His office was located in the administration block, not far from that of the Governor, and the decor was something he had given careful consideration to. On one shelf stood a variety of academic psychology tomes, none of which he actually needed to keep in there as he had read them all already, but he figured their presence lent a certain authority to his words and made the inmates take him more seriously. On another shelf was a ceramic phrenology head with the different parts of the mind traced out across its white glazed surface. Phrenology had been a nineteenth-century fad that was completely discredited these days, but he found that the inmates enjoyed looking at it and, like the books, it hopefully reinforced the clinical setting.

On his desk sat a framed photograph of his two children and a mug that bore the words ‘World’s Okayest Dad’. These again were calculated props to put the inmates at ease and make them feel able to connect with him as a human being. He knew that many of them had kids and he was happy to talk about his own if they asked. And they often did.

He peered through his wire-rimmed glasses at the file lying open on the desk in front of him. Reading through the notes, it appeared that his next appointment, Bailey Pike, had possible suicidal tendencies. She had been referred to him by the Governor as the result of an adjudication following an apparent attempt at self-harm. Suicide and self-harm were very serious issues and an increasingly prevalent problem inside the prison system. In today’s one-to-one assessment, he hoped to get to the root cause of her suicidal thoughts and assess how far she might try to do something similar again.

He leafed through her file and briefly scanned her criminal history. The details were fairly sparse. An accountant who’d embezzled money from her employers. The nature of the crime gave little insight into her personality.

He turned to her intake evaluation – the psychometric tests she’d filled out when she’d been inducted into the prison – and began to study the results.

Interesting—

There was a knock on the door. He looked up. He positioned the mug so that the words ‘World’s Okayest Dad’ would be plainly visible to the person sitting opposite him.

‘Come in,’ he said.

The door opened and the inmate came in, accompanied by a female prison officer. He smiled and nodded at the prison officer, who left, closing the door behind her.

‘Hello, Bailey,’ he said. ‘I’m Doctor Bodie. Thank you for coming to see me. Please take a seat.’

She sat down on the other side of the desk, crossing both her arms and her legs. Her head hung forward to the left, her hair obscuring that side of her face. He could instantly tell from her body language that she appeared unwilling to engage.

He noticed that she had sustained some kind of beating as her face showed signs of cuts and bruising, not unlike his own, but somewhat worse.