The cell was fitted out in exactly the same way as almost all of the other cells in the prison – two metal-framed bunks, a stainless-steel sink, a mirror, a toilet, a small table in the corner and a single barred window seemingly designed to let in only the most miserly amount of light.
Sharon Finn lay on her bunk looking up at the springs of the empty bed above. Her cellmate had been released two days earlier. Sharon had had a number of cellmates over the past few years and she knew she’d probably have quite a few more as she still had another three years to serve. Three had been released, two had been transferred, one had escaped and one had died of cancer. She wondered what the next one would be like and how long they’d be hanging around.
Sharon was an addict of sorts and her addiction had got her into trouble. She wasn’t addicted to substances. No, nothing as crude as that. She was addicted to secrets. Other people’s secrets. And that was why she had been locked up.
In her mind, she hadn’t committed a crime. In her mind, an injustice had been done by locking her up in here. Sure, someone had ended up killing himself as a result of her actions. But that had been his decision. He shouldn’t have got himself into that kind of situation in the first place. She’d merely discovered that he’d been having an affair. She’d merely threatened to tell his wife. Everything would have been fine if he’d merely agreed to pay her the money she’d asked for.
She hadn’t expected him to kill himself.
He had implicated her in his suicide note, and that, plus subsequent evidence of their correspondence, had been enough for the court to convict her.
Making unwarranted demands with menaces with a view to making a gain. That was how the judge had phrased it.
Blackmail. That was the shorter way to describe it.
Still, nine years seemed a bit excessive in her opinion.
The fact that her victim had been a high court judge might have had something to do with her heavy sentence now she thought about it. He’d probably had friends in high places. He’d probably been private-school chums with the judge who’d sentenced her.
She sighed and shifted on the bunk. Life just wasn’t fair. She’d launched a number of appeals, but they’d all been unsuccessful.
Anyhow, prison wasn’t quite as bad as people made out. In fact, she’d found that she actually quite enjoyed it. The main problem that most inmates suffered from in here was boredom. But that was only because most of them lacked the internal resources to amuse themselves. She, on the other hand, found the inmate population to be an almost inexhaustible source of entertainment. There were more than enough dark and dirty secrets in here to keep her occupied for a lifetime.
A metallic clank jerked her out of her reverie as the door to her cell opened. She looked up. A prison officer was standing there accompanied by an inmate she hadn’t seen before who was holding a pack of sheets and prison-issue clothes and her plastic cup, plate and cutlery.
She suddenly remembered that today was when her new cellmate was due to arrive.
The prison officer was called Maggie Cooper. She was a big, lumbering woman. Solid, sensible and honest. Boring, in a nutshell. If people were books to read, Maggie would be the equivalent of the telephone directory.
The inmate, by contrast, looked like she had potential.
Sharon immediately sat up, like a hungry animal sniffing out the possibility of new food. She was pleased to have a new cellmate, to have someone to talk to, to find out about.
Maggie cleared her throat before speaking. ‘Sharon, this is your new cellmate. Her name’s Bailey Pike.’
Sharon’s first impression was that the inmate was shy and wary, half hiding behind the fringe of hair which hung down over one side of her face. Mind you, a little apprehension was to be expected on her first day in prison.
With that brief introduction, Maggie left the cell. Sharon lay there and openly watched Bailey as she began to settle in. She took in her details. Brown hair. Some freckles scattered across the nose. Fairly slim. Looked like she kept herself in shape. Nothing out of the ordinary. Sharon had almost formed the opinion that Bailey was quite pretty, but then she noticed the scar.
As Bailey was placing her stuff on the bunk, her fringe fell back as she lifted her head, revealing a nasty jagged white scar which ran down the side of her face and neck. It definitely marred her looks.
Sharon realised then that Bailey’s reticent demeanour wasn’t so much due to shyness as a desire to conceal the scar behind the lock of hair which she evidently wore loose for that very reason. She obviously felt self-conscious about it.
Sharon was instantly intrigued. Her enquiring mind began to whir like clockwork as she wondered how Bailey had acquired the scar. Had it been an accident? Had she been the victim of some form of violence?
‘So why are you in here then?’ Sharon asked by way of greeting. After all, in her mind it was one of the most important questions you could ask in here.
‘Fraud.’
‘What? Like stealing money?’
‘Yeah. I embezzled some money.’
She seemed a bit cagey. Sharon wondered if she still felt guilty about her wrongdoing even though she’d already been caught for it.
‘A lot of money?’
Bailey paused unpacking her items and looked down at Sharon. Sharon found herself staring into an intense pair of grey eyes.
‘Enough to put me away for four years.’
‘Four years huh?’ Sharon nodded, impressed. ‘Must have been a decent wad. Who’d you nick it from?’
‘I’m…’ Bailey checked herself. ‘I was an accountant. I stole the money from my employers.’
Fiddling the books. A fairly dull crime, thought Sharon. But she was a little puzzled nonetheless. The girl didn’t quite look how Sharon imagined accountants to be. She didn’t look boring enough. And she was certain that she could detect a seam of hardness just beneath the surface, a steel which she wouldn’t have expected in a mere accountant. Or maybe she was imagining it.
She stared at the scar. It compounded her growing sense that there was more to Bailey than met the eye. How did she get that scar? Sharon would find out sooner or later. Over the course of the long hours spent in the cell together, you found out virtually everything there was to know about your cellmate. And, who knew, there might even be something to gain out of it.
Sharon lay back down on her bunk, smiled like a shark and flexed her fingers, cracking her knuckles one by one.
‘So why are you in here?’ asked Bailey.
Sharon sighed. ‘I’m just too inquisitive for my own good.’
Bailey nodded and continued arranging her items on the bunk. Sharon continued to observe her. She could tell that Bailey was slightly ill at ease under her blatant scrutiny, but she didn’t care. She’d found that the longer you stared at people, the more you noticed those little cracks that revealed who they really were.
‘You know, Bailey, I’m glad to have your company to be honest.’ She paused for effect. ‘What with the murder and everything.’
Bailey froze. She turned to look at Sharon once more. ‘What murder?’
‘You haven’t heard about it? Silly me. Of course you haven’t. It’s your first day. Well, I didn’t see it or anything. But I heard all about it. Everyone’s talking about it. Really vicious. Lots of blood. Bits cut off. That kind of thing. They did a big cell search yesterday. Looking for the murder weapon. But I overheard them saying that they were also looking for…’ she dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, ‘…a human body part.’
Bailey’s face screwed up in disgust and alarm. Sharon was enjoying shocking her on her first day. It gave her a pleasant sense of superiority.
‘Who got murdered?’ said Bailey.
‘Some girl. I never met her. Never even knew about her until she ended up dead.’
‘Who murdered her?’
That was a very good point, thought Sharon, frowning to herself. She hadn’t really thought about it up until now, and now she did think about it, it did somewhat bother her that whoever had done this was still around. Sharon wasn’t the type who scared easily, but there was something about this particular murder that kind of got to her.
‘I have no idea who did it,’ she said. ‘And I guess that means you want to be watching your back.’