Naomi looked at the bare walls, tatty and scratched, as if legions of people before her had tried to get a hold with their fingernails, in a futile attempt to climb up.

For up seemed to be the only way out in a round room with no doors and a concrete floor with a fine crack. A gap not even big enough to stick your little finger into. An opportunity for a crowbar, if one had been to hand. Naomi was wearing nothing but tattered pyjamas. Fortunately it wasn’t so cold in her dungeon; she suspected that some generators or other technical devices were warming her prison with their sticky, radiated heat. She slept on a mat that took up almost the entire room. Apart from this there was a plastic bag and a grey bucket, which was lowered every couple of days on a thin rope, smeared with Vaseline to prevent Naomi from getting any ideas about trying to climb it.

Oh, yes, she also had the computer.

At the start of her martyrdom – eight weeks ago, if the date on the screen was to be believed – she hadn’t tied the bucket to the rope properly and her faeces came pouring out on top of her. Most of it had trickled away through the crack. But not all.

The bucket was also used to supply her with food: bottles of water, chocolate bars and microwave meals she had to eat cold.

Two months.

Without a shower. Without any music.

And without any light, save for the weak glow of the screen, which wasn’t sufficient to tell where the plastic bucket disappeared to nor who it was – from whatever height – who lowered it to her. Besides the water, food and tissues, which she used as sanitary towels during her period, there would regularly be a new battery in the bucket. Naomi didn’t use much energy.

The only software on the computer was a cheap word-processing programme with no saved documents. Obviously there was no internet connection. And naturally Naomi wasn’t able to change the system preferences. Not even the brightness of the monitor, on which this single question flashed continually: ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’

For the first few days of her solitary confinement, sick with worry about Anouk, she had actually thought about her transgressions. About one which was serious enough to justify the horrific punishment she’d been suffering ever since she’d run out of her cabin that night in her pyjamas to look for her daughter. Anouk had left her a note at the foot of her bed.

I’m sorry, Mama.

There was nothing else on the piece of white paper, hastily scribbled without any explanation. No sign-off. Just: I’m sorry, Mama. In conjunction with the fact that it was half past two in the morning and Anouk was no longer sleeping beside her, there couldn’t be a more distressing message for a mother.