She softened a little. ‘They used to know about me too. I’m not so famous these days, of course, now it’s taken so long to get here.’

The gate buzzed, another guard coming to get Rhonda. We were on a one-to-one ratio here, at least at the start, before the prison was privatised and the cuts began to bite. She stirred herself, and I couldn’t help it; a wave of desperation swept me. How could I have blown my only social encounter in so long?

‘I’m really so sorry!’ I cried. ‘Please. Let’s start over?’

She laughed. ‘What do you think this is, a sorority? Honey, what are you, twenty?’

‘Twenty-one next month.’ I would celebrate my birthday in prison in a foreign country. No keys for me, ironically.

‘Casey, that’s your name?’

‘Yes.’

‘Rhonda. Rhonda Castle, you want to look me up when you get the chance.’

Passing me, she gently squeezed my arm, which wasn’t really allowed, but it was so quick the guard probably didn’t see, or didn’t care enough to remonstrate. Just a little touch, but it sustained me all through the following week, until I saw her again. By then, of course, I had found out what she did. Unlike the others, Rhonda never bothered to say she was innocent. She was a murderer all right, and she never even tried to deny it.

Next time I saw her was about a week later, in the canteen, on a rare occasion we didn’t have food in our cells, due to staff shortages. To keep us apart from the other prisoners, we ate lunch at 10 a.m. She was sitting with Paola, who was a twitching wreck, nails scraping at phantom itches under her skin. Seeing Paola had made me resolve never to try drugs, no matter how good oblivion seemed in this place. Of course I’d done a little weed as an idiot schoolgirl – a fact that had been dragged up at my trial, like everything else – but the hard stuff, heroin and crack, they scared me. Rhonda was the same. Despite years in prison, she had maintained standards, like keeping her hair and nails neat, always wearing pressed clothes, and speaking in educated full sentences.