Night had fallen and Bailey lay awake on her bunk in the dimness listening to the sounds of the prison – muted sobbing, a distant clang, the gurgling of pipes, a solitary shout, the creak of springs as her cellmate shifted position on the bunk below.
She was knackered, but she couldn’t get to sleep as her buzzing mind was still processing her first day in prison.
The whole procedure had begun eleven hours earlier in the local Crown Court. She had been taken in handcuffs to a holding cell underneath the courtroom to make it seem as if she had just come directly from being sentenced. After spending three hours in the holding cell, she had been transferred to a prison van to be taken to HMP Foxbrook.
The drive to the prison took just under an hour, and as the van lurched into the prison complex, she caught a glimpse through the tinted window of the huge perimeter wall looming up, cold and forbidding, topped with thick coils of razor wire.
Stepping out of the van, she had looked up at the four huge house-blocks towering above her, their grey Victorian brickwork peppered with hundreds of tiny windows, each one denoting a cell. Whether it was just her imagination or whether it was real, she felt as if hundreds of eyes were watching her from the windows, judging her, forming opinions, already making decisions about her. An edging fear had begun to gnaw at her for she was only too aware that somewhere behind those walls was the person or persons who had killed Alice and that very soon she would be trapped in there with them.
Once inside the prison, she had been moved from room to room for each step of the processing and induction procedure. First, her details had been taken by the prison officers and her personal items had been taken away, logged and put in plastic bags, to be returned to her when she was released. Then she had been strip-searched and issued with prison clothes – a grey tracksuit – and a reception pack, consisting of blankets, soap, toothpaste, basic toiletries and a plastic cup, plate and cutlery for when she needed to eat anything in her cell. She had undergone a brief health check by the prison doctor and asked about any allergies she had that might need special requirements. Then she’d been given some psychometric questionnaires to fill out for the benefit of the prison psychologist. Finally, she’d been assigned a six-digit prison number and allocated a cell.
Naturally, she’d had very little say in anything during the whole procedure. The tone of it had been slightly shambolic, with the staff appearing bored and inattentive, which was perhaps unsurprising seeing as they did it day in day out. No one volunteered much in the way of information, after all she wasn’t one of them, and she got the impression that she’d have to pick it up herself in due course.
After she had been processed, they had taken her to her cell. And that was when she got her first taste of what the prison was really like on the inside.
The four house-blocks of HMP Foxbrook were arranged like the spokes of a wheel around a central hub and atrium area. It was the classic panopticon layout, designed by the Victorians for optimal surveillance in an era before the invention of CCTV. They were five-storey galleried wings, the tiers of cells towering up above her, reaching almost to the ceiling high above. The green paint flaking off the ancient brickwork combined with the feeble daylight filtering through the distant, grimy skylights gave the place a dingy claustrophobic feel.
The whole place echoed with the noise of chatter, the clump of feet trudging up the flights of cast-iron stairs and the clank of doors opening and closing, and beyond the disinfectant smell lay the faint whiff of illicit drugs.
In the central atrium, inmates of all ages and ethnic backgrounds, dressed mostly in prison-issue grey tracksuits and trainers, were standing and sitting around in small groups on the plastic benches and tables, which she noticed were bolted to the floor.
Accompanied by a female prison officer, she was marched through the atrium and up the metal stairs to her cell, passing the inmates as they lounged on the landings and leant on the banisters, chatting and watching each other, some of them breaking off their conversations to observe her as she walked by. Most of the gazes were flat and impenetrable, others were curious, some were downright hostile. As she passed by one group of inmates, she heard one of them mutter something she couldn’t quite make out, which got some sniggers in response. She knew it had been directed at her, but she kept her head down and avoided eye contact.
She felt that familiar gut-twisting fear return, that they would somehow see through her and see her for what she actually was – a serving police officer. But despite that, she found herself falling back into her undercover role with an ease she hadn’t been expecting, especially considering what had happened on the previous job. And, what was more, on the crest of the fear, she felt that old buzz, the reason she’d started working undercover in the first place. Only now, after her extended absence from this kind of work, did she realise just how much she craved it.
As for her cellmate, Sharon, her cover story seemed to have done the trick for the time being. Sharon seemed affable enough, but Bailey didn’t trust her one inch. She had that familiar animal cunning that so many criminals seemed to possess. As a policewoman, Bailey had encountered it innumerable times. Although not necessarily intelligent as such, these people had an innate deviousness that it was well to be wary of and fatal to underestimate.
The undercover training course had emphasised that it was always best to try to keep your cover story as true to life as possible. The more you lied, the more you were at risk of holes showing in your story. And the more you tried to be what you weren’t, the more likely people were to see through you. Criminals were paranoid people by their very nature, and often on the lookout for anything suspicious. So it had been no lie about the accountancy. Bailey really had once been an accountant. For about five minutes. She’d studied it at college, thinking that it would make a good solid career. But as a job, she’d found it so boring that she’d quit after two months and applied to join the police instead, something she’d wanted to do ever since she was a kid. The upshot of this, however, was that when it came to financial records and bookkeeping, spreadsheets and payroll, she could talk with some authority and sound natural.
And that was important, because maintaining a cover story required discipline and the ability to stay on the ball all the time, however tired you were. One thing the training course had emphasised was that the effort of sustaining a facade, the pressure of having to lie, and the consequences of making mistakes could take a heavy psychological toll, especially over an extended period of time.
But the central tenet that had been drilled into them incessantly was that, whatever the circumstances, you had to maintain your cover, however tempting it might be to reveal the truth, however much someone might claim that they knew you were a police officer.
Never break cover.
Never admit that you’re a cop.
Never. Break. Cover.