Jailbird

by Caro Savage

  But just how had Felicia Lee escaped? Had she dug some kind of tunnel that lay undiscovered somewhere in the prison? It seemed unlikely that she had assiduously burrowed her way out of here. Bailey was certain that the breach took some other form. But without knowing what this was or where it was, there was nothing that she or Frank, or anyone else, could do.

  She looked at her watch. Time was ticking down. She had around an hour or so of free association time left before she was locked in her cell for the rest of the day, and once that happened she might as well give up for good.

  A hand grabbed her upper arm, breaking her reverie. She spun around. It was Toni, accompanied by Keisha. They both closed in on her.

  ‘We’ve been looking for you,’ said Toni.

  ‘Oh?’ She tensed and assumed a defensive stance.

  Since her close call with them a few days earlier, Bailey had been actively trying to avoid Toni and the others. And in the meantime, she’d been so consumed with trying to work out the Felicia Lee connection that she’d forgotten to consider that they were probably wondering where she’d got to.

  Toni leaned in menacingly. ‘I hope our little misunderstanding the other day didn’t make you forget that you still work for us, remember? And there’s business to be conducted.’

  Shit.

  This was not what she needed right now. She just didn’t have the time for it.

  With a mirthless smile, Keisha pushed a plastic bag full of drugs into the pocket of Bailey’s jogging top.

  ‘I want you up on the fourth-floor landing of A-Wing,’ said Toni. ‘Pronto.’

  ‘Sure. No problem,’ she said, silently berating herself for getting caught up in the gang’s activities. She knew there was no excuse that she could make so she headed indoors. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw Toni give her the ‘I’m watching you’ gesture.

  Up on the fourth-floor landing, Bailey leant on the balcony, her head hung in despair as the sounds of the prison echoed around her. She reflected that her chances of finding out anything by the end of today had now grown slim to the point of being almost non-existent.

  ‘Got any speed?’

  Bailey looked up. A lank-haired inmate with sallow skin and twitchy-looking eyes was standing beside her, fidgeting nervously and looking around in a shifty manner.

  ‘Sure,’ said Bailey.

  She eased a small bag of amphetamine powder from her pocket.

  The inmate opened her palm to reveal a handful of screwed-up banknotes.

  Bailey gave a cursory glance around her before conducting the transaction—

  —And froze as she spotted the uniform of a prison officer walking in her direction along one side of the fourth-floor landing.

  She gestured for the inmate to hold off for the moment. They both smiled falsely at each other in a pretence of conversation.

  As the prison officer got closer, Bailey saw that it was Terry. She relaxed slightly. If there was one prison officer who wouldn’t be disrupting her business, it was him.

  As he passed by, he shot her a sly knowing look. He knew exactly what she was up to and it served to line his pockets handsomely. He strolled slowly past.

  She waited until his back was turned and he was walking away from her down the other side of the landing before completing the transaction with the lank-haired inmate. The inmate wandered off, leaving Bailey once again by herself, leaning on the balcony.

  She glumly fingered the bag of drugs in her pocket. Despite her efforts, despite Alice’s efforts, the drugs were flowing back into the prison in much the same quantities as before, all thanks to Terry. Somehow he was getting them in. Somehow…

  A thought started to take form in her mind…

  She looked up sharply at Terry’s receding back as he walked off down the landing.

  Terry had found a way to evade gatehouse security and the random checks which that entailed. How else did it explain the fact that he’d never got caught? How else did it explain the fact that he felt confident enough to continue smuggling drugs in despite being under suspicion so recently?

  He must be exploiting some kind of hidden gap in the prison’s security. Could this be one and the same gap that Felicia Lee had used in order to escape?

  Terry had the answer to what Bailey was looking for, but she could hardly go up and ask him.

  She stood there on the landing, furiously analysing the situation, examining it from every angle, going back, right back, to the beginning…

  Terry… the drugs… the killer… they all intersected with one person.

  Alice.

  Alice had been investigating the drugs ring and Alice had been murdered by the killer.

  She thought back to Alice’s original text message: Source well concealed in prison. Investigating today. Will update later.

  Could it be possible that Alice had been referring to the breach rather than to a person?

  The breach quite obviously had to be well concealed because if everyone knew about it then everyone would try and escape through it. But as part of her investigation into the drugs ring, Alice had somehow worked out where it was, identifying it as the source point of the drugs flowing into the prison. She had gone to investigate the breach and she had encountered the killer getting into the prison. And that’s how she’d ended up dead.

  The breach was located in the laundry.

  100

  Bailey looked at her watch. Sixteen minutes of association time left. She still had time.

  She scanned the landing for signs of Toni and the others. She couldn’t see them anywhere. Now was her chance; she couldn’t leave it any longer.

  She headed for the stairwell, gripping both banisters, launching herself downwards, two or three steps at a time, her trainers clumping hard on the metal beneath her feet.

  ‘No running on the landings!’ she heard one of the prison officers shout from somewhere up above her. Bailey slowed temporarily until she was out of his line of sight, then resumed her frantic pace.

  When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she bolted across the atrium – getting a few surprised looks as she did so – and made her way once again down into the basement.

  She sprinted along the dingy corridors, panting hard with the exertion.

  And then she was at the laundry.

  She halted outside the door, trying to catch her breath while she peered in through the small glass window.

  It was full of inmates working, pushing laundry trolleys, loading and unloading the washing machines and dryers, folding linen. She noticed a prison officer standing on one side of the room conversing with one of the inmates.

  Bailey cursed to herself. She couldn’t just go in and start poking around. But she needed to know the specifics of the breach. To know that it was in the laundry wasn’t good enough. She needed to know exactly what form it took if Frank was to have a solid basis on which to launch a police operation and liaise with the prison authorities to lock down the prison.

  She looked at her watch. Twelve minutes left.

  She stood outside the door of the laundry, gnawing her lip and tapping her foot, trying to work out what to do, trying to work out what form the breach could possibly take. It was something in the fabric of the prison. Something which had been overlooked.

  She stared at the big heavy door in front of her. The metal plaque riveted just beneath the window panel looked like it had been there since the prison was built.

  ‘WATER SUPPLY ROOM’.

  These days, the water was piped in from the reservoir. That’s what Maggie had told her.

  But back in the old days…

  …The prison used to draw its water directly from a subterranean tributary of the River Foxbrook.

  But the river had dried up when the reservoir was built.

  Drawn directly…

  …from a subterranean tributary…

  …which was all dried up…

  …which must lead out to a dry river bed somewhere to the north of the prison.
>
  Source well concealed in prison.

  And then it hit her.

  The source was a well which was concealed in the prison.

  A well.

  The breach was a well. The well had drawn water from the subterranean river, but it had fallen into disuse when that had dried up. And the well was in the laundry – the ‘Water Supply Room’.

  Alice had been telling them exactly that in not-so-plain English. The answer had been there right in front of them all along.

  She had gone to the laundry that day to try and locate the well and confirm its existence. But it hadn’t been Terry who’d climbed out of it carrying drugs. It had been the killer.

  It all fell into place now in a white-hot rush of revelation.

  Bailey prayed it was enough to go on. It had better be. She had no choice now. She had no time left. She ran back along the corridor and up the stairs, heading for the phones. She still had time to call Frank.

  When she saw the massive queue at the phones, she swore aloud. She looked at her watch. There were nine minutes of association time left before they were all locked back in their cells. She knew she would never get to the front of the queue in nine minutes’ time.

  She suddenly remembered. Toni kept a mobile phone in her stash down in the basement.

  Bailey hurried back down to the basement, this time making her way to the small maintenance cupboard beneath B-Wing where the stash was located.

  She pulled the door shut behind her, turned the light on and knelt down among the cleaning products. She pushed the industrial rolls of cleaning tissue aside to expose the small ventilation grille set into the bottom of the wall. Levering it off with her fingernails, she placed it on the floor.

  She put her hand in carefully. Very carefully, remembering the rat trap…

  But there was nothing in there.

  She reached in further, putting almost her whole arm in. Nothing.

  Shit!

  Toni must have moved the location of the stash.

  Bailey pulled her arm out and looked at her watch. Six minutes left.

  She had no choice but to resort to the nuclear option.

  101

  ‘Come in,’ said the Governor.

  Shelley pushed the door open and nodded at Bailey to go in.

  It was the first time Bailey had been in the Governor’s office and the decor immediately put her in mind of one of those old-fashioned private members’ clubs. The walls were lined with dark oak panelling and there was one of those fancy-looking leather sofas with buttons on it.

  The Governor was sitting behind a huge wooden desk, lounging back in a large throne-like leather desk chair, his hands steepled in front of him.

  ‘Shelley here tells me you wanted to see me urgently,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Bailey. ‘It’s very important.’

  He looked up at the antique-style carriage clock on the mantelpiece. ‘Couldn’t it have waited until tomorrow? I know I said I had an open-door policy, but you’ve only got two minutes of association time left.’

  ‘I’ll keep it brief.’

  He sighed and gestured for her to sit down.

  Bailey sat down facing him across the desk. She looked up at Shelley and then at the Governor.

  ‘It’s private,’ she said.

  He waved at Shelley to leave.

  Shelley left the office and closed the door behind her. Bailey and the Governor stared at each other in silence for a few moments.

  ‘Well?’ said the Governor.

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘My name isn’t actually Bailey Pike. My real name is Bailey Morgan and I’m an undercover police officer.’

  The Governor’s brows slowly knitted in perplexity. ‘An undercover police officer?’

  ‘I was placed here in order to investigate the activities of a drugs ring which has been operating inside this prison. What I’ve uncovered is almost as shocking as it is unbelievable. But you must believe what I’m about to tell you because if we don’t act on it immediately, then lives will be lost. I would have gone through official channels, but there just isn’t time. That’s why I’ve come to talk directly to you.’

  There. She’d said it. She’d finally done it. She’d broken cover.

  It had been a momentous decision to make. And it went against everything she’d been taught. But she’d really had no choice in the matter. She now felt a vertiginous sense of apprehension at what the next few moments would bring.

  The Governor sat there, staring at her over his steepled fingers. It was hard to tell what he was thinking. Then he raised his eyebrows in realisation.

  ‘I thought I recognised you. You’re the one who jumped off the balcony.’ He nodded slowly. ‘I believe there were certain issues surrounding your… uh… mental stability.’

  ‘I assure you I am completely mentally stable. I jumped off the balcony for a very good reason. I did that in order to infiltrate—’

  ‘I think you’d be better off talking to Doctor Bodie than to me,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we—’

  ‘Listen to me!’ she hissed.

  He recoiled, taken aback. He suddenly looked a little bit scared.

  ‘There isn’t much time,’ she whispered. ‘There is a drugs ring operating inside this prison. They are using a breach in security to smuggle drugs in.’

  ‘That’s a ridiculous assertion! We follow security procedures extremely rigorously in this prison.’

  ‘There’s an old disused well in the prison laundry. One of your prison officers – Terry – is using this well as a conduit through which to transport drugs into the prison.’

  ‘If you’re a police officer then why wasn’t I told about you?’

  ‘We had no idea how deep the rot went. We couldn’t risk letting on about this operation to anyone who worked here.’

  The Governor bristled a little and frowned.

  ‘These are very serious allegations.’ He looked up at the clock. ‘And they’re not something that we can adequately address in the next sixty seconds or so. Come back and see me tomorrow and—’

  ‘No! We have to act now.’

  ‘I’m starting to lose patience with you, Bailey. Now as I said—’

  ‘Inmates are being murdered in this prison, in case you hadn’t noticed! They’re being scalped and murdered. One of them was an undercover policewoman and she was also my friend.’

  The Governor went silent.

  Bailey continued, ‘The murders are being committed by a killer known as the Hairdresser. You may have heard of him. He gained notoriety for murdering prostitutes in the Midlands some years ago. He started off by taking the hair of his victims. Now he’s taking their scalps.’

  ‘The “Hairdresser”?’ said the Governor, rolling the name off his tongue sceptically.

  ‘His real name is Leonard Lee. He’s getting inside the prison via the same breach of security which is being used to bring the drugs in.’

  ‘This disused well?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  He looked at the clock, then smiled pleasantly at her. ‘You’re out of time.’

  ‘We’re all out of time. Leonard Lee kills on a sixteen-day cycle and the next murder is due to take place tomorrow. We have to call the police, lock down the prison and locate the well, so we can catch him. If we don’t take action now then someone will die.’

  ‘Out of the question. It’s time for you to go back to your cell, Bailey.’

  Desperation overwhelmed her. This wasn’t working.

  ‘If you don’t believe me, then at least call my boss. His name is Detective Superintendent Frank Grinham. He’ll confirm who I am.’

  She leaned forward and grabbed a fountain pen from the brass stationery holder on his desk. She looked around for a bit of paper. All she could see on his desk was a glossy magazine entitled Yachting World. She flipped it over and tore off a small corner of the back cover.

  ‘Now just a minute…’ said the Governor, starting for
ward in his chair.

  ‘This is his direct line,’ she said, scribbling down Frank’s number on the piece of paper. She thrust it across the desk towards him. ‘You can call him right now.’

  ‘We’ll do nothing of the sort.’

  ‘I can call him myself.’ She stood up and reached for the telephone on his desk.

  He snatched the receiver from her grasp and slammed it back down. ‘That’s quite enough!’ he barked. ‘Shelley!’

  The door opened and Shelley came in.

  ‘It’s time to take Bailey back to her cell,’ said the Governor.

  ‘No! You must believe me! You have to believe me!’

  Shelley gripped her by the arm. Bailey tried to pull away.

  ‘If you don’t behave yourself, then Shelley will place you in segregation,’ said the Governor. ‘Now, it seems quite clear to me that you still have some mental issues to resolve and to that end I’ll be recommending that you attend a further course of treatment with Doctor Bodie until you get better.’

  Bailey sagged in Shelley’s grip.

  She’d failed.

  She let Shelley march her out of the Governor’s office and prayed to herself that the Hairdresser wouldn’t strike until after she’d had the chance to call Frank first thing tomorrow morning.

  102

  The Governor stared at the piece of paper with the telephone number on it. He picked it up off his desk and noticed that his hand was shaking. Screwing it up into a tiny ball, he dropped it into his wastepaper basket.

  He stood up and walked over to the antique wooden cabinet by the window, opened it up and took out a bottle of sixteen-year-old Lagavulin and a tumbler. He poured himself a generous shot and knocked it back. The whisky burned a trail down his throat and instantly made him feel better.

  He held out his hand. The shaking seemed to have subsided.

  How the fuck had this inmate found out about the well? Weren’t they all supposed to be stupid? Isn’t that why they were in here?