In the basement it became much harder to follow her discreetly. Ahead of her, Agata padded rapidly along the poorly lit corridor, the bulbs flickering unevenly overhead. She walked past the workshop up to the far end of the corridor.

Agata halted and glanced behind her. Bailey stopped sharp and drew back behind a corner. She peeked around and saw that Agata was standing by the door to a room of some sort. With one last glance around, she opened the door and entered the room, closing the door behind her.

Bailey waited a few moments, then walked up to the door. It had a sign on it saying ‘ELECTRICITY 2’. Presumably it was some kind of maintenance room which contained fuse boxes and the like.

She needed to find some sort of concealed vantage point close by. There was a door opposite. She tried the handle. The door opened. The room beyond was small, dark and musty and it appeared to be stacked full of metal bunk-bed frames. It was a storage cupboard. Bailey squeezed in and pulled the door almost closed, so it was just open a crack.

She stood there, peeking through the crack across the corridor. She waited for what felt like ages. What was Agata doing in there? Was she waiting for someone to arrive or was that person already in there?

She squinted at her watch in the darkness. She had been standing there for just over ten minutes. Just then, the door opposite creaked open. She looked up.

Agata stood there in the corridor, barely a metre away from Bailey. Up close, Bailey could see that she looked flushed and she had a light sheen of perspiration across her skin. Her hair was ruffled and her make-up was slightly smudged. She brushed a loose strand of hair out of her eyes and walked off up the corridor the way she had come, but at a jauntier pace.

Bailey waited there, tense.

About thirty seconds later, a second figure emerged from the dimness of the electricity room.

A prison officer.

Dylan.

She’d seen him around but had never conversed with him in anything more than the most cursory manner. In his early to mid-thirties, he was handsome in a rugged way, with sandy-coloured hair, a tanned complexion and very light blue eyes.

He stood there for a few moments adjusting the cinch on his belt, softly whistling some tune that she didn’t recognise. Well, well, she thought. Dylan had clearly been engaged in a bit of ‘misconduct in public office’.

As Bailey had suspected, Agata had been dolled up because she was going to meet her boyfriend. And her boyfriend was Dylan. Presumably, he was who the two inmates had been fighting over in the canteen. In fact, now that she thought back, Bailey recalled that Dylan had been in the canteen chatting to Amber just before the fight had kicked off. His presence there had probably triggered the outburst between his two rival lovers.