Jailbird

by Caro Savage

  ‘You don’t need to remind me.’

  68

  Bailey stood just outside the cell, to one side of the open door, eavesdropping on their conversation, trying to ascertain what they were saying above the soporific bass beat of the dub.

  ‘You know, I see him as a chocolate digestives man,’ she could hear Kay saying. ‘Dark chocolate, obviously. There’s something classic about them which I think would appeal to him.’

  ‘No way,’ said Seema. ‘He’d be into something Belgian, like those butter waffle-style ones that they like to eat over there. Or no, actually, the more I think about it, he’d probably go for Oreo cookies. All those years in Hollywood, he surely would have gone native by now, certainly in terms of biscuits anyway.’

  ‘You’re missing my point. We’re not talking about what he actually eats in real life. We’re talking hypothetically here. We’re imagining a biscuit as an embodiment of man and man as an embodiment of a biscuit. There is a human spectrum and a biscuit spectrum and we are trying to establish, in his case, where those two spectrums intersect.’

  ‘I see… okay. We’re getting kind of metaphysical here.’

  It didn’t take long for Bailey to realise who they were talking about. After all, their conversations appeared to revolve around a fairly limited set of topics.

  She turned into the cell and leant against the doorway.

  ‘I think he’d probably go for Garibaldi,’ she said. ‘As biscuits go, they possess a certain masculine quality, don’t you think? And that definitely makes them worthy of a world-class kickboxer.’

  Kay, who was sitting on the desk chair, looked up slowly, squinting at her through the miasma of dope smoke that filled the cell.

  ‘Oh… it’s you again. Haven’t seen you for a while. Got any more gear?’

  Bailey reached into her tracksuit pocket and pulled out the original bag of weed she’d purchased from Keisha several weeks earlier. Not having touched it since the last time she’d been in this cell, she still had a fair amount left over.

  She tossed it over to Kay, sitting at the table, whose eyes flared in appreciation as she eagerly pulled open the little bag and began to construct a new joint.

  Seema peered up at Bailey from the lower bunk. Her face creased in thought.

  ‘Garibaldi, huh? A controversial choice.’ She turned to Mel who was slumped next to her. ‘What do you think, Mel?’

  Mel was just staring vacantly into middle space. She hadn’t demonstrated the slightest awareness of Bailey’s presence. Seema nudged her.

  ‘Uhhh?’ said Mel, blinking and shaking her head clear.

  ‘Garibaldi? Jean-Claude? Yes? No?’

  Mel looked slowly at each of them in turn with her big bloodshot eyes, befuddled as to what they were talking about.

  Bailey sat down on the edge of the bunk next to Mel and waited for Kay to finish making the joint. After a minute or so, Kay held up the completed spliff with a flourish.

  ‘I think that’s definitely a nine out of ten.’

  She lit it, took a few deep drags and then passed it to Bailey.

  Bailey once again pretended to participate, being careful not to inhale. She needed to be on the ball for the next stage of this little plan.

  As soon as it looked like they were relaxed with her presence in the cell, she yawned and spoke casually as if she was just starting a random conversation.

  ‘You know, me and you have got something in common now, Mel.’

  Mel frowned in puzzlement. ‘Uh?’

  ‘Yeah. Both of us had cellmates who were murdered. Your one, Ally, was first. Then my one, Sharon just the other day, in the kitchen.’

  Mel convulsed slightly, eyeing her warily.

  ‘Then there were those other two as well,’ continued Bailey. ‘Poodle and Natalie. That makes four in total.’

  Mel twitched reflexively at the mention of the murders. She tried to suppress her agitation, but her fingers drummed against the surface of the bunk. Bailey observed her reactions closely.

  ‘Aren’t you all a bit worried?’ asked Bailey, addressing the question to the three of them. ‘I’m a bit worried that the next time it could be me or you.’

  ‘I am totally shitting myself,’ said Seema, looking around fearfully. ‘The prison is supposed to protect the world from us. But who protects us from the prison?’

  ‘No one’s going to protect us,’ Kay scoffed. ‘The more of us that get killed the better. Don’t you see? It’s all part of their plan. Each one of us that dies, it’s one less mouth for the taxpayer to feed.’

  ‘The weird thing is that they were all scalped,’ said Bailey. ‘Don’t you think that’s weird?’

  Mel tensed. Her eyes rolled even more. Her knuckles turned white as she gripped the bedspread, the material bunching up around her. The tendons stood out on her arms, hands and neck.

  ‘What do you reckon, Mel?’ Bailey asked, leaning in a little closer to Mel. ‘Why do you think they were scalped?’

  ‘Uh-oh,’ muttered Seema. ‘I don’t think you want to be asking her about that.’

  ‘Ah let her…’ said Kay. ‘This could be interesting.’

  ‘What do you think, Mel?’ said Bailey, trying to probe a little further without sounding too much like a policewoman. ‘Why on earth were they scalped?’

  A low guttural moan came from Mel. Bailey shuddered, genuinely disturbed by the torment and horror which she detected in the depths of those bloodshot brown eyes.

  ‘You’ve done it now,’ said Seema, edging away from Mel on the bunk as if she were a bomb about to explode.

  Mel swung her head round to skewer Bailey with a deranged stare. Bailey recoiled slightly.

  ‘Him a duppy,’ hissed Mel. ‘Duppies always get yuh inna de end! De duppies gwine kill wi aal!’

  ‘Duppy?’ said Bailey. ‘What’s a duppy?’

  ‘Jamaican folklore bullshit,’ said Kay.

  ‘Mi told yuh,’ uttered Mel to no one in particular. ‘Mi told yuh him was bak. Mi told yuh! Ah him. Him ah bak! AH HIM!’

  Her entire body began to twist in anguish while a subdued moaning issued from her throat.

  Mel’s shaking hand shot out, her fingers scrabbling for a sheet of paper from the bed beside her. She started folding it without even looking at it, making neat precise creases. She knew what she was doing.

  Bailey leaned closer to Mel, who was staring into middle space whilst simultaneously folding the paper. She appeared to be mumbling something.

  ‘…ertresorertresorertresorertresor…’

  Bailey couldn’t make out what it was. She leaned in closer still.

  ‘What’s that, Mel?’

  Mel ignored her, the paper rustling. Seema and Kay were now sitting as far back away from Mel as their respective corners of the cell would allow them.

  Mel burbled the same noise over and over again like a Buddhist mantra while the paper rustled, a small origami animal beginning to take form.

  ‘…ertresorertresorertresorertresorertresor…’

  ‘I can’t hear you, Mel,’ said Bailey getting closer, close enough that she could feel Mel’s hot breath on her face. ‘Speak up.’

  ‘If you know what’s good for you,’ whispered Seema. ‘You’ll stop right there.’

  But Bailey pressed on. ‘Mel. Why do you think they’re scalped?’

  Mel suddenly stopped folding the paper. A half-completed origami duck fell between her legs. Both Kay and Seema watched it drop in horror. They had never seen Mel not complete a duck.

  Mel’s eyes suddenly focused on Bailey. She spat a single word at her.

  ‘HAIRDRESSA!’

  Then like a banshee Mel was up and had her hands around Bailey’s throat, wrestling her to the ground.

  Before she had time to react, Bailey was off the bunk and on her back on the concrete floor with Mel sitting astride her, screaming and throttling her.

  Bailey gasped and tried to speak but she could hardly even breathe. ‘Uhhh… Mel… ughhh… pu
h-lease…’

  Mel’s mouth was wide open, yellow teeth bared, emitting a wail like an air-raid siren that just would not stop. Her bloodshot eyes stared into Bailey’s with the force of industrial lasers.

  Bailey wasn’t weak, but she was no match for a strength drawn from a deep reservoir of madness.

  ‘MI KILL HIM! MI FUCKING KILL HIM!’ screeched Mel.

  ‘Go for it, Mel!’ Bailey heard Kay shout in encouragement. She was enjoying the spectacle.

  Mel’s fingers were like metal rods bending into the soft flesh of her neck, squeezing her windpipe, cutting off the blood in the arteries in her neck. Bailey tried to lever her fingers under Mel’s hands, but it was no use. It was as if they were welded to her neck.

  With a horrifying finality, Bailey suddenly realised that Mel would kill her unless she did something fast. She had unleashed something beyond her control.

  She clenched her fists and put them together and, with all the force her fading strength could muster, she punched Mel in both breasts.

  Mel’s wailing suddenly went off-pitch with a high squeak of pain and, for just a moment, her grip weakened on Bailey’s neck and that was all Bailey needed. Using a jiu-jitsu counter she had learnt in defensive groundwork training, she pushed Mel’s right elbow outwards, causing her to lose balance and topple sideways. She then got her knee up underneath her and kicked downwards hard, knocking Mel’s leg away.

  She flipped Mel over on her back, wrenching her hands from her throat. Suddenly their positions were reversed. Bailey pinned one of Mel’s arms down with her knee and the other down with her hand and used her remaining arm to shove an elbow across her neck to force her head back against the floor.

  Bailey caught her breath. God, it felt good to be able to breathe. She leaned in close to Mel’s contorted face.

  ‘Mel, I’m not the killer,’ she panted. ‘The killer is out there. Not in here.’

  Mel gasped and wheezed. Her eyes rolled. Once again Mel wasn’t there. She was in some other place.

  Bailey braced herself and then jumped off Mel as fast as she could, lurching to the far side of the cell and into the doorway. But Mel just lay there on the ground panting, gibbering, tears running from her eyes, her energy spent.

  ‘Bor-ing,’ said Kay.

  ‘Now you know why we call her Crazy Mel,’ said Seema.

  69

  The tattoo gun whirred as the tiny needle etched its marks into the flesh of her lower back, Poppy pausing intermittently to dip it into the pot of ink beside her.

  Coming here was still a necessity for Bailey if she realistically wanted to maintain her cover. Although the focus of her investigation had now shifted away from the gang, she couldn’t just decide to part company with them unless she wanted to discover exactly what ‘blood out’ entailed, and she was in no rush to do that.

  Anyhow, she’d grown to look forward to these sessions, having become accustomed to the pain, and found it satisfying to witness the gradual completion of what was shaping up to be a beautiful and intricate tattoo, even if ultimately she might have to get rid of it.

  She heard Poppy suddenly gasp.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Bailey.

  ‘You’ve got a nasty bruise on your neck.’

  ‘It’s nothing. I had a run-in with one of the more unbalanced inmates.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Poppy, a dangerous tone in her voice. ‘I’ll sort her out.’

  ‘Really, it’s nothing. It looks worse than it is. I honestly can’t feel a thing.’

  ‘If you say so…’

  Bailey felt Poppy’s fingertips tenderly brush across the bruised tissue. They lingered there for a short while, then they trailed down to the hard ridges of scar tissue and cigarette burns which adorned her neck and upper back.

  ‘Tell me about him,’ said Poppy.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your ex. The one who did this to you.’

  Bailey was silent for a few moments. She desperately craved the catharsis of being able to spill the truth to Poppy, but there was only so much she could reveal.

  ‘I should never have got involved with him in the first place.’

  ‘How did you meet him?’

  ‘It was through work.’

  It had all started when the police arrested Spyros Scafidi, a Greek national who occupied a key logistical role in the car theft ring.

  The ring was operated by a notorious and well-established London crime family who had their tentacles in many places, car theft being one of their more lucrative enterprises.

  They targeted top-of-the-range vehicles, premium brands, which they acquired through all manner of means, from keyless theft to straightforward carjacking. The stolen cars were taken to a network of scrapyards and lock-up garages which the gang owned around the country, where the necessary work was done on them to obscure their dodgy provenance. Then they were sold abroad in the kinds of places where law enforcement was slack, corruption was rife and wealthy people wanted nice cars without asking too many questions about where they came from.

  And that’s where Spyros entered the picture. He was in charge of getting the cars to their destinations without anyone realising they were stolen. He worked out the routes, manipulated the paperwork and conducted the necessary liaisons with crooked customs officials.

  It was largely thanks to him that the operation was so successful, netting the gang tens of millions of pounds a year. But Interpol had been tracking him for a while, suspecting his involvement in the movement of stolen cars. And so it was that, following a joint surveillance operation with the UK National Crime Agency, they finally pounced on him. On his laptop, they found material that incontrovertibly linked him to the theft of a large number of vehicles in the UK. To save himself a heavy jail sentence, he turned informant and agreed to help the authorities infiltrate the gang’s operation so they could gather enough hard evidence to nail the ringleaders. With his help, a sequence of undercover police officers were inserted into the organisation, each one vouching for the next. Bailey was fourth in the chain, infiltrated as a secretary into their modern, airy west London offices.

  The place was clean, slick, open-plan. It resembled the offices of any successful mid-sized business. On the surface, the people there were operating a bona fide business focused on the sale and export of prestige cars. They talked in terms of revenue projections and market penetration, pricing strategy and supply chain, lead generation and sales pipelines. They took it seriously. It almost sounded legitimate.

  Her job was mundane – answering the phone, taking minutes of meetings, making travel arrangements – routine administrative tasks that she diligently performed whilst carefully fostering a meek and obedient demeanour.

  But beneath the boring clerical work, she was quietly gathering evidence against them: secretly recording their conversations, copying computer files onto a memory stick, taking down details of names, places, dates and transactions – constructing a picture of how they operated and who did what, with the aim of reaching that critical point where the police could swoop in and arrest them all.

  Despite the run-of-the-mill, almost anodyne, nature of the office, she didn’t let herself get complacent for one second. She was under no illusions as to what would happen to her if the gang sussed her out. She was aware of just how ruthless they were and knew that for them murder was a necessary tool of the business when circumstances dictated.

  The day it all went wrong had started out just like any other day there – typing up agendas and sorting out air tickets, followed by a meeting with a prospective client from South Africa. The meeting was supposed to be held in the lobby of an upmarket central London hotel. Meetings were often held there because it impressed clients and promoted the image of the gang as trustworthy, respectable businessmen, which is how they liked to see themselves.

  It was whilst she was in the back of the car, on the way to the meeting, sandwiched between two particularly brawny members of the gang, their muscles bursting out of
their Savile Row suits, that she realised that something was amiss.

  Instead of driving into central London, she noticed that they were in fact on the A12 heading eastwards out of the city in the direction of Essex. At that point a bad feeling began to gnaw at her.

  ‘Just got to make a little detour first,’ was the answer when she casually enquired where they were going.

  If a problem arose while she was working undercover, she would send a coded text message to her police colleagues to let them know that something was up, and if need be they could triangulate her position from her mobile phone signal.

  She reached into her bag. But her phone wasn’t there. A bolt of alarm shot through her. She rooted further. It definitely wasn’t in there.

  ‘Lost something?’

  ‘My phone.’ She sighed, playing ditzy. ‘Silly me. Must have left it on my desk.’

  But she knew they must have taken it from her bag when she wasn’t looking. They were one step ahead of her. Something was definitely up.

  But she couldn’t afford to panic, or to show any kind of fear. That would have given the game away for sure. So she sat there, quietly trying to anticipate, with a mounting dread, what lay in wait for her when they reached their final destination.

  The traffic thinned out as they entered a bleak industrial estate situated just beyond the north-eastern outskirts of the city – big grey warehouses, empty units, vacant weed-strewn lots… and the location of one of their scrapyards.

  The scrapyard had big concrete walls with broken bottles set into the cement along the top. The metal gate rolled back to let them in and then clanged shut behind them. The place was filled with stacks of rusted cars, towering five or six high – write-offs destined for scrap. All around, among the dirty puddles in the pitted ground, lay bits of engines and other car parts. Over to one side was a row of grim-looking concrete workshops, outside of which were two huge, slavering Rottweilers chained to a metal post.