The girl sat and talked while the other women sat in a daze, listening to her chatter. Agla squeezed past the table to the cupboards to fetch herself a cup for her morning coffee. She liked it black. She didn’t bother eating breakfast, even though her fellow prisoners and the warders constantly reminded her how unhealthy that was.

‘I could have ditched the package at the airport in Panama and tried to disappear there, but that didn’t have a hope of working out.’

As the girl continued to talk, Agla sat at the far end of the table with her coffee and tried to concentrate on the book she had brought with her.

‘I heard about one guy who tried to make a run for it like that,’ the girl said, ‘but he came to a bad end. A stretch in prison’s better than being chopped up for dog food!’

The other women muttered their agreement, and two of them stood up, saying that they were going to the laundry to work. There were no cars to be polished today, so the bookkeeper from up north, who for some reason preferred washing cars to doing laundry, stayed where she was. Normally there was at least one car a day to be washed, but now that spring was coming and there was no salt on the roads, people found it easier to give their car a wash themselves. For much of April the prison officers had taken turns bringing in their own cars to be washed and polished, so that there was some activity, but now that well had run dry. It would have been ridiculous for the staff to bring in cars so clean they sparkled and have them washed again.

The new girl, who so far still hadn’t seen a reason to apply a brush to her mop of hair, stood up, then planted herself in a chair next to Agla; she was uncomfortably close.

‘What do you want?’ Agla whispered without looking up.

‘I want to sit next to someone who smells nice,’ the girl whispered back, as if whispering was some kind of game and not a necessity for someone with a damaged larynx. ‘You smell nice. The bookkeeper’s Chanel stink was suffocating me. What year is it? Nineteen sixty-five? There are more modern fragrances, y’know.’

The girl giggled to herself. Agla sipped her coffee. This person’s over-familiar attitude was seriously starting to irritate her. She inched her chair closer to Agla all the time. Agla shifted her chair in the opposite direction, a signal that enough was enough. But the girl apparently failed to notice.

‘What did you do?’ she asked, as if that was a perfectly normal question to ask in a prison.

Agla had used her computer time to search for the other women on the internet, trying to find out about their backgrounds, but none of them had actually asked her anything. Maybe that was because they all knew who she was. The fact that this girl knew nothing about her told its own tale; she couldn’t have read any newspapers or followed the news.