Holmwood House looked, from the outside, like an old folks’ home – apart from the high barbed wire-decorated perimeter fence – one of those Eighties-built institutions that appeared as though someone had designed it in Lego. The entrance sported a porch with bright green painted metal poles supporting a corrugated plastic pointed roof, and Pat thought how much Gill would hate the look of it. She liked muted colours and stylish architecture. But then, how often did she get out? Perhaps she never crossed the threshold. He had a fleeting image of what he would find when he came into her room – a hunched, prematurely aged figure, the colour leached from her waxy cheeks, dry frizzy hair, dressed in some kind of nylon tabard . . . He shuddered. No, surely not, that was prison. Gill wasn’t in prison, at least, not a physical one.

As he stretched out his finger to press the door buzzer, his mouth went dry. Despite his years of police experience, he’d never been inside a secure unit before. A surprisingly perky-looking receptionist was sitting behind a melamine desk in a lobby area with a locked double door leading into the main house. She looked up when he came in, and he saw her eyes briefly flicker with appreciation when she gazed at the tattoos on his upper arms and then up at his face. It felt like a long time since a woman had done that, even though this one was in her late forties, with unbrushed straw-like hair and lipstick that had bled into the wrinkles around her lips. She was quite pretty when she smiled, though, and Pat felt slightly more at ease.

She handed him a sheet of paper pinned to a clipboard with Holmwood’s rules and regulations on it and a dotted line at the bottom for him to sign on. He saw with dismay that one of the first rules was ‘All mobile phones to be left at Reception’.

‘Damn, can I really not take my phone in? I just wanted to show my w – er . . . visitor, some photos on it.’

He felt immediately flustered and ashamed that he hadn’t been able to say the word ‘wife’. Why had he said ‘visitor’? He was the visitor, not Gill. Still, he’d have sounded even more of a twat if he’d said ‘my visitee’. The receptionist looked at his wedding ring and smirked very slightly, enough though to make him not feel so flattered at her initial reaction.

‘Sorry, you can’t,’ she said tartly. ‘You have to leave it, and all your other possessions, in one of those lockers over there.’