All was dark on the other side of the small glass window. Bailey stood in the corridor and peered into the laundry alongside the other two. She was glad she’d managed to convince Amber, but the three of them still had a long way to go if they wanted to get themselves out of here alive.
Amber gave Bailey a sceptical glance. She looked at her watch.
She began to fiddle with the large bunch of keys that were attached to her belt by a chain. They clinked as she went through them one by one.
‘I think this one should do it,’ she said, holding up a long old-fashioned copper-coloured key.
She inserted it into the lock and turned it.
Click.
Clack.
She twisted the door handle, pushed open the door and stepped inside.
Reaching to her right, she flicked the light switch. The halogen strip lighting flickered on down the length of the room, filling it with a harsh artificial light.
Bailey and Poppy stepped inside. The door swung closed behind them.
Amber turned to face Bailey and folded her arms.
‘The ball’s in your court now.’
Bailey surveyed the laundry – the silent rows of washing machines and dryers… the canvas-sided trolleys piled with mesh bags full of dirty items… the bed sheets hanging up by the racking… the tangle of pipes and ducts running along the walls and ceiling… the clumps of lint which dotted the tiled floor…
She breathed slowly in and out, detecting the faint acrid smell of detergent.
Suddenly she didn’t feel so sure any more.
‘I don’t see any well in here,’ said Poppy in a quiet voice, as if reading Bailey’s thoughts.
‘It has to be in here,’ she said, gritting her teeth.
She scanned the room again, from the doorway right down to the far end, scrutinising every detail, but nothing jumped out at her.
‘What are we looking for exactly?’ asked Amber.
‘It’s an old disused well. Like it says on the door, this place used to be the water supply room for the prison. The well supplied the water.’
‘I’ve been in here on numerous occasions and I’ve never noticed anything which resembles a well,’ said Amber.
‘It’s not going to be obvious,’ replied Bailey. ‘So we need to be methodical. Let’s split up. We’ll find it more quickly that way. I’ll do this side and work my way down to the back of the room. Poppy, you can look over there to the right, by the racking. And, Amber, how about if you cover this part over here by the doorway? That way you can also keep an eye on anyone who might disturb us. You’re our best protection against them now.’
They both nodded and the three of them went their separate ways.
Bailey paced slowly down the length of the laundry, the scattered granules of detergent powder crunching beneath the soles of her trainers. She looked from left to right and up and down, trying to detect any feature that might have once been a well or that might now conceal a well. But, just as before, there was nothing, just a lot of machinery and a great deal of dirty linen.
She reached the end of the room and halted next to the bank of top-loading washing machines that lined the back wall. She turned around and looked back the way she had come. Was there any clue in the layout of the laundry? She tilted her head one way and then the other, as if the difference in perspective might yield some insight. But it didn’t.
She was starting to get worried. She had been staking everything on the well. Maybe she had been wrong. Maybe there was no well. In which case…
She didn’t want to think about it.
There had to be a well. And it had to be in here somewhere.
She wondered how the others were doing.
‘Any luck?’ she called out.
There was no answer.
She walked forward a few steps in the direction of the door and then stopped. She peered around for the other two, but they were nowhere to be seen. And she couldn’t hear them either. The laundry was completely silent.
‘Found anything yet?’ she said in a loud voice.
But still there was no answer.
Apprehension rippled through her.
‘Poppy?’ she said.
No answer.
Bailey walked forward slowly.
‘Amber?’ she called.
No answer.
The silence was now heavy and oppressive. She could hear her heart thumping in her chest.
Unsettled, she headed over to the racking. The hanging sheets billowed ever so slightly as she made her way between them, pushing them aside.
Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. She could feel it in her gut. As a policewoman she’d learned to trust her instincts and right now an alarm bell was going off in her head.
Ahead of her a sheet briefly billowed aside and she got a partial glimpse of a trainer-clad foot lying sideways on the floor.
A sinking feeling of dread came over her.
‘Oh shit,’ she whispered.
She hurried forward, pushing the sheets aside, her mouth dry, her heart hammering harder than ever.
And then she stopped. The white sheet hanging directly in front of her was stained bright red with what looked like an arterial spray pattern.
She swallowed hard and wrenched it aside.
Poppy was lying on the floor, her large green eyes wide open, staring sightlessly upwards. Her throat had been cut. The wound gaped like a second mouth, a pool of thick crimson blood ebbing slowly outwards across the tiles.
‘Oh my god!’ gasped Bailey, reeling backwards.
She felt dizzy. She thought she was going to faint. She took several deep breaths and tried to look away but she couldn’t tear her gaze from the dead staring eyes. They seemed to be accusing her. Poppy had trusted her. And now Poppy was dead.
A surge of emotion forced an involuntary sob from her lips. Only now did she realise just how close she’d grown to Poppy over the course of the past few weeks. Those feelings wrenched at her like painful barbs. First Alice and now Poppy. Why did her friends have to die?
She inhaled sharply to try and compose herself. Her scattered thoughts began to regroup. She dropped into a combat poise. She was in mortal danger right now. This had happened without her hearing a single thing, and whoever had done it was very close by indeed.
What about Amber? Was Amber okay?
‘Amber?’ she stammered, stepping backwards.
‘Yes?’
Bailey spun around.
Amber was standing just a few metres away, leaning casually against an industrial steam press. Her bunch of keys dangled from her hand, swinging gently back and forth on their chain like the pendulum of a stage hypnotist.
Bailey stared at them clinking softly, temporarily mesmerised.
And then she noticed Poppy’s bloody shank lying on the floor by Amber’s shiny black shoe. It was the shank that Amber had confiscated only a short time earlier.
She looked up at Amber. Amber smiled faintly.
Bailey felt as if her insides had been sucked out of her.
‘Why?’ she gasped. ‘Why did you kill her?’
‘She was dead weight,’ said Amber with a dismissive shrug.
‘You bitch.’
‘That’s not a very nice thing to say,’ said Amber with a mocking smile on her face. ‘I could put you on the nicking sheet for saying that.’
Bailey was panting hard now, fighting to control the anger that was overtaking her. ‘I can’t believe it’s been you all along, working with them. With Terry and the Governor and the gang. Secretly helping them.’
Amber frowned, puzzled. ‘Me? A drug dealer?’ She spoke the words with disdain. ‘You’ve got to be joking. You are so off-track, it’s almost funny.’
Now Bailey was confused. Really confused. Questions tumbled chaotically through her mind, looking for answers that weren’t there.
‘But… then… then why…?’
She stared at Amber, confounded. And that’s when it hit her.
The realisation surfaced in its entirety. She gasped, almost unable to draw breath. She gazed transfixed at Amber’s face as the elements clicked into place and the recognition was complete.
‘Felicia Lee,’ she whispered hoarsely.
‘How very observant of you. But then you are a police officer and the police are supposed to be observant, aren’t they?’
The metamorphosis was uncanny – the unkempt tangle of black hair had been dyed blonde and drawn back tight and smooth into a neat bun; the dark brown eyes had been cleverly masked by blue contact lenses; and the facial structure had been deliberately obscured by the large pair of thick-rimmed glasses. On a cosmetic level, the transformation was relatively simple, but crudely effective, and probably enough to fool most people.
But what really completed her disguise was the way that she carried herself. With her pressed uniform and prim demeanour, she seemed worlds away from the nihilistic punked-out girl in the file photo. Now Bailey knew why the picture of Felicia Lee had elicited such a strange feeling of unease in her – she must have on some level subconsciously recognised Amber.
But now, the Amber she’d known was evaporating before her very eyes, casting off the layers of primness and virtue like a snake shedding its skin. And to see it happening unnerved Bailey like nothing she’d ever encountered before.
What disturbed her the most though, was how completely she’d been taken in by the caring and conscientious facade. For Amber to have been able to so successfully conceal her true character served to illustrate just how dangerous she really was. Even just a short while earlier when Bailey had convinced Amber to help, Amber had played her part to perfection.
Assimilating everything before her, Bailey now understood what Amber was doing here.
‘You’re bringing him into the prison, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Through the well. Your brother.’
‘For a policewoman, you’re quite smart. Smarter than your friend anyway. She wasn’t half as good as you at concealing her identity. I only realised you were a cop just now when you told me out there in the corridor.’
The breath caught in Bailey’s throat. ‘You knew Alice was a police officer?’
‘I caught her using her mobile phone one day. You do know they’re illegal in here? I plucked it right out of her hand before she knew what I was doing. Confiscated it there and then. She hadn’t had time to lock it, so I took the opportunity to read though the messages and listen to the voicemails. It didn’t take me long to work out that she was much more than just your ordinary inmate.
‘When I put it to her that she was a policewoman, she went ahead and admitted it. Guess she knew I had her bang to rights. Made me promise not to tell anyone. Confided in me that she was investigating some drugs ring, told me that she was trying to work out how the drugs were getting into the prison. So I gave her back her phone and told her about this well in the laundry, how I’d seen some suspicious stuff going on down there. I told her to go down and check it out when no one else was around. Unfortunately she bumped into Leonard…’
Bailey stared at Amber with a growing hatred in her guts. ‘You deliberately served her up to him.’
Amber shrugged and smiled. ‘I’ve never liked the police. Besides, she had nice hair. Strawberry blonde. I knew Leonard would like it.’
‘She trusted you.’
‘She was stupid.’
‘She was my friend.’
‘Get over it,’ sneered Amber.
‘You’re history,’ growled Bailey.
Amber pouted in an exaggerated expression of concern. ‘Okay, officer. I suppose you’d better arrest me.’ She held out both hands, fists clenched, for Bailey to cuff.
Bailey flexed and reasserted her fighting stance. It didn’t matter that she had no handcuffs. With her police training and her martial arts background, she was confident that she would be able to subdue and restrain Amber.
Sizing up her opponent, she took a careful step forward.
She hesitated. There was something wrong. Amber was too relaxed.
Amber’s gaze flickered momentarily over Bailey’s left shoulder. It was a microscopic tell, but it was enough.
There was someone behind her.
Bailey spun around.
There was no one there.
She spun back to face Amber and found herself looking directly into the nozzle of a small black aerosol canister which Amber had been concealing in her clenched fist. It seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, like a coin produced from thin air by a conjurer.
Bailey realised that Amber’s glance over her shoulder had been a feint just as Amber depressed the aerosol nozzle. A thin cold jet of white liquid squirted into her eyes. A fraction of a second later, she felt an intense burning sensation and her eyes began to water furiously. It was some kind of debilitating gas spray.
She coughed and spluttered, temporarily blinded. She lashed out wildly but Amber had the advantage. Amber stepped to one side and then stamped hard on the side of Bailey’s right knee. Bailey felt her leg give way with a tearing sound accompanied by an excruciating pain. She shrieked in agony and collapsed forward. Amber then karate-chopped her hard on the back of the head and blackness descended upon her.