Cheap chocolate and mutual masturbation were all they’d managed. Graeme recalled the sour but thrilling taste of Catherine’s tongue in his mouth, the feel of it on his cock. There had been one bush in the grounds that all the security cameras’ angles just missed, and that had been where they had rendezvoused every day, meeting behind it, next to the fence, when they were supposed to be doing their sports sessions. That was many years ago, but you didn’t forget your first sexual experience. He helps keep the memories alive when he’s alone on his single mattress with its yellow-grey sheet.

Clean, ironed, fresh sheets. That’s what they’d have on all the beds in their cottage.

‘It wasn’t that easy,’ he says with eyes downcast, picking at his oil-grimed fingernails. ‘The alternator had gone. I had to reconnect the—’

‘Yeah, yeah, aren’t you clever? Anyway, more to the point…’ Catherine glances towards the nurse, but he’s talking to another patient, so she continues. ‘How’s the plan coming along? Did you get what I told you to get?’

This is the question Graeme has been dreading and one he’s amazed Catherine hasn’t asked sooner. He replies in a low gabble. ‘I’m working on it, babe. I spoke to a bloke down the gym who says he can get one, but that was a month ago, and I ain’t seen him since. You can’t rush these things, he warned me it would be difficult.’

‘For fuck’s sake, Graeme, it’s been months since we first discussed it! I’m going insane in here! Being this good isn’t frickin’ easy.’

‘You’ve been dead good. Ground leave every week for, what, two years now?’

‘No need to patronise me.’

‘I’m not!’

Graeme wasn’t. He was genuinely pleased that Catherine’s behaviour had stabilised enough for her to finally have been moved to the medium-security Ashworth. He secretly hoped it was because Catherine was getting better, rather than the true reason – that it was a means to an end.

Catherine had a plan. She’d had the same plan ever since they’d first met. And every time the plan met a setback – another sentence for another crime committed to add to her now very long list of ABH, GBH, attempted murder – she never, ever associated her own actions with the consequences. Instead, the long, bony finger of her blame stayed pointing at the one oblivious person whose fault she believed it was. All of it.

Sometimes Graeme thought that if someone told Catherine this individual was responsible for world poverty and global warming Catherine would readily believe it … He almost felt sorry for them. Catherine had always made it sound like they were a mixture of Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot and Hitler, all rolled into one.

Although he’d never dare suggest that to Catherine. She’d never speak to him again.