by Caro Savage
Frank stroked his chin thoughtfully as he mulled over the idea. ‘I see your point. But it’s a little tenuous though. What put you onto this?’
‘There’s this inmate, Mel. She’s what they call a fraggle…’
She proceeded to tell him what Mel had told her, leaving out any mention of duppies. When she had finished, he fixed her with a faintly amused look.
‘A claim about a serial killer coming from an ex-crack whore who you yourself said is a bit…’ he made the ‘crazy’ gesture with his finger. ‘It’s not exactly the strongest of sources to go on. But then again… it would be remiss to disregard it completely.’
‘I did some research on it.’
She took out the book that she had borrowed from the library. A book was one of the few items that inmates were permitted to bring to a visit. She looked around surreptitiously. No one appeared to be paying them any attention.
She put it on the table and slid it over to him.
He picked it up and looked sceptically at the tacky cover with its embossed silver lettering.
‘Cold Cases Volume Three? Looks like the kind of thing some hack knocked out in five minutes.’
‘It was all they had in the prison library. Listen…’
She took it from him, opened it up and started to read to him in a low voice.
‘The Hairdresser. A serial killer who preyed on sex workers in the red-light districts of Wolverhampton and Walsall. He was dubbed the Hairdresser by the local media because of his obsession with cutting off and taking his victims’ hair. Six prostitutes fell prey to his cruel knife. The killings all happened within an eight-month period during 2014 and then stopped abruptly and were never repeated. He was never captured. What happened to the Hairdresser? Did he die? Did he give up? Did he just get tired of it? Or is he waiting for the ruckus to die down so he can strike again?’
‘Cold cases are usually cold for a good reason,’ said Frank. ‘I remember when all that was going on. They had a shitload of police on the investigation. And they didn’t manage to solve it. It turned out to be one big dead-end.’
‘I remember once when I was a kid,’ said Bailey in a soft voice, ‘we went to stay with some friends of my parents who had a smallholding in the countryside. One night we woke up to the most godawful squawking noise. The next morning, we went outside to see what had happened. It turned out that a fox had managed to get inside the chicken coop. There were white feathers and blood everywhere. And dead chickens. Lots of dead chickens. Torn to pieces. Once the fox had got in there, they were…’ She grasped for the right word.
‘Sitting ducks?’ suggested Frank drily.
‘The women in here fit his victim type exactly – ex-hookers… lost women. But this is a group of victims with a difference. They’re all enclosed like chickens in a coop. They’re easy prey.’
‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’ he said, eyeing the prison officers making their slow circuit of the visit hall.
She followed his gaze and nodded. ‘Maybe the heat got too much in the Midlands so he decided to move away somewhere else, to lie low for a bit.’
‘And he just conveniently decided to get a job as a prison officer?’ Frank raised one eyebrow doubtfully.
‘It’s a perfectly viable explanation. Decent salary, financial security, and the chance to have access on a daily basis to exactly the kind of women he likes to hunt. Plus he has the protection of a uniform. He’s in a position of trust and authority. It would also explain how he manages to get around the prison so easily and so elusively – he has his own set of keys.’
‘Prison officers are vetted before they can work in a prison. They have to undergo fairly detailed background checks, criminal record checks, that kind of thing.’
‘You know as well as I do that if he was never caught for anything before, then nothing untoward would have shown up in any checks. And even if he had, I’m sure you’re also aware that any dedicated criminal can quite easily source a new identity, a clean identity, which means it’d be no problem getting around those background checks.’
Frank conceded her point with a nod and a raised eyebrow.
‘Still,’ he said, ‘the Hairdresser is a cold case, which means it’s an angle that’s only worth pursuing if you can find something new, something solid, to go on. And at the moment you don’t appear to have anything of the sort. Cheap crime books and crazy ex-hookers don’t make the cut. You should know me by now, Bailey.’
She did indeed know only too well the kind of stringent standards by which Frank insisted on operating.
‘Something solid,’ she sighed. ‘Sure…’
‘And don’t forget,’ he added, tapping his watch. ‘You’re running out of time.’
74
Bailey lay on her bunk ruminating, listening to the pipes gurgle, staring at the wall watching the shadows grow longer as the sun went down. She curled her hair around her fingers and let it uncurl…
Frank was right. Time was running short and she desperately needed something more to go on than the unsubstantiated assertions of one of the less sane inmates in the prison. The idea of the Hairdresser was enticing but ultimately futile if she couldn’t establish anything concrete.
She swung herself off the bunk and began to pace the cell impatiently, back and forth like a caged animal, willing some kind of solution to come to her.
But nothing did.
She sighed in frustration and sat down heavily on the bare mattress of the lower bunk, Sharon’s former bunk. Sharon hadn’t yet been replaced with a new cellmate and Bailey supposed that in the meantime she could switch her bedding from the upper bunk to the lower bunk. After all, in prison the lower bunk was regarded as the more preferable bunk to possess – you weren’t right up by the glare of the ceiling light and you didn’t need to climb up and down all the time.
Bailey ran her hand over the mattress and decided against switching. She’d kind of got used to the upper bunk and, if truth be told, despite her professed lack of superstition, she felt slightly uneasy about sleeping in a bunk whose previous occupant had been brutally murdered.
Poor old Sharon.
Bailey hadn’t particularly liked her, but no one deserved a fate like that.
She recalled the gruesome scene and that single cryptic word that Sharon had scrawled in her own blood as she lay dying.
Flee.
A chilling warning.
There was something eerie about it. It brought to mind Mel’s duppies.
A momentary wave of goosebumps rippled across her flesh. She instantly quelled those thoughts. The supernatural did not constitute a feasible explanation.
But now, the more she thought about it, the more Bailey was sure that the answer lay there, locked within that single scrawl, just beyond reach.
What exactly had Sharon seen in the kitchen? Why had she even been in the kitchen? Bailey knew that she worked there, but the murder had taken place outside of work hours, so she must have gone there for some other reason.
She lay down on Sharon’s bunk, placing her hands behind her head, hoping to absorb by osmosis some new insight. She cast her mind back to Sharon and her schemes. Had she had some kind of blackmail scheme going? Had she been murdered because of it? If so, it must tie into the other murders somehow.
On the morning that Sharon had been murdered, Bailey had asked her what she was doing that day. Sharon had tapped the side of her nose. A secret.
As a police detective, Bailey had become accustomed to observing and memorising the minutiae of people’s behaviour. And, as she recalled, Sharon had done that same gesture one time before…
It had been when she’d been talking about that fight in the canteen.
Knowledge is power.
That’s what she’d said as she’d tapped the side of her nose.
Maybe it was just a mannerism. Maybe the connection was too tenuous.
Or maybe not.
75
Agata looked attractive from a dista
nce with her blonde hair and exaggerated pout, but up close it became apparent that she had bad skin and poorly maintained teeth.
Bailey hovered nearby in the yard, covertly studying her as she stood alone in the shadow of the east wall smoking a cigarette.
Of the two inmates who’d been fighting in the canteen, Agata was the only one Bailey had been able to locate. She’d followed her around for a bit, picking up her name in the process, waiting for an opportune time to make an approach. And right now looked ideal, seeing as she was all by herself.
Bailey pulled out a cigarette and put it between her lips. She made a show of patting her pockets and frowning.
She then sauntered casually over to Agata, the cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. Agata eyed her guardedly – as far as she was concerned, Bailey was a complete stranger.
‘Got a light?’ asked Bailey.
Agata held out a pack of safety matches. Bailey smiled, took them, struck one and lit her cigarette.
She handed the matches back.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
Agata nodded in acknowledgement.
Bailey sucked in a lungful of smoke, immediately feeling dizzy from the head rush. It had been at least five years since she’d last smoked a cigarette.
‘You sure beat the shit out of that girl in the canteen the other day,’ she said. ‘That was you, wasn’t it?’
Agata threw back her head and laughed, blowing out a stream of smoke.
‘Yeah that bitch had it coming.’ Her accent was strong. Bailey guessed Polish.
‘Come to think of it I haven’t seen her around recently.’
‘She got transferred to another prison.’
That explained why Bailey hadn’t been able to find her. She took another puff on the cigarette.
‘She was accusing you of stealing her boyfriend or something like that, wasn’t she?’
‘I can’t help it if he preferred me to her.’ Agata puffed up a little, like she was bragging.
‘Fair dues. Although… surely it’s pointless to argue over someone who’s outside the prison?’
‘Who said he was outside the prison?’ Agata smiled slyly.
The implications of what she was saying sunk in. If he was inside the prison, then this boyfriend had to be a member of staff.
Bailey knew that conducting sexual relationships with inmates was highly forbidden for prison staff. The legal term was ‘misconduct in public office’. It was the kind of offence that resulted in jail time. They always dished out heavy sentences in order to deter future offenders. And like Frank had said, it wasn’t a nice experience to be a former prison officer behind bars.
Was this the knowledge that Sharon had acquired during the course of the fight? She had been sitting very close to them at the time, at a neighbouring table, and so she could have overheard something to that effect. It was exactly the kind of juicy secret she would have relished holding over somebody.
Had she been attempting to blackmail a member of staff?
Had that person murdered her?
Was that same member of staff responsible for the other murders?
Had Sharon unwittingly picked a vicious killer as the subject of her extortion attempt? Surely she would have been a bit more careful had she known the true nature of the person she was trying to blackmail.
The unanswered questions tripped over and over in Bailey’s mind.
‘So who is it?’ she said in what she hoped was a jokey conspiratorial whisper. ‘Let me in on your little secret.’
Agata laughed and shook her head. ‘I’m not going to tell you that. If everyone knew about it then it wouldn’t be fun any more.’
Bailey wanted to grab her by the lapels and shake the identity out of her but instead she smiled and shrugged like it was no big deal.
Agata crushed her cigarette underfoot, winked at Bailey and walked off.
76
It was just past midnight and the monolithic prison slumbered beneath a bright full moon. Not everyone was asleep however…
Mel cowered on the floor in the far corner of her cell. Her eyes were wide open. A low keening moan of fear issued from the back of her throat.
Nighttime was when duppies liked to come out. That was when she had to be most vigilant. Sometimes her cellmate would wake up and tell her to be quiet. But her cellmate didn’t understand. Mel envied her ignorance as she lay there snoring lightly.
She looked around the cell, peering up at the window, squinting once again into the shadows by the door, alert for any possible intrusion, her paranoia sharpened and amplified by all the dope she had smoked the previous day.
The prison might have big thick walls and locks and bars, but these were no obstacle for a duppy. Duppies could walk straight through walls and locked doors. Or sometimes they liked to transform themselves into animals, like a fly or a rat, and get into a place through some unprotected crack.
That was the thing with duppies. They could be anything. They could be anywhere. You never knew for sure. That’s why she was so scared.
When she was a child, her grandmother had told her plenty of stories about the duppies which haunted the hills and jungles of rural Jamaica. Rollin’ Calf, Whooping Boy, Bubby Susan, Ol’ Higue…
There was a whole host of them to be scared of, all of them grotesque-looking and frightening, and each with their own horrible method of killing you. If you were foolish or unlucky enough to be walking around at night when one of them was around, then they would hunt you down and kill you for sure.
‘Who are they? What are they?’ she would ask her grandmother.
‘Dem be de duppies of a people dere long ’fore our people.’
The evil souls of the ancient dead wandering the earth…
But her grandmother had warned her that it was your run-of-the-mill duppy that you had to be most careful of, because those were the ones that looked human. These were most often the angry souls of wronged people seeking vengeance or the malevolent souls of particularly bad people who couldn’t bear to give up their twisted ways.
More worryingly though, her grandmother had told her that duppies weren’t just limited to the realm of the dead. In fact, you could even be a duppy yourself and not know it. Her grandmother had explained that when you fell asleep your soul wandered off and did things. You woke up and remembered those things as dreams. But maybe, in some cases, you actually did them for real…
Either way, all Mel knew was that duppies existed and they were something to be very, very afraid of. The only real way to get rid of a duppy was to get an obeah man – a witch doctor – to carry out a special ritual. But there were no obeah men in here to do that. That was the problem.
Whether the Hairdresser was the soul of a living person or a dead person, or whether he was some kind of ancient demon, she didn’t know. But the way he got around like he did without ever getting caught and the nasty things he did to his victims put her in no doubt that he was quite definitely a duppy.
A small movement on the floor suddenly snagged her attention. She froze. Something had scuttled out from under her bunk.
A cockroach.
She stared petrified as it crawled along the edge of the cell towards her.
The Hairdresser…
At any moment he would change back into human form and pull out his knife and then… and then…
She whimpered and swallowed, barely able to draw breath, so constricted was her throat by the raw fear which gripped her entire body.
The cockroach paused in a beam of moonlight, its long black antennae wavering. She braced herself for the transformation. But it didn’t happen. The cockroach just sat there. She could feel it watching her.
‘Mi duh nah fear duppies,’ she whispered hoarsely, but she had no faith in what she was saying.
The cockroach edged forward to within a few centimetres of her big toe. She jerked her foot back.
She reached into the tangle of her afro and pulled out her razor blade. It was decep
tively light and insubstantial, but it was deadly if used in the right way. And she knew how to use it.
She held it out in front of her between thumb and forefinger, the dull steel glinting in the moonlight.
‘Guh wey evil duppy,’ she hissed.
The cockroach twiddled its antennae a little more, then it turned and scuttled away underneath the cell door and out into the prison.
She breathed a sigh of relief.
No duppy was going to get Mel tonight.
No way.
No. way.
77
Bailey looked at her watch. In forty minutes’ time she was supposed to meet up with Toni and the rest of the gang out in the yard. No reason had been given for the meeting, only that it was of crucial importance that they all attend.
Forty minutes. That should hopefully give her enough time to do what she needed to do.
Casually lounging against the banister, she turned her attention back to the second-floor landing of C-Wing which she had been observing from her position at the juncture of the four house-blocks.
Her concentration was focused specifically on the fourth cell on the right, the one she had been staking out all morning.
After a few minutes more, Agata finally emerged, walking in the direction of the central stairwell. She passed by, oblivious to Bailey’s presence. As she did so, Bailey noticed that she appeared to be wearing make-up – a hint of mascara and a touch of lip gloss, if she wasn’t mistaken.
Bailey waited a few moments, then pushed herself off the banister and followed her down the metal stairs, keeping at a safe distance. Agata descended all the way down to the ground floor and made her way across the atrium, looking at her watch as if she had an appointment to keep. She disappeared down the stairwell which led to the prison basement. Bailey sped up her pace, determined not to lose her.