She drove home immediately and worked quickly: sweeping ashes and bits of pages into plastic bags, flushing three full buds of green down the loo, taking bags of bottle-clanging rubbish to the bins. She’d read enough on her phone in the car to expect a knock on the door soon. She was all over the internet. ‘Manhater should be done for manslaughter’, Derek McLaverty and his lions were arguing, and people were hearing them roar.

‘Misandrist Mary called me last night’, Derek had somehow posted from his cell, ‘all weepy, weepy, trying to get me on side. But I know her game, that emotional manipulation. Typical woman, asking questions all nicey-nicey but really it’s a trap. When she hung up, she shopped me for needing a hug from my boys, and now I’m locked up again. Because my best friend was murdered and I needed to hug my sons.

‘Funny fact: Mary-Contrary’s son, Jack Shields-Lawson, hates her guts! We welcome you, Jack, to our movement. Things have to change, folks. Liam’s dead because he wanted a life, and I’m inside because I love my children.’

She shouldn’t have clicked on the video of Derek being interviewed on YouTube, winning every argument with the presenter, who passed articulate and collected £200 in round one, and subsequently said all the wrong things, just as Mary was now thinking all the wrong things, like Derek McLaverty was the scum of the earth. That cool demeanour, that designer suit, that bullshit USP – being a devoted dad of two when he couldn’t even set aside an hour a week to see them.

Whatever. Later. She had to be at Lowfield in fifteen minutes. Drugs defo gone, windows open, sex toys in drawer, laptop search history deleted, she reached for her key, and remembered the pen drive in her pocket. Shit, the pen drive. She should deal with that as a matter of urgency. She couldn’t take it to prison. Mary raced back into her bedroom, opened the rarely used drawer under her bed filled with heeled boots she wanted to wear but never did because they didn’t suit her, and placed the pen drive in one of her favourites. From River Island, they were – kind of retro, maybe if she tried them with a maxi skirt.

On the way to prison, she left a message asking Minnie to call her, and another with her boss, Catherine. She arrived at Lowfield at three minutes past ten.