‘There you go, then.’ Deborah sat at the desk and Sasha and Lolly crowded in front of it. ‘Many of the women who come here tend to be younger. A lot of them have spent much of their adult life behind bars, and have nowhere else to go. We get fewer older residents because they tend to have stronger family ties, but Rachel didn’t seem to have anyone.’

‘What do you remember about her?’ asked Lolly.

Deborah gave a little snort. ‘That she was very argumentative. Honestly, Rachel could start a row in an empty room. She didn’t give a fig who she upset, and we had to watch her very closely. To look at her, you’d think she was very unassuming.’

Lolly looked up from the notebook in which she had been writing. ‘Unassuming, how do you spell that?’

‘Put “quiet”,’ suggested Sasha.

‘I believe Rachel had a number of altercations in prison because of her confrontational nature, and we had a lot of trouble keeping her from causing a disturbance. It became a problem.’

‘She got into fights?’ asked Sasha.

‘It never got physical, at least – she could have gone back to prison under the terms of her licence if it had. But everyone was always on high alert where she was concerned, and staff here had to step in a couple of times.’

‘What kind of arguments?’

‘Some of the residents would be watching the TV, for example, and Rachel would walk in and turn the channel over without asking.’ She stabbed at the air with an invisible remote. ‘Or she would report a minor infringement of the rules by other residents, like if they didn’t wash up after themselves. She walked around like she owned the place and it didn’t make her popular. It’s a shame she didn’t follow her own high standards of behaviour.’

‘What happened?’ asked Lolly.

‘After she left, we discovered she had defaced a wall in her room.’

‘That doesn’t sound good,’ said Sasha. ‘What did she do?’

‘She wrote the names of her children in marker pen behind the bed. And it was insoluble ink, too, so the wall had to be repainted. If we had discovered the damage when she was here, she would have been put on a warning.’

‘Where did she go after she left here?’ asked Lolly Chambers.

‘You’ll have to ask her Offender Manager at the Probation Service about that. But I do remember she kept turning up for weeks after, asking to be allowed back in – she insisted she’d left something behind, but there was nothing in her room. She was very persistent. I think she just wanted to come back – a lot of former prisoners can get bewildered in the outside world after being locked up for so long. And ex-cons can lead very transient lives – it’s been two years now, so she could have moved several times.’