There was still plenty of stuff that she was unfamiliar with though, so she wasn’t totally relaxed by any means. In fact, she’d found that this place could suddenly put you on edge when you were least expecting it. Like now for example.

She glanced around nervously.

‘Hey stop messing about!’ she said.

Maybe some of the other inmates – her laundry colleagues – were playing a practical joke on her. She hoped so. Because if it wasn’t them then maybe it was one of the dangerous-looking cliques she’d seen around the prison. Maybe they’d taken a dislike to her for some reason. Maybe they had it in for her.

‘Haha. Try and creep up on Ally. Yeah that’s hilarious. You can come out now.’

She tried to sound breezy but her nerves betrayed her, her voice instead coming out reedy and uneven.

There was no answer. Just the incessant rumbling of the machinery.

Her knuckles turned white as she tightened her grip on the handle of the trolley and squinted into the dim recesses of the cavernous laundry. A burst of excess steam hissed from a nearby pipe. She jumped and gasped, her heart thumping in her chest.

Her mind raced to think what had made the clanking sound. It might be a rat. The prison did have a rodent problem. Or maybe she was just spooking herself out unnecessarily.

‘You silly girl,’ she muttered, shaking her head and pulling herself upright.

She recommenced pushing the trolley, awkwardly manoeuvring its bulky weight towards one of the empty washing machines at the end of the room.

Then, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a shadow pass behind one of the sheets that were hanging up, waiting to be folded and placed on the wire racks.

She let go of the trolley and spun around to look. Was there someone there? She could have sworn she was the only one in here.

No. It was surely just a ripple in the material caused by convection in the warm air currents generated by the dryers. She turned back to the trolley, taking hold of the handle once again.

But then in the darkness beyond the racking, just behind the dryers, something caught her eye.

A brief sparkle.

A shiny surface which captured the few photons bouncing around behind the stacks of machinery and reflected them back to her…

She stopped again, momentarily entranced by it as it twinkled in the shadows like a lone star aglow in the distant black depths of deep space. For a brief moment she forgot her apprehension as she tried to make sense of it floating there in the shadows like the needle of a compass… turning… pointing in her direction…

Then a depth charge of cold fear detonated in her gut as she realised what it was.

Long…

Thin…

Sharp…

A blade.

A shank.

Her heart began to hammer inside her chest. Her hands fell away from the handle of the trolley.

‘Oh fuck,’ she whispered.