When she reached the ground floor, she began to head towards the atrium. As she did so, she felt something wet splat onto the top of her head. She stopped and reached up to check, a sense of revulsion coming over her as she felt sticky strands of what she realised was saliva in her hair.

She looked up to see the carrot-haired girl leaning over the balcony, leering down at her with her friends. They all cackled with laughter.

Bailey wiped the saliva from her head, flicking it away in disgust. She moved underneath the cover of the first-floor landing so they couldn’t spit on her any more and continued on her way.

How mindless, she thought angrily. To pick on her for no other reason than that she was by herself and they thought they could get away with it.

But then what was she expecting? This was prison. People generally didn’t end up in here because they were nice.

Chapter 11

The central atrium was where the four house-blocks converged. She stood there in the middle and slowly gazed around. In all directions, vaulted tiers of cells stretched away into the gloom. She tried to remember what she’d been told during her induction about where everything was located.

As she recalled, the four house-blocks were known as A-Wing – which was her wing – B-Wing, C-Wing and D-Wing. Within the perimeter wall, besides the house-blocks, there was the prison exercise yard, an administrative complex, a medical facility, a chapel and the segregation block. The administrative buildings included the staff mess room and facilities, and that was also where the Governor’s office was situated. The gatehouse, fortified in the tradition of a medieval keep, was located midway along the eastern wall of the prison, next to the main road, and provided the only point of access to the prison. And if she wasn’t mistaken, the stairwell on the other side of the atrium led down to the basement level of the prison, where the laundry was located, somewhere underneath A-Wing.

Doing her best to avoid any further hostile encounters, she made her way across the atrium and descended the flight of stairs.

The place where Alice had been murdered seemed as good a place as any to start her investigation, even though the crime scene had long since been cleaned up. The police often retraced the steps of victims in order to trigger associations in the minds of potential witnesses, but for her she hoped that it might provoke some insight into Alice’s thought patterns in those final few hours that she had been alive.

The basement corridor appeared dingy and deserted, the overhead strip lighting flickering uncertainly. Down here, there was a more pronounced sense of dilapidation than elsewhere in the prison. Paint was peeling off the ancient brickwork, the flakes scattering the flagstones amidst the dry husks of long-dead bugs, and bits of cladding hung loose from the pipes which ran along the sides of the walls.