‘I don’t recognise you,’ said the prison officer. ‘You weren’t in here ten minutes ago.’

‘Oh hello…’ said Bailey, smiling affably and clicking her fingers in attempted recall. ‘Sorry what was your name again?’

‘Shelley Foster,’ the officer replied without smiling. ‘And you are…?’

‘Bailey Pike.’ Bailey smiled and held out her hand. Shelley made no attempt to shake it.

‘You haven’t answered my question,’ said Shelley. ‘What are you doing in here?’

‘I was just… er… admiring this antique mangle.’

Bailey cringed inside at her excuse. Surely she could do better than that. What had happened to her ability to think on her feet? She must be rusty.

Shelley curled her lip in a sceptical sneer and tapped one of her chunky black shoes on the floor impatiently.

‘Do you work in here?’ she asked.

‘Um… No.’

‘Then you shouldn’t be in here. The laundry is off limits to anyone who doesn’t work here.’

‘I guess I’ll be going then.’

‘Inmates need to stay in the right areas. If I see you out of bounds again, I’ll put you on the nicking sheet.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m new here. I didn’t know the rules.’

‘You should have been paying more attention at induction.’

Bailey nodded meekly and rapidly made her way out of the laundry, disappointed that her investigation had yielded no useful information so far.

Chapter 12

When Bailey got to the phones, she found a large noisy queue. The opportunity to make phone calls was limited to a few hours a day during the association period, and everyone wanted to make calls at the same time – off-peak and out of office hours.

She joined the end of the queue and stood there eavesdropping on the conversations going on around her, listening out for any nuggets of gossip which might concern Alice. But she didn’t pick up anything about the murder. The inmates’ talk seemed to revolve mainly around their lawyers and their appeals, their kids and what to get them for their birthdays, and their husbands and boyfriends and whether they were cheating on them whilst they were in prison. The lives she was hearing about put the prison demographic firmly at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum.

Standing there in the queue, she reflected that she would have liked to have called her parents, particularly her father. She’d talked to him briefly on the phone before entering the prison, in an attempt to clear the air, but he hadn’t really been very receptive to her overtures and she was now going to have to wait until this job was over before trying again. For the period that she was incarcerated in the prison, she would be unable to conduct any kind of communication with them for security reasons. It would just be too risky. Her parents knew about her undercover work and that she could never reveal any more than the vaguest details about whatever job she was working on. All they knew was that she could be out of touch for indeterminate periods of time and she always tried to warn them in advance when it looked like this might be the case so they didn’t get too worried about her. On this occasion though, she hadn’t had the chance to properly inform them before her father had ended the call in a frosty huff, making her remember once again that it was pointless trying to communicate with him when he was in one of his moods.