For obvious reasons, women are not allowed on the men’s corridor and vice versa. For some of the same reasons they’re not awfully keen on anyone going into anyone else’s bedroom. I mean, privacy is important to everyone, I get that. That doesn’t mean certain stuff doesn’t happen between patients, because trust me, it certainly does. In plain sight, quite often, because I’ve seen them at it.

A quick hand-job in the corner of the music room.

A fumble in the bushes when patients are allowed outside.

Still, isn’t it nice to know they have rules that are meant to prevent such terrible things?

I reckoned, though, that with everything that was happening on the ward that evening, and with coppers causing chaos all over the show, the staff would probably be way too busy to worry about an innocent spot of bedroom-hopping. So, half an hour after I’d been safely tucked up, I knocked quietly on a couple of doors and brought L-Plate and Donna back to my room to see what they made of it all.

‘He killed himself, didn’t he.’ Donna wasn’t asking a question.

‘Most obvious explanation,’ L-Plate said. She was sitting on the end of my bed brushing her hair, wearing expensive pyjamas with embroidered stars on them that her parents had brought her from home. ‘I don’t think he’s been awfully happy lately.’

L-Plate’s lovely, but even if you discount the heroin and the flat-Earth stuff, she’s not the sharpest tool in the box. ‘How many people in here are happy?’ I asked.

‘Well, yeah . . . but even less happy than usual.’

‘Topped himself,’ Donna said. ‘Course he has.’

‘How’s he done that, then?’ I stared around my room, a replica of the other nineteen on the ward. A single bed and a grimy window behind a rip-proof curtain. A chair made deliberately heavy so nobody can throw it. A wardrobe with three shelves and nothing you can hang anything from.

Least of all yourself.

‘You want to do it bad enough, you find a way,’ Donna said.

Donna, the Walker, who was here because she’s threatened to do it countless times, who has been doing it for several years in one of the slowest and cruellest ways possible. I looked at her, perched on the chair that probably weighed three times what she did. Wrists that a baby could wrap its hands around and a collarbone knitting-needle-thin beneath her ratty pink dressing gown. ‘Not sure I buy it,’ I said.