‘Can I see it?’

He took out his own mobile and tapped on the screen a few times. He pushed it across the table to her.

She picked it up and looked at the message on the small screen. It was tantalisingly brief.

Source well concealed in prison. Investigating today. Will update later.

‘She never got to update me later,’ he said. ‘She sent this on the day she was killed.’

‘Do you think the source of the drugs is a member of staff, hence the “well concealed” reference?’

‘Could be. That’s why I want to make sure that nobody in the prison authorities suspects that you’re an undercover police officer. But then no one was supposed to know that Alice was a cop either, and that didn’t prevent her from getting murdered.’

Bailey sighed. ‘So no leads and very little information. I’m going in almost completely cold.’

‘Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. There is one possible lead. The murder investigation team interviewed Alice’s cellmate – a girl by the name of Melanie Clarke. But, by all accounts, she was a fruitcake and they couldn’t get anything coherent out of her. But I suppose you could always give it another shot.’

Bailey nodded and filed the name away for future reference.

Frank observed her gravely.

‘You’re going to have to be really careful on this one, Bailey. This is a dangerous job.’

‘What’s new.’

Chapter 6

Amber White had only started working as a prison officer a few weeks previously and already she was finding out that the job was proving to be much more challenging than anything she’d covered in the role-plays and written exercises she’d done during training.

She was sitting in the meeting room in the administration block with the rest of the other prison officers waiting for the Governor to arrive and begin their daily morning briefing.

‘How long is it going to be before one of us gets murdered?’ Terry was saying. ‘That’s what I want to know.’

Terry Brinkle was one of the longer-serving prison officers and he also functioned as the staff union rep. A big man with an acne-scarred face and lidded eyes, he gave the impression that he was perpetually half-asleep, but Amber had soon realised he was an unusually alert and calculating individual.

As staff union rep he always seemed to have something to gripe about in the morning briefings, but in this particular case his concerns appeared to be justified. The other prison officers seemed to think so too, as there was a general murmur of accord in the room.

‘Yeah I don’t want to get stabbed up,’ she heard someone say.

‘They did more than just stab her up!’ someone else said.

‘We don’t get paid even remotely enough to face those kinds of risks.’

The murder in the laundry had happened not long after Amber had started and it had proved to be a particularly unpleasant introduction to life in the prison.

She swallowed nervously and adjusted her large thick-rimmed spectacles. She located a few loose strands of blonde hair which had escaped her tight bun and tucked them behind her ear.