‘The last time I had beef goulash here,’ said Keisha, eyeing Bailey’s plate, ‘I got the shits like you would not believe. Sometimes the food here just goes straight through me.’

Bailey looked at her plate of beef goulash. She poked at the brown lumpy stew with her plastic fork and stirred it around a little bit. For some reason, it didn’t look quite so appealing any more.

‘Did you know that diarrhoea is actually a genetic condition?’ said Rong.

Keisha looked at her with mild surprise. ‘Genetic condition? Really? I never knew that.’

‘Yeah. It runs in the family.’

There was a brief pause, then a chorus of boos at the bad joke.

Muscles was frowning to herself. She didn’t seem to get it.

‘Man, you had me going there for a minute,’ said Keisha, laughing and shaking her head. ‘Genetic condition!’

Now that they were laughing and in a relatively good mood, Bailey decided that this would be an opportune moment to test the waters.

‘So who am I replacing?’ she asked, recalling Toni’s mention in the hospital that the gang had been short of one member before she joined.

They all fell quiet and once again dark, cryptic looks passed between them.

Toni turned to look at Bailey with her cold hard gaze.

‘Never you mind about that,’ she said in a tone that firmly put an end to any further questions on the matter.

‘Just remember what we said,’ growled Keisha. ‘Blood in. Blood out.’

It was an overt warning. More of a threat really. The harsh granite expressions on their faces said it all.

Bailey nodded obediently and went back to poking around in her beef goulash and they returned to talking about more mundane matters.

What Bailey found odd was that so far she hadn’t heard the gang talking about the one thing that seemed to be on the lips of every inmate in here – the recent murders. The conspicuous absence of this topic in their conversation seemed somewhat suspicious to her. She decided to probe a little. Seeing as everyone else in the place was gossiping about it, surely it wouldn’t sound too odd if she mentioned it.

‘So what do you think is going on with these murders then?’ she asked.

They all fell quiet and the mood suddenly turned distinctly chilly.

All eyes turned to Bailey. Toni’s in particular seemed to bore into her.

Bailey swallowed. Had she overstepped the mark?

‘You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?’ said Toni.

Bailey instantly regretted broaching the subject. The question had been too direct, too blunt. Her eagerness to find out what had happened to Alice had obscured her judgement. But she couldn’t unsay it.

‘What?’ said Toni softly. ‘Are you scared? Scared of getting scalped?’ There was a taunting, mocking tone in her voice.

Toni slowly began to mimic a scalping, using her jacket potato as an ersatz human head. She sawed the skin off the top of it with the serrated edge of the plastic knife, revealing the white flesh of the potato underneath. All of them watched, transfixed.