with the smell of people who have travelled hundreds of miles along grey and damp motorways to be told by overweight men in grey and damp uniforms with black and shining truncheons to wait on grey and damp government seats for nothing but more bad news, grey and damp, as the bolts and the locks slide back and forth and the alarms sound and the numbers are called and the old people stand up and sit back down and the child cries and cries until a voice from a desk by the door shrieks: ‘Twenty-seven’.

The child has stopped crying and its mother is looking at you.

‘Twenty-seven!’

You stand up.

‘Number twenty-seven!’

At the desk you say: ‘John Piggott to see Michael Myshkin.’

A woman in a grey uniform runs her wet, bitten finger down a biro list, sniffs and says: ‘Purpose of visit?’

‘His mother asked me to come and see him.’

She sniffs again and looks up at you: ‘Family?’

‘No,’ you say. ‘I’m a solicitor.’

‘Legal then?’ she spits at you with sudden English hate, crisp and vicious.

You nod, vaguely afraid.

She hands you back your visitor’s pass: ‘First time?’

You nod again, her breath old and close.

‘The patient will be brought to the visitors’ room and a member of staff will be present throughout the visit. Visits are limited to forty-five minutes. You will both be seated at a table and are to remain seated throughout the course of the visit. You are to refrain from any physical contact and are not to pass anything directly to the patient. Anything you wish to give the patient must be done so through this office and can only be one of the items on this approved list,’ she says and hands you a photocopied piece of A4.

‘Thank you,’ you smile.

‘Return to your seat and wait for a member of staff to escort you to the visiting area.’

‘Thank you,’ you say again and do as you are told.

Thirty minutes and a paper swan later, a lanky guard with spots of blood upon his collar says: ‘John Winston Piggott?’