I nod to indicate that I understand but I don’t really. When? Now? Tomorrow? What if I plead guilty, can I change my mind? I heave it all away somewhere in my head. At the moment, this isn’t information that I can process. All I have in my mind is bail. Every clean inch of thinking room is considering, calculating variations of the same data. If I don’t get bail I will be taken to a prison. But I don’t know for how long. I don’t know if I can I try again for bail in another day or two or if there are limits. And I don’t know how long can I survive behind high walls in a maze of ever-decreasing squares.

On the other side of the sanity equation, the fact is I have to be out. I need to be out so that I can find those dollars. I can’t tell the police about any of it. They are past believing me and there is no way that Nina will tell them the truth. She stole a quarter of a million dollars and did God knows what with them. And even if, in some circumstances, she might tell the truth, she wouldn’t do it to help me. She thinks I killed Grace, her best friend. What if the police get to her? What if they speak to Seb and he tells them about Nina and the money? When I think about it in this way, I am not sure where his loyalties lie.

But if there’s the slightest chance that I can trace the money, I have to try. I need to speak to Nina, before the police do.

Jan drifts back to her seat and sits scrolling through messages on her phone and I remain, wilting between extreme alternatives.

Fifteen minutes pass agonisingly by. People walk in and out of court. Bored, all of them, except for a small Indian man who is clutching a paper and worriedly looking for the right court. He alone seems at all moved by the significance of this awful, cheap, blanched room. When the judge comes back in, the man ducks back out again silently. The room falls quiet and everybody eases once again into character. My breath stops. I hold it so I can listen to what he is saying, but all I can hear is a pulsing sound in my ears. Fragments of his words find their way across the court and snake through the glass. Considered very carefully … balancing the interests of the defendant and the prosecution … seems to me … met by … imposition of …

He finishes speaking and there is no reaction from anybody that allows me to deduce his decision. The gaolers aren’t uncuffing me. The prosecution isn’t complaining. On the other hand, Jan isn’t either. She hasn’t leapt to her feet to remonstrate or shout ‘appeal’.