Tabitha had never liked lifts. What if they fell? What if they got stuck? She always took the stairs. When she went to London, she hated the Underground. Once she had been on a train during rush hour, standing up, crammed among the hot bodies, and the train had stopped between tunnels. There had been a muffled announcement, which she couldn’t understand. It had stopped for five minutes, ten minutes. It was in the summer and the heat was stifling. Gradually Tabitha had thought of the solid clay and brick between her and the surface. And then she had thought of how she was in the middle of a train that was stuffed with people in carriage after carriage in front of her and carriage after carriage behind her. She had felt an impulse, which she could barely stifle, to scream and scream and fight her way out.

Now she was in a cell, four paces long, three paces wide. There was a tiny, barred window. It looked out on a yard, beyond that a wall topped with barbed wire, and beyond that, you could just make out the hills, hazy in the distance. Yesterday she had looked out of that window and she had thought that she saw a little shape moving on that hill. Someone walking. Someone outside. Someone free. But now it was dark and there was nothing but the spotlights illuminating the yard. The door of the cell would stay locked until the middle of the morning. When she thought about it, she felt like she was buried alive and wanted to yell for someone to come and rescue her. Perhaps that was what that woman had been howling about.

If Tabitha couldn’t scream, then perhaps she could cry. But she knew that if she cried, she wouldn’t be able to stop. And probably it wasn’t good to be seen crying.

It was very cold, and the single blanket was inadequate. She drew her knees up almost to her chest and lay hugging herself in the darkness. She smelled different. Of prison soap and hair that needed washing, something slightly moldy. She closed her eyes and thought of the sea, waves swelling and cresting onto the rocky shore. Thoughts came in long dark curls and she tried to push them away. There was another scream, then someone banged on a door far away.