‘Who was she?’

‘Her name was Sarah Prebble. She had a little blonde topknot. You might have seen her around.’

‘You mean Poodle?’ said Sharon from her bunk.

Bailey remembered her distinctive hairstyle. She realised Poodle must be the nickname for the girl with the track marks that she’d noticed in the shower, the one who’d told her to fuck off in the canteen. The junkie.

‘She was murdered, wasn’t she?’ said Bailey. ‘That’s why all the police were here.’

Amber looked around uneasily. ‘We haven’t really been told anything yet, but yes, it looks that way.’

‘Poodle got murdered?!’ said Sharon. ‘No way!’

‘What happened?’ asked Bailey.

‘We’re not supposed to talk about it.’

‘Oh come on. You must know something.’

‘Yeah give us the juicy details,’ said Sharon.

Amber sighed. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘From what I’ve heard, it was pretty unpleasant. And that’s all I can tell you at this stage.’

Bailey watched her walk off along the landing unlocking the cells.

Unpleasant. What did that mean exactly?

Chapter 20

‘What it means,’ said the Governor, surveying the roomful of prison officers, ‘is that you all need to keep an extra-special eye out for anything which appears in the least bit suspicious.’

‘But you still haven’t answered my question,’ said Maggie. ‘Is this murder linked in any way to the one in the laundry? By all accounts—’

‘We won’t know anything for certain until the autopsy’s been done,’ said the Governor firmly. ‘So there’s no point speculating about it. Anyhow, it’s not your job or my job to be thinking about such things. That’s the job of the police. That’s why they’re here.’

At the mention of the police, a low series of resentful groans rumbled across the room.

‘Your job,’ the Governor continued, ‘is to maintain security and order within the prison.’

‘But how can we do that if the tools that we have at our disposal are inadequate?’ Terry griped. ‘We can barely protect ourselves, let alone the inmates. Not to mention the fact that we’re seriously understaffed and seriously overstretched. Is it any wonder that this kind of thing is happening?’

He crossed his arms and stared defiantly at the Governor. The Governor glared back at him. The room fell into a tense silence at their stand-off.

Amber glanced around. Dylan was sitting a few seats away. As usual, he was looking bored and faintly amused by it all. He raised his sandy-coloured eyebrows at her in mock alarm. She couldn’t help but smile. The daily morning briefings never seemed to go by without some kind of confrontation between Terry and the Governor.

The Governor pulled his attention away from Terry to address them all. ‘I had a meeting with the lead detective on the case. And if there’s one thing we both agree on, it’s that we want to do our best to keep all of this out of the media. From the police’s perspective, they don’t need loads of journalists clogging up their investigation. And from our perspective, a media frenzy could create unnecessary panic and disorder inside the prison, and that’s one thing we definitely don’t need.’