It was a fire alarm.

Bailey had no idea what time it was, but the sky was still dark outside. She fumbled for her watch and squinted at the little screen. It was 3.10 in the morning.

And then she smelt the burning smell and she knew it wasn’t a drill. Acrid, sharp, biting into the back of her throat and nasal passage. Something was definitely on fire.

She sat up sharply. She pulled back the sheets and jumped out of the bunk. With a surge of panic, she realised that she was locked in the cell. She could burn to death or die of smoke inhalation if she was trapped in here.

She ran to the door and heard the commotion outside. Other inmates were panicking in the same way, banging on the doors and shouting.

Then there was the sound of a key rattling in the lock. Her door was flung open. A female prison officer stood there.

‘This is not a drill,’ she announced. ‘Go to the end of the landing and follow the fire evacuation procedure.’

Bailey faintly remembered the fire drill instructions she’d been given when she’d been inducted into the prison, something about stairwells and meeting points.

She walked out of the cell. The burning smell was a lot stronger out here and the landing had a thin layer of smoke filling it. All of the other cells were open or in the process of being opened. The inmates milled about chaotically, both jittery and befuddled, coughing at the smoke, some pushing each other aside in an attempt to get out faster. The prison officers were barking instructions, trying to get them to evacuate in an orderly fashion, but the feeling was one of barely contained panic and Bailey was worried that it would degenerate into a stampede. Fortunately, it didn’t and she joined the crowd as they descended to the atrium and made their way out into the prison yard.

Outside, a spattering of stars twinkled across the clear black sky. The inmates clustered in a large groggy mass, the prison looming over them like a shapeless stone behemoth. In the semi-darkness, she couldn’t immediately make out anyone she knew.

The murk of night seemed to amplify the general mood of dread that shrouded the prison and the inmates huddled together instinctively for self-protection, casting fearful glances into the huge black triangles of shadow cast by the corners of the giant house-blocks, whispering amongst themselves, speculating perhaps… was this something to do with another murder?

The prison officers herded them around, shouting at them to line up according to wing and landing, so they could count them off floor by floor.

Not too far away, she noticed Dylan moving the inmates into line, walking up and down, eventually coming to a halt in the shadows by the wall.

He presented an enigma to her. And the thing about enigmas was that she was never satisfied until she’d solved them.

He seemed affable enough, but he was a little too closed for her to get a proper sense of what he was really like. He came across as smart-looking and professional, yet he was breaking the law by having an affair with at least one of the inmates. On top of that there was the intimation of mental instability and the circumstantial possibility that he was a vicious and sadistic killer.