‘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.