Bailey lay on her bunk ruminating, listening to the pipes gurgle, staring at the wall watching the shadows grow longer as the sun went down. She curled her hair around her fingers and let it uncurl…
Frank was right. Time was running short and she desperately needed something more to go on than the unsubstantiated assertions of one of the less sane inmates in the prison. The idea of the Hairdresser was enticing but ultimately futile if she couldn’t establish anything concrete.
She swung herself off the bunk and began to pace the cell impatiently, back and forth like a caged animal, willing some kind of solution to come to her.
But nothing did.
She sighed in frustration and sat down heavily on the bare mattress of the lower bunk, Sharon’s former bunk. Sharon hadn’t yet been replaced with a new cellmate and Bailey supposed that in the meantime she could switch her bedding from the upper bunk to the lower bunk. After all, in prison the lower bunk was regarded as the more preferable bunk to possess – you weren’t right up by the glare of the ceiling light and you didn’t need to climb up and down all the time.
Bailey ran her hand over the mattress and decided against switching. She’d kind of got used to the upper bunk and, if truth be told, despite her professed lack of superstition, she felt slightly uneasy about sleeping in a bunk whose previous occupant had been brutally murdered.
Poor old Sharon.
Bailey hadn’t particularly liked her, but no one deserved a fate like that.
She recalled the gruesome scene and that single cryptic word that Sharon had scrawled in her own blood as she lay dying.
Flee.
A chilling warning.
There was something eerie about it. It brought to mind Mel’s duppies.
A momentary wave of goosebumps rippled across her flesh. She instantly quelled those thoughts. The supernatural did not constitute a feasible explanation.
But now, the more she thought about it, the more Bailey was sure that the answer lay there, locked within that single scrawl, just beyond reach.
What exactly had Sharon seen in the kitchen? Why had she even been in the kitchen? Bailey knew that she worked there, but the murder had taken place outside of work hours, so she must have gone there for some other reason.
She lay down on Sharon’s bunk, placing her hands behind her head, hoping to absorb by osmosis some new insight. She cast her mind back to Sharon and her schemes. Had she had some kind of blackmail scheme going? Had she been murdered because of it? If so, it must tie into the other murders somehow.
On the morning that Sharon had been murdered, Bailey had asked her what she was doing that day. Sharon had tapped the side of her nose. A secret.
As a police detective, Bailey had become accustomed to observing and memorising the minutiae of people’s behaviour. And, as she recalled, Sharon had done that same gesture one time before…
It had been when she’d been talking about that fight in the canteen.
Knowledge is power.
That’s what she’d said as she’d tapped the side of her nose.
Maybe it was just a mannerism. Maybe the connection was too tenuous.
Or maybe not.