‘What are you looking at?’ said the girl, fixing Bailey with a hostile glare.

‘Oh nothing,’ said Bailey, backing off with a placatory smile. Although she was curious to find out more, the shower probably wasn’t the best place to start asking questions.

She hurriedly finished up, towelled off and headed back to her cell, reminding herself to pick up some decent shower gel from the prison shop.

In the reflection of the small plastic mirror above the sink, she could see Sharon lying on the bunk behind her, engrossed in a Mills & Boon novel.

Bailey had just finished drying her hair, and she now started to apply some moisturiser to her face. As she was doing so, she couldn’t help but notice the beginnings of crow’s feet around her eyes. Age crept up on you. A wrinkle here, a wrinkle there. She thought wistfully of the Clarins eye serum she kept in her bathroom cabinet at home. She couldn’t imagine the prison shop stocked it.

Despite these small vanities, she had never been a big one for make-up. A bit of lip gloss was the most she’d stretch to if she wanted to do herself up. And, what with the scars, there seemed even less of a point bothering with that kind of thing these days.

She noticed Sharon watching her from her bunk. Her cellmate had put her book down and was looking at her curiously.

‘Have you got a boyfriend?’ Sharon asked.

Bailey shook her head.

‘Surely there must be someone?’

‘Yeah… there was. But it didn’t work out.’

‘Why not?’

Her last boyfriend had been called Mark. He was a detective in the CID. She’d lived with him for just over two years. He had wanted to settle down, get married and start a family. He’d seemed more concerned with her biological clock than she was. But she wasn’t interested in having children. She valued her independence too much. So it had fallen apart.

More than that, she feared the quiet oppression of suburbia. A pebble-dashed house. Kids. A normal life. A suffocating prison. Worse than a real prison. She’d rather be here than there. And here she was…

‘I guess we wanted different things,’ she said.

‘You probably had incompatible star signs,’ Sharon replied knowledgeably. ‘I’m a big one for star signs. I’m a Virgo myself. What sign are you?’

Bailey met Sharon’s eyes in the mirror. ‘Aren’t Virgos supposed to be intuitive by nature? Why don’t you try and work it out?’

Sharon smiled at the challenge. She scrutinised Bailey’s meagre collection of belongings. Bailey had brought little into the prison – a few books of cryptic crosswords and Sudoku, and an iPod full of eighties power ballads, her one guilty pleasure.

‘Mmm…’ Sharon stroked her chin. ‘Not a lot to go on. You like puzzles. That means you’re analytical. Probably good with numbers. I’d say you were… a Capricorn.’

Sharon was correct.