by Caro Savage
Bailey instantly regretted the quip. She realised that she had to strike the right balance between not drawing too much attention to herself and not appearing to be a weakling.
The rest of the canteen had suddenly gone quiet and all eyes were now on her table.
‘It’s okay. I’ll move,’ she said. Better to keep a low profile for the time being rather than rile anybody.
She stood up and picked up her tray. But the gold-toothed inmate knocked it out of her hands. Her lunch splattered all over the table.
‘Now look what you’ve done, you clumsy bitch,’ said gold-tooth. ‘You’ve gone and knocked crap all over our table. Clean it up. Now.’
‘Maybe she should lick it up,’ said the oriental one with a smirk.
The others sniggered.
‘Good idea,’ said gold-tooth. ‘Lick it up.’
Bailey stood there looking at the remnants of her meal. She’d hardly begun to eat it.
The group of inmates crowded around her in a menacing fashion. The big one towered over her, no glimmer of emotion in her dead piggy eyes.
Bailey’s heart was beating hard, adrenaline pumping through her system, as she tried to determine the best course of action. Everyone else had paused eating and was now transfixed. This was prime entertainment.
‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ said gold-tooth.
Bailey slowly clenched her fists. They could forget it. Submitting to their humiliation wasn’t an option. To do so in front of everyone else in here would open her up to all kinds of abuse further down the line.
Instead, her jiu-jitsu training kicked in and she moved into the basic defensive yoi stance: her body positioned side-on so it formed a narrower target, her knees slightly bent to give her a lower centre of balance, one foot positioned in front of the other to ensure maximum stability, her arms raised up in front of her, poised ready to parry and strike. She marked their positions, eyed them individually in turn, took a deep breath and prepared to go down fighting.
‘That’s enough of that,’ said a firm voice.
She looked around to see one of the prison officers standing there. A tide of relief rolled over her. The prison officer was young, with a somewhat prim and starched appearance. Her blonde hair was tucked into a tight bun and bright blue eyes looked out from behind a pair of large thick-rimmed glasses.
Gold-tooth scowled at her. ‘She’s dropped her food all over our table.’
‘You can find somewhere else to sit today, Toni.’
They all stood there for a few moments, glaring at the prison officer. Bailey wondered what would happen. But the prison officer stood her ground, her hands on her hips, fearlessly staring them down.
‘Your lunch is getting colder the longer you stand there,’ she said.
The gold-toothed one called Toni turned to Bailey with a sneer. ‘Next time,’ she hissed.
Then she and her associates swaggered over to another table and sat down, hunched over their food, throwing her the occasional dirty look over their shoulders.
‘Thanks,’ said Bailey.
‘Don’t mention it.’ The prison officer scrutinised her. ‘You’re new here, aren’t you? I haven’t seen you before.’
‘I just got in the other day.’
‘I’m Amber.’ She held out her hand for Bailey to shake.
Bailey hesitated. She was wary of appearing to look too friendly with a prison officer in case she got mistaken for a snitch. She knew all too well how criminals felt about snitches.
Amber seemed to sense her reticence and withdrew her hand with a light shrug.
Bailey reflected how ironic it was that this prison officer looked just the type of person she would have got on with on the outside. But in here she was forced to keep a distance for the sake of maintaining a realistic cover.
‘Get yourself another tray of food,’ said Amber. ‘I’ll arrange for this to be cleared up.’
‘I’m not hungry any more.’
It was true. She wasn’t. The confrontation suddenly seemed to have robbed her of her appetite. She left the canteen to go back to her cell.
With each passing moment in this place, Bailey was starting to question what she’d got herself into.
15
Bailey lay on her bunk and reflected on the altercation in the canteen. That had been the second run-in she’d had with a hostile group of inmates since she’d been locked up. First the carrot-haired one and her friends, and now this other group led by the one with the gold tooth.
What was that old saying? You’ve made your bed, now lie in it. She’d chosen to be here and, at the end of the day, these kinds of situations were all part of the job.
Despite her short ill-advised detour into accountancy, all she’d ever really wanted was to be a policewoman. She’d wanted to be one ever since she was very young.
Growing up in the outer London suburbs, she and her sister Jennifer had had a happy early childhood, their plain semi-detached house forming the scene for countless games of make-believe. They had been close despite their considerable differences. Jennifer, two years older, had been the demure girly one, and Bailey had been the scrappy little tomboy who’d looked up to her.
Then, one day, at the age of eight years old, Jennifer had gone missing, abducted on the way home from a friend’s house just a few doors down the street. She had never been seen again. An extensive police investigation was launched but no witnesses were found, there were no records of any suspicious vehicles being seen in the area, and the detectives were unable to identify any potential suspects. No similar occurrences appeared to have taken place in the vicinity and it seemed like her abduction was just a random, opportunistic one-off. Her disappearance featured on Crimewatch and there was a reconstruction, but that too yielded no useful leads. It was as if she had just vanished into thin air.
For six-year-old Bailey, the loss had been extremely hard to comprehend, even harder for her parents to convey to her, devastated as they were. The word ‘dead’ was never said aloud in the house. But that unspoken likelihood constantly hovered there, grew ever more pronounced as time passed.
Later on, when she was older, Bailey came to understand the kinds of things that happened to children who were abducted and the kind of sick people who did those things. It had instilled in her a strong need for justice. And what better way to see justice done than to join the police?
As a result of Jennifer’s disappearance, her parents had become extremely protective of Bailey, oppressively so. She had reacted against it, especially as a teenager, actively seeking out risky situations. That tendency had continued into adulthood, eventually drawing her into the most dangerous area of policing – undercover work.
But her choice of profession was also a point of contention with her father. Over the years, her parents had become affected in different ways by Jennifer’s disappearance. Her mother had turned increasingly religious and had grown potty, to the point where Bailey was beginning to wonder if she was suffering from some kind of premature dementia. Her father, on the other hand, was haunted by the conviction that Jennifer was still alive and he maintained a dogmatic obsession with finding her. He still clung desperately to some shred of hope that she was out there somewhere and that she would come home someday, if only he could locate her. He kept a large scrapbook full of yellowing newspaper clippings relating to her disappearance and he insisted on keeping her bedroom preserved exactly the way it had been the day she had gone missing – the walls covered with her crude felt-tip pictures, her stuffed toys lined up along her bed, her clothes hanging in the wardrobe, her dinosaur-themed mobile still suspended from the ceiling. Bailey found it kind of creepy and she did her utmost to avoid going into Jennifer’s bedroom whenever she was at her parents’ house.
Her father was forever claiming that he was on the verge of finding Jennifer. It would usually be something or other he’d found on the internet – some vague clue alluding to her existence. He’d get all excited and call up Bailey to tell
her about it. But, of course, it always turned out to be groundless, a mere concoction of wishful thinking. She understood that this was his way of coping. It was the only thing that kept him going. He was in denial and she didn’t have the heart to tell him to snap out of it.
But sometimes it would erupt, like the argument they’d had the last time they’d met. He’d had a go at her, demanding to know why she wasn’t doing more, as a policewoman, to find out Jennifer’s whereabouts. It wasn’t like she hadn’t tried, of course. Not long after becoming a detective, she had taken the opportunity to examine the original case files. However, she had soon realised that with no evidence, no witnesses and no body, it would have been futile to try and reopen what was essentially a cold case that was now over twenty years old. She was a realist and, as a policewoman, she had become familiar with enough cases of a similar ilk to know the unpleasant truth about what had probably happened to Jennifer.
Despite the fact that she believed Jennifer was long dead, it didn’t mean that she’d forgotten her sister. Quite the opposite. Jennifer was there every day in the back of Bailey’s mind, crying out for redress, pushing her ever onwards to do her job the best she could. Jennifer, as well as Alice, was the reason she was here right now, endangering her well-being for the sake of making some kind of difference.
Not that it would ever bring either of them back…
16
Pushing the memories away, she rolled into a sitting position and tried to think of what to do next. She was itching to make progress, but she felt stuck already. Curling her free-hanging lock of hair around her fingers and letting it uncurl again, she contemplated her options.
She looked at her watch. There were forty-five minutes of free association time left before she was locked in her cell. Hoisting herself off the bunk, she left the cell and walked out onto the landing. She scanned her surroundings.
Her gaze settled on a female prison officer standing around ten metres away, sturdily built, with a face like old leather. She tried to recall her name…
Maggie. That was it. Maggie Cooper.
She looked like she’d been working here for a while, long enough to be familiar with the whereabouts of any given inmate. And from what Bailey had observed of her in the short time she’d been here, she appeared to be relatively approachable.
Bailey eased up to her.
‘I’m looking for Melanie Clarke,’ she said with a polite smile. ‘Do you know where I can find her?’
Maggie gave her the once-over with a steely professional flick of the eye. ‘Any particular reason?’
‘Uh… just wanted to have a chat,’ said Bailey innocently.
‘Just a regular conversation, huh?’
Bailey nodded earnestly.
Maggie sighed and raised one eyebrow.
‘Well… good luck with that,’ she said in a manner that suggested that having any kind of conversation with Melanie Clarke would prove to be most challenging. ‘She lives on B-Wing. Cell number one-one-three.’
‘Thank you,’ said Bailey and headed off along the landing.
After having given it some thought, Bailey had come to the conclusion that asking a guard about Melanie Clarke was a safer bet than asking the inmates whose affiliations at this stage she was still uncertain of.
At the end of the landing, she descended a flight of stairs and eventually reached the junction of A-Wing and B-Wing. She turned and began to walk along one of the lower landings of B-Wing, passing by the cells, moving carefully through the groups of inmates leaning on the balconies. This was deep within the heart of the hive. It was an unfamiliar area to Bailey and she was on edge.
Once again, she was shocked by the general air of neglect in the prison and the distinct lack of modernity. Although she knew that these were criminals and this their place of punishment it was still worse than she’d anticipated. The antique architecture made no concessions to light or space, instead suffusing the place with a dark labyrinthine feel. She got the sense of things happening unseen, things being got away with…
She walked past cells where inmates sat entranced by the flickering lights of TV screens or computer games. In other cells, they just lay there immobile on their bunks plugged into headphones listening to music or reading magazines.
To an outside observer, it might have seemed an easy life, but she sensed that it was all part of a desperate quest for distraction from the tedium and boredom of life in the prison. And more than that it was a way to avoid having to think too much about what they had done to end up behind bars in the first place.
As she walked along, she wondered how best to frame her approach to Melanie Clarke, how to broach the subject of Alice without sounding odd or raising suspicion. After all, she and Alice weren’t supposed to be connected to each other in any way whatsoever. In the end, she decided that she’d just play it by ear.
She reached cell number 113 and stepped into the open doorway. A white inmate with long brown hair was sitting cross-legged on the floor with her eyes closed in what appeared to be a meditative yoga position.
‘Melanie Clarke?’ said Bailey.
The inmate opened her eyes and looked at Bailey with a slightly miffed expression. She shook her head and nodded to her right. ‘She’s with her mates. Cell at the end. Follow your nose.’
She closed her eyes again.
Bailey stepped back onto the landing. She sniffed the air. The odour of illicit drugs was always present, but the distinctive smell of marijuana seemed to be particularly pronounced down here. She continued walking along the landing. As she drew closer to the cell at the end, the pungent smell of dope grew even stronger. As did the sound of music. She recognised the bass thump and reverb of heavy dub. It resembled some psychedelic form of reggae.
She stopped outside the last cell. The door was open. She peered in warily but it was hard to see anything through the thick layers of marijuana smoke. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, the first thing she made out was the glowing tip of a joint as it flared and was passed around the three inmates occupying the cell.
Beneath a large poster of Jean-Claude Van Damme flexing his oiled muscles was a white inmate sitting on a chair at the desk rolling a joint. She had a nose ring and her dark red hair was twisted into crude dreadlocks. On the bunk was a mocha-skinned Asian inmate who was nodding her head hypnotically to the music emanating from the cheap portable stereo that was sitting by her feet. And slumped next to her on the bunk was a mixed-race inmate with her frizzy hair poking out in all directions. She was just staring vacantly into middle space.
Bailey wondered which one of the three was Melanie Clarke.
For some reason, there was a colourful profusion of small origami animals scattered around the cell. With a single glance, Bailey could distinguish a crane, a horse, a tortoise and what even appeared to be a spider.
She hung around outside, doing a good imitation of casually lounging, all the while attempting to eavesdrop on the conversation of the inmates in the cell.
‘Bloodsport without a doubt,’ the Asian one was saying. ‘It’s an instant classic.’
The white one was shaking her head, without looking up from the joint.
‘Hard Target. Has to be. He’d matured by that stage. He was at the height of his powers. Couple that with a top-drawer action director like John Woo and you’ve got a masterpiece.’
‘Nah. It’s got too much shooting and not enough kickboxing. Van Damme is a kickboxer first and foremost. His best films are the ones that fully showcase his kickboxing talent.’
Bailey hovered on the threshold, wondering how she could interject. She trawled her mind. A piece of trivia floated to the surface. As an undercover cop, she had fallen into a habit of storing any bits of information that she could later retrieve to buttress a cover story or insinuate herself with people. However useless a bit of trivia might seem, you never knew when it might come in handy.
She sidled into the doorway. At first, none of the three figures in the cell regis
tered her presence.
‘I think you’re forgetting Cyborg,’ said Bailey.
The white one was the first to look up. Then the Asian one. And, finally, the mixed-race one.
They all stared at her blankly through the thick haze of smoke. She moved just inside the doorway to the cell. She stifled a cough and blinked. The smoke was dense enough to make her eyes water.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ said the white one, her face creased in suspicion.
The Asian one squinted at her as a thought seemed to occur.
‘Cyborg? Of course.’ She turned to the white one. ‘Kay, I totally forgot about Cyborg. Totally underrated. Kind of a low-budget masterpiece.’
The white one called Kay turned to her. Her face morphed into an expression of disgust. ‘Seema, you cannot be serious! Cyborg is worse than Nowhere to Run. It’s a substandard Mad Max rip-off. It’s one of his early ones you want to forget about.’
If the white one was called Kay and the Asian one was called Seema, then Bailey deduced that the frazzled-looking mixed-race one had to be Melanie Clarke.
Seema was shaking her head vigorously in disagreement with Kay. ‘Cyborg was a massive straight-to-video hit. So successful that they made two sequels.’
‘Neither of which had Jean-Claude in them. So they don’t count.’
Bailey judged that now was the time to drop her nugget of useless trivia. On one of her many sleepless nights, she’d found herself watching Cyborg, the type of low-budget sci-fi thriller which occupied the late-night slots on lesser-viewed channels. It wasn’t exactly her kind of film, but she’d noticed something faintly odd whilst watching it. ‘Did you know that the main characters in Cyborg are named after guitars?’ she said.
‘Guitars?’ sneered Kay. ‘I have never heard such a load of crap in all my life. Anyway, you still haven’t answered my question. Who are you and what do you want?’
But Seema was staring up at Bailey with an expression of wonderment verging on awe. ‘You know she’s right,’ she murmured. ‘Jean-Claude’s character is called Gibson Rickenbacker. Gibson is a type of guitar and so is Rickenbacker. And the baddie’s called Fender. Another guitar!’