For lunch today, Bailey had been veering between the choice of jacket potato or beef goulash. She’d eventually gone for the beef goulash as it smelt particularly appetising.
She was sitting with the ABC at their corner table in the canteen. They were friendly now that they had accepted her as one of their own, but she was still careful to be wary. With people like this, you could never be quite sure. She knew from past experience that criminals could be the most amiable people one minute but then switch to the complete opposite in the blink of an eye. And when they turned nasty, they were capable of doing very bad things indeed.
One thing she had noticed since joining the gang was the marked difference in how she was treated by the other inmates. Now that they knew she was a member of the ABC, they generally made a point of staying out of her way and she caught a few of them looking at her with something approaching fear in their eyes. She had to admit, it felt kind of good.
Bailey casually scanned the canteen and noticed the skinny carrot-haired inmate who had tripped her up and spat on her not so long ago. She was sitting by herself a few tables away. Bailey fixed her with a piercing stare and soon caught the girl’s eye. The girl appeared to recognise her, and when she saw who Bailey was sitting with, her eyes widened in fear. She went pale, dropped her gaze and suddenly took a very strong interest in the contents of her plate. Bailey allowed herself a little smirk.
‘The last time I had beef goulash here,’ said Keisha, eyeing Bailey’s plate, ‘I got the shits like you would not believe. Sometimes the food here just goes straight through me.’
Bailey looked at her plate of beef goulash. She poked at the brown lumpy stew with her plastic fork and stirred it around a little bit. For some reason, it didn’t look quite so appealing any more.
‘Did you know that diarrhoea is actually a genetic condition?’ said Rong.
Keisha looked at her with mild surprise. ‘Genetic condition? Really? I never knew that.’
‘Yeah. It runs in the family.’
There was a brief pause, then a chorus of boos at the bad joke.
Muscles was frowning to herself. She didn’t seem to get it.
‘Man, you had me going there for a minute,’ said Keisha, laughing and shaking her head. ‘Genetic condition!’
Now that they were laughing and in a relatively good mood, Bailey decided that this would be an opportune moment to test the waters.
‘So who am I replacing?’ she asked, recalling Toni’s mention in the hospital that the gang had been short of one member before she joined.
They all fell quiet and once again dark, cryptic looks passed between them.
Toni turned to look at Bailey with her cold hard gaze.
‘Never you mind about that,’ she said in a tone that firmly put an end to any further questions on the matter.
‘Just remember what we said,’ growled Keisha. ‘Blood in. Blood out.’
It was an overt warning. More of a threat really. The harsh granite expressions on their faces said it all.
Bailey nodded obediently and went back to poking around in her beef goulash and they returned to talking about more mundane matters.
What Bailey found odd was that so far she hadn’t heard the gang talking about the one thing that seemed to be on the lips of every inmate in here – the recent murders. The conspicuous absence of this topic in their conversation seemed somewhat suspicious to her. She decided to probe a little. Seeing as everyone else in the place was gossiping about it, surely it wouldn’t sound too odd if she mentioned it.
‘So what do you think is going on with these murders then?’ she asked.
They all fell quiet and the mood suddenly turned distinctly chilly.
All eyes turned to Bailey. Toni’s in particular seemed to bore into her.
Bailey swallowed. Had she overstepped the mark?
‘You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?’ said Toni.
Bailey instantly regretted broaching the subject. The question had been too direct, too blunt. Her eagerness to find out what had happened to Alice had obscured her judgement. But she couldn’t unsay it.
‘What?’ said Toni softly. ‘Are you scared? Scared of getting scalped?’ There was a taunting, mocking tone in her voice.
Toni slowly began to mimic a scalping, using her jacket potato as an ersatz human head. She sawed the skin off the top of it with the serrated edge of the plastic knife, revealing the white flesh of the potato underneath. All of them watched, transfixed.
When she’d sawn off the ‘scalp’, she held it up, dangling it between her thumb and forefinger and then she popped it into her mouth and started chewing it.
The others all burst out laughing. Bailey joined in, forcing herself to laugh along, even though she could find no humour in the situation.
Was it just a joke or was there a deeper truth to be uncovered?
‘I’m not scared,’ said Bailey. ‘Just wanted to know if I need to buy any new shampoo in the shop or not. Won’t be needing quite as much as normal if I get scalped.’
Toni and the others snorted in amusement.
Any tension that might have been there now disappeared, and the conversation turned to dessert.
Bailey decided there and then to be more careful about pursuing the issue. She didn’t want to look suspicious. She’d have to be patient and bide her time. Softly, softly, catchee monkey, as the old proverb went.
She laughed and chatted with them for a while longer, then eventually made her excuses and got up to put her tray in the rack and leave the canteen.
Just as she was sliding her tray into the rack, a voice next to her said: ‘I recognise you from somewhere.’
Bailey turned around. Standing next to her was an inmate she hadn’t noticed before. She was small, with sallow rodent-like features. It took Bailey a few seconds to recognise her, but when she did her stomach dropped.
‘Yeah. I’m sure I know you,’ the inmate continued, her eyes narrowing as she tried to place Bailey. ‘Have we met before?’
Her name was Carly Potson and she had been some scrote junkie Bailey had arrested way back in her uniformed days, long before she’d started undercover work. She was surprised at the girl’s power of recall, especially considering how many drugs she’d probably ingested over the years. If Carly made the connection, Bailey would be in big trouble as she would likely blurt it out right there in the canteen.
She should have known this might happen. Having arrested as many people as she had done in her career, it was always going to be a possibility that she would encounter one of them in here. She desperately tried to think what she could do to prevent her cover getting blown.
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Toni and the others standing up and walking towards her to put their trays in the rack.
Shit.
She could only pray that her appearance was sufficiently different, and that the context of the prison was sufficiently removed, that Carly wouldn’t make the connection.
‘No. You must be mistaken,’ said Bailey.
Carly shook her head slowly. ‘I swear I’ve seen you before.’
‘Must be déjà vu.’
Carly peered hard at Bailey. ‘No I don’t think so… now where on earth was it?’
Toni and the others had now arrived at the rack. They were looking on with interest, hovering next to her. Perhaps because Bailey was new to their gang, they didn’t quite trust her completely as yet and wanted to gauge who else she communicated with.
Bailey realised she had to do something right now to make Carly go away. As the undercover training instructor had repeatedly drummed into them, the ability to think on your feet and use your initiative were key attributes of being a successful undercover police officer. And right now she was thinking pretty hard…
She flicked her hair aside to reveal the jagged scar on the side of her face.
‘See this?’ she muttered.
Carly’s eyes widened. She nodded.
‘Seen it before?’ said Bailey.
Carly shook her head. Bailey had obtained the scar some time after dealing with Carly, so Carly wouldn’t have known her with the scar.
‘Quite recognisable, isn’t it?’ She injected a mean tone into her voice.
Carly nodded, staring at the scar.
‘I can give you one just like it if you want. Then everyone will recognise you very easily.’
Carly’s eyes widened in fear. She shrank away from Bailey.
‘Now fuck off and don’t bother me again,’ hissed Bailey.
Carly cowered and scuttled away out of the canteen.
The rest of the gang laughed and sniggered.
Toni patted her on the back. ‘Way to go, champ!’
Bailey breathed a sigh of relief and brushed her hair back down over her scar.
She might have deflected suspicion this time, but that didn’t mean this was the end of it by any means. Knowing that there was someone in here who could potentially identify her as a policewoman made her very, very uneasy. It made her situation inestimably more precarious. She couldn’t afford to let it eat away at her though. She took a deep breath to calm herself. She’d just have to roll with it and pray that her act just now had done the trick. Hopefully she wouldn’t be seeing any more of Carly Potson.