She didn’t take his harsh tone too personally. She remembered now that he got like this whenever he was under the cosh.

‘Leave it with me, Frank. You know I’ll deliver the goods one way or another.’

‘Do you have anything that you can tell me?’

‘Natalie Spakes was scalped.’

‘I already know that. You, on the other hand, as an inmate, are not supposed to know that. We haven’t made that information public.’

‘Word gets around fast in here. Same signature. Same killer. I’m ninety-nine per cent certain it’s the gang. Did you know that she used to be a member? And she wanted out. Apparently she was planning to blow the lid on their activities.’

‘Yeah I know. Her boyfriend mentioned it. He’s pretty cut up about her death. They’ve got a kid you know. A four-year-old. The kid’s the reason she wanted to leave the gang. She was hoping that by snitching she could get out earlier so she could be with him. I can’t understand why she joined them in the first place.’

‘Protection. Prestige. Peer pressure. Who knows? You wouldn’t understand unless you were in here. Being in here twists your perspective on things.’

‘The murder investigation team are working off the possibility that a member of staff may have been involved, if not in actually committing the crime, then at least in facilitating it. She was found dead in a locked cell in a particularly secure and heavily monitored part of the prison. Somebody with access to a set of keys must have been complicit somehow. What’s more, the cameras to that part of the prison went down shortly before the murder happened. They thought it was a technical glitch, so they called an engineer out, but he wasn’t able to get there until the next morning, by which time the deed had already been done.’ He paused. ‘It turns out that some wires had been cut.’

‘Cut?’

‘Apparently there was a small vulnerability in the wiring leading to the segregation block. Anyone who knew about it – staff or inmate – could have cut those wires.’

The fact that the murder had taken place in the segregation block had been a strong hint to Bailey that a member of staff was embroiled in some way, but the news of the wire cutting illustrated just how audacious and determined the perpetrators actually were.

‘The whole thing must have been planned out in advance,’ she said. ‘It looks like the drugs ring and the murders are all tied up together. If a member of staff was involved in Natalie’s murder, then I bet that same person or persons is helping the gang get the drugs into the prison. We just need to work out who they are.’

‘According to the rota, there were over thirty prison officers on duty that night – Friday the seventh of June. They’ve interviewed all of them, but no one seems to know anything. Like I mentioned before, the staff aren’t particularly co-operative and the inmates even less so.’