‘I want to buy some weed,’ said Bailey quietly.

‘How much?’

‘An eighth.’

‘Ninety quid.’

‘Ninety quid!’

Bailey was stunned. That was more than four times the street price for an eighth of an ounce of marijuana.

Keisha shrugged and looked away as if to say take it or leave it.

‘All right,’ said Bailey.

‘Have you got cash?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s not allowed, is it?’

Keisha snorted in contempt as if she had said something stupid. ‘Cigarettes then. From your canteen account.’

‘It’ll take me a while to get that many.’

‘You can have it on credit.’ Keisha’s face twisted into a mean-looking sneer. ‘But if you lose it or get it confiscated, you still have to pay. Just remember… when it comes to paying, you always pay, because there’s nowhere to hide in here and it won’t take us long to find out where you live.’

Bailey was in no doubt that this would be the case. She smiled at Keisha, shook her hand, pocketed the weed and walked off.

Chapter 25

Bailey stood beneath the showerhead and let the streams of hot water wash the grime of the prison off her. She had finally got some decent shower gel from the prison shop and it made the uncomfortable experience of communal showering marginally more tolerable than it had been before.

She blinked the soap out of her eyes and glanced casually over her shoulder at Keisha, who was standing just a few metres away.

Since buying the drugs, Bailey had been surreptitiously shadowing Keisha, gathering intelligence on her movements, the people she associated with and what she got up to on a daily basis. It transpired, as she’d suspected, that her core associates consisted of the group that she’d encountered in the canteen – the gold-toothed one, the oriental one and the big lumbering one.

Their primary activities appeared to consist of selling drugs and collecting debts, with some intimidation thrown in for good measure. As far as she could ascertain, the gold-toothed one seemed to be in charge of this illicit enterprise.

She was standing over there right now, next to Keisha, facing away from Bailey, soap suds running down her firm, boyish form. They were chatting furtively about something and Bailey was curious to know what, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying under the roar of the water and she didn’t want to get too close in case the gold-toothed one spotted her and decided to pick on her again.

She flicked the excess water from her hair and was about to leave the shower room when she noticed something unusual about the pair of them. The gold-toothed one had a distinctive tattoo etched at the base of her spine, and Keisha had an identical design in exactly the same place.

It consisted of three playing cards fanned out. The one on the front was an ace of spades, with a black A in the top right corner and an inverted A in the bottom left corner. The spade in the middle of the playing card was depicted in the form of a dagger clutched in a skeletal hand, behind which leered a malevolent grinning skull. The top right corners of the other two cards showed only the letters B and C respectively, drawn in the same font as the letter A.