‘He’s going to give me two more of my own when I get back.’

‘Is he? How is that going to work exactly? I’m confused.’

‘The plan is I go out before we’re finished and tell the officer you tried to give me the stuff.’

‘But I was searched on the way in, so they’ll know it’s from you. In fact, weren’t you searched your end? How’d you get it in?’ As soon as Mary asked, she realised: in his arse, hence the wriggling. He had somehow managed to retrieve a package from his anus right in front of her, and right in front of the cameras. ‘Your excrement is also in my bag?’

He nodded a shame-faced apology. ‘I eat healthy in here.’

‘John Paul, as ever there are significant flaws in your decision-making processes. The packet is covered in your DNA. You could get a year for this. Did Derek say why? Did he say anything about me?’

‘He said you killed his best friend. He said you put him in here, and because of you he might never see his Oskar and Freddie again.’

‘Listen, I won’t be searched on the way out. Smuggling drugs out of prison isn’t hard.’

‘Really?’

‘I can walk out of here with my bag, no problem.’

John Paul was thinking very hard. ‘Can I put it back in?’

‘Your best plan is to take the package out of my satchel and reinsert it into your anus while chatting to me?’

‘Maybe I could snort it, under the table.’ He was understandably excited at this idea.

‘Tell Derek I said hey.’ Mary packed her paperwork into the satchel and covered the small, soiled balloon with a tissue. She stood and shook his hand. ‘You look just like him, you know.’

Mary was right. It was easy to smuggle drugs out of prison.

She hadn’t looked at her phones all morning and wouldn’t until she’d emailed John Paul’s report. She had to focus, get it done. She managed to get it off in an hour, thanks to a fair amount of copying and pasting.

Getting on with it was the only option in social work. If you stopped getting on with it, you drowned. Mary had been through worse weeks than this. Twelve of her clients had killed themselves on her watch, two of them in the young offender’s institution. She’d been ripped to pieces at three fatal accident inquiries, scolded at MAPPA on a monthly basis, torn apart at breach proceedings, sworn at in children’s hearings, spat on by angry mothers, followed by desperate probationers, threatened by rapists.

Things had often seemed so horrible that Mary couldn’t imagine ever feeling safe again. But disasters blew over in social work. Probably because management didn’t have time to deal with this week’s disasters. They were only just dealing with last year’s.