Sharon Finn lay on her bunk looking up at the springs of the empty bed above. Her cellmate had been released two days earlier. Sharon had had a number of cellmates over the past few years and she knew she’d probably have quite a few more as she still had another three years to serve. Three had been released, two had been transferred, one had escaped and one had died of cancer. She wondered what the next one would be like and how long they’d be hanging around.

Sharon was an addict of sorts and her addiction had got her into trouble. She wasn’t addicted to substances. No, nothing as crude as that. She was addicted to secrets. Other people’s secrets. And that was why she had been locked up.

In her mind, she hadn’t committed a crime. In her mind, an injustice had been done by locking her up in here. Sure, someone had ended up killing himself as a result of her actions. But that had been his decision. He shouldn’t have got himself into that kind of situation in the first place. She’d merely discovered that he’d been having an affair. She’d merely threatened to tell his wife. Everything would have been fine if he’d merely agreed to pay her the money she’d asked for.

She hadn’t expected him to kill himself.

He had implicated her in his suicide note, and that, plus subsequent evidence of their correspondence, had been enough for the court to convict her.

Making unwarranted demands with menaces with a view to making a gain. That was how the judge had phrased it.

Blackmail. That was the shorter way to describe it.

Still, nine years seemed a bit excessive in her opinion.

The fact that her victim had been a high court judge might have had something to do with her heavy sentence now she thought about it. He’d probably had friends in high places. He’d probably been private-school chums with the judge who’d sentenced her.

She sighed and shifted on the bunk. Life just wasn’t fair. She’d launched a number of appeals, but they’d all been unsuccessful.

Anyhow, prison wasn’t quite as bad as people made out. In fact, she’d found that she actually quite enjoyed it. The main problem that most inmates suffered from in here was boredom. But that was only because most of them lacked the internal resources to amuse themselves. She, on the other hand, found the inmate population to be an almost inexhaustible source of entertainment. There were more than enough dark and dirty secrets in here to keep her occupied for a lifetime.

A metallic clank jerked her out of her reverie as the door to her cell opened. She looked up. A prison officer was standing there accompanied by an inmate she hadn’t seen before who was holding a pack of sheets and prison-issue clothes and her plastic cup, plate and cutlery.

She suddenly remembered that today was when her new cellmate was due to arrive.