by Caro Savage
‘Sounds straightforward enough,’ she said.
‘It is. But, of course, if anything should go wrong, then the consequences for you will be dire,’ said Toni with a death’s-head smile. ‘So you’d better not fuck up. For your own sake.’
And she switched off the light.
49
The chapel was cool and dim. Bailey stood at the top of the aisle, rows of empty wooden pews stretching out on either side of her down to the front of the room. There, atop the altar stood a painted statue of Jesus hanging on the cross, his face frozen in an expression of pious agony.
She was keenly aware of the bundles of cash secreted just beneath her waistband, and had been so ever since Toni had given them to her.
She scanned the room again. There was no sign of anyone else in here. Yet.
As for Father O’Malley, his office door was closed and she had no intention of disturbing him.
As soon as Toni had informed her that the chapel was to be the rendezvous point, the possibility had crossed her mind that Father O’Malley might be the contact. But it seemed unlikely. He was a drunk and drunks just weren’t reliable enough for this type of thing. More probable was that the chapel had been chosen for the very reason that he was too inebriated most of the time to pay proper attention to what was going on in there. At any rate, it explained why Toni had come here that time that Bailey had covertly followed her. She had been making a pick-up.
Bailey padded down the carpeted aisle to the front of the chapel and, as per Toni’s instructions, headed for the right-hand of the two confessional booths. She stepped inside the small wooden cubicle and sat down on the narrow seat. It was the first time she had been inside a confessional. It was cramped, very dim and it smelt faintly of varnish.
To her immediate right there was a wooden grate to enable communication between the two booths. And it was when she peered through this that she became aware of someone occupying the other booth. It was too indistinct to make out anything other than a shadowy outline sitting there in silence.
A jolt of anticipation went through her. This must be the contact she was supposed to meet.
The person shifted impatiently, their clothes rustling. Whoever it was, they were aware of her presence and waiting for her to say something.
‘Forgive me Father for I have sinned,’ she said.
‘A sin is not a sin if no one sees it,’ came the response. A man’s voice. A cockney accent. Definitely not Father O’Malley. It had to be one of the guards, but she wasn’t able to make out which one.
‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over,’ she said, completing the script that Toni had told her to recite.
There was a pause. The silhouette leaned closer to the grate.
‘It’s under the seat,’ he said.
She reached between her legs and groped around under the wooden seat of the confessional, her fingers closing around a large package wrapped in polythene. She picked it up. It was fairly heavy. It must have weighed around a kilogram.
‘Leave the money in the same place,’ he said. She could smell cigarettes on his breath. He was a smoker.
She pulled the bundles of cash out from her waistband and placed them beneath the seat. She then tucked the drugs into her tracksuit top and zipped it up, hoping that it was baggy enough to disguise the bulky package.
If only she could see who was on the other side of the grate. It was frustrating to be so close and yet unable to make a positive ID.
‘The money’s there,’ she said.
‘Say ten Hail Marys and piss off.’ He laughed sarcastically.
She took one last squint through the grate.
‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ he growled. ‘Business is done for today.’
‘Thank you, Father,’ she whispered. She stood up, exited the confessional and scurried out of the chapel.
But once she was outside she didn’t go straight back to Toni’s cell as she’d been instructed to. It was imperative that she identified the contact and this could be her only opportunity.
The weather wasn’t bad, so the yard was relatively busy, unlike before when she’d followed Toni to the chapel. Not far away she noticed a group of inmates playing football, being cheered on by a few bystanders. She pulled her hood up and headed over to them, attempting to mingle with the spectators as inconspicuously as possible while maintaining an eye on the door of the chapel.
It took a long five minutes before the door opened and someone emerged.
It was Terry.
So Terry Brinkle was the source. He was definitely well concealed, or at least made an effort to be that way.
He stood by the door for a few moments, his eyes narrowed, scanning the yard to see if anyone was watching him.
She dropped her head, hiding her face beneath the hood, and made some cheering gestures at the footballers. Glancing up, she saw him walking briskly in the direction of the administration block. She imagined he was probably going to deposit the money in his locker or something like that.
A feeling of elation sparked within her. It was all starting to make sense now. Finally.
When she got back to Toni’s cell, the whole gang were there sitting around glaring at her. She felt an arctic chill of hostility and suspicion emanating from them.
‘What took you so long?’ hissed Toni, her eyes bulging in a scary fashion.
Bailey scrambled for an appropriate lie.
‘There were some screws hanging around in the yard by the entrance to the house-blocks. I was worried they might search me, so I took a detour to avoid them.’
Toni eyeballed her for a few moments, then nodded slowly, apparently satisfied with her explanation.
‘You can never be too careful,’ she said.
Bailey unzipped her tracksuit top and pulled out the package. She handed it to Toni, who hefted it in her hand, a satisfied smirk crossing her face. She tossed it to Keisha, who was sitting on the bunk. Keisha began to peel off the polythene.
The drugs consisted of two bars of what Bailey recognised as cannabis resin.
‘Each of those blocks of hash is five hundred grams,’ said Toni. ‘Each one has got twenty grams of smack and twenty grams of coke embedded in it. It’s the most efficient way of delivering it.’
Bailey nodded, carefully memorising the information.
Toni continued, ‘Once we split that up and sell it, it’ll net us in the region of forty grand or so. We can charge up to four times the street value in here, sometimes more. It’s all about supply and demand, see. And demand for that is at a premium.’
It was a lucrative business indeed and Bailey was eager to find out more about quantities and frequencies of deliveries so she could get a sense of the scale of their operation, as well as any insights into the nature of the organised crime group on the outside who were supplying the drugs. However, not wanting to appear too interested, she contented herself with an obedient nod.
Toni clapped her on the back and smiled, her gold tooth sparkling in the corner of her mouth. ‘You did good. You’re one of us now. And soon you’ll be reaping the rewards.’
50
Bailey closed her eyes and savoured the dreamlike piano chords of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ through the earpiece of the phone receiver.
‘Hello, Bailey,’ said Frank, the music cutting off abruptly.
Her eyes blinked open.
‘I’ve located the source of the drugs,’ she said, without any preamble. ‘It’s a prison officer by the name of Terry Brinkle.’
She then proceeded to recount the nature of the transaction in the chapel, the cash and the drugs involved.
‘Excellent work,’ he said when she had finished. ‘This is exactly the kind of information the drugs squad want to know.’
‘Alice must have been on the cusp of identifying Terry when she was murdered.’
‘Let me check something quickly,’ he said.
She heard the sound of computer keys tapping i
n the background.
He came back on the line: ‘I just looked at the prison officers’ rota. I got a copy off the murder investigation team. It says here that Terry was one of those who was on duty the night that Natalie was murdered.’
‘What about Alice and Poodle?’
‘Just a sec…’
She waited tensely as he checked, listening to his ragged breathing – he was evidently as excited as she was.
‘According to this,’ he said. ‘Terry was on duty when Alice was killed but not when Poodle was killed. He had a day off.’
‘Well, assuming that he just facilitated where necessary, he only actually needed to be on duty when Natalie was murdered as that required the most facilitation.’
‘I think we’ve narrowed it down sufficiently to point to Terry as their agent on the other side of the bars. Do you think he’s working alone, or do you think there are other members of staff involved? By the sounds of things, it’s quite a slick and well-organised operation with fairly significant quantities involved. I’d be surprised if he isn’t getting some kind of assistance.’
‘The gang haven’t mentioned anyone else and he’s the only member of staff I’ve conducted business with so far.’
‘Well, we’ll just focus on him for the time being. You’ve done excellent work in managing to identify him.’
‘Alice said he was well concealed. And he certainly makes an effort to be that way.’
‘He can’t afford not to be. Have you heard what they do to ex-screws inside?’
‘No. What?’
‘They chuck a cup of boiling water over them. Except that they put sugar in it. That makes it stick to you like napalm, so it melts your skin.’
‘Nice.’
‘And I’m sure he’s well aware of that. Which means when we catch him, he’ll do anything to avoid a custodial sentence. He’ll give up the gang in the blink of an eye if he thinks it’ll get him off. We’ll have much more leverage over him than we would over your average inmate. Once we’ve got him in an interrogation room, we’ll make him spill the beans on everything, including the organised crime group who are behind the supply of drugs to the prison.’
‘And then we can finally find out exactly what happened to Alice.’
‘Sure. We’ve just got to catch him. The important thing is to get him in the act. We need you to find out exactly when the next delivery is going to take place.’
51
It was raining outside, a soporific patter which threatened to lull her to sleep even though it was only three in the afternoon. Lying face-down on Poppy’s bunk, Bailey would almost have felt cosy in here, were it not for the persistent jabbing pain of the tattoo needle drilling its patterns into her flesh.
Poppy knelt astride her, concentrating intently on the intricacies of the design, pausing occasionally to dip the needle in the pot of ink that stood on the chair beside the bunk.
‘It’s like the penthouse suite up here,’ said Bailey. ‘You’re lucky – you’ve got a nice view. You can see over the walls.’
Poppy lifted the whirring tattoo gun from her back for a moment.
‘Sometimes when I’m bored I look out of the window and try to count the sails of the windsurfers on the reservoir. On hot days, I wish I could swim in there. It’s so close… yet so… you know.’
‘Well, actually, taking a shower in here is kind of like having a swim in the reservoir. That’s where the prison pipes in all its water from apparently.’
‘How d’you know that?’
‘Maggie cornered me and some others while we were waiting to use the phone. She’s a veritable fountain of knowledge about the prison.’
‘Oh god, I should have known! That woman is so bloody tedious! She always manages to pin you down and then she talks at you and you just have to stand there and listen to her.’
‘So I guess that means you’re not interested in hearing about the meaning of the name. I thought it was kind of interesting.’
‘It’s named after some river or something. Yeah I know all about that.’
‘She told me that when this place was built in the 1800s it used to draw its water directly from a subterranean tributary of the River Foxbrook. But the river dried up in the thirties after they dammed it in order to build the reservoir.’
‘I find history so boring. It’s all in the past. What’s the point of knowing about it? Who cares?’
‘Don’t they say those who forget history are condemned to repeat it? History helps us to learn from our mistakes. And mistakes are the reason we’re in here, aren’t they?’
‘I’m not sure that knowing about the local reservoir is going to make much of a difference.’
Bailey laughed. ‘Yeah, maybe you’re right.’
‘Talking of mistakes, though… How exactly did you get those scars? I know you said you don’t like to talk about it…’
As part of her undercover role, Bailey knew that she needed to have a plausible explanation for her scars. However, because people often felt awkward broaching the subject with her, she was generally able to avoid having to go into too much detail.
‘It was…’ Bailey paused to choose the appropriate words, ‘…an abusive partner.’
She knew how many of the women in here had been in abusive relationships of one form or another and that this answer wouldn’t sound particularly unusual.
‘He did that to you for no reason?’ asked Poppy.
‘I guess he had his reasons.’
Poppy’s fingertips traced the ridges of the scars on Bailey’s back, moving in a feather-light pattern across the disfigured flesh.
‘You flinched the first time I touched you. Before I’d even started tattooing you. Like it hurt you.’ She paused. ‘Did he…?’
‘Did he rape me?’
There was a silence between them. A long silence.
‘You don’t have to let it ruin your life, you know,’ said Poppy.
Bailey was faintly concerned that Poppy’s probing of this sensitive area would cause her to inadvertently lose emotional control and reveal everything. So she decided to change the subject.
‘That French writing on your chest,’ she said. ‘What does it say? I’ve been wanting to ask you ever since I saw it.’
‘It says “je meur de soif aupres de la fontaine”. Translated, that means, “I die of thirst next to the fountain”. It’s medieval French.’
‘I die of thirst next to the fountain,’ echoed Bailey. ‘Very poetic.’
‘That’s because it’s from a poem. The poem’s called “The Ballad of Contradictions”. It was written by a poet called François Villon in 1451. Have you heard of him?’
‘No.’
‘He lived in France in the fifteenth century. He wrote this earthy but incredibly beautiful poetry about the Parisian underclasses in the Middle Ages. He was kind of a proto-punk and also a lyrical genius. He disappeared from the history books in 1463 and no one knows what happened to him.’
Bailey was surprised. She’d imagined it saying something crasser and much more banal.
‘I thought you said you hated history.’
Poppy laughed. ‘I’ll make an exception for François Villon. He was a bit of an outlaw and he was always getting thrown in prison. He wrote some of his greatest poetry whilst he was in prison.’
‘Does the library here have any?’
‘Nah. I already checked. He’s a bit too obscure unfortunately.’
As she lay there on the bunk, Bailey reflected on how different Poppy was from the rest of the gang. She was more cultured for one thing, but she also seemed to have a sense of humanity about her that they quite blatantly lacked. Bailey realised that she was actually starting to like Poppy. But she had to be careful. Those kinds of feelings could sometimes be a dangerous thing when you were working undercover.
52
Bailey was impatient for something to happen, but she knew she couldn’t rush things. And what she definitely couldn’t do was to force some
thing to happen, however great the temptation was to steer events in the direction she desired.
One of the most important things she had been taught as an undercover police officer was not to be an agent provocateur. It was expressly forbidden to actively incite criminals to commit a crime in order to catch them, because if it ever came to light when the case went to court, then the case would immediately be scuppered. Not only that, it would in itself constitute an illegal act.
Her training had required her to learn the law inside out when it came to this area, so she knew exactly where the boundaries for acceptable action lay. The true art of being an undercover police officer instead resided in being able to insinuate oneself to the degree that one became part of the planning without actually getting the criminals to do anything they wouldn’t have done by themselves.
So she channelled her restive feelings into a clandestine observation schedule, secretly shadowing Terry over the course of several days as he performed his duties around the prison. Her aim was to build up a picture of his activities and gather any information that could be of use in constructing a case against him. Where she was able to, she eavesdropped on the conversations he had with other prison officers, learning in the process that he was a union representative and appeared to hate the Governor, and vice versa. Most of his dialogues seemed to revolve around various issues with ‘management’, such as overwork, personal safety and government cost-cutting.
One thing that did puzzle her, and one thing that she was unable to ascertain from just watching him, was the method that he was using to smuggle the drugs into the prison. She knew that the guards were subject to random bag checks when they entered and exited the prison. So maybe he just took a gamble each time and had always been lucky. But that seemed like a risky way of doing business. And given that it had been going on for a while, surely he should have been caught out by now. There had to be something else to it…