Chapter 18

Poodle let out a soft moan of relief and sank back against the wall, her aches and chills instantly dissipating in the sublime rush of the narcotic flowing through her system. All of her troubles and concerns melted away into nothing. Suddenly being in prison no longer bothered her like it normally did. Three square meals a day and a roof over her head. Who could want for more? And the other inmates – maybe they weren’t such a bad bunch after all.

She lay slumped in the shadows with the hypodermic syringe still poking out of her track-marked forearm, her drug-taking paraphernalia scattered on the ground beside her.

She was in her favourite place – the Old Tread-Wheel House, known as such because it was where the treadmills had been located back in Victorian times. Or at least that’s what Maggie had told her one time when she’d been standing out in the yard. But the treadmills were long gone, leaving only large square bracket holes in the crumbling brickwork to indicate where they had once been fitted. In their place lay sheets of timber stacked against the walls, several piles of concrete blocks and some scaffolding poles scattered on the ground. That’s all this place was used for these days – storing building materials and other bits of old junk. It was technically kept locked, but Poodle had found a missing panel on a side door through which she managed to squeeze in.

The building was located over on the far west side of the prison complex and no one ever really went there, which meant it was the perfect place to keep her stash safe from the greedy prying hands of other inmates and the random cell searches by the prison officers.

It was comfortably dim, the small narrow windows emitting only a meagre amount of light. It might have been mouldy and musty and full of spiders, but it was quiet, there were no cameras, and no one would disturb her while she was shooting up, and that was the most important thing.

She lay there cocooned in the warm afterglow of the hit with her eyes closed and a drowsy smile on her face. Wrapped in the cosy darkness, she wished she could lie here like this forever.

But eventually the heroin daze began to recede as it always did, leaving her feeling pleasantly mellow. She sat up and looked at her watch. It was time to be getting back to her cell. Gathering up her drug paraphernalia, she placed it back in its plastic bag, rolled it up and concealed it once again in its hiding place behind a loose brick in the wall.

She stood up slowly and began to walk back towards the door with the missing panel.

And that’s when she heard the noise.

A faint scraping sound.

It came from the shadows down the other end of the room.

Poodle stopped, motionless for a moment. She scanned the murk.