Pushing the memories away, she rolled into a sitting position and tried to think of what to do next. She was itching to make progress, but she felt stuck already. Curling her free-hanging lock of hair around her fingers and letting it uncurl again, she contemplated her options.
She looked at her watch. There were forty-five minutes of free association time left before she was locked in her cell. Hoisting herself off the bunk, she left the cell and walked out onto the landing. She scanned her surroundings.
Her gaze settled on a female prison officer standing around ten metres away, sturdily built, with a face like old leather. She tried to recall her name…
Maggie. That was it. Maggie Cooper.
She looked like she’d been working here for a while, long enough to be familiar with the whereabouts of any given inmate. And from what Bailey had observed of her in the short time she’d been here, she appeared to be relatively approachable.
Bailey eased up to her.
‘I’m looking for Melanie Clarke,’ she said with a polite smile. ‘Do you know where I can find her?’
Maggie gave her the once-over with a steely professional flick of the eye. ‘Any particular reason?’
‘Uh… just wanted to have a chat,’ said Bailey innocently.
‘Just a regular conversation, huh?’
Bailey nodded earnestly.
Maggie sighed and raised one eyebrow.
‘Well… good luck with that,’ she said in a manner that suggested that having any kind of conversation with Melanie Clarke would prove to be most challenging. ‘She lives on B-Wing. Cell number one-one-three.’
‘Thank you,’ said Bailey and headed off along the landing.
After having given it some thought, Bailey had come to the conclusion that asking a guard about Melanie Clarke was a safer bet than asking the inmates whose affiliations at this stage she was still uncertain of.
At the end of the landing, she descended a flight of stairs and eventually reached the junction of A-Wing and B-Wing. She turned and began to walk along one of the lower landings of B-Wing, passing by the cells, moving carefully through the groups of inmates leaning on the balconies. This was deep within the heart of the hive. It was an unfamiliar area to Bailey and she was on edge.
Once again, she was shocked by the general air of neglect in the prison and the distinct lack of modernity. Although she knew that these were criminals and this their place of punishment it was still worse than she’d anticipated. The antique architecture made no concessions to light or space, instead suffusing the place with a dark labyrinthine feel. She got the sense of things happening unseen, things being got away with…
She walked past cells where inmates sat entranced by the flickering lights of TV screens or computer games. In other cells, they just lay there immobile on their bunks plugged into headphones listening to music or reading magazines.
To an outside observer, it might have seemed an easy life, but she sensed that it was all part of a desperate quest for distraction from the tedium and boredom of life in the prison. And more than that it was a way to avoid having to think too much about what they had done to end up behind bars in the first place.
As she walked along, she wondered how best to frame her approach to Melanie Clarke, how to broach the subject of Alice without sounding odd or raising suspicion. After all, she and Alice weren’t supposed to be connected to each other in any way whatsoever. In the end, she decided that she’d just play it by ear.
She reached cell number 113 and stepped into the open doorway. A white inmate with long brown hair was sitting cross-legged on the floor with her eyes closed in what appeared to be a meditative yoga position.
‘Melanie Clarke?’ said Bailey.
The inmate opened her eyes and looked at Bailey with a slightly miffed expression. She shook her head and nodded to her right. ‘She’s with her mates. Cell at the end. Follow your nose.’
She closed her eyes again.
Bailey stepped back onto the landing. She sniffed the air. The odour of illicit drugs was always present, but the distinctive smell of marijuana seemed to be particularly pronounced down here. She continued walking along the landing. As she drew closer to the cell at the end, the pungent smell of dope grew even stronger. As did the sound of music. She recognised the bass thump and reverb of heavy dub. It resembled some psychedelic form of reggae.
She stopped outside the last cell. The door was open. She peered in warily but it was hard to see anything through the thick layers of marijuana smoke. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, the first thing she made out was the glowing tip of a joint as it flared and was passed around the three inmates occupying the cell.
Beneath a large poster of Jean-Claude Van Damme flexing his oiled muscles was a white inmate sitting on a chair at the desk rolling a joint. She had a nose ring and her dark red hair was twisted into crude dreadlocks. On the bunk was a mocha-skinned Asian inmate who was nodding her head hypnotically to the music emanating from the cheap portable stereo that was sitting by her feet. And slumped next to her on the bunk was a mixed-race inmate with her frizzy hair poking out in all directions. She was just staring vacantly into middle space.
Bailey wondered which one of the three was Melanie Clarke.
For some reason, there was a colourful profusion of small origami animals scattered around the cell. With a single glance, Bailey could distinguish a crane, a horse, a tortoise and what even appeared to be a spider.
She hung around outside, doing a good imitation of casually lounging, all the while attempting to eavesdrop on the conversation of the inmates in the cell.
‘Bloodsport without a doubt,’ the Asian one was saying. ‘It’s an instant classic.’
The white one was shaking her head, without looking up from the joint.
‘Hard Target. Has to be. He’d matured by that stage. He was at the height of his powers. Couple that with a top-drawer action director like John Woo and you’ve got a masterpiece.’
‘Nah. It’s got too much shooting and not enough kickboxing. Van Damme is a kickboxer first and foremost. His best films are the ones that fully showcase his kickboxing talent.’
Bailey hovered on the threshold, wondering how she could interject. She trawled her mind. A piece of trivia floated to the surface. As an undercover cop, she had fallen into a habit of storing any bits of information that she could later retrieve to buttress a cover story or insinuate herself with people. However useless a bit of trivia might seem, you never knew when it might come in handy.
She sidled into the doorway. At first, none of the three figures in the cell registered her presence.
‘I think you’re forgetting Cyborg,’ said Bailey.
The white one was the first to look up. Then the Asian one. And, finally, the mixed-race one.
They all stared at her blankly through the thick haze of smoke. She moved just inside the doorway to the cell. She stifled a cough and blinked. The smoke was dense enough to make her eyes water.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ said the white one, her face creased in suspicion.
The Asian one squinted at her as a thought seemed to occur.
‘Cyborg? Of course.’ She turned to the white one. ‘Kay, I totally forgot about Cyborg. Totally underrated. Kind of a low-budget masterpiece.’
The white one called Kay turned to her. Her face morphed into an expression of disgust. ‘Seema, you cannot be serious! Cyborg is worse than Nowhere to Run. It’s a substandard Mad Max rip-off. It’s one of his early ones you want to forget about.’
If the white one was called Kay and the Asian one was called Seema, then Bailey deduced that the frazzled-looking mixed-race one had to be Melanie Clarke.
Seema was shaking her head vigorously in disagreement with Kay. ‘Cyborg was a massive straight-to-video hit. So successful that they made two sequels.’
‘Neither of which had Jean-Claude in them. So they don’t count.’
Bailey judged that now was the time to drop her nugget of useless trivia. On one of her many sleepless nights, she’d found herself watching Cyborg, the type of low-budget sci-fi thriller which occupied the late-night slots on lesser-viewed channels. It wasn’t exactly her kind of film, but she’d noticed something faintly odd whilst watching it. ‘Did you know that the main characters in Cyborg are named after guitars?’ she said.
‘Guitars?’ sneered Kay. ‘I have never heard such a load of crap in all my life. Anyway, you still haven’t answered my question. Who are you and what do you want?’
But Seema was staring up at Bailey with an expression of wonderment verging on awe. ‘You know she’s right,’ she murmured. ‘Jean-Claude’s character is called Gibson Rickenbacker. Gibson is a type of guitar and so is Rickenbacker. And the baddie’s called Fender. Another guitar!’
Seema shook her head in stupefaction.
‘Guitars! Fuck me! All these times I’ve watched it and I’ve never noticed. Man that totally blows my mind. What do you think, Mel?’
Mel had been sitting there vacantly, her eyes half-closed and her mouth half-open, taking a pull from a spliff every so often, a long head of ash building up at the end. She didn’t seem to have heard Seema.
Seema whacked her on the upper arm to get her attention. ‘Mel, I asked you a question.’
Mel blinked and looked around at them as if for the first time. The head of ash fell off the spliff into her lap. She didn’t seem to notice.
‘Uhh… yeah… rich tea biscuits… yeah.’
Kay screwed up her face in disgust. ‘Mel, get with the picture! We had the biscuit conversation over twenty minutes ago.’
Mel looked confused. With a faint sense of dismay, Bailey could see that extracting any kind of useful information from this inmate would require an effort of the first order. And that was if she actually even had anything useful to say, which Bailey was beginning to seriously doubt from looking at her. Either way, she judged that now wasn’t the time or the place to start grilling her. Still, at least she knew what she looked like and where she hung out.
Mel turned to face her. Bailey looked down and realised that Mel was holding out the spliff.
‘Don’t give her our weed!’ said Kay. ‘The only reason she butted in just now was so she could weasel a smoke out of us. We don’t even know her name.’
Bailey held up a hand to refuse the spliff. It was a good excuse to avoid having to smoke any. As an undercover police officer, she was technically forbidden from taking drugs, although sometimes situations arose when it was difficult not to participate without appearing suspicious.
Evaluating the situation, she saw an opportunity to provide an excuse for her intrusion and also hopefully gain some understanding of how the drugs were distributed in this place.
‘My name’s Bailey. I just happened to be passing by and I smelt your gear. If you’d just be nice enough to tell me where I could buy some, I’ll get out of your hair.’
Seema looked her up and down, then conceded, ‘Keisha. She stands on the third floor at the end of C-Wing. She’ll sort you out.’