It must have just been her imagination.

She finished tying her shoelace, stood up and continued walking, rounding the corner…

…where she bumped straight into two inmates.

She gasped and jumped back in surprise. They did exactly the same thing.

She recognised them immediately. Bailey and Poppy. Both members of that nasty gang. This didn’t look good.

‘What are you doing out of your cells?! How did you manage to get down here?!’

A guilty glance passed between them.

‘This isn’t what it looks like,’ said Bailey, taking a step forward.

Amber assumed a defensive stance. She saw the bunch of keys in Bailey’s hand. Those were prison officer’s keys.

‘Where did you get those keys?’ she demanded.

Bailey looked down. ‘Oh these? I can explain—’

Then Amber noticed that Poppy was clutching a shank in one hand.

This was not a good situation to be in. Alone in the basement, outnumbered two-to-one by armed inmates who were quite clearly in the process of trying to break out of the prison.

‘Don’t come one step closer!’ she said in a low firm voice.

She reached for her walkie-talkie which was clipped to her belt. She brought it up and pressed the ‘transmit’ button.

‘Please don’t,’ whispered Bailey desperately. ‘They’ll kill us.’

Amber frowned. There was something exceedingly odd about this situation.

She paused, her finger on the button, the noise of the static hissing in the otherwise silent corridor. The tone of Bailey’s voice and the look of fear in Poppy’s eyes told her that she needed to listen.

Slowly, she lifted her finger from the ‘transmit’ button.

Bailey visibly sagged in relief.

Amber clipped the walkie-talkie back onto her belt but didn’t relax her defensive posture.

‘Okay, you’d better tell me what’s going on. Right now.’

Chapter 106

Bailey exhaled slowly. Thank god it had been Amber who’d caught them as opposed to some other guard. Although she was uptight and she did things by the book, she possessed that thin margin of empathy that many of her colleagues lacked. In this situation, it could make the critical difference between life and death.

‘I’m a serving police officer, acting in an undercover capacity.’

Amber’s eyes widened. She raised her eyebrows. A faint smile crossed her face as if this was some bad joke. ‘You expect me to believe that?’

‘You have to, because it’s true.’

‘I’m not an idiot, Bailey.’

‘I know you’re not. You just need to know a little bit of background.’

And with that, Bailey launched into a full, unexpurgated account of her activities at the prison – Alice… the gang… Terry… Crazy Mel… the Hairdresser… Felicia Lee…

It was the first time Poppy had heard the complete story, and both she and Amber listened in wide-eyed silence as the words gushed out in a frenetic unbroken torrent.

Bailey finished and they both just stared at her, astounded.

Amber blinked and shook her head. ‘That is one hell of a story, Bailey. A killer getting into the prison through a well which is used for drug smuggling.’