Jailbird: An action-packed page-turner that will have you hooked

Chapter 1

The clank sounded out of place.

Alice Jenkins stopped pushing the laundry trolley and lifted her head. She tossed her long reddish-blonde hair out of her face.

‘Hey, who’s there?’

She was answered only by the repetitive groaning of the huge industrial washing machines and dryers which lined both sides of the prison laundry.

She peered uncertainly into the shadows beyond the giant wire racks, which held folded piles of freshly laundered bedding and towels. Down here in the basement there were no windows and the overhead strip lighting flickered with a sickly insipid yellow which failed to illuminate the room properly.

Alice had only started her job in the laundry two days before. Normally there were other inmates working in here, but this afternoon she was all alone. That was because she’d volunteered to do some overtime, explaining to the laundry supervisor that she wanted to earn a little extra cash for her canteen account.

She hadn’t been in prison for very long. Just a few weeks. She’d been sent down for benefit fraud. Not a major crime but enough to land her inside for a year and three months. But she seemed to be getting the hang of things. Like managing to get this job in the laundry.

There was still plenty of stuff that she was unfamiliar with though, so she wasn’t totally relaxed by any means. In fact, she’d found that this place could suddenly put you on edge when you were least expecting it. Like now for example.

She glanced around nervously.

‘Hey stop messing about!’ she said.

Maybe some of the other inmates – her laundry colleagues – were playing a practical joke on her. She hoped so. Because if it wasn’t them then maybe it was one of the dangerous-looking cliques she’d seen around the prison. Maybe they’d taken a dislike to her for some reason. Maybe they had it in for her.

‘Haha. Try and creep up on Ally. Yeah that’s hilarious. You can come out now.’

She tried to sound breezy but her nerves betrayed her, her voice instead coming out reedy and uneven.

There was no answer. Just the incessant rumbling of the machinery.

Her knuckles turned white as she tightened her grip on the handle of the trolley and squinted into the dim recesses of the cavernous laundry. A burst of excess steam hissed from a nearby pipe. She jumped and gasped, her heart thumping in her chest.

Her mind raced to think what had made the clanking sound. It might be a rat. The prison did have a rodent problem. Or maybe she was just spooking herself out unnecessarily.

‘You silly girl,’ she muttered, shaking her head and pulling herself upright.

She recommenced pushing the trolley, awkwardly manoeuvring its bulky weight towards one of the empty washing machines at the end of the room.

Then, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a shadow pass behind one of the sheets that were hanging up, waiting to be folded and placed on the wire racks.

She let go of the trolley and spun around to look. Was there someone there? She could have sworn she was the only one in here.

No. It was surely just a ripple in the material caused by convection in the warm air currents generated by the dryers. She turned back to the trolley, taking hold of the handle once again.

But then in the darkness beyond the racking, just behind the dryers, something caught her eye.

A brief sparkle.

A shiny surface which captured the few photons bouncing around behind the stacks of machinery and reflected them back to her…

She stopped again, momentarily entranced by it as it twinkled in the shadows like a lone star aglow in the distant black depths of deep space. For a brief moment she forgot her apprehension as she tried to make sense of it floating there in the shadows like the needle of a compass… turning… pointing in her direction…

Then a depth charge of cold fear detonated in her gut as she realised what it was.

Long…

Thin…

Sharp…

A blade.

A shank.

Her heart began to hammer inside her chest. Her hands fell away from the handle of the trolley.

‘Oh fuck,’ she whispered.

They’d come to kill her.

They’d decided to come for her when she was all alone. She cursed her stupidity for making the mistake of being down here by herself.

Somewhere along the line she’d messed up and now she was going to pay for it with her life.

She felt a heavy nausea rise up inside her, the fear of impending death.

Slowly, she edged backwards around the trolley to put it between herself and whoever was behind the dryers. She again squinted to try and see more.

In the shadows, silence. A flicker of movement in the darkness. A shadow within a shadow. It was big. It was no rat. That was for sure. It was a person.

She gulped. Her mouth was dry. She glanced towards the doorway. It was at the far end of the laundry. That distant metal door had never looked more appealing. Nor had it ever seemed further away. She glanced back at the row of dryers.

Tensing, she took a deep breath… and bolted.

She sprinted through the laundry, heading towards the exit… weaving through the laundry bins… running away from whatever it was in the shadows… running away from the glitter of razor-sharp steel.

She ran faster than she had ever run in her life. As if something had taken her over. As if there was an animal inside her.

Her breath tore in her throat. Adrenaline coursed through her body. Her trainers hammered on the concrete floor, the slap of her footfalls echoing through the big room.

She ran and ran. The doorway getting closer. Her portal of freedom. If only she could get there. So close now. She panted. Her lungs working overtime to power her flight.

And then a laundry bin spun out in front of her and she tripped over it, crashing onto the floor amidst a cascade of dirty linen.

‘Oh god!’ she gasped. Her eyes filled with tears, blurring her vision.

She tried to scramble to her feet, but she got tangled in the sheets, the white material having wrapped itself around her ankles with an almost malevolent will of its own.

As she reached down to extract herself from the fatal web of dirty linen, she felt a hand grip her hair roughly from behind. The strands twisting into the fingers, winding tight like a winch.

With a sharp yank, her head was pulled back. She gasped in pain as she felt the roots ripping out. Literally one by one. Pop. Pop. Pop. Out of her scalp.

She tried in vain to twist her head to see her attacker but she couldn’t, so tight was the grip. All she could see were her own hands clambering uselessly in the empty space in front of her.

‘Oh god!’ she choked. ‘Please don’t hurt me!’

But her words fell away unheard. Through tear-blurred vision she caught the flashing arc of the blade clutched in a black leather glove as it swooped down from above and sliced into the front of her scalp.

She screeched in agony as the cold steel carved the flesh away from her skull. The searing pain was beyond anything she’d ever experienced. A deluge of hot blood coursed down from the wound, transforming her face into a crimson liquid mask locked in a scream of terror.

With an audible rip, her partially severed scalp was savagely torn away from her head. Blinded by the blood in her eyes and paralysed by the shock of the assault, she was in no state to do anything about the knife as it came round again, this time to cut her throat.

Chapter 2

Detective Constable Bailey Morgan studied the cryptic crossword on the desk in front of her. Technically she was supposed to be doing work – checking through a pile of witness statements – but it was one of those days when time seemed to be moving with the consistency of treacle and police paperwork just wasn’t making it go any faster.

She glanced up, scanning the office to see if any of her colleagues had noticed what she was doing. It didn’t appear that any of them had. But then it was a Friday afternoon and the place was relatively deserted.

Anyone meeting her gaze would have found themselves looking into a pair of eyes the colour of cold ashes, the dark rings around them underscored by her pale complexion. They would probably have noticed that although her shoulder-length chestnut hair was tied up in a ponytail, there was a bit that she deliberately wore loose down over the left side of her face in a blatant, and not completely successful, attempt to conceal the thin white scar which ran from the top of her cheekbone down to the bottom of her jaw. They would hopefully at least have observed that she had good taste in clothes compared to the rest of her colleagues in the CID – whereas most of them, particularly the men, got their suits in Matalan, hers was a Donna Karan, cut to fit her lithe figure perfectly.

She fiddled absently with the lock of hair that hung down over the side of her face, curling it around her finger and letting it uncurl, as she was apt to do when she was lost in thought.

The good thing about cryptic crosswords was how completely they absorbed her. She could spend hours doing them, trying to untangle the mind-bending logic that went into their construction. And this one seemed to be doing the job very well. According to the clock on the wall, there were now just twenty-five minutes to go until she could officially knock off for the weekend and begin to concentrate on getting psyched up for the jiu-jitsu grading she was due to participate in the next day. If she passed, she’d move from green belt up to purple. For some people, moving up the belts was all about status, but for her the important thing was that it meant that she got to learn progressively more advanced and deadly ways of defending herself.

She curled her hair around her fingers and let it uncurl. She stared down at the cryptic crossword. There was one more word to fill in which she couldn’t get. Twelve across…

_ _ _ e

The clue was ‘Ceremony sounds correct’.

What the hell could it be?

Thinking laterally, it occurred to her that the hint probably lay in the word ‘sounds’. A word for ‘ceremony’ that sounded like the word for ‘correct’. It was on the tip of her tongue…

Her phone rang, loud in the quiet office. She jumped.

Her first thought was that it was her father. On Sunday she was supposed to have lunch with her parents, but earlier that week she’d had a big blowout with her dad, and those plans had fallen through. His phone call would either be an attempt to make up or an attempt to force home some point he’d made in their argument. She hoped it was the former rather than the latter.

Her parents lived in Bromley, not too far from where she lived in Crystal Palace, and she visited them on a fairly frequent basis. They were both in their sixties, and prior to retiring, her dad had worked for the local council as a health and safety inspector and her mum had been a teacher. She had always been closer to her father than to her mother, who was growing worryingly peculiar with age. However, her father was consumed with a very particular obsession, one that he and Bailey often argued about, to the point where they would sometimes end up not speaking to each other for weeks on end.

She sighed and braced herself as she fished her phone out of her bag. She looked at the number flashing on the screen.

It wasn’t her dad.

An anxious tightness gripped her. She recognised the number immediately, even though she had deleted that person’s contact details from her phone. It was her ex-boss, Detective Superintendent Frank Grinham. It had been almost six months since she’d last heard from him. Why was he calling her now, out of the blue?

She looked at the phone flashing, hesitating for a few moments, and then she answered it.

‘Hello Frank,’ she said.

‘Hello Bailey.’

An uncomfortable pause.

‘What can I do for you?’ she asked stiffly.

‘There’s something important I need to talk to you about.’

‘Go on.’

‘I can’t discuss it over the phone. Let’s meet in person. Are you free tomorrow afternoon?’

There was something about his tone that put the wind up her, something ominous yet also compelling.

She opened her mouth to explain that she had a jiu-jitsu grading to go to tomorrow afternoon, but instead the words that came out were: ‘Sure. I guess.’

‘There’s a pub called the Pig and Whistle just round the corner from my office. Know it?’

‘Yeah, I remember.’

‘Half past three?’

‘See you there.’

She hung up.

Frank’s phone call had been almost as cryptic as the crossword in front of her. But his enigmatic air didn’t come as a complete surprise. After all, he was responsible for running undercover operations and secrecy was his stock-in-trade. She’d worked undercover for him on a variety of jobs over a two-year period, which had ended abruptly six months ago when she’d quit that line of work.

Working undercover had never been something she’d been intending to do when she’d joined the police seven years previously at the age of twenty-two. In fact, she’d barely been aware that that kind of thing even went on.

She’d started as a uniformed constable, doing the standard training at Hendon, followed by eighteen months on the beat. At the first opportunity, she’d transferred to the CID to work as a detective, eager to take a more proactive approach to catching criminals. And it was whilst she was there that she’d first become aware of Frank’s operation.

Undercover work was where the danger and the kudos lay. And that was where she’d found her calling, running considerable risks on behalf of the law with the exhilarating feeling that she was really making a difference.

It had been great… until it hadn’t been great.

And so she’d left, never to look back. That was why she’d deleted Frank’s details from her phone. That was why she was sitting here in this office counting down the minutes until the end of the day.

But if she was so keen to put all that behind her then why had she agreed to meet him?

She knew his call could only mean one thing: that he needed her help. But whether she was ready to give it was another matter entirely.

She curled the lock of hair around her fingers and let it slowly uncurl.

She stared at the cryptic crossword.

The answer jumped out at her.

Rite.

The answer was ‘rite’.

Chapter 3

If she had a bad feeling about the meeting, Frank’s choice of venue only increased her misgivings. Although she’d walked past it many a time, she’d never actually been inside the Pig and Whistle. It just wasn’t her kind of place. It was a huge, brightly-lit sports pub with shiny fittings and a big TV screen on every wall blaring out the football highlights. She’d have much rather been in a dojo right now doing her jiu-jitsu grading, but she’d cancelled that to be here and it was too late to change her mind about it now.

She stood inside the doorway for a few moments and scanned the room from under the brim of her baseball cap, taking in the old men sitting by themselves staring vacantly at the football on the TV screens. She found the scene depressing and wondered why he’d chosen this pub when there were nicer and quieter places situated just as close to his office as this one.

Outwardly, it would have been hard to guess that she was a police detective, for she was just dressed casually in jeans and a suede-fringed cowboy jacket, her long brown hair tucked up under her cap, apart from the bit hanging down over the left side of her face.

The pub wasn’t particularly busy and it didn’t take her long to spot Frank sitting at a table in the far corner, his back to the wall, nursing a pint of lager. In his late forties, he had cropped red hair turning to grey and the kind of pasty countenance that made him look ill even when he wasn’t. With his grey suit and black Oxfords, he could have passed for some kind of sales rep sinking a pint after a business meeting in town. For him, Saturday was a workday, no different to any other. It was the nature of the work he did, and she knew just how committed he was to it.

He’d already noticed her and was watching her with a thin smile on his face, dashing any notion she might have had of turning around and leaving. She walked over to his table. He stood up and they engaged in a perfunctory and slightly awkward embrace. She put her bag down and sat in the chair opposite him.

His smile, just as she remembered, was purely a permutation of the muscles around his mouth. It didn’t extend upwards to the rest of his face. His pale blue eyes were, as ever, dead, watery and penetrating.

‘Vodka and blackcurrant?’ he said.

‘You’ve got a good memory.’

‘It’s only been six months.’

She watched him as he went to the bar to get her a drink, his profile illuminated by the blue light of the TV screens. Although his cold-fish demeanour could put a lot of people off, she felt a measure of affection for him as her former mentor. She’d learnt a lot from him, not least that you often had to think like an outlaw in order to catch one.

He came back from the bar and placed the drink down in front of her.

‘How’s the job?’ he asked.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Working towards my sergeant’s exams.’

‘You’ve got rings under your eyes.’

‘I don’t sleep so well these days.’

‘I hear warm milk before bed is good for you.’

‘I’ve tried everything.’

He nodded slowly and looked away.

They filled up the minutes with small talk, him asking her questions but seemingly only half-interested in her responses, his eyes flickering around the pub all the while.

She waited until they reached a natural pause in the conversation and raised her eyebrows at him expectantly. ‘You were never one for casual chit-chat, Frank, so let’s get to the point.’

He nodded slowly. ‘I have some bad news for you. I thought it better to tell you in person.’

‘I knew there was something wrong.’

‘Alice is dead.’

A dagger of shock knifed through her. ‘Alice Simms?’

‘I know you two were quite close.’

She blinked and nodded stiffly. She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. An unsolicited flood of memories and emotions threatened to overwhelm her. She bit them back. She didn’t want to appear weak in front of Frank. She didn’t want to break down in public and certainly not in a place like this.

Taking a deep breath, she steadied herself.

‘We did undercover training together and you know how tough that is. We became really good mates.’

‘I’m sorry to be the one who had to break it to you.’

‘You could have chosen a slightly nicer place to do it in.’

He shrugged apologetically.

Alice had been one of Bailey’s closest friends when she had been working undercover. The bond they had forged whilst operating in such a challenging environment had been particularly strong. They’d first met on the undercover training course and their friendship had rapidly grown beyond work to the point where they’d ended up sharing a flat together, an arrangement that had ceased when Bailey had quit that line of work. To hear that Alice was now dead left Bailey stunned.

‘What happened?’ she whispered.

‘She was murdered last week. In the line of duty.’

‘Doing what exactly?’

He glanced around. The TV screens blared. They were showing a replay of a penalty, the ball hitting the back of the net again and again from various angles. No one appeared to be paying the slightest bit of interest in them. She realised now that Frank had chosen this pub because it was big enough and noisy enough for them to chat without anyone overhearing.

He turned back to face her and lowered his voice slightly. ‘She was working undercover in a women’s prison. She was going under the name of Alice Jenkins.’

Bailey raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘A prison? I’ve worked in some pretty dicey places but never anything quite like that. Which one was she in?’

‘HMP Foxbrook. Know it?’

She nodded. ‘I’ve driven past it a few times. Big old Victorian place. Public sector. It’s pretty grim-looking, like something out of Dickens.’

‘She’d gone undercover there to investigate a drugs ring. It’s a very lucrative business, selling drugs in prison. It’s a captive market. Quite literally.’

‘Someone found out she was a cop?’

The very prospect of it filled her with horror. She could envisage all too clearly the reaction of a mob of prisoners suddenly discovering a copper in their midst.

‘She was deep cover. Not even the prison authorities knew she was a police officer. And they still don’t. And we want to keep it that way for the time being.’

‘So what happened?’

‘We don’t know, but it’s quite possible her cover got blown somehow. Maybe she slipped up in some way. But it’s proving very hard to get to the bottom of it. The inmates are being extremely uncooperative, not surprisingly, and the staff aren’t much better.’

‘Forensics?’

He shook his head. ‘Nothing of any specific value. And in the context of a closed environment like a prison, there’s too much cross-contamination for DNA analysis to be reliable.’

Bailey shook her head. ‘I can’t believe it. Alice was good. She was always top of the class. I’m really surprised that something like this happened to her.’

‘It seems she underestimated what she was up against. It was pretty brutal what they did to her. Her body was found in the prison laundry. She’d had her throat cut…’ he hesitated for a moment, ‘…and she’d been scalped.’

Bailey sat there numbly absorbing what he was telling her. She finished her drink and placed the glass back on the table. She regretted not asking for a double.

‘What about CCTV?’ she said hoarsely. ‘Surely that must have caught something.’

He shook his head. ‘No cameras in the laundry. It’s not considered to be a high-risk area. That’s probably the reason why they chose to do it there.’

‘They…?’ she echoed.

He shrugged, opening his palms, welcoming an answer to her question.

‘You want me to come back and work for you, don’t you?’ she said.

But it wasn’t really a question because she’d known that this had been the whole point of the meeting all along.

‘I want to find out what happened to her. I’m certain she was onto something and I’m pretty sure that was the reason she was killed. I want to know what she found out.’

He fixed her with his watery, penetrating gaze.

‘Are you ready to come back, Bailey?’

Chapter 4

‘Spyros!’

Bailey wrenched awake, twisted in the sweat-soaked sheets, alone in her bed, gasping the name that she had been screaming in her dreams.

For a few moments, she just lay there, shrouded in the greyness of pre-dawn, her heart palpitating in her chest, and waited for the horror to slowly subside.

She’d tried prescription medication of all types – from sleeping pills to antidepressants. She’d gone for counselling. She’d even tried alternative medicine. Anything to make the nightmares go away. But none of it had been any good. Each and every night, a slightly different iteration of that last undercover job played out, and each time was no less horrific than the last.

She’d thought that quitting undercover work would make things better. But it hadn’t. If anything, the nightmares had been getting worse.

Turning her head, she saw that the glowing digits of her bedside clock read 4.05 a.m. She knew that she would be unable to get back to sleep.

Pulling aside the sheets, she got up out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom. She switched the light on. Blinking in the harsh unflattering glare, she looked at herself in the mirror of the bathroom cabinet.

Jesus she looked like shit. Like some kind of zombie. Her skin was grey. Her eyes had dark rings around them. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a good night’s sleep.

She ran a hand through her hair, spotting yet another white strand amongst the brown. She was only twenty-nine and she already had white hairs appearing on a regular basis. Damn nightmares. She pulled the offending strand out with a snapping sound and dropped it in the sink.

Opening the cabinet, she took out a box of beta-blockers. She popped two of the tablets out of the blister pack and tossed them back with a mouthful of water directly from the tap.

She wasn’t planning on going back to bed. No point lying in the darkness ruminating over things. She decided to go into the living room to watch whatever crap was showing on TV at this time in the morning, anything to distract her from the bad dreams, the stupider and more mundane the better.

Wandering into the living room, she sat down on the sofa and switched on the TV. It was showing a long American infomercial advertising an ultra-intensive workout programme that promised to transform flab into rippling muscle. She’d seen this one many times before. It was on most nights, most of the time, on most of the channels so it seemed. But she sat there and watched it again.

As she slouched on the sofa in the flickering light of the TV screen, she thought again about the decision she’d made the previous day. She’d said yes to Frank because of Alice. And later that evening she’d mourned alone for her friend in the privacy of her flat, resolving through tears and gritted teeth to find out what had happened to her. But now, after awakening from the nightmares, she wasn’t so sure about her decision any more. Had it been a really bad idea?

Surely, she had to be crazy to want to plunge herself back into that same world which had chewed her up and left her like this.

A surge of black panic suddenly overwhelmed her.

It had been the wrong decision. She couldn’t do it.

She picked her mobile phone up off the coffee table. The small screen glowed as she activated it. She dialled Frank Grinham’s number. It began to ring.

Brrring… Brrring… Brrring…

She ended the call before he could answer. Switching off her phone, she tossed it aside, angry at her brief lapse in resolve. She realised now that her mistake had been quitting undercover work in the first place. It had left her too much time on her hands to think about stuff.

And some things it was just better not to dwell on.

Chapter 5

Considering that it was the nerve centre for some very delicate and high-stakes undercover operations, the office came across as kind of poky and a bit disorganised, with messy stacks of papers lying everywhere on the desks next to the computers. However, despite the apparent disorder, Bailey knew that there was a system of sorts in place.

‘It’s been a while since you’ve been here,’ said Frank over his shoulder as he led her through the desks towards one of the side rooms.

It was true. Previously, when she’d been working undercover, she’d seldom needed to come to headquarters, apart from the occasional briefing for the bigger or more sensitive jobs. More often, a job would just come through directly on the mobile phone she’d been issued with especially for that purpose and she’d take it directly from there.

Numerous black filing cabinets lined the sides of the rooms, containing files going back years relating to past cases. Noticeboards on the walls were adorned with mugshots linked together by lines tracing the connections between the various individuals within criminal organisations who were the subject of ongoing operations. There were several maps of the UK, including a big one of London, which were dotted with a plethora of coloured pins. All in all, it wasn’t as slick or as high-tech in appearance as people might have expected. But then, at the end of the day, undercover work was primarily about human beings rather than technology.

She followed Frank through the office into a side room that contained little more than a table and two chairs. Through the window, she could see that it had started drizzling outside, the London skyline receding into a grey foggy murk.

He closed the door. They both sat down and he scrutinised her in silence for a few moments.

‘I got a missed call from you the other night. Is everything okay?’

‘Everything’s fine.’ He didn’t need to know about the nightmares.

‘Are you sure you’re up to it? You know, I didn’t actually check the records to see if you’d been signed off as psychologically fit to return to undercover work.’

‘The shrinks all said I was fine.’ But she hadn’t told them the half of it. She just hadn’t been able to bring herself to.

He smiled and nodded slowly. ‘You miss the rush, don’t you? There’s nothing quite like it.’

She knew he spoke from bountiful experience. Frank had worked in undercover roles on countless operations over the years before eventually taking over the reins. He had an ex-wife and a kid he never saw who were casualties of his relentless dedication to the job. And to that end Bailey knew first-hand what a hard taskmaster he could be.

He was right, though. She did miss the rush of working undercover. It made her feel alive like nothing else, especially when normal life made her feel as if she was dying inside. But the buzz wasn’t the only reason she was here. Not by a long stretch. Alice was the main reason.

‘So what’s the deal?’ she said.

The smiled faded. He cleared his throat.

‘As you may already be aware, drugs in prison are a major social issue and a political hot topic. They’re worth up to four times their street value inside and it’s estimated that the drugs trade in the UK prison system is worth around a hundred million pounds a year.’

‘Big business,’ she murmured.

‘We’ve been aware of the problem at HMP Foxbrook for a while now and this operation forms part of the Government’s overall initiative to clamp down on drug use and drug dealing within the wider prison system.’

‘So just how big is the problem at HMP Foxbrook?’ she asked.

‘Well, we know that drugs get into the prison through all kinds of means. Visitors smuggle stuff in. Corrupt staff smuggle stuff in. Stuff gets chucked over the wall. Stuff gets hidden in packages posted to prisoners. Stuff gets flown in by drone. But that’s all small fry. What we’re concerned about here are much larger quantities. We suspect the existence of an organised drug smuggling and distribution ring who are working at scale.’

‘Where’s the budget for this operation coming from?’

‘The operation is being funded by the Metropolitan Police, more specifically the Basic Command Unit which covers the borough that the prison lies in. Drugs detectives from that BCU will be overseeing the operation and they’re also in charge of the budget. They’re the ones I’ll be reporting back to with any intelligence that you gather.’

The Metropolitan Police was divided up into a number of Basic Command Units, or BCUs, each assigned to a specific geographical area of London.

‘So basically the whole thing’s being run by the local drugs squad,’ said Bailey.

‘That’s more or less correct,’ Frank agreed. ‘They want you to uncover how the drugs are entering the prison and they want to identify the key players involved. Once we’ve nailed the perpetrators, we should be able to find out who on the outside is behind the supply of drugs to the prison. We think that a major organised crime group is responsible. When we reach that point, the NCA will probably want to step in, so they’re very interested in the outcome of this operation.’

The National Crime Agency, or NCA, were responsible for tackling organised crime on a variety of fronts, but they only dealt with really large and significant cases, underlining to Bailey that this operation could potentially lead into a major investigation.

‘And Alice?’

‘I want to make it clear right now, Bailey, that your priority is uncovering the drugs ring. Alice’s murder is being investigated by the police separately. Do you understand?’ He fixed her with a stern look and a raised eyebrow.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘The drugs ring is the priority. But I do also intend to find out who killed Alice.’

‘Well, as I was saying before in the pub, I think her murder was probably connected to her investigation of the drugs ring, so unlocking the identity of her killer is likely to be a key element in cracking this case and securing some serious convictions, and finding out who did it will probably form an integral part of your investigation anyhow.’

‘I figured as much. She must have been onto something serious.’

‘In case you’re not already aware, all murders in custody have to be investigated by the police, the Prison and Probation Ombudsman, the employer and the coroner. But, like I mentioned before, not a great deal of progress has been made in terms of finding out who killed her. But that’s where you, in your undercover role, might be able to shed some light on matters. However, the murder investigation team who are currently investigating her death will not be made aware that you are a police officer and you will not make direct contact with them in any way. Everything goes through me. Do you understand?’

‘That suits me just fine. So when do I start?’

‘The budget’s been signed off so you can start right away. We can get you in there almost immediately. I’ve already obtained the authorisation from your CID detective sergeant to get you released.’ He paused. ‘How’s this Thursday? ’

‘The sixteenth of May?’

‘Can you be ready by then?’

It was only three days away. Quite often in the past, undercover jobs would come up at short notice and Bailey had become used to rapidly dropping everything in order to accommodate them. Working undercover wasn’t a permanent job and it never had been. Whenever she’d gone on an undercover operation her regular casework had merely been put on hold until she had finished or had been redistributed to others to do.

A thought suddenly crossed her mind. ‘When’s Alice’s funeral?’

‘I don’t know at the moment. They’ve done the autopsy, but her body hasn’t been released to the funeral home yet. There’s got to be an inquest at some point and that always holds things up.’

She sighed. ‘Okay, well I guess this Thursday’s fine then,’ she said. ‘No point in delaying things.’

‘That’s what I like to hear,’ he said. ‘You know you’ll probably make a decent bit of overtime from this job.’

‘I’m not doing it for the money.’

‘Do you have a cover story you can use?’

She nodded. She knew the drill. Her cover story was her responsibility. Quite often, there was never any need to resort to it, as a lot of people just weren’t that concerned with hearing about your life. But then, other