‘You’ll learn the rules to live by when you’re on the trot with your old man, love. It really is a different ballgame. You’ll spend your whole life looking over your shoulder, wondering what the next day will bring. Whether you’ll be caught, and charged as an accessory. Whether the filth will be waiting when you get home, whether you’ll be banged up or allowed bail. You’ve got it all to come. Do you think you can handle it? Only this could get a bit rough, you know. This isn’t TV, my dear, this is real life.’

Donna realised that all three men were watching her intently. The easy camaraderie was gone. Alan and Anthony really wanted to know the answer to their question. Taking a deep breath, she finally and irrevocably put herself on the line.

‘I can handle it, Eric. The point is, can you?’

The three laughed, and Donna felt the tension leave the room. She laughed with them, while inside her bowels felt as if they were turning to iced water and her heart beat so loud she wondered how the three of them didn’t remark on the sound.

‘Oh, I can handle it, my dear. That is my job.’

Donna looked around the dingy room, at the well-used furniture with cigarette burns and greasy marks, at the cold fireplace with the cracked tiles on the hearth, and the faded flock wallpaper.

All she could think as she sat there, cold, friendless and frightened, was that it would all be worth it once Georgio was back with her.

Everything would be worth it.

She needed to believe that more than anything else in the world.

Georgio lay in his bunk thinking about the off. He had to find out something concrete soon or he would go mad. Lewis would be back on the Wing within the next forty-eight hours. That meant going back to living on a daily basis, minding his back and listening out for footsteps, watching for hidden weapons.

Lewis never let anyone feel they were entirely safe from him. It was the edge he had over people. He could smile at you, and joke, and put his arm around your shoulders, oblivious of the fact he had ordered your beating, or worse. It was the ‘worse’ that bothered Georgio. Lewis’s forte was scarring people. Cutting them up and watching them weep. Georgio knew that he had his creds, he was a known villain, respected because he didn’t get caught - not until now anyway. But no one was a match for a psychopath like Lewis.

He turned on his bunk, willing the night away and also willing it to stay. He concentrated on his wife. A small smile was playing around his lips. In the dimness he could make out Donna’s photograph alongside the others on the cell wall by his bunk. He frowned as he saw the line of her cheekbones emphasised by the half-light.