Bailey lay on her bunk and reflected on the altercation in the canteen. That had been the second run-in she’d had with a hostile group of inmates since she’d been locked up. First the carrot-haired one and her friends, and now this other group led by the one with the gold tooth.
What was that old saying? You’ve made your bed, now lie in it. She’d chosen to be here and, at the end of the day, these kinds of situations were all part of the job.
Despite her short ill-advised detour into accountancy, all she’d ever really wanted was to be a policewoman. She’d wanted to be one ever since she was very young.
Growing up in the outer London suburbs, she and her sister Jennifer had had a happy early childhood, their plain semi-detached house forming the scene for countless games of make-believe. They had been close despite their considerable differences. Jennifer, two years older, had been the demure girly one, and Bailey had been the scrappy little tomboy who’d looked up to her.
Then, one day, at the age of eight years old, Jennifer had gone missing, abducted on the way home from a friend’s house just a few doors down the street. She had never been seen again. An extensive police investigation was launched but no witnesses were found, there were no records of any suspicious vehicles being seen in the area, and the detectives were unable to identify any potential suspects. No similar occurrences appeared to have taken place in the vicinity and it seemed like her abduction was just a random, opportunistic one-off. Her disappearance featured on Crimewatch and there was a reconstruction, but that too yielded no useful leads. It was as if she had just vanished into thin air.
For six-year-old Bailey, the loss had been extremely hard to comprehend, even harder for her parents to convey to her, devastated as they were. The word ‘dead’ was never said aloud in the house. But that unspoken likelihood constantly hovered there, grew ever more pronounced as time passed.
Later on, when she was older, Bailey came to understand the kinds of things that happened to children who were abducted and the kind of sick people who did those things. It had instilled in her a strong need for justice. And what better way to see justice done than to join the police?
As a result of Jennifer’s disappearance, her parents had become extremely protective of Bailey, oppressively so. She had reacted against it, especially as a teenager, actively seeking out risky situations. That tendency had continued into adulthood, eventually drawing her into the most dangerous area of policing – undercover work.
But her choice of profession was also a point of contention with her father. Over the years, her parents had become affected in different ways by Jennifer’s disappearance. Her mother had turned increasingly religious and had grown potty, to the point where Bailey was beginning to wonder if she was suffering from some kind of premature dementia. Her father, on the other hand, was haunted by the conviction that Jennifer was still alive and he maintained a dogmatic obsession with finding her. He still clung desperately to some shred of hope that she was out there somewhere and that she would come home someday, if only he could locate her. He kept a large scrapbook full of yellowing newspaper clippings relating to her disappearance and he insisted on keeping her bedroom preserved exactly the way it had been the day she had gone missing – the walls covered with her crude felt-tip pictures, her stuffed toys lined up along her bed, her clothes hanging in the wardrobe, her dinosaur-themed mobile still suspended from the ceiling. Bailey found it kind of creepy and she did her utmost to avoid going into Jennifer’s bedroom whenever she was at her parents’ house.
Her father was forever claiming that he was on the verge of finding Jennifer. It would usually be something or other he’d found on the internet – some vague clue alluding to her existence. He’d get all excited and call up Bailey to tell her about it. But, of course, it always turned out to be groundless, a mere concoction of wishful thinking. She understood that this was his way of coping. It was the only thing that kept him going. He was in denial and she didn’t have the heart to tell him to snap out of it.
But sometimes it would erupt, like the argument they’d had the last time they’d met. He’d had a go at her, demanding to know why she wasn’t doing more, as a policewoman, to find out Jennifer’s whereabouts. It wasn’t like she hadn’t tried, of course. Not long after becoming a detective, she had taken the opportunity to examine the original case files. However, she had soon realised that with no evidence, no witnesses and no body, it would have been futile to try and reopen what was essentially a cold case that was now over twenty years old. She was a realist and, as a policewoman, she had become familiar with enough cases of a similar ilk to know the unpleasant truth about what had probably happened to Jennifer.
Despite the fact that she believed Jennifer was long dead, it didn’t mean that she’d forgotten her sister. Quite the opposite. Jennifer was there every day in the back of Bailey’s mind, crying out for redress, pushing her ever onwards to do her job the best she could. Jennifer, as well as Alice, was the reason she was here right now, endangering her well-being for the sake of making some kind of difference.
Not that it would ever bring either of them back…