It had been a short road for Lucy Barnes from home in a mews house in London's Belgravia to the attic of a terraced house in the West Country town. On this cool and early summer evening she was at the end of her financial resources.

She had gone to London that week, she had broken into the family home through a kitchen window, she had taken the teapot. They would change the locks after that. Probably they had already changed the locks. She couldn't remember now why she had only taken the teapot. She had no idea where she would go for more money, for more scag, after the doses that were on the floor beside her were exhausted.

A short road. Cannabis smoking behind the school's sports pavilion, an act of adolescent defiance and experimentation.

She had been through dragon chasing, heating the scag powder through tinfoil and inhaling the fumes through a soft drinks tube. She had tried mouth organ playing, dragging the same heated fumes into her lungs through the cover of a matchbox.

One and a half years after her expulsion – and pretty goddam embarrassing that had been because darling Daddy was already signed up to hand over the prizes at next term's Speech Day – she was a mainliner and needing a grand a month to stay with it.

The pusher had said this was new stuff, purer than he had ever had through his hands before, the best stuff he had ever been sold. None of the usual dilution shit in the cut, no talcum or chalk dust or fine sugar. Real stuff, like it had been before the dealers got to be so bloody greedy.

She loaded the hypodermic. She could estimate the dose, didn't use fragile weighing scales. She sat cross-legged on a square of threadbare carpet. The attic was lit by the beam from a street light that pierced the dirty glass of the skylight window. She could see what she was doing. The arm veins were no longer any good to her, the leg veins were failing on her. She kicked off her shoes. She wore no tights, nor socks.