Jailbird

by Caro Savage

  In the basement it became much harder to follow her discreetly. Ahead of her, Agata padded rapidly along the poorly lit corridor, the bulbs flickering unevenly overhead. She walked past the workshop up to the far end of the corridor.

  Agata halted and glanced behind her. Bailey stopped sharp and drew back behind a corner. She peeked around and saw that Agata was standing by the door to a room of some sort. With one last glance around, she opened the door and entered the room, closing the door behind her.

  Bailey waited a few moments, then walked up to the door. It had a sign on it saying ‘ELECTRICITY 2’. Presumably it was some kind of maintenance room which contained fuse boxes and the like.

  She needed to find some sort of concealed vantage point close by. There was a door opposite. She tried the handle. The door opened. The room beyond was small, dark and musty and it appeared to be stacked full of metal bunk-bed frames. It was a storage cupboard. Bailey squeezed in and pulled the door almost closed, so it was just open a crack.

  She stood there, peeking through the crack across the corridor. She waited for what felt like ages. What was Agata doing in there? Was she waiting for someone to arrive or was that person already in there?

  She squinted at her watch in the darkness. She had been standing there for just over ten minutes. Just then, the door opposite creaked open. She looked up.

  Agata stood there in the corridor, barely a metre away from Bailey. Up close, Bailey could see that she looked flushed and she had a light sheen of perspiration across her skin. Her hair was ruffled and her make-up was slightly smudged. She brushed a loose strand of hair out of her eyes and walked off up the corridor the way she had come, but at a jauntier pace.

  Bailey waited there, tense.

  About thirty seconds later, a second figure emerged from the dimness of the electricity room.

  A prison officer.

  Dylan.

  She’d seen him around but had never conversed with him in anything more than the most cursory manner. In his early to mid-thirties, he was handsome in a rugged way, with sandy-coloured hair, a tanned complexion and very light blue eyes.

  He stood there for a few moments adjusting the cinch on his belt, softly whistling some tune that she didn’t recognise. Well, well, she thought. Dylan had clearly been engaged in a bit of ‘misconduct in public office’.

  As Bailey had suspected, Agata had been dolled up because she was going to meet her boyfriend. And her boyfriend was Dylan. Presumably, he was who the two inmates had been fighting over in the canteen. In fact, now that she thought back, Bailey recalled that Dylan had been in the canteen chatting to Amber just before the fight had kicked off. His presence there had probably triggered the outburst between his two rival lovers.

  Had Sharon been blackmailing Dylan? Had Dylan killed Sharon? If so, did that mean he had also killed the others?

  Bailey felt something crawl across her foot. She looked down. It was a rat. Its thick fleshy tail dragged across the top of her trainer. She reflexively jumped back in revulsion, bumping against the bunk-bed frames as she did so.

  Dylan froze and stopped whistling. He turned to the storage cupboard. His eyes narrowed as he peered at the crack of the door. She felt like he was looking straight into her eyes.

  He started forward towards her.

  Panic spiked through her. She immediately retreated backwards, squeezing herself behind the stack of bunk frames, managing to conceal herself just as he pulled open the door.

  Light flooded in. He stood there silhouetted in the doorway.

  Bailey crouched, squashed behind the metal frames, holding her breath. What would he do if he discovered her? Would he put her on the nicking sheet? If anyone should be on the nicking sheet, it should be him. Having sex with the inmates was unprofessional, unethical and illegal.

  He stood silently in the doorway. She could hear his breathing and smell the musky tang of his sweat infused with the odour of his cologne. She could virtually smell the sex on him.

  The rat scurried out between his legs. He jumped backwards in surprise.

  ‘Fucking rats!’ he muttered in disgust.

  He kicked at the rat. It squealed and ran off down the corridor.

  He stood there for a fraction longer, then he shut the door, leaving Bailey in the blackness.

  She heaved a sigh of relief. That had been close.

  She listened and waited a few minutes until she was sure that he was gone. Then she navigated her way through the blackness to the door. She felt for the door handle. With a mounting sense of panic, she realised that there was no door handle on the inside. She was locked in.

  Shit. She was locked in and due to meet Toni and the others in ten minutes out in the yard.

  78

  After a certain amount of banging on the inside of the door, someone eventually opened it. It was the small tubby inmate with glasses who worked in the laundry. Bailey was grateful that she had attracted the attention of an inmate rather than a guard, who might have disciplined her.

  She made some feeble excuse about looking in the wrong place for something and hurried back up to ground level and out into the yard. She looked at her watch. She was fifteen minutes late.

  She spotted Toni and the rest of the gang assembled on one of the concrete picnic tables. Keisha and Rong were playfully punching each other. Muscles sat there like a statue, staring straight ahead. Poppy looked bored, idly filing her nails.

  Toni was sitting in the middle. When she saw Bailey approaching, her face twisted into a sneer.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she said. ‘You’re late.’

  ‘I got held up.’

  ‘Where?’ Toni’s eyes bored into her.

  They had all fallen silent and were now staring at her. She remembered her undercover training. Stick to the truth where possible.

  ‘I accidentally got locked in a room in the basement.’

  ‘And why did you get locked in a room in the basement?’ said Toni slowly, her brow creasing quizzically.

  And now the lie. Bailey took a deep breath.

  ‘I was checking out possible alternative locations to keep a stash. You know… what with what’s been going on. I thought it might be a good idea.’

  Toni eyed her for a few moments, then nodded. An acceptable excuse it seemed. She turned her attention back to the rest of the gang.

  ‘The reason we’re having this meeting is that I wanted to let you know that we’re going to resume operations fairly soon.’

  ‘I thought you said it was too risky,’ frowned Keisha. ‘I thought you said it was too soon.’

  ‘Our contact is confident he can get it in without being found out.’

  Bailey wondered how Terry was doing it. Surely, in light of what had happened recently, he wouldn’t want to risk spot checks at the prison entrance.

  ‘How’s he bringing it in?’ she asked.

  Toni shrugged. ‘I don’t know and I don’t care. All I know is that every minute we’re not working, we’re losing money.’

  She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together and smiled, her gold tooth glinting, a venal look in her eyes.

  79

  ‘Dylan Prince. Dylan spelt D-Y-L-A-N.’

  ‘As in the Welsh poet?’ said Frank. ‘Just checking right now…’

  She stood in the phone booth listening to the tapping of computer keys as Frank checked the prison officers’ rota. She glanced over her shoulder at the busy queue for the phones. Nobody seemed to be paying her too much attention.

  Frank came back on the line. ‘According to this… Dylan was on duty when Alice was killed, when Poodle was killed, when Natalie was killed and when Sharon was killed.’

  ‘All of them?’ Even if Bailey had her suspicions about Dylan, she was still somewhat surprised.

  ‘That’s right. Who exactly is this Dylan Prince?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to work out.’

  Having had minimal interaction with Dylan before, and having never spoken to him prop
erly, Bailey had very little sense of the kind of person he was. Although she’d noticed him around the prison, he had been fairly elusive so far in terms of making any kind of specific impression on her.

  ‘Well, you’d better work it out soon. I had a meeting with the drugs squad yesterday and they can’t understand why this operation’s still going. They’re giving me all kinds of flak about it. With each day that goes by it’s getting harder and harder for me to justify your presence in there.’

  She could sense the stress in his voice and she knew from previous experience that he wasn’t nice to be around when he got stressed. Being in this place, she couldn’t have been further removed from him physically, yet here she was feeling the pressure from him more than ever.

  ‘I was summoned to a meeting with the gang just now. Toni said they’re planning to resume operations pretty soon.’

  ‘Did she give a date? Any specifics? Quantities? Pick-up points? That kind of thing.’

  ‘No. Nothing yet.’

  He sighed. ‘I don’t think that’s going to satisfy them.’

  ‘Look, just stall them for a bit longer so I can check out Dylan,’ she said. ‘Have faith in me. I’ve always delivered before, haven’t I?’

  80

  Dylan stood with his arms crossed, leaning against a pillar, softly whistling that same tune she’d heard him whistling down in the basement.

  While he was monitoring free association activity on the first-floor landing of A-Wing, Bailey was covertly monitoring him from a short distance away. Compared to some of the other prison officers, he took evident care in his appearance – his shirt glowed white and clean, his black shoes were buffed to a mirror shine and his trousers were neatly ironed with a sharp crease.

  With his sandy-coloured hair and pale blue eyes, he bore more than a slight resemblance to Mark, the detective she’d dated for two years before they’d split up over the issue of kids and marriage. Quite why she was drawn to the ‘Teutonic look’, as Sharon had put it, she didn’t know; it just seemed that most of the guys she’d been out with had looked like that. However, the crimes she suspected Dylan of committing somewhat took the shine off any outward appeal he might have had for her.

  After a few more minutes of watching him, she worked out what seemed to be the best way to break the ice. She walked up to him.

  ‘What’s that tune you’re whistling?’ she asked.

  He stopped whistling and hit her with a long piercing stare as he sized her up. He looked somewhat guarded and a little wary, in the way that the prison officers often were if you approached them unawares. It was generally the case that inmates didn’t approach them out of the blue unless they wanted to extract some favour from them.

  ‘It sounds familiar,’ she lied.

  ‘I can’t imagine you’d know it unless you’re into military marching music.’

  ‘Actually that’s my favourite genre,’ she said.

  The tanned skin around his eyes crinkled into a smile at her sarcasm.

  ‘We used to drill to it when I was in the army,’ he said. ‘It’s stuck in my head ever since.’

  ‘You were in the army?’

  That explained the smartness of his appearance. Old habits die hard. The army had probably taught him to bull his shoes to a shine with melted shoe polish, just like she had been taught to in police training at Hendon.

  ‘Royal Marines. Forty Commando. ‘Sarie Marais’ is the name of the song. It’s the official marching tune of the Royal Marines.’

  Her knowledge of the Royal Marines extended little further than the recruiting adverts they showed in the cinema before the main feature came on.

  ‘I take it you like jobs with uniforms then?’

  He plucked contemptuously at his tie. ‘This clip-on tie, this polyester shirt… this uniform’s shit. Army kit’s much better quality.’

  ‘Why did you leave it then… the army?’

  He paused for a few moments. ‘I was invalided out. I got injured.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘IED blast in Afghanistan.’

  Improved Explosive Device. She’d heard the term on the news many times.

  She looked him up and down. ‘You look fine to me.’

  He pointed at his head. ‘I’ve got a metal plate in my skull.’

  ‘No shit.’ She peered at his head. ‘The surgeons did a good job. I can’t tell it’s there.’

  He leant forward and pushed his sandy hair aside to reveal a long white surgical scar running around the right-hand side of his head.

  ‘It’s made of titanium,’ he said. ‘It’s moulded exactly to the same shape my head was before. It’s fitted on with four screws. They had to remove almost a quarter of my skull to let my brain recover from the injury. I spent the whole of 2014 in a medically induced coma in a military neuro-trauma unit in Plymouth while they fixed me up.’

  ‘Wow,’ she murmured. ‘It must be weird having that much metal in your head.’

  ‘I can sometimes pick up shortwave radio through it.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Nah,’ he smiled.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ she asked.

  ‘Occasionally. They got most of the shrapnel out, but there’s still a small piece lodged deep inside my brain. It would have been too risky to remove it so they left it in there.’

  ‘Any side effects?’

  He smiled blankly at her.

  Then something across the landing appeared to catch his attention. She followed his gaze. A female prison officer was standing there pointing at her watch. Dylan nodded to her, mouthed something and turned back to Bailey.

  ‘I’m due to be relieved so I can go on my lunch break. Have a good day now.’

  He nodded politely to her, turned and walked off down the landing.

  ‘Bon appétit,’ she murmured to his departing back, thinking absently to herself that she kind of liked the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled. She tried to shake the thought away.

  Following their exchange, she felt slightly frustrated at having been unable to properly fathom his capacity as the potential killer. He was just too unreadable. On the surface he seemed perfectly pleasant, but then there was that bit of shrapnel lodged in his brain, and who knew what strange and unpredictable effects that could have on someone’s behaviour? The upshot was that she couldn’t yet tell if she was on the right track with him or not, although there was nothing so far to make her explicitly doubt her theory either.

  The key takeaway from their encounter, however, was the date.

  2014.

  As she walked back to her cell, she reflected on its significance. At the same time that the Hairdresser had been murdering prostitutes up in the Midlands, Dylan had been lying comatose in a military hospital in Plymouth.

  If Dylan did turn out to be a viable suspect then she could completely dismiss the idea of the Hairdresser because there was quite clearly no connection between the two of them.

  And given the lack of hard evidence to support the Hairdresser theory, she really only had one option to follow: Find out more about Dylan.

  81

  Bailey lay face-down on the bunk, her chin resting on her forearms, enjoying the sensation of the tattoo needle puncturing the skin of her back. There was a strange kind of pleasure in the pain and she put it down to the endorphins that her brain was releasing as a response to it. She’d heard in the past how people got physiologically addicted to having tattoos. Now she was beginning to understand why.

  The last session had ended awkwardly and she had been a little apprehensive about how this next one would turn out. But so far it seemed to be going fine, both of them acting like nothing had happened.

  ‘What do you think of Dylan?’ Bailey asked, breaking the silence.

  Poppy lifted the needle momentarily. ‘The guard?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Hmm… I always got the impression he was the happy-go-lucky type until I saw him lose it once. He lost it big time. And it was over something really m
inor. A girl had her feet on a chair in the canteen, but he completely flipped out. He was shouting and screaming. He actually had to be restrained by the other screws. That can’t be right, can it?’

  Interesting, thought Bailey. It certainly suggested that there was another side to him, one that she hadn’t seen yet.

  ‘Did you know he’s got a metal plate in his skull and a piece of shrapnel lodged in his brain?’

  ‘Guess that explains it,’ said Poppy. ‘Why are you so interested in Dylan all of a sudden?’

  Bailey decided to change the subject. ‘You told me last time you had a plan for when you got out of here, but we never got to talk about it.’

  Poppy didn’t respond immediately and Bailey wondered if she had upset her again. But it seemed she hadn’t, as Poppy started to speak, softly at first, then with a growing ardour in her voice.

  ‘Toni and the others… this place is their life. It’s all they have. But prison isn’t the be-all and end-all. You might be king in here, but what’s the point of being cock of the roost in what amounts to little more than a glorified brick box. Me… I want more. It started as a dream, but the more I’ve been thinking about it, the more I think I could make it a reality, ever since I met you actually…’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘When I get out of here, I want to open a tattoo shop. I’ve got it all worked out. I’m going to call it “Ink-ubus”.’

  ‘I like the sound of it,’ said Bailey, with a genuine sense of sincerity. ‘Not sure what it means though.’

  ‘It’s a pun on the word “incubus”, which is spelt with a C. An incubus is a mythological demon who has sex with sleeping women.’

  ‘Sounds charming!’ laughed Bailey.

  ‘I’ve even designed a logo of a naughty little demon,’ said Poppy. She paused and swallowed. ‘But the thing is, I’m really bad with numbers. I’ve always been good at art, shit at maths. I need someone to help me on the business side. You told me you used to be an accountant, right?’