Jailbird Detective

by Helen Jacey

  Contents

  About the author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Helen Jacey is the founder of Shedunnit Productions which creates original stories with a distinctive female gaze across all media. A screenwriter and story consultant, renowned for her expertise on feminism and the creative process, Helen has worked with international film institutions, production companies and leading brands. Her book The Woman in the Story: Creating Memorable Female Characters, second edition published in 2017, was the first creative writing guide to focus on female representation on screen. Previously Helen worked in the international aid sector in Eastern Europe, to reform the orphanage system and provide services for vulnerable women and children. She was awarded a BA by the University of Manchester, an MA by the London Institute and a PhD by the University of the Arts London.

  Jailbird Detective

  Elvira Slate Investigations Book One

  By Helen Jacey

  Shedunnit Productions

  To Jack, with love

  1

  Coachella Valley, September 1945

  Dust lacquered the windscreen like cheap hair spray. The cop couldn’t see anymore so he pulled up. We were deep in the desert but he seemed to know his way around fine. I glanced out of the window. Prickly pear cacti stood between dried-out grasses, flat-faced and pockmarked freaky spectators. In the distance, a bird of prey scanned the horizon. A female, needing to feed her chicks?

  The cop got out. His shoes crunched on the dry earth, as he came around to fling the passenger door open. ‘Get out.’ His pistol hung down loosely in his hand.

  I tipped myself out of the car onto the clumpy terrain. Not so easy with cuffs on. Not so elegant, either. My hat, the one Alberta had lent me, and my only protection against the sun’s inferno, tumbled off and rolled onto its side. One section of the rim was coated in dirt. The dipped-in-breadcrumbs look.

  A shame.

  I wouldn’t be giving it back.

  Without it, I would fry in seconds.

  The cop made no move to pick the hat up. That he didn’t spelt it out loud and clear.

  Execution was imminent.

  2

  London, four months earlier

  The wardress is new here, the nervous type, trying to tick all the boxes. Her neat little head with its mousy bun is in dire need of a good wash and set. At least we inmates have an excuse for looking like what the cat dragged in.

  She is escorting me back to my cell. A battered copy of Luminous Honeymoon is tucked under my arm, a reward for chatting to do-gooders the week before and telling them how reformed I was. A safe bet the most romantic pages have been long ripped out by other women. Still, I can use my imagination. You have to, inside – or go barking mad.

  I am miles away and don’t pay much attention to the huddle of screws heading in our direction. After all, they get everywhere. Bossy cow Doodlebag, screw queen bee, is at the front, leading the way.

  ‘Stand back!’ the wardress hisses, pushing me around to face the wall. Something’s up, something a prisoner shouldn’t see. I’m four inches taller than her, and with a slight shift of my head I can easily watch.

  Behind the screws, two men, older gents as usual, lug a stretcher.

  On the stretcher is a sheet, and under the sheet, a stiff.

  That’s a turn-up. Somebody snuffing it – and in Block F, too. Women don’t die in our block; we’re all playing the long game. Who has actually gone through with what we all think about, but would never do? Faces race through my mind. Maybe it’s natural causes. There are a few old biddies – Georgina, Millicent. Tough old birds, but this place is a strain on anybody’s heart.

  Death and I go back a long way. I’ve seen my fair share of the departed – life on the street and with Billy made sure of that – but the wardress is shaking. So, her first encounter with the Reaper, then.

  Deal with it, sweetie.

  I could comfort her but a screw is a screw. Another bluebottle feeding off the Holloway shit of our existence. I just hope she won’t throw up.

  The funeral party approaches. The wardress has recovered herself sufficiently to ram me further into the wall. Unexpectedly hard. Damn the bitch. My nose scrapes the cold brick wall, just as I meet Doodlebag’s eyes.

  Keep your mouth shut, her look demands.

  I look down, taking a peek at the stretcher. A sheet covers the corpse. It’s a slight frame, a tall body. Pointless guessing who it is. There’s a peace and calm to the body under its gray shroud, almost a grace, a defiant grace.

  You can’t touch me now.

  A gray cell blanket has been thrown over the woman’s legs. A strange touch, she hardly needs it now. Maybe one of the screws did it, in a warped act of compassion.

  They trudge past us. One of the older gents staggers a little. His face is emaciated, his arms like spindles. Definitely not cut out for this work. I’m not cut out to be a long-term inmate of His Majesty’s Prison Holloway either, but that’s war for you. We all end up somewhere we’d rather not be.

  Something catches my eye. A blonde curl suddenly springs from under the side of the sheet. A pale ivory curl, perfectly formed.

  My stomach lurches.

  Only one person has curls like that.

  Lena.

  3

  Lena is dead.

  My only friend in this dump. Why? Who has got to her?

  Someone in Block F.

  So much for security.

  Now this extended lockup. Shock has swallowed time and I’m curled up on my excuse for a bed facing the wall. Staring at the same old dents in the brickwork. Any other position gives me a view of my ‘chamber pot’, as the banged-up toffs who make up the majority of the real fascists and communists, call them.

  I don’t want to watch whichever fly has popped by today to crawl across the rim of the toilet, to circle over the bowl below.

  Lena was laughing and singing only yesterday, one of the few people inside who makes a point of staying chipper. She could adorn a land girl poster, or be Hitler’s perfect woman with her model looks. A universal blonde. Up close, she is victim to the Holloway beauty regime like the rest of us. Broken veins for rouge, ingrained mud for hand cream. It was her hai
r that defied jail. Naturally pale golden locks that we all envied. Mine is mouse and I swear it looks green on a bad day, and there are plenty of those. Dead straight, too. Lena’s long fingers wound it around strips of torn pillowcases to force it into shape; I would look glamorous for a few days.

  She’d only done it last night.

  All dressed up, nowhere to go.

  And last night she repeated her plans on release. She would breed horses on her Tasmanian farm. Part-Arabs or something. But she had seemed wistful, more so than usual. I’d asked her what was wrong. ‘Other than this shithole?’ Then she’d sniggered.

  Lena and I shared a made-up joke that my father, the unknown American GI who was on his way home from the battlefields of Europe and who had left my mother Violet up the duff, had also taken a pop at Lena’s mother Gwen, an Aussie nurse on leave at the time. Whoever the father really was, Gwen had retired with her pregnant belly full of baby Lena to Melbourne. She made up some cock-and-bull story about a fiancé who was shot down; Gwen was embraced with open arms. One day, her luck ran out – she was bitten by a red spider on her calf on the beach and died on the spot. When she was only two years old, Lena’s rich aunt took her on.

  ‘What’s the point of a hot country if sunbathing costs your life?’ I jibed.

  ‘Come on down and you’ll see for yourself,’ she’d counter.

  ‘I’ll take your word for it, then. Think I’m going to spend months in some ship’s berth after this joint? I’ll only do that once more in my life and it won’t be to get to Tasmania.’

  ‘You’re making a big mistake. I’ll set you up with a dinkum cockie. Pop out a couple of brats. We can pretend we were nurses together.’

  Now that was funny. We weren’t the caring types. And so we’d banter away, locked up in dreary old Holloway, as the bombs and the rain poured down.

  Recent events, impressions, race through my mind, searching for oddities, any kind of clue. Dirty looks in the washroom, raised voices, Lena being distracted once too often.

  What have I missed?

  She has been carted off to meet the Governor a few times recently. I didn’t probe, but it was odd.

  The Secret Service could be behind the whole thing. They had already done me over. Rubbing out a girl? Fair dinkum, as Lena would say. Being banged up on 18Bs makes us easy targets and all the more hated by the screws. Traitors, working for the enemy. Of course, some of the women in here are the genuine article and proud of it, self-declared Hitler-lovers now eating their words, especially the toffs. They don’t exactly rough it inside, after their friends in high places intervene. Hypocrites. That’s England for you. A country where we all shit the same shit, where we all breathe the same air, but where a posh accent and the right surname secures an early release and a pat on the back.

  Darling! You’ve just been a little silly! Of course you didn’t know he’d turn out to be a madman. Of course you didn’t!

  Others are like me. Petty criminals, call girls, or just plain idiots, doing the bidding of some man under the misguided belief he loved her; sleeping with a handsome foreign fellow. Seeking love with the wrong types, in the wrong places.

  Fools for love.

  Lena has never defended herself, she has never complained about her incarceration.

  The times she came closest to grumbling were at breakfast, faced with dismal prison sludge each morning, pining for golden Tasmanian honey.

  I never bothered to ask why a country girl from Australia was running around wartime Europe. And other than mentioning to Lena that I was betrayed by the man I thought loved me, I have never dwelt on who, what, where and why.

  If it was all a bluff, she was a natural. Who knows what anybody really is inside? Who cares? We all lie, playing a twisted game of chums one day, surly bitches the next.

  There has been the odd fuck-up. Like me not hearing Lena call out ‘Jem’ across the yard, the name the authorities know me by. ‘Too young to go deaf, Jem,’ She grinned, her blue eyes trying to read me. ‘Just miles away,’ I lied.

  I haven’t been Jem for years. Lena didn’t need to know I’d gone by the name Ida Boyd before October ’41, so I never told her. Just as I was never interested in her real name.

  Inside, you need a friend, not the truth.

  No way has she topped herself.

  If the screws haven’t done it, who else?

  Muriel Sainte. No secret she and Lena can’t stand the sight of each other. Muriel tends to be whimpering and pathetic. She moans and protests her innocence every second breath. Fainting fits, the vapors, but always with endearing manners. Toughie Lena has no time for such self-pitying antics and Muriel considers Lena a brute. But I quite like Muriel. She’s almost theatrical, which can provide a bit of fun. Over the years, she’s been a chum of sorts, singing La Marseillaise and teaching me French.

  Je m’appelle Jemima Day, ça va?

  And behind that weak veneer, there’s steel in her veins. It’s clever how she gets everyone to run around for her, even the screws.

  Muriel is detested by her nation and is probably facing the chop, French-style, after a long marinade in Resistance rage. Her terror of her looming death has eaten her away. She can’t be more than five stone now. Her hair is thinning on top, all her eyebrows have gone and her top lip is puckered like somebody pulled a thread tight. At least the guillotine is instant, not like noose.

  The noose. I try to think about something else. The thought of the noose always triggers the same panic in me. An uncontrollable tightness, a constriction of my neck that feels physical. Lena once joked about being hung and in seconds I was gasping, full of terrors, followed by waves of nausea. She’d laughed before she saw the state I was in.

  I never comfort Muriel with the fact that if I am executed I will face a worse fate. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ I tell her often. Is it? For any of us? While others have been released, there’s a hard core of us left. We’re the ones they don’t trust an inch. We’re the ones who will face the music later.

  Muriel’s clinging to the hope that peace will make her compatriots see sense, persuade them of her innocence. She’s kidding herself; France will need scapegoats.

  Shame and anger make a habit of landing someone else in it.

  I know Muriel didn’t kill Lena. She’s always stayed out of trouble.

  Her life depends on good behavior.

  Now there’s Jenny O’Mullins, a real oddball. Her wartime activities seem plain idiotic. The gossip is she’d been a secretary in the War Office but forgot documents on a train one evening. As if! She is creepy, with her long face and gray, watery eyes that stare for too long. I avoid her.

  Then there’s Bertha Fazekas, a Hungarian writer, who suffers manic spells and should really be in an asylum. One of the few ladies who stays fat on the Holloway ration. Extra dripping on her slice of National Loaf, in return for what? What can she bribe the canteen staff with? Once you get on Bertha’s radar, you never get off it and she has had a crush on Lena from day one. Love and hate shared a very fine line in crazy ladies, perhaps even more so in Block F. Bertha could have done it. But, as with Muriel, I doubt it.

  The obvious contenders are, well, just too obviously suspect. Austrian and German émigrés, clinging to each other like barnacles on a dry rock. Lena has intense debates with them in the yard, in German. She’s fluent, her grandparents hailed from Frankfurt before moving to Australia. Sometimes they bicker. Once it erupted into a brawl. Lena got a fat eye before the screws broke it up.

  ‘Let the fascists kill each other.’ Muriel carted me away, arm-in-arm, preventing me from jumping in.

  I don’t speak a word of German, just a smattering of Italian. Even that is fading fast.

  I stand up, and pace the cell. I feel the pangs in my stiff hip. My lasting gift from Holloway… if I ever get out. Giving this place my best years is bad enough. Now it is invading my bones.

  Now it has taken my friend.

  I will find the bitch that did it and get h
er.

  My eyes fill, hot and fluid. Tears of rage. Tears for the stupidity. Tears for my powerlessness. Tears for my imprisonment.

  Who am I fooling?

  I rub my eyes with a corner of the grimy sheet.

  You don’t cry for strangers.

  4

  By late afternoon, I am on gardening duty with a couple of the others. The warders are acting normal; everything Holloway humdrum.

  I could have imagined the whole thing.

  Muriel, Bertha and Emilia, a jolly Italian who indignantly claims some of her dodgy clientele landed her inside, are gathered around, busy trying to work out the reason behind the extended lockup.

  I won’t breathe a word.

  The ground is brittle; digging with the hand fork thankless and painful. Sturdy potato plants wave at me in the breeze. I want to trample them into pulp. I am sick of the place, and hate everything and everyone in it. Why the hell hasn’t a V-2 flattened us by now?

  To make matters worse, Doodlebag waddles out into the vegetable garden, craning her fat neck around. She looks like a pantomime dame, even down to the brass buttons straining against the buttonholes of her jacket. I continue to squat, scratching aimlessly at the surface of the mud.

  Her large shadow looms over me. She literally growls at me. ‘Governor wants to see you, Day. Now. Leave your tools here.’

  I put down the fork, stand up and follow her, my mind racing. No secret to anyone that Lena and I were friends, but why this?

  The others just stand there, leaning against shovels and forks. Women who have seen it all and probably done far worse outside, now reduced to schoolgirl gossip about who is in trouble with the headmistress and why.

  To brighten their day, I mimic Doodlebag’s fat backside as I follow her. A tribute to Lena. It’s the kind of thing she’d do.

  ‘Mamma mia!’ Emilia roars with mirth.

  Doodlebag spins around, eyes bulging in fury. I pull a blank face. Emilia’s expression is an equally bad attempt at looking innocent and I stifle a laugh, sucking in my cheeks, looking down.

  Doodlebag grunts, decides it isn’t worth her while, and shoves me on, in front of her this time.