The more she watched him, the more she wondered how he’d been corrupted. When had he taken that first step down that dark road that had brought him to this current place?

As an undercover cop, she understood the lure of corruption all too well. One of the dangers of working undercover was letting yourself fall prey to the benefits of the criminal life. When you infiltrated a criminal gang, you were exposed to that kind of life, day in day out – the designer clothes, the high-performance cars, the posh restaurants, the respect and fear of virtually everyone you encountered. For a police officer who didn’t get paid a great deal, relatively speaking, the temptation could be very strong. And for some it was too much to resist.

For her, though, it had never been much of an issue. The fancy lifestyle – she could take it or leave it. What she’d always been more worried about was the mental contamination. Hanging about with criminals all the time meant that you started to pick up their habits and their fucked-up logic. Their mindset became your mindset and you became tainted with their twisted morality, or their complete lack of it. But sometimes you had no alternative. Because when it came to surviving in their world you had to think like them in order to be one step ahead of them.

Maybe that’s what had happened to Terry. He’d been contaminated. Working in the prison system, being around criminals all day long, he had at some point gone native.

Chapter 53

The vegetarian lasagne was of a remarkably good quality – creamy béchamel sauce, a tender aubergine filling and a crispy brown cheese topping.

Today the lunch choice had been between that and chicken tikka masala. Bailey had never been a big curry fan, so she’d opted for the lasagne.

Sitting there by herself, her tray of food in front of her, with little else to occupy her attention, she idly observed the other inmates in the canteen as they ate their lunch. The various cliques sat at their tables, hunched conspiratorially over their food, gossiping furiously amongst themselves, no doubt speculating about Natalie’s murder. From what Bailey had eavesdropped, it appeared to be the sole topic of conversation at the moment. The demise of yet another inmate had inevitably cranked up the general sense of paranoia among the prison’s population.

Over in the queue, she noticed the three stoners – Kay, Seema and Mel – debating over the menu options, all of them eventually going for the chicken tikka masala. She watched them walk to a table holding their trays, Mel limping along behind the other two, her tangled afro bobbing up and down. Bailey had noticed on previous occasions that Mel had a gimpy leg which gave her a distinctive lopsided gait.

They had hardly sat down at the table before Kay began teasing Mel. Bailey was sitting a bit too far away to make out what she was saying, but the subject was quite clear – Kay was making exaggerated gesticulations miming the action of scalping and making horrible faces. Mel was twitching nervously, her eyes rolling, shaking her head and giving out sporadic low moans.