The name rises to the surface like a bubble of air escaping and there is nothing she can do to stop it bursting from her mouth.

Saying it over and over again.

‘Spyros!’

Bailey jerked awake the next morning, the stench of her burning flesh still strong in her nostrils.

As always, she reflexively checked herself, running her hands over her body, surprised to discover that she wasn’t bleeding and her flesh wasn’t raw. The scars were now thin hard ridges of flesh and the burns were now coarse discoloured patches.

She rolled off her bunk and put the kettle on, noticing a faint shaking in her hands as she opened her breakfast packet. Not long after, Sharon yawned, stretched and got up to join her for tea.

They both sat there in the cell, drinking tea, neither of them saying much to the other. Sharon seemed uncharacteristically quiet and Bailey got the impression she wanted to say something. Eventually, she tilted her head at Bailey, a faintly quizzical expression on her face.

‘You were saying stuff in your sleep last night.’

Bailey felt a burst of panic. What had she revealed?

‘What was I saying?’

‘You were tossing and turning a lot. That’s what woke me up, see. The bed springs creaking. You were murmuring and moaning. You didn’t sound happy. And then you started saying stuff.’

She cursed to herself. What if she had given her cover away?

‘What kind of stuff?’ she asked. She had to know if she’d revealed anything compromising.

‘Something about Spyros. You kept saying the word Spyros. What’s Spyros?’

Her heart thumped hard.

The name.

She’d said the name.

‘Oh nothing.’ She tried to sound casual.

‘Sounds like a Greek restaurant.’

Bailey tried to emit what she hoped was a casually dismissive laugh.

‘Is it a person?’ Sharon enquired.

Bailey shrugged. ‘I don’t know. People say all kinds of stuff in their dreams.’

‘I’ve heard you say it before when you’ve been sleeping. It must have some kind of meaning. Is it a bloke?’ Sharon winked suggestively.

Bailey realised she needed to give Sharon something to sate her curiosity.

‘Yeah, it was a bloke.’

‘Ahh… thought so. You’re a dark horse, Bailey.’

‘But I don’t want to talk about him,’ said Bailey, deliberately flicking her lock of hair aside to reveal the scar on her face.

Sharon’s face went serious, almost in a caricature of shock. ‘Oh… he did that to you, did he? What a bastard!’

She didn’t know the half of it.

Chapter 38

Doctor Malcolm Bodie winced as he fingered the bruise on the side of his bald head and prayed that his next appointment wasn’t the volatile type like the one who’d punched him the day before yesterday.

Still, as a forensic psychologist, it wasn’t as if he was blind to these occasional risks of the job. They came with the territory. His particular profession was regarded as one of the most demanding positions within the field of clinical psychology and the circumstances could often be stressful. But, despite that, he never lost sight of the fact that it was necessary to maintain compassion for the inmates. After all, many of them had experienced the worst types of violence, abuse and drug addiction, and had become trapped in the kind of negative life cycles that he was here to help them break out of. The odd mishap aside, he generally enjoyed his job and derived a great deal of fulfilment from it.