Bailey lay there and tried to focus her mind on something other than the sharp pain in her lower back as the tattoo gun drilled its intricate patterns into her flesh.
Poppy was once again sitting astride her on the bunk, working intently on the design.
‘Tell me more about your crime,’ said Poppy, pausing to dip the tattoo needle into the tiny pot of ink on the chair beside the bunk.
Bailey was surprised that Poppy was so curious about the reason that she had supposedly ended up in here. It wasn’t as if it was a particularly interesting or unusual crime, and she’d already told her a bit about it during their previous session.
It did cross her mind that Poppy might have been tasked with probing her story in a little more depth in order to confirm that she was actually who she said she was.
Either way, Bailey had no choice but to recite her story just the way she had rehearsed it so many times in her head.
‘Like I told you before, I worked in the accounts department for a big marketing company. People never suspect that the mild-mannered person in accounts is actually stealing hundreds of thousands of pounds from the company. I guess their mistake was that they had the same person responsible for setting up new vendors, processing invoices, making payments and reconciling the financial statements. That person was me.
‘I saw how much the top executives would spend on their business trips, on entertaining top clients, and so on. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to siphon off a bit of that cash for myself. The company was rolling in it and I thought they wouldn’t notice if a little bit went missing here and there.
‘It was dead easy as there wasn’t really any system in place to check what I was doing. It was pretty simple for me to set up a new vendor, a made-up company which appeared on the financial statements as “Corporate Services Ltd”. It sounded convincing enough not to raise any suspicions and it sounded suitably bland enough that it could have been providing anything from corporate entertainment to logistics.
‘I billed the marketing company for the services provided by this fake vendor, processing the invoices myself and then writing the cheques to be paid directly into their bank account, which happened to be my own personal bank account.’
‘Hmm… very clever. So how did you get caught then?’
‘How do you think? I got greedy didn’t I. You see, no one noticed at the beginning. It was just too easy. I got overconfident and started to increase the amounts. But then all it took was somebody questioning a particularly large payment to “Corporate Services Ltd”, and it all began to unravel. They suspected something was up, so they brought in a forensic accountant behind my back to do some digging around. They checked out the vendor and found out it was fake and that was that.
‘If I’d have kept it low-key, I’d have gotten away with it. I’d have flown beneath the radar and no one would have been any the wiser. I’d probably still be doing it now.’
‘Well, maybe things are meant to happen for a reason,’ said Poppy. ‘Maybe it was fate that brought you in here.’
There was something slightly cryptic about Poppy’s response and Bailey couldn’t quite work out what she was getting at.
‘Yeah maybe, but hopefully not fated to get scalped though,’ she said, steering the conversation in a new direction.
Poppy sighed. ‘It’s a pity really. I kind of liked her.’
‘Who?’
‘Natalie.’
‘You knew her?’
Apart from her name, Bailey knew next to nothing about the latest victim, save that she had met her demise whilst incarcerated in what was supposedly the securest part of the prison.
‘It doesn’t seem like that long ago that she was lying right here on this bunk where you are now, getting her tattoo done.’
Bailey perked up, lifting her head. ‘You mean…?’
‘She used to be one of us.’
‘A member of the ABC?’
‘Didn’t you know?’
Toni and the others had mentioned nothing to hint that Natalie had once been a member of the gang. This was a revelation. This was just the kind of information Bailey had been hoping to find out.
‘They don’t tell me anything.’
‘That’s because you’re new.’
‘Is that why she was in segregation?’ Bailey asked.
‘She wanted out. But you know how it is…’
‘Blood out…’
‘Apparently she was going to snitch on us. I guess that ain’t going to happen now.’
Now it all made sense. The talk of being one member down and the dark looks that had passed between the gang whenever the subject arose. Natalie was the missing member. Natalie was a snitch. Natalie had wanted to leave the gang. And there was only one way to leave. Blood out.
The question Bailey was dying to ask was on the very tip of her tongue…
‘Right, that’ll do for today,’ said Poppy, wiping the blood and excess ink from the tattoo. ‘It’ll take a few more sessions to get the details completed, but I want to make sure it’s perfect.’
The moment had passed. Bailey felt a rush of frustration. She had been tantalisingly close to finding out the truth, she was sure of it.
She got off the bunk and put her clothes back on before glancing at her watch. Twenty minutes of free association time left. She hoped the queues at the phones weren’t too long.