Jailbird Read online

  Jailbird

  Caro Savage

  For CPC

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Acknowledgments

  More from Caro Savage

  About the Author

  About Boldwood Books

  1

  The clank sounded out of place.

  Alice Jenkins stopped pushing the laundry trolley and lifted her head. She tossed her long reddish-blonde hair out of her face.

  ‘Hey, who’s there?’

  She was answered only by the repetitive groaning of the huge industrial washing machines and dryers which lined both sides of the prison laundry.

  She peered uncertainly into the shadows beyond the giant wire racks, which held folded piles of freshly laundered bedding and towels. Down here in the basement there were no windows and the overhead strip lighting flickered with a sickly insipid yellow which failed to illuminate the room properly.

  Alice had only started her job in the laundry two days before. Normally there were other inmates working in here, but this afternoon she was all alone. That was because she’d volunteered to do some overtime, explaining to the laundry supervisor that she wanted to earn a little extra cash for her canteen account.

  She hadn’t been in prison for very long. Just a few weeks. She’d been sent down for benefit fraud. Not a major crime but enough to land her inside for a year and three months. But she seemed to be getting the hang of things. Like managing to get this job in the laundry.

  There was still plenty of stuff that she was unfamiliar with though, so she wasn’t totally relaxed by any means. In fact, she’d found that this place could suddenly put you on edge when you were least expecting it. Like now for example.

  She glanced around nervously.

  ‘Hey stop messing about!’ she said.

  Maybe some of the other inmates – her laundry colleagues – were playing a practical joke on her. She hoped so. Because if it wasn’t them then maybe it was one of the dangerous-looking cliques she’d seen around the prison. Maybe they’d taken a dislike to her for some reason. Maybe they had it in for her.

  ‘Haha. Try and creep up on Ally. Yeah that’s hilarious. You can come out now.’

  She tried to sound breezy but her nerves betrayed her, her voice instead coming out reedy and uneven.

  There was no answer. Just the incessant rumbling of the machinery.

  Her knuckles turned white as she tightened her grip on the handle of the trolley and squinted into the dim recesses of the cavernous laundry. A burst of excess steam hissed from a nearby pipe. She jumped and gasped, her heart thumping in her chest.

  Her mind raced to think what had made the clanking sound. It might be a rat. The prison did have a rodent problem. Or maybe she was just spooking herself out unnecessarily.

  ‘You silly girl,’ she muttered, shaking her head and pulling herself upright.

  She recommenced pushing the trolley, awkwardly manoeuvring its bulky weight towards one of the empty washing machines at the end of the room.

  Then, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a shadow pass behind one of the sheets that were hanging up, waiting to be folded and placed on the wire racks.

  She let go of the trolley and spun around to look. Was there someone there? She could have sworn she was the only one in here.

  No. It was surely just a ripple in the material caused by convection in the warm air currents generated by the dryers. She turned back to the trolley, taking hold of the handle once again.

  But then in the darkness beyond the racking, just behind the dryers, something caught her eye.

  A brief sparkle.

  A shiny surface which captured the few photons bouncing around behind the stacks of machinery and reflected them back to her…

  She stopped again, momentarily entranced by it as it twinkled in the shadows like a lone star aglow in the distant black depths of deep space. For a brief moment she forgot her apprehension as she tried to make sense of it floating there in the shadows like the needle of a compass… turning… pointing in her direction…

  Then a depth charge of cold fear detonated in her gut as she realised what it was.

  Long…

  Thin…

  Sharp…

  A blade.

  A shank.

  Her heart began to hammer inside her chest. Her hands fell away from the handle of the trolley.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ she whispered.

  They’d come to kill her.

  They’d decided to come for her when she was all alone. She cursed her stupidity for making the mistake of being down here by herself.

  Somewhere along the line she’d messed up and now she was going to pay for it with her life.

  She felt a heavy nausea rise up inside her, the fear of impending death.

  Slowly, she edged backwards around the trolley to put
it between herself and whoever was behind the dryers. She again squinted to try and see more.

  In the shadows, silence. A flicker of movement in the darkness. A shadow within a shadow. It was big. It was no rat. That was for sure. It was a person.

  She gulped. Her mouth was dry. She glanced towards the doorway. It was at the far end of the laundry. That distant metal door had never looked more appealing. Nor had it ever seemed further away. She glanced back at the row of dryers.

  Tensing, she took a deep breath… and bolted.

  She sprinted through the laundry, heading towards the exit… weaving through the laundry bins… running away from whatever it was in the shadows… running away from the glitter of razor-sharp steel.

  She ran faster than she had ever run in her life. As if something had taken her over. As if there was an animal inside her.

  Her breath tore in her throat. Adrenaline coursed through her body. Her trainers hammered on the concrete floor, the slap of her footfalls echoing through the big room.

  She ran and ran. The doorway getting closer. Her portal of freedom. If only she could get there. So close now. She panted. Her lungs working overtime to power her flight.

  And then a laundry bin spun out in front of her and she tripped over it, crashing onto the floor amidst a cascade of dirty linen.

  ‘Oh god!’ she gasped. Her eyes filled with tears, blurring her vision.

  She tried to scramble to her feet, but she got tangled in the sheets, the white material having wrapped itself around her ankles with an almost malevolent will of its own.

  As she reached down to extract herself from the fatal web of dirty linen, she felt a hand grip her hair roughly from behind. The strands twisting into the fingers, winding tight like a winch.

  With a sharp yank, her head was pulled back. She gasped in pain as she felt the roots ripping out. Literally one by one. Pop. Pop. Pop. Out of her scalp.

  She tried in vain to twist her head to see her attacker but she couldn’t, so tight was the grip. All she could see were her own hands clambering uselessly in the empty space in front of her.

  ‘Oh god!’ she choked. ‘Please don’t hurt me!’

  But her words fell away unheard. Through tear-blurred vision she caught the flashing arc of the blade clutched in a black leather glove as it swooped down from above and sliced into the front of her scalp.

  She screeched in agony as the cold steel carved the flesh away from her skull. The searing pain was beyond anything she’d ever experienced. A deluge of hot blood coursed down from the wound, transforming her face into a crimson liquid mask locked in a scream of terror.

  With an audible rip, her partially severed scalp was savagely torn away from her head. Blinded by the blood in her eyes and paralysed by the shock of the assault, she was in no state to do anything about the knife as it came round again, this time to cut her throat.

  2

  Detective Constable Bailey Morgan studied the cryptic crossword on the desk in front of her. Technically she was supposed to be doing work – checking through a pile of witness statements – but it was one of those days when time seemed to be moving with the consistency of treacle and police paperwork just wasn’t making it go any faster.

  She glanced up, scanning the office to see if any of her colleagues had noticed what she was doing. It didn’t appear that any of them had. But then it was a Friday afternoon and the place was relatively deserted.

  Anyone meeting her gaze would have found themselves looking into a pair of eyes the colour of cold ashes, the dark rings around them underscored by her pale complexion. They would probably have noticed that although her shoulder-length chestnut hair was tied up in a ponytail, there was a bit that she deliberately wore loose down over the left side of her face in a blatant, and not completely successful, attempt to conceal the thin white scar which ran from the top of her cheekbone down to the bottom of her jaw. They would hopefully at least have observed that she had good taste in clothes compared to the rest of her colleagues in the CID – whereas most of them, particularly the men, got their suits in Matalan, hers was a Donna Karan, cut to fit her lithe figure perfectly.

  She fiddled absently with the lock of hair that hung down over the side of her face, curling it around her finger and letting it uncurl, as she was apt to do when she was lost in thought.

  The good thing about cryptic crosswords was how completely they absorbed her. She could spend hours doing them, trying to untangle the mind-bending logic that went into their construction. And this one seemed to be doing the job very well. According to the clock on the wall, there were now just twenty-five minutes to go until she could officially knock off for the weekend and begin to concentrate on getting psyched up for the jiu-jitsu grading she was due to participate in the next day. If she passed, she’d move from green belt up to purple. For some people, moving up the belts was all about status, but for her the important thing was that it meant that she got to learn progressively more advanced and deadly ways of defending herself.

  She curled her hair around her fingers and let it uncurl. She stared down at the cryptic crossword. There was one more word to fill in which she couldn’t get. Twelve across…

  _ _ _ e

  The clue was ‘Ceremony sounds correct’.

  What the hell could it be?

  Thinking laterally, it occurred to her that the hint probably lay in the word ‘sounds’. A word for ‘ceremony’ that sounded like the word for ‘correct’. It was on the tip of her tongue…

  Her phone rang, loud in the quiet office. She jumped.

  Her first thought was that it was her father. On Sunday she was supposed to have lunch with her parents, but earlier that week she’d had a big blowout with her dad, and those plans had fallen through. His phone call would either be an attempt to make up or an attempt to force home some point he’d made in their argument. She hoped it was the former rather than the latter.

  Her parents lived in Bromley, not too far from where she lived in Crystal Palace, and she visited them on a fairly frequent basis. They were both in their sixties, and prior to retiring, her dad had worked for the local council as a health and safety inspector and her mum had been a teacher. She had always been closer to her father than to her mother, who was growing worryingly peculiar with age. However, her father was consumed with a very particular obsession, one that he and Bailey often argued about, to the point where they would sometimes end up not speaking to each other for weeks on end.

  She sighed and braced herself as she fished her phone out of her bag. She looked at the number flashing on the screen.

  It wasn’t her dad.

  An anxious tightness gripped her. She recognised the number immediately, even though she had deleted that person’s contact details from her phone. It was her ex-boss, Detective Superintendent Frank Grinham. It had been almost six months since she’d last heard from him. Why was he calling her now, out of the blue?

  She looked at the phone flashing, hesitating for a few moments, and then she answered it.

  ‘Hello Frank,’ she said.

  ‘Hello Bailey.’

  An uncomfortable pause.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ she asked stiffly.

  ‘There’s something important I need to talk to you about.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I can’t discuss it over the phone. Let’s meet in person. Are you free tomorrow afternoon?’

  There was something about his tone that put the wind up her, something ominous yet also compelling.

  She opened her mouth to explain that she had a jiu-jitsu grading to go to tomorrow afternoon, but instead the words that came out were: ‘Sure. I guess.’

  ‘There’s a pub called the Pig and Whistle just round the corner from my office. Know it?’

  ‘Yeah, I remember.’

  ‘Half past three?’

  ‘See you there.’

  She hung up.

  Frank’s phone call had been almost as cryptic as the crossword in front of her. But
his enigmatic air didn’t come as a complete surprise. After all, he was responsible for running undercover operations and secrecy was his stock-in-trade. She’d worked undercover for him on a variety of jobs over a two-year period, which had ended abruptly six months ago when she’d quit that line of work.

  Working undercover had never been something she’d been intending to do when she’d joined the police seven years previously at the age of twenty-two. In fact, she’d barely been aware that that kind of thing even went on.

  She’d started as a uniformed constable, doing the standard training at Hendon, followed by eighteen months on the beat. At the first opportunity, she’d transferred to the CID to work as a detective, eager to take a more proactive approach to catching criminals. And it was whilst she was there that she’d first become aware of Frank’s operation.