by Caro Savage
‘Sharon recognised you though, didn’t she? That fight in the canteen. You got your glasses knocked off and that’s when she recognised you. She knew you better than most because you were cellmates. She was trying to blackmail you, wasn’t she?’
‘I never really got on with Sharon to be honest. She always thought she was smarter than she actually was. And look where it got her. She was swimming way out of her depth.’
‘Seems like a lot of trouble to go to though.’
‘What?’
‘Getting a job here, in the same prison where you were an inmate. Risking being discovered.’
Amber smiled. ‘That’s all part of the thrill. That’s what I get off on. Knowing that I’m fooling everybody. Laughing at them secretly. The stupid mugs. I’ve never played such a fun game in all my life. You wouldn’t know just how fun it is unless—’ Her eyes suddenly widened. ‘Oh, well actually you probably would know, wouldn’t you, Miss Undercover Cop?’
Bailey grimaced. Sadly, Amber was right on the button. They were more alike in that respect than Bailey cared to admit.
‘But I still don’t get it though,’ said Bailey.
‘What is there to get?’
Bailey shook her head in puzzlement. ‘Why are you both doing it?’
‘Why?’ Amber looked baffled, as if what she and her brother were engaged in was the most normal thing in the world.
‘Yes. Why?’
A smile spread across Amber’s face like an oil slick across water. Her eyes now glittered with an alien coldness. She threw her head back and laughed a low husky laugh. The sound chilled Bailey to the bone.
Amber dropped her head and fixed Bailey with a piercing stare. ‘It’s all about needs. Leonard’s got needs. Special needs.’
‘You’re telling me.’
Amber’s face hardened.
‘That’s the mistake you people always make,’ she snapped. ‘You think people like us are stupid, like we’ve got learning difficulties or something. Well we’re not! Anyhow, you’re the one who was stupid enough to let herself get tied up.’
‘I don’t think you’re stupid. I just think you’re fucked up. You’re sick. You need help. I can help you. I can help both of you.’
Amber raised one eyebrow.
‘I think you’re the one who needs help.’ She sighed. ‘But sadly it looks like you’re not going to get any.’
She looked at her watch and began to hum a jaunty little tune to herself.
‘Tell me about “The Family”,’ said Bailey.
Amber stopped humming and looked at her with surprise.
‘My, my… you have been industrious.’
‘They had extreme religious views, didn’t they?’
Amber snorted a laugh. ‘That’s an understatement. They had a rather puritanical ethic, shall we say. Anything denoting beauty or sensuality was forbidden. We were kept in cages, forced to wear sackcloth, that kind of thing. Long hair was forbidden. We all had our heads shaved.’
She paused in reminiscence. ‘Leonard developed quite a thing for it. For hair. For women’s hair. So much so that when he got a bit older they let him do the shearing once in a while. He used to love that. Shearing the girls in the cages. His special treat. I guess he was at a particularly impressionable age. But then it all got taken away from him when social services came along and “rescued” us. He tried it on the outside for a bit – taking women’s hair – but it was never quite the same. But when I told him about this place – all the women in cages just waiting to be sheared – he was beside himself. He couldn’t wait to get stuck in.’
‘He’s doing a little more than shearing them,’ said Bailey. ‘He obviously has a deep-seated hatred of women.’
‘He’s working through some stuff.’
‘What? Mummy issues?’ Bailey was unable to repress her scorn. Then a thought occurred. ‘Is she the one who locked you in the cages?’
Amber raised one eyebrow. ‘Cute analysis. And not far off the mark. But ultimately trite. You’ll never understand what my brother and I went through.’
‘You’re right. I don’t think I ever will.’
Amber shrugged indifferently.
Silence once again occupied the space between them.
Despite her current predicament, Bailey wasn’t about to give up just yet. She had a job to do and she was determined to extract as much information as possible from Amber.
‘Where’s the well?’
‘You’ll know soon enough.’
‘How did you find out about it?’
‘So many questions…’ Amber tutted.
‘The mysterious escape of Felicia Lee is prison legend in here.’
Amber puffed up proudly. She looked at her watch.
‘Well, I suppose we do still have a few minutes to kill. And I guess telling you is not going to make a difference either way. Are you sitting comfortably?’
She looked at Bailey tied to the mangle and smiled amiably.
‘I guess not. Still, never mind. So… not long after I got locked up in here, I decided I needed to earn some extra cash for my canteen account so I got a job in the laundry. Pretty boring, but pretty easy.
‘The day I escaped, I’d had a really bad night the night before. Nightmares. No sleep. That kind of thing. Know what I mean?’
‘Only too well.’
‘Anyhow, the upshot was that by the afternoon the only thing I felt like doing was taking a nice long nap. But I had to go and do my annoying job in the laundry.
‘So there I was, pushing this big trolley full of nice clean sheets along and I was looking at it thinking how inviting it looked. It looked so inviting, in fact, that when the laundry supervisor wasn’t looking I climbed in and pulled the sheets over me and took a little nap.
‘The next thing I knew was that this noise had woken me up. When I opened my eyes, I realised that all the lights were off and the place was empty. No one had noticed me asleep in the trolley. They’d all finished up for the day and left the laundry and locked me in. That was the first thing I realised.
‘The second thing I realised was that the noise that had woken me up had come from someone else who was in the laundry with me. To tell you the truth that got me a little scared. I hardly knew if I was still dreaming or not. So I stayed in the trolley hidden under the sheets and peeked out at whoever was in there. Just like a little kid hiding in their bed from monsters.
‘Who should it be in the laundry with me? Yep, you guessed it. It was Terry. The noise that woke me up was the sound of him coming out of the well. I could barely believe what I was seeing. I instantly knew he was up to no good. Why else would a prison officer be entering the prison secretly?
‘Anyhow, I held my breath and stayed as quiet as possible and waited until he’d left the laundry and locked the door behind him. I waited a few more minutes, just to be on the safe side, then I climbed out of the trolley and went to investigate. And that’s how I found out about the well. I escaped, right there and then.’
She grinned at Bailey.
‘Nice story don’t you think?’ she said.
‘Beautiful,’ muttered Bailey.
Amber’s face soured.
‘Be as sarcastic as you want. It won’t make any difference. You’re going to die soon, in a really unpleasant way. And it’ll serve you right.’
Bailey shifted position to try and ease her discomfort. She winced as her injured knee sent an agonising jolt of pain up her leg.
‘Why did you kill your baby?’ she said.
Amber fixed her with a long look. ‘I’m not the nurturing type.’
‘So you bashed its brains out?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ Amber crossed her arms defensively.
‘Was it retarded?’
‘Fuck you!’ she spat, looking away.
‘It was, wasn’t it?’ Bailey paused. ‘That’s why incest is illegal.’
Amber jerked her head around sharply, and Bailey knew her guess had be
en correct.
‘What would you understand about me and my brother?’ hissed Amber. ‘You don’t know what we went through.’
‘Let me guess, you went through the care system separately, then reunited as adults. Fell into a relationship. You’re the only one that understood him and vice versa.’
‘You don’t know shit! I’m going to enjoy seeing him rip your fucking scalp off!’
‘But an illegitimate mentally handicapped child. That just wouldn’t do.’
‘Shut up!’ shouted Amber.
‘Mind you, with parents like you two, it’s probably better off dead.’
Amber jumped off the dryer, strode over to where Bailey was sitting on the floor tied to the mangle and kicked her hard in the stomach.
‘Shut the fuck up!’
Bailey gasped, winded. It took a minute or so for her to recover her breath.
‘So what if you both had problems. That’s no excuse.’
‘Don’t get high and mighty on me. Right now you’re in no position to judge us.’
‘I just want to understand you.’
‘Why? What’s the point? You’ll be dead very shortly.’
A muted thumping sound echoed through the laundry.
Amber tilted her head to listen. She smiled coldly at Bailey.
‘As if on cue.’
109
Bailey peered around trying to work out where the noise had come from. She couldn’t see any sign of him. Yet.
Again the muted thump.
It was coming from the far end of the laundry.
Then a movement from one of the top-loader washing machines by the back wall. It was the one with the sign taped over its control panel which read: ‘OUT OF ORDER – ELECTROCUTION HAZARD!’
The lid of the washing machine began to lift up, seemingly of its own accord. Then black leather-gloved fingers emerged to grip either side of the rim, pulling upwards…
Bailey watched, transfixed, marvelling at the simple ingenuity of the deception. The well was concealed beneath the washing machine, which itself was conveniently out of order, no doubt to deter casual investigation. No wonder it had been impossible to find.
A head appeared. It was the head of a woman with long black hair. The hair hung down over her face, concealing her features. As she levered herself up out of the well, the hair fell aside to reveal her face, and that was when Bailey recognised her.
U-G-L-Y, you ain’t got no alibi. You’re ugly! Clap clap-clap. Ugly! Clap clap-clap.
The schoolyard taunt rang out in her head.
It was the inmate who Amber had been escorting across the atrium just a short while before Sharon had been killed and who, Bailey now realised, she had never seen since.
No wonder she’d looked like a man. She had been a man. In drag.
That had been the killer. That had been Leonard.
Amber had been taking him to the kitchen so he could kill Sharon.
Their modus operandi now became apparent – Leonard had been making his way around the prison disguised as a female inmate in the custody of Amber. The disguise had served him for the short periods that he had needed to traverse areas of the prison in view of other inmates and staff.
Calmly, he pulled himself out of the washing machine, swung his legs over the rim and jumped to the floor. Straightening up, he stood there, looking across the room at them. He flexed his fingers, the leather gloves creaking as he did so.
Lifting his hand, he brushed the long dark hair back to reveal a clean-shaven male face wearing a hint of lipstick and a dash of mascara. Without the make-up it could have been quite a handsome face, but right here, right now, under the harsh light of the halogen bulbs, it looked utterly grotesque – the freakish visage of a perverted monster.
He started to walk towards them, his trainers crunching lightly on the detergent powder scattered on the tiled floor.
And that was when the fear kicked in. A sudden blind terror arising from the primal depths of Bailey’s brain. He was coming to scalp her and kill her and each step he took brought that horrible fate a little closer.
She squirmed in vain against the heavy cast-iron mangle, the mesh bag cutting into her wrists, but she was held firm, sitting there helplessly on the floor with her hands tied behind her back, tethered immobile like a sacrificial lamb.
She suppressed a reflexive urge to scream at the top of her voice. Better to conserve her energy.
He stopped next to Amber. She turned to him and draped her arms over his shoulders. He placed an arm around her waist and pulled her close to him. They kissed, long and passionate.
Bailey watched in disgust and fascination.
Amber broke off and spoke in a low voice into her brother’s ear: ‘She knows all about you. She’s a policewoman, you know.’
Leonard looked at Bailey over Amber’s shoulder. Their eyes met and a shudder of revulsion went through her.
‘A policewoman?’ His deep male voice sounded bizarre, incongruous, coming from him dressed as he was.
‘She’s investigating you,’ said Amber.
‘I’m flattered,’ he murmured.
He disengaged himself from the embrace. Amber stood aside obediently. Reaching behind him, he pulled out a knife with a long shiny Bowie-style blade. He tested the edge with his thumb. It looked sharp. Raising his eyes, he grinned at Bailey.
‘She has nice hair,’ he said, peering at her scalp appreciatively. He glanced at his sister. ‘You chose well.’
‘She kind of chose herself,’ said Amber.
Bailey felt her guts twist in dread. She writhed and struggled, but to no avail. Her bonds were too tight.
This was it.
This was the end.
She cursed her bad luck.
So much for Mel’s tiger protecting her.
Be careful it bites.
Those words returned now, washed up like flotsam on the shores of her panicked mind. What had Mel meant? Had she meant anything at all? How could the tiger bite? It was only made of paper.
For protection.
Mel liked to protect herself because Mel was paranoid.
They don’t call her Crazy Mel for nothing…
Be careful it bites.
Protection.
Now Bailey understood.
She prayed that the origami tiger was still in her back pocket where she’d put it after Mel had given it to her. She’d forgotten all about it up to now.
Stretching and twisting herself, she managed to poke her fingers into her back pocket. With the tips of her fingers, she could feel the edge of the folded paper. Thank god it was still there.
If only she could get a grip on it. She didn’t have much time. A matter of seconds, maybe a minute, if that.
Amber looked down at her squirming. She gave Bailey a look of mock pity.
‘Don’t worry it’ll all be over soon.’
Bailey got a grip on the origami tiger between her thumb and forefinger. She eased it carefully out of her back pocket. If she dropped it now all would be lost. She pressed her finger against the folded ridge which formed its back. She felt a sharp jabbing sensation as it sliced into her fingertip. Never before had she felt so pleased to feel pain.
It was just as she had suspected. Mel had hidden a razor blade inside the origami tiger. A razor blade – Mel’s favourite form of self-defence.
Gripping the tiger firmly, Bailey began to awkwardly saw through the mesh bag which bound her wrists.
She glanced up at him from her sedentary position on the floor. Leonard was beginning to walk towards her, the knife dangling loosely at his side.
She needed to stall him somehow. She needed to think of something to say. Anything.
‘Is that just a normal wig or is that a scalp you’re wearing?’ she stammered, trying to force a conversational tone into her voice.
‘Just a wig,’ he said, looking faintly amused.
He was getting closer. Four metres away… three metres away… two metres away…
/> Bailey sawed furiously at her bonds. With her hands tied behind her, she was working blind, but she could feel the individual strands of mesh giving way beneath the edge of the razor.
‘The Hairdresser, huh?’ Her voice shook. ‘I bet you would have preferred to be called something like the Hunter or the Ripper. Hairdresser sounds kind of… effete, don’t you think?’
‘You’re only making it harder on yourself,’ said Amber.
And then he was there standing astride her. From her perspective, sitting at his feet, he seemed huge, like a silent colossus, blocking out the light.
He looked down at her and adjusted his grip on the knife, placing his thumb on the back of the blade so he could apply more pressure when cutting.
Bailey’s heart pounded uncontrollably in her chest as she desperately sawed through the bonds.
Amber seated herself back on top of the dryer, swinging her feet in anticipation like an excited child.
‘This is a rare treat,’ she said. ‘Normally I don’t get to watch.’
Leonard bent down over Bailey’s seated form and grabbed a handful of her hair. He viciously yanked her head at an angle and began to wind her hair around his fist, tautening her scalp. She winced and gasped, feeling the roots popping out. He eyed her hairline in the detached manner of a surgeon gauging the best angle from which to make a cut.
She frantically sawed away, feeling just a final few strands remaining.
‘Stay still,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to ruin it.’
He bent down closer to her level. She felt his warm breath on her face.
He placed the cold steel edge of his knife horizontally across the top of her forehead. She felt him tense as he prepared to slice her scalp off.
The final few strands of mesh gave way. In that instant, she brought up her left hand and knocked his knife away from her forehead. With her right hand, in a single transverse swipe, she drew the origami tiger across the side of his neck. It left a thin red line in its wake.
Leonard jerked upright and reeled backwards in surprise.
Amber jumped off the washing machine, a puzzled frown on her face.
He put his hand up to the cut on his neck, then looked at his gloved fingers. He grunted dismissively.