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other. As they waited for the security door to buzz open and swallow them up, Darren knew he wouldn’t be smiling much for the next eight hours.
    He took out his mop and began to figure-of-eight the floor. After an hour and a half he was desperate to make the rest of the day more interesting. One thing Darren didn’t lack was an imagination. He was a daydreamer, an artist. He began to trace a large surfboard shape on the lino with his mop and filled it in with water. Then he drew large crashing waves, and some rocks to avoid when catching a break into shore. Then he filled in the spaces by the closed doors with the low clouds that always hung over the shore when he, Jez, Mike and CJ took the boards to Devon to surf.
    He used the mop as the oar on a paddle board for the next bit of corridor, leaning low and bending his knees as if adjusting to the movement and swell of the ocean. He looked behind him at his rapidly drying picture. Not bad. Maybe he could use this experience to create some real works of art when he got home.
    There were thirty-five cameras inside the buildings at Roehampton, and a further ten on the perimeter and the exit points. Sonny’s job was to monitor a third of these and make sure everything looked OK. Which it always did. He was alone at the moment, as Corey was in the small kitchen at the end of the corridor brewing the tea. They worked in pairs at Roehampton, in case someone was taken ill or needed a bathroom break.
    The images from the cameras were black and white and soundless, and relayed on to TV screens that reached from desk height to the ceiling of the windowless room. After a while the rhythms on the screens, the occasional door swinging open, a group of visitors or Dr McCabe walking around, blended into a pleasing backdrop that was as hypnotising to Sonny as driving on a motorway at night. Which was why the young cleaner on camera number fifteen jerking about with the mop was something to see.
    Corey came back, holding two tea mugs. Sonny used the zoom feature on the camera. ‘You seen that white guy before?’
    Corey sat down on his swivel chair and put his feet on the desk, something that Sonny hated. They watched Darren turn a full circle with the mop. ‘He trippin’,’ Corey said. ‘What’s he drawing on the floor?’
    ‘His resignation if Kamal catches him,’ Sonny answered, shaking his head and sipping his tea.
    Darren had reached the end of the corridor. There was no clock in this corridor and he had no idea if he was ahead of schedule or behind. An orderly coming the other way down the corridor opened the door with a key and he pushed his bucket through.
    Darren turned to see another long corridor, this time with doors leading off on the left, with no windows. He wondered how far from the kitchens he was, how soon he might see Chloe again. His bucket had a dodgy wheel that meant it didn’t push straight, like a supermarket trolley. He decided to count nineteenth-century French artists as he mopped to the end of the corridor. Maybe he could paint an imaginary Cézanne on the floor. No, that mountain Cézanne was always painting was the wrong shape for this passage. Which artist did long wide paintings?
    The door at the end of this corridor had a narrow panel with security glass in it. He looked through it and saw a tall man in civilian clothes coming closer, someone behind him. Darren stood back as the man opened the door.
    The woman directly behind the man was an inmate. Darren looked at her as she passed and felt a pain as if his heart had stopped. It was Olivia Duvall.
    Those were the last eyes Carly ever saw.
    Olivia stared at him with big brown eyes framed with long curled eyelashes, crow’s feet radiating over her cheekbones. She had eyebrows that weren’t overplucked, but neither were they anything Frida Kahlo would admire. Her skin was tanned, with a soft down of hair across the cheeks. She didn’t break her stride as her eyes dropped to his name badge and