The drive to the prison took just under an hour, and as the van lurched into the prison complex, she caught a glimpse through the tinted window of the huge perimeter wall looming up, cold and forbidding, topped with thick coils of razor wire.

Stepping out of the van, she had looked up at the four huge house-blocks towering above her, their grey Victorian brickwork peppered with hundreds of tiny windows, each one denoting a cell. Whether it was just her imagination or whether it was real, she felt as if hundreds of eyes were watching her from the windows, judging her, forming opinions, already making decisions about her. An edging fear had begun to gnaw at her for she was only too aware that somewhere behind those walls was the person or persons who had killed Alice and that very soon she would be trapped in there with them.

Once inside the prison, she had been moved from room to room for each step of the processing and induction procedure. First, her details had been taken by the prison officers and her personal items had been taken away, logged and put in plastic bags, to be returned to her when she was released. Then she had been strip-searched and issued with prison clothes – a grey tracksuit – and a reception pack, consisting of blankets, soap, toothpaste, basic toiletries and a plastic cup, plate and cutlery for when she needed to eat anything in her cell. She had undergone a brief health check by the prison doctor and asked about any allergies she had that might need special requirements. Then she’d been given some psychometric questionnaires to fill out for the benefit of the prison psychologist. Finally, she’d been assigned a six-digit prison number and allocated a cell.

Naturally, she’d had very little say in anything during the whole procedure. The tone of it had been slightly shambolic, with the staff appearing bored and inattentive, which was perhaps unsurprising seeing as they did it day in day out. No one volunteered much in the way of information, after all she wasn’t one of them, and she got the impression that she’d have to pick it up herself in due course.

After she had been processed, they had taken her to her cell. And that was when she got her first taste of what the prison was really like on the inside.

The four house-blocks of HMP Foxbrook were arranged like the spokes of a wheel around a central hub and atrium area. It was the classic panopticon layout, designed by the Victorians for optimal surveillance in an era before the invention of CCTV. They were five-storey galleried wings, the tiers of cells towering up above her, reaching almost to the ceiling high above. The green paint flaking off the ancient brickwork combined with the feeble daylight filtering through the distant, grimy skylights gave the place a dingy claustrophobic feel.

The whole place echoed with the noise of chatter, the clump of feet trudging up the flights of cast-iron stairs and the clank of doors opening and closing, and beyond the disinfectant smell lay the faint whiff of illicit drugs.