by Caro Savage
‘Fuck! I saw him delivering the drugs with my own eyes. He’s guilty as hell!’
‘As you well know, without a wire we can’t prove anything.’
She sighed in frustration. She understood how it worked.
‘It just doesn’t add up though,’ she said. ‘Something else is going on here. It’s not the gang who have been doing the killings. These murders… I’m getting the feeling they may not even be drug-related at all.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Forget about it. We’re pulling you out.’
‘What?! Why?!’
‘Like I said at the start, the funding for this operation is coming from the drugs squad, and that’s the primary reason that you were inserted – to uncover the drugs ring. But the problem is that Terry and the gang will be much more careful from now on, now that they know they’re being watched. There’s no telling how long it’ll be before they resume their trafficking operations to the extent where it makes sense to monitor them properly. So it’s been decided that it would be a waste of time and money to keep you in there any longer. It’s therefore been decided to terminate the operation due to budgetary restraints.’
‘But what about Alice?’
‘What about her?’
‘Don’t you want to find out who killed her?’
‘Of course I do. That’s why the murder detectives are there.’
‘But they aren’t any closer to finding out who did it than they were at the beginning. I’m the best shot you’ve got at finding out who killed her and you know it.’
‘Look, Bailey, it made sense for you to investigate the murders if it seemed like they might tie into the drugs. But now that’s finished for the time being, there’s no reason for you to be in there any longer. The operation is over. We’re pulling you out.’
‘I’m not leaving,’ she said bluntly.
‘You’re what?’ She could visualise the disbelieving expression on his face.
‘You heard me. I’m staying.’
‘That’s insubordination.’
‘I have to find out who killed Alice. And the other girls. And I have to find out why. I owe it to her.’
‘You’re letting it get personal. That’s not professional.’
‘You could have used someone else instead of me, but you knew Alice was my friend and you knew that because of that I’d be much more motivated to get to the bottom of whatever was happening in here. And now you want me to forget about her?’
‘I’m worried about you, Bailey,’ he said gently. ‘You’re in there all alone with no backup and I’m worried that the psychological pressure of working undercover is getting to you. Maybe I made a mistake in asking you to come back. Maybe you weren’t ready.’
‘You didn’t make a mistake. And I appreciate that you care about me. I know that you cared about Alice in the same way. And I know that you’re itching to find out what happened to her just like I am. You owe it to her almost as much as I do. She was one of us, remember?’
There was a silence on the other end of the phone. She knew she had him on the fence.
‘Bailey, I don’t have any choice in the matter. The drugs squad own this operation and they’re the ones who—’
‘Tell them I’m working a new angle,’ she said. ‘Tell them anything. Just stall them until I’ve found out a bit more information. Something’s going on in here, Frank. Something very odd. And I’m determined to get to the bottom of it. It killed Alice. And it killed Poodle, Natalie and Sharon. And if I’m not mistaken it’s going to kill more inmates before we’re through. And we don’t want their blood on our hands, do we?’
‘Nice to know you care about them even if they’d likely kill you if they found out who you really were.’
Ignoring him, she pressed on. ‘You’ll do it won’t you, Frank? You’ll stall the drugs squad for me. You’ll buy me a little more time.’
There was another silence, a longer one. And then an audible sigh.
‘All right, Bailey. You win. I forgot just how stubborn you can be. I guess that’s one of the reasons you’re so good. You never give up.’ He paused. ‘You’ve got two weeks, maximum. If you can’t establish anything solid by then, we’re pulling you out. End of story.’
65
Bailey lay on her bunk staring up at the ceiling, counting the cracks in the paintwork, speculating with a slight tinge of guilt that it was kind of nice to have the cell to herself for the time being. Privacy was at such a premium in this place. But, of course, for Sharon’s sake, she would have wished for different circumstances in which to have obtained that privacy.
An orange light filtered through the small window as the sun went down outside, the bars casting long shadows against one wall. She was now locked in for the evening and activity within the prison had died down to the sporadic clang here and there of a distant door opening and closing, the odd shout, the odd cry.
With Sharon’s demise, the overall sense of claustrophobia in the prison had grown even more cloying. Now as night fell, it began to impinge on Bailey more than ever. She lay there, acutely aware that, all alone, she was that much more vulnerable to someone sneaking in when she was asleep pulling out a knife and—
She shut off the thought. She couldn’t afford to let herself succumb to the fear that was enveloping the rest of the inmates otherwise she’d be no good to anyone.
Maybe Frank did have a point about her mental state. After all, here she was insisting on remaining locked up in this miserable and oppressive place surrounded by people who’d happily do her in without a second thought if they knew she was a policewoman. On top of that she was trapped in here with a killer who appeared to have a penchant for scalping and it wasn’t wildly unrealistic to suppose that she herself could be the next victim.
Maybe that last job had sent her round the bend. Maybe she should be paying more attention to Doctor Bodie…
Screw that.
She reminded herself why she was still here. She was here to find out who killed Alice and make sure that they faced the appropriate justice.
It was all about justice at the end of the day.
Justice was the spur that drove her onwards from deep within. Jennifer. An eight-year-old child standing permanently on the periphery of her consciousness, demanding justice, ever since she’d gone missing all those years before. Bailey couldn’t let her down.
She’d told Frank that she was their best shot. But was she really? Now that she knew it wasn’t the gang, she was right back at square one. The murder squad, with their team of dedicated detectives and their fancy technical resources, had been working on this since the beginning and had made little progress in their investigation. Did she really believe that she could do better than them just by herself, all in the space of the next two weeks? Doubts were starting to creep in…
She forcibly quashed them and turned her thoughts again to the evidence, rolling it over and over in her mind, trying to establish a new perspective from which to approach it.
She needed to think like a homicide detective.
She needed to think in terms of offender profiling.
What could she infer about the characteristics of the offender based upon their crime scene behaviour?
There was obviously one blatant element that linked all of the murders – the victims had all been scalped. And that was really all that she had to go on right now. So that had to be where she started.
She’d assumed that this mutilation had just been a gory way for the gang to strike fear into the inmate population. But if the murders weren’t connected to drugs and power, then it would seem that the scalping formed a reason in and of itself.
But who would do such a thing and for what reason? It made little sense, but whatever the motive, the perpetrator was clearly a very sick and dangerous individual.
There had to be some clue somewhere in this huge dilapidated dump. She lay there on her bunk and thought about everything that she’d seen and experienced over the past few weeks, raking ov
er her memories for any salient details. There had to be something. There had to be.
66
The Governor stood by the window in his office and watched the inmates trudging around in the prison yard on their morning exercise. It was at times like this that he was pleasantly reminded that everything he could survey, from horizon to horizon, fell under his domain. Admittedly, the horizon stopped dead at the huge perimeter wall that blocked out the rest of the outside world. But still, it felt good to be the one in charge, the one to whom all here had to defer. He wasn’t just the Governor, he was the Guv’nor and this was his manor. There was just one thing which gnawed away at this feeling of potency and that was the nagging issue of these blasted murders.
Of course they were shocking and tragic occurrences. But it really didn’t do to have these policemen here all the time. Not only was this his turf and he resented their infringement upon it, but they didn’t even seem to be doing their job very well as they still hadn’t caught anyone.
Moreover, his real worry was that this whole situation was in danger of drawing attention to the place. More specifically, he was worried that it would draw attention to him. It would make him look inept. And that wasn’t good for his career. Or for his knighthood. Because that’s what he was angling for – to make it onto the honours list next year. And an OBE wouldn’t cut it. No way. It was a knighthood or nothing as far as he was concerned. And he didn’t see why not. He had spent years running various prisons up and down the country, doing his bit for society. He had quite literally served his time and now he felt that it was only fair that he was rewarded for that.
That’s why he wished the murders would just go away. At least they hadn’t been plastered all over the media. Not yet. His strategy of containment appeared to be working so far. No one outside the prison seemed to be paying too much attention to what was going on inside. He just hoped that it would stay that way. Otherwise it could really damage his credibility with the Home Secretary.
He turned away from the window and stopped for a moment to admire a framed photograph that hung on the wall of his office. It had been taken at an official function and it depicted the Governor smiling broadly whilst shaking hands with the Home Secretary. The Governor had been working hard to make a good impression on him and he felt that he was getting close to the point where he could almost call him a friend.
With the Home Secretary behind his nomination for a knighthood, he knew that it would be a shoo-in, so he’d been progressively grooming him, slipping him hints here and there whenever they met at official functions and the like, with the hope that he would submit a nomination on the Governor’s behalf. The important thing was to appear humble and selfless and committed, which he was quite good at doing.
He looked at his watch. It was eleven o’clock. He felt a little buzz of pleasure. The Governor had a ritual which he meticulously stuck to every day. At eleven o’clock, he would sit down at his desk with his Danish pastry and coffee, with strict instructions not to be disturbed, and read through the latest issue of Yachting World. He often advised the inmates that having some form of daily routine would help them to deal with doing their time. Well, they had their routines and he had his.
He sat down at his desk, opened up the magazine, took a sip of his coffee and chewed on a mouthful of Danish pastry. He leafed through the reviews section, eagerly absorbing the technical specifications of the newest models, thinking again about the Beneteau cruiser he was planning to buy – a sleek white forty-footer with that tasteful wooden decking at the aft that you could turn into a bathing platform once you were anchored somewhere.
Maybe once he’d got his yacht, he’d invite the Home Secretary on board. After he’d got his knighthood of course. It wouldn’t look very humble to be swanning around on an expensive yacht before then. They would sit on the deck and drink fine brandy, maybe smoke a cigar, and chat like the patrician men that they were, about things like the state of the nation and the damn difficulty in finding a decent tailor these days.
He smiled to himself, lost in his fantasy, when the phone on his desk rang, jerking him out of his reverie. It was the prison switchboard.
He sighed in irritation. Didn’t they know better than to disturb him between eleven and eleven thirty? He could choose to not answer it. But then again… it might just be the Home Secretary returning one of his calls.
Better safe than sorry. He picked up the phone.
‘Yes, what is it?’ he said brusquely.
‘I have a journalist here on the line,’ replied the switchboard operator. ‘Shall I put her through?’
‘A journalist?’ He felt a bite of anxiety. ‘What does she want?’
‘She wants to know if you have any comment on the story that’s in today’s paper.’
‘Story? What story?’
67
Sitting by herself in the corner of the canteen, Bailey absently pushed the spaghetti carbonara around on her plate and reflected on how quickly they’d cleaned up the mess in the kitchen after Sharon’s death. The scene of crime officers had finished their business with admirable speed and minimal disruption to the inmates’ feeding routine. It was impressive, if rather clinical.
She looked up from her pasta to see Mel limping along holding a tray of food, her frizzy hair bobbing up and down, her big brown eyes rolling nervously from side to side.
A feeling had started to grow in Bailey that Mel wasn’t just some headcase. Sure she was unhinged, but there was something more to her, Bailey was certain. Mel knew something. She knew something about the murders. Any mention of scalping seemed to set her off, like that time she had suddenly stormed out of the canteen. Of course, Alice – her cellmate, who she’d liked – had been murdered in a particularly brutal fashion, and Mel did smoke way too much dope, but Bailey sensed that her reactions stemmed from something deeper and more significant than either of these things. Locked inside that crazy head of hers was some vital piece of information and Bailey was determined to find out what it was.
Someone sat down next to her, breaking her train of thought. It was Keisha. Then Rong sat down. Then Muscles. And then Poppy.
They bantered for a bit, distracting her from her observations of Mel.
After a short while, Toni came and joined them. She looked tense and preoccupied. They all fell silent. They knew better than to speak up when she was in a mood like this.
She looked like she was going to say something. They waited expectantly.
She scanned the canteen suspiciously then, turning her attention back to them, spoke in a very low voice, almost a whisper. ‘Turns out that fucking bitch was Old Bill.’
A preliminary chill shot through Bailey.
‘Who?’ said Keisha.
‘Remember that one who got it in the laundry a while back?’
‘She was a cop?!’ exclaimed Poppy.
‘No shit!’ growled Rong.
‘A fucking pig?!’
‘That fucking bitch!’
‘How did you find that out?’ asked Bailey, attempting to keep her voice level.
‘It was in today’s paper,’ said Toni. ‘Apparently the police tried to cover up her death, so her family went to the newspaper. Turns out that she was undercover right here in this prison.’
‘An undercover cop,’ muttered Keisha, glancing around apprehensively. ‘If there was one, there could be more. Sitting in here right now. We could be surrounded by them.’
Bailey took a deep breath and kept her calm. She scowled and looked over her shoulder in a similarly paranoid fashion.
‘Maybe that’s why Terry was arrested,’ said Rong. ‘What do you think, Toni?’
All eyes turned to Toni. She grimaced, her gold tooth glinting.
‘Stay vigilant and look out for anyone who’s acting suspicious.’
Her eyes rested on Bailey for what Bailey thought was a fraction of a second longer than they needed to. Or was she just imagining it?
At the first opportunity, Bailey made
her way to the phones, where she waited impatiently in the queue for a booth to become free.
She was on edge, acutely aware that, thanks to the newspaper story, many of those around her now had their eyes open to the possibility that there could be an undercover police officer in their midst. It lurked there in every glance in her direction, every veiled whisper. But she knew that it was mostly just in her head and she fought to keep those negative thoughts at bay. No one knew who she really was and she was going to make sure it stayed that way. So long as she kept her cool, she would be fine.
A phone became free. She scurried over to it and hurriedly punched in her PIN, followed by Frank’s number.
‘Hello, Sullivan Knight Solicitors,’ said Rita in her customary sing-song tones.
‘It’s Bailey Pike speaking. I’d like to talk to Mr Knight please,’ said Bailey, reciting the words as if by rote.
‘Just putting you through.’
She got to listen to less than two seconds of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ before Frank came on the line. He dived in immediately, clearly expecting her call.
‘Bailey, it’s as much of a surprise to me as it is to you. The first I knew of it was this morning’s paper, but there was no way for me to get hold of you. Is your cover still intact?’
‘I think so. I can’t tell for sure. But either way, this revelation is something I just don’t need right now.’
‘I’m really pissed off with the family,’ he huffed. ‘I thought I made it quite clear to them that this kind of action could endanger ongoing police operations.’
‘Well, what’s done is done. I’ll just have to be that bit more careful.’ She paused. ‘One thing it did prove though is that up until this morning the gang had no idea that Alice was an undercover police officer, which only serves to reinforce my belief that they didn’t kill her, or any of the others for that matter.’
‘But are you any closer to finding out who actually did do it and why? I told the drugs squad you’d found a new angle and that seemed to satisfy them for the time being, but time is running out, Bailey.’