforts to remain inconspicuous proved to be in vain. Ahead of her, she saw that a group of eight or so inmates had noticed her approaching. It was probably because she was new and they didn’t recognise her. A preliminary pang of anxiety shot through her.
It was becoming apparent that the prison was full of different cliques, formed for the purposes of company and mutual self-protection. This particular group looked like they’d come straight off some particularly grim council estate: hard eyes, hard faces, hard lives. They were watching her and conferring amongst themselves and it didn’t look like they were saying nice things.
She put her head down and increased her pace slightly as she passed by them…
And suddenly she found herself sprawled face-down on the cold concrete surface of the landing, the palms of her hands stinging with the impact of the floor.
She lay there stunned and bewildered for a few moments before it sunk in that one of them had deliberately tripped her up. She turned her head and saw the culprit – a slight, skinny girl with carrot-coloured hair, who was grinning at her unpleasantly.
‘Whoops!’ said the girl, looking to her companions for approval.
They all sniggered.
Bailey felt a cold anger consume her. How dare they? She pulled herself to her feet. Stay calm, she thought, taking a deep breath. No rash actions.
She shot a long hard look of contempt at the one who’d tripped her up. She was clearly the smallest and weediest of the group, the kind of pathetic hanger-on who would have sucked up to the bullies at school.
The girl puffed her chest out aggressively.
‘What are you gonna do about it?’ she sneered.
If she’d had the inmate to herself, Bailey could quite easily have subdued her and taught her a painful lesson in why it was important to be nice to people; but, like any true coward, the girl was operating from within the safety of a group. A confrontation would thus be risky. Anyhow, Bailey had more important things to focus on.
She turned away from them and continued on her way, ignoring their jeers.
She was glad to reach the stairwell and get away from them. As she descended the metal flights of stairs, it occurred to her that perhaps she should have made more of an overt effort to stand up for herself. Because she hadn’t, they might try it on again. Too late now though.
When she reached the ground floor, she began to head towards the atrium. As she did so, she felt something wet splat onto the top of her head. She stopped and reached up to check, a sense of revulsion coming over her as she felt sticky strands of what she realised was saliva in her hair.
She looked up to see the carrot-haired girl leaning over the balcony, leering down at her with her friends. They all cackled with laughter.
Bailey wiped the saliva from her head, flicking it away in disgust. She moved underneath the cover of the first-floor landing so they couldn’t spit on her any more and continued on her way.
How mindless, she thought angrily. To pick on her for no other reason than that she was by herself and they thought they could get away with it.
But then what was she expecting? This was prison. People generally didn’t end up in here because they were nice.
11
The central atrium was where the four house-blocks converged. She stood there in the middle and slowly gazed around. In all directions, vaulted tiers of cells stretched away into the gloom. She tried to remember what she’d been told during her induction about where everything was located.
As she recalled, the four house-blocks were known as A-Wing – which was her wing – B-Wing, C-Wing and D-Wing. Within the perimeter wall, besides the house-blocks, there was the prison exercise yard, an administrative complex, a medical facility, a chapel and the segregation block. The administrative buildings included the staff mess room and facilities, and that was also where the Governor’s office was situated. The gatehouse, fortified in the tradition of a medieval keep, was located midway along the eastern wall of the prison, next to the main road, and provided the only point of access to the prison. And if she wasn’t mistaken, the stairwell on the other side of the atrium led down to the basement level of the prison, where the laundry was located, somewhere underneath A-Wing.
Doing her best to avoid any further hostile encounters, she made her way across the atrium and descended the flight of stairs.
The place where Alice had been murdered seemed as good a place as any to start her investigation, even though the crime scene had long since been cleaned up. The police often retraced the steps of victims in order to trigger associations in the minds of potential witnesses, but for her she hoped that it might provoke some insight into Alice’s thought patterns in those final few hours that she had been alive.
The basement corridor appeared dingy and deserted, the overhead strip lighting flickering uncertainly. Down here, there was a more pronounced sense of dilapidation than elsewhere in the prison. Paint was peeling off the ancient brickwork, the flakes scattering the flagstones amidst the dry husks of long-dead bugs, and bits of cladding hung loose from the pipes which ran along the sides of the walls.
Bailey wasn’t entirely sure if she was even allowed to be down here, but seeing as no one had stopped her, she saw no reason not to continue.
As she walked along the corridor, she reflected that she knew little about the history of HMP Foxbrook, only that it had been built as a prison in Victorian times when penal attitudes had been much harsher. And, as such, the fabric of the building was still permeated with the dank oppressiveness of that era.
Preoccupied by those thoughts, she almost walked right past the entrance to the laundry – a heavy iron door with a metal plaque riveted onto it which said ‘WATER SUPPLY ROOM’. There was a small glass panel set into the door, through which she noticed what appeared to be a row of washing machines or dryers stretching down the length of the large room that lay beyond.
Standing outside, peering through the glass panel, she could see inmates at work inside – pushing trolleys, loading washing machines, emptying dryers, folding sheets.
She debated with herself for a few moments whether to enter.
Act like you work here, she told herself. Move with a purpose and people will be less likely to doubt you.
She took a deep breath, pushed the door open and strode confidently into the laundry.
A few of the inmates glanced up, but then went back to their tasks, indifferent to her. They probably assumed, as she’d intended, that she had come here to work, just like them. The overall atmosphere was one of subdued industriousness.
The laundry was a long cavernous room, the farther edges of which lay beyond the reach of the weak light emanating from the bulbs hanging down from the ceiling. It was warm down here, stuffy even, and the air was suffused with the acrid smell of detergent.
The floor of the laundry was filled with large yellow trolleys made of canvas. Along one side of the room, a row of huge stainless-steel washing machines groaned as their massive drums rotated, churning the items inside, washing the filth of the prison off them. A bit further along, big industrial dryers rumbled at a different frequency, the hot air carried out of the room through an overhead aluminium ventilation duct. On the other side were the industrial folders and the steam presses, and giant wire racks stacked with folded piles of freshly laundered items. Sheets
hung up next to the racking, the white material billowing softly.
She remembered from her induction that the individual inmates’ laundry was sent down here in numbered mesh bags which were never opened. The bags went straight into the machines, and then into the dryers, and then back to the inmates.
She stood there amongst the trolleys and did a slow three-sixty, scanning the room for any possible clues or insights. Nothing jumped out at her, apart from the lack of CCTV cameras, just as Frank had mentioned.
According to him, Alice had obtained a job in the laundry and had been down here alone when she had been murdered. The question was whether there was any special significance to the laundry beyond the fact that it was secluded enough to commit a murder away from the eyes of the prison authorities and the other inmates. Either way, it sounded as if Alice had been very close to identifying those responsible for bringing the drugs into the prison, and it seemed that they’d murdered her before she’d had a chance to report back to Frank.
Her attention snagged on the white shirt and black epaulettes of a prison officer’s uniform. The female officer – stern and masculine-looking – had just emerged from behind the racking and was slowly patrolling the other side of the room. Bailey didn’t know her name.
Bailey hurriedly turned away and took hold of the nearest trolley and began to push it along, keeping her head down as she did so. Her trolley appeared to be piled with used cleaning rags and mop ends and it didn’t smell too good.
She walked along, feeling the crunch of spilt washing powder on the tiled floor beneath her feet and eventually found that she had reached the far end of the laundry.
Glancing around, she decided to buy a little more time by pretending to do some work. She manoeuvred the trolley in front of a washing machine, an old top-loader standing up against the wall, and picked up a handful of rags, wrinkling her nose at the horrible smell which emanated from them. Holding them in one hand at arm’s length, she started to lift up the lid of the washing machine.