by Caro Savage
Seema shook her head in stupefaction.
‘Guitars! Fuck me! All these times I’ve watched it and I’ve never noticed. Man that totally blows my mind. What do you think, Mel?’
Mel had been sitting there vacantly, her eyes half-closed and her mouth half-open, taking a pull from a spliff every so often, a long head of ash building up at the end. She didn’t seem to have heard Seema.
Seema whacked her on the upper arm to get her attention. ‘Mel, I asked you a question.’
Mel blinked and looked around at them as if for the first time. The head of ash fell off the spliff into her lap. She didn’t seem to notice.
‘Uhh… yeah… rich tea biscuits… yeah.’
Kay screwed up her face in disgust. ‘Mel, get with the picture! We had the biscuit conversation over twenty minutes ago.’
Mel looked confused. With a faint sense of dismay, Bailey could see that extracting any kind of useful information from this inmate would require an effort of the first order. And that was if she actually even had anything useful to say, which Bailey was beginning to seriously doubt from looking at her. Either way, she judged that now wasn’t the time or the place to start grilling her. Still, at least she knew what she looked like and where she hung out.
Mel turned to face her. Bailey looked down and realised that Mel was holding out the spliff.
‘Don’t give her our weed!’ said Kay. ‘The only reason she butted in just now was so she could weasel a smoke out of us. We don’t even know her name.’
Bailey held up a hand to refuse the spliff. It was a good excuse to avoid having to smoke any. As an undercover police officer, she was technically forbidden from taking drugs, although sometimes situations arose when it was difficult not to participate without appearing suspicious.
Evaluating the situation, she saw an opportunity to provide an excuse for her intrusion and also hopefully gain some understanding of how the drugs were distributed in this place.
‘My name’s Bailey. I just happened to be passing by and I smelt your gear. If you’d just be nice enough to tell me where I could buy some, I’ll get out of your hair.’
Seema looked her up and down, then conceded, ‘Keisha. She stands on the third floor at the end of C-Wing. She’ll sort you out.’
17
‘Spyros!’
Bailey jerked awake, breathing hard, soaked in sweat, sheets tangled around her, repeating the name over and over.
The grey light of pre-dawn filtered through the small cell window. She guessed it was about 4 a.m., but in here she couldn’t get up and watch TV to distract herself from the bad dreams like she could at home.
Slowly, the palpitations subsided and she lay there listening to Sharon snoring softly beneath her, apparently deep in peaceful slumber. Lucky her.
The worst thing about the dreams was their inevitability. It instilled in her a sense of dreadful anticipation each night before she went to sleep. The dreams were really just one dream, recurring in different permutations of the same scenario, but always with the same awful outcome.
Her fingertips semi-consciously traced the latticework of scars across her body. Unable to get back to sleep, all she could do was lie there and try not to think too hard about how badly that last job had turned out.
It hadn’t always been this way, of course. It had all started out just fine…
The undercover training course – that’s where it had started. That’s where she had first met Alice.
The course had been an incredibly challenging undertaking, going from 7 a.m. to 4 a.m. for two full weeks. It had a notoriously high drop-out rate and, out of the original twelve students who had enrolled on the course, only five had made it through to the end. She and Alice had been among them.
They’d learnt everything about working undercover, from the basic stuff like how to interpret body language and how to dress in the right way, through to the more advanced things like how to do drug deals, how to run informants and how to conduct surveillance.
They’d subsequently worked together in Frank’s undercover unit, sometimes on the same jobs, more often on separate jobs, growing ever closer as they did so. Nobody but another undercover understood the unique stresses of the job, the constant peril within which you operated. It wasn’t always easy to cope with, so they’d relied upon each other for emotional support. They’d even gone to jiu-jitsu classes together, figuring that a bit of self-defence training could be helpful in a tight corner.
Bailey remembered how much they’d both revelled in the maverick glamour of working undercover and the satisfaction they’d gained in taking down dangerous and powerful villains…
…but then it had all gone so horribly wrong.
After the trauma of that last operation, Bailey had quit undercover work, had moved out of the flat she’d shared with Alice and had temporarily moved back in with her parents. She had almost quit the police force completely, only deciding against it after realising that there was nothing else she felt inclined to do. So she had retreated back to her safe, boring desk job, doing paperwork, transcribing recordings of interviews, checking witness statements, and numerous other tasks which kept the past at bay.
She had decided to concentrate on passing her sergeant’s exams in order to work her way up the police hierarchy, something she hadn’t had much opportunity to do when working undercover. Her plan was to try to get promoted and put it all behind her. But normal life had proved harder than she’d bargained on.
Alice had reached out to her, offering the kind of understanding, as a fellow undercover, and as a friend, that no one else would have been able to. But in her messed-up state, Bailey had shunned her help, not wanting to have anything more to do with any of them. She’d eventually relented and tried to contact her, hoping to heal the rift, but Alice had been incommunicado, working undercover in this prison as it turned out. And then all of a sudden Alice was dead. Bailey had been too late in trying to make up with her friend and she would always regret it. But she was here now and determined to make amends. If there was one last thing she could do for Alice it would be to find her killer and make them pay.
18
Poodle let out a soft moan of relief and sank back against the wall, her aches and chills instantly dissipating in the sublime rush of the narcotic flowing through her system. All of her troubles and concerns melted away into nothing. Suddenly being in prison no longer bothered her like it normally did. Three square meals a day and a roof over her head. Who could want for more? And the other inmates – maybe they weren’t such a bad bunch after all.
She lay slumped in the shadows with the hypodermic syringe still poking out of her track-marked forearm, her drug-taking paraphernalia scattered on the ground beside her.
She was in her favourite place – the Old Tread-Wheel House, known as such because it was where the treadmills had been located back in Victorian times. Or at least that’s what Maggie had told her one time when she’d been standing out in the yard. But the treadmills were long gone, leaving only large square bracket holes in the crumbling brickwork to indicate where they had once been fitted. In their place lay sheets of timber stacked against the walls, several piles of concrete blocks and some scaffolding poles scattered on the ground. That’s all this place was used for these days – storing building materials and other bits of old junk. It was technically kept locked, but Poodle had found a missing panel on a side door through which she managed to squeeze in.
The building was located over on the far west side of the prison complex and no one ever really went there, which meant it was the perfect place to keep her stash safe from the greedy prying hands of other inmates and the random cell searches by the prison officers.
It was comfortably dim, the small narrow windows emitting only a meagre amount of light. It might have been mouldy and musty and full of spiders, but it was quiet, there were no cameras, and no one would disturb her while she was shooting up, and that was the most important thing.
She lay
there cocooned in the warm afterglow of the hit with her eyes closed and a drowsy smile on her face. Wrapped in the cosy darkness, she wished she could lie here like this forever.
But eventually the heroin daze began to recede as it always did, leaving her feeling pleasantly mellow. She sat up and looked at her watch. It was time to be getting back to her cell. Gathering up her drug paraphernalia, she placed it back in its plastic bag, rolled it up and concealed it once again in its hiding place behind a loose brick in the wall.
She stood up slowly and began to walk back towards the door with the missing panel.
And that’s when she heard the noise.
A faint scraping sound.
It came from the shadows down the other end of the room.
Poodle stopped, motionless for a moment. She scanned the murk.
Something wasn’t right.
She could feel the hairs on the back of her neck standing up. She could sense another presence in the room.
In the dinginess, in the shadows, among the stacks of debris, someone or something was there. She knew she wasn’t hallucinating. She’d taken more than enough heroin to know that it didn’t make you hallucinate.
She stared intently into the gloom at the far end of the room, but she couldn’t make out what lay in the depths of the shadows.
Small tendrils of fear began to impinge upon her chilled-out mood and her heart began to beat a little faster. Was it a guard? Was it another inmate? Most importantly, was her stash in danger?
‘Who’s there?’ she whispered hoarsely. Her voice seemed to echo around the room like the ringing of a huge bell.
Her only answer was silence.
‘Who are you?’
Still no answer.
‘What do you want?’
Nothing.
She began to walk forward in the direction of the door, but with each step that she took, the more the sensation increased of someone in the shadows looking directly at her, their eyes boring into her.
She stopped, unable to proceed any further. She swallowed, her mouth dry all of a sudden. Then she began to back slowly away from the blackness in the further reaches of the room because that’s where it was.
She could sense it moving towards her. Soon it would emerge from the shadows.
She suddenly remembered now. The gossip. About that murder in the laundry. How horrible it had been. How they still hadn’t caught whoever had done it. She hadn’t paid much attention to it. She’d had more important things on her mind. Like her next shot of smack. But now it hit home with a sickening dread… that maybe, just maybe, there was something that she should be very scared about.
‘Please don’t hurt me,’ she begged, imploring the mute shadows. ‘You can have my stash. Take it all. Just please don’t hurt me.’
She stumbled backwards, her feet scraping the rough floor…
…And bumped into something.
She gasped and spun around.
A pile of concrete blocks. She had backed into a pile of concrete blocks.
She let out an exhalation of relief and smiled to herself. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe she was just jittery. Maybe just…
SCHWIPPP…
Poodle’s ears perked up and she tensed. The noise had been very close to her. It had been accompanied by a strange tight feeling in her chest. She tried to swallow but found that she couldn’t.
She looked down.
Protruding from the centre of her chest was a long glistening metal blade. A globule of her blood ran along the blade and came to the end. It hung there, crimson and viscous.
She watched it, entranced, as it swung there, hanging by an ever-extending thread, which then snapped.
The drop of blood fell to the floor in what seemed like slow motion. It seemed to take forever to hit the floor. As it fell, it assumed a circular shape, revolving and rotating, the light reflecting off its pulsating surface. Then it hit the floor and disintegrated with an audible splat.
Poodle reached up slowly with her hand to touch the blade, to see if it was real. Her slender fingers brushed the razor tip of the steel.
It was real.
SCHWURP…
The blade disappeared, sucked back into her chest. Gone, as if by magic, as if it had never been there.
Poodle coughed.
Inside her throat there was a surge of hot iron-tang flavoured blood. She coughed and tried to swallow to force it back down but the eruption was too much.
Her punctured lungs spasmed and she coughed again and this time the blood escaped her mouth, spraying outwards in a fine mist, landing on the pale flesh of her face and on her hands.
She coughed again, blood now pouring uncontrollably from her mouth.
She took a step forward but found that her legs seemed to be only partially under her control. They felt as if they were made of lead.
She took another step, weaving uncertainly. Heading towards the door. Maybe she could get to the door, get out through the panel. If only she could get into the yard…
In her peripheral vision, she saw something moving in the shadows, past her towards the doorway, cutting off her route of escape. In the darkness, she glimpsed the flash of steel.
Poodle walked towards the door, the hardest walking she had ever done in her life, the hardest walking she would ever do in her life.
Almost at the door now. She just needed to get to the door.
But then a figure stepped forward, its upper half cloaked in shadow.
Poodle gasped and staggered back two steps. She opened her mouth to scream, but instead she gurgled and more blood came out of her mouth.
Out of the darkness, the glinting blade came around horizontally, clutched in a black leather-gloved hand, the razor edge turned towards her. She noted mathematically that the intersection point of its trajectory was precisely where her throat was.
And then the blade made contact, although it did not halt. Its arc continued and terminated, having travelled almost one hundred and eighty degrees from its starting point.
The figure stepped fully out of the shadows to reveal itself as a jet of hot arterial blood gushed up the side of Poodle’s face.
19
They’d been locked down for over two hours now with no explanation as to the reason why. Bailey had been spending the time lying on her bunk plugged into her iPod, listening all the way through her entire collection of eighties power ballads. She’d come to the realisation that Whitesnake’s ‘Is This Love’ was actually a much better track than she’d given it credit for up until now, although it was still nowhere near as good as her all-time favourite, ‘Kayleigh’ by Marillion, which she could listen to endlessly on repeat.
She unplugged herself and stood up and stretched. She walked over to the small window of the cell and gazed out across the yard at the huge grey walls topped with multiple coils of razor wire, the tiny vicious blades sparkling orange in the light of the setting sun. Sharon lay on her bunk, engrossed in a women’s lifestyle magazine.
‘Did you know,’ said Sharon, reading from the magazine, ‘that in Cambodia they eat deep-fried tarantula as an aphrodisiac?’
Bailey shook her head. ‘No. I can’t say I knew that.’
‘There’s a whole list of weird aphrodisiacs here. I think I’ll just stick to asparagus though. Apparently that does the job just as well.’
‘Really? I heard it makes your wee smell bad.’
‘Yeah, but that doesn’t matter, does it? Not unless you’re into water sports of course.’ Sharon sniggered.
Bailey’s attention was captured by some sort of commotion in the yard. A group of prison officers had suddenly appeared and were standing there gesticulating to each other, engaged in some sort of heated debate.
‘Are you?’ said Sharon.
‘Am I what?’ murmured Bailey absently. She was no longer paying attention to Sharon.
‘Are you into water sports?’
Bailey craned her head to peer down into the yard, trying to work out what was
going on. Then, from around the corner of B-Wing, a group of SOCOs – scene of crime officers – appeared, marching in a procession across the yard, dressed in paper suits, overshoes and masks, looking like astronauts, probably sweating in the warm weather. They were accompanied by uniformed police officers and detectives in suits, as well as a number of prison officers.
The police were here and the presence of SOCOs meant one thing.
A murder.
The SOCOs were supposed to ensure that the crime scene forensics remained as uncontaminated as possible. That’s why they wore those strange outfits.
Sharon looked up from her magazine, noticing that something had caught Bailey’s eye.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked.
‘Looks like trouble,’ Bailey replied. ‘That’s why we’ve been locked down. Police everywhere.’
Sharon tossed her magazine aside and jumped off her bunk to join Bailey next to the window.
‘Fucking pigs,’ she muttered. ‘Wonder if someone else has topped it.’
She stood there for a few moments, then yawned and went back and sat down on her bunk and picked up her magazine again. Bailey continued to stand by the window looking down at the yard.
Eventually her conjecture was confirmed when the SOCOs re-emerged from across the other side of the prison yard wheeling a metal trolley on which lay what was unmistakably a black body bag. Bailey wondered who indeed was zipped up beneath the black plastic.
It was frustrating not to be able to know more. She wished she could just go and ask the homicide detectives who were down there right now. But, obviously, in her undercover capacity she could do no such thing.
After another hour or so, the lockdown lifted and their cell was unlocked. Bailey noticed that it was Amber who unlocked the cell, the prison officer she had encountered in the canteen. She seemed like the approachable type.