A small sucking noise disrupted the heavy silence as Lisa Carlisle drained the last of the whisky and the flask left her beautiful lips, it was loud in my empty cell. I exhaled blue smoke dramatically and waited for her to speak, instead, she got up to leave.
            "I would say 'wait here', but you're not going anywhere are you?" She threw over her shoulder before closing the door behind her. I smiled to myself, safe in the knowledge that she would probably return with more illicit alcohol and keep me company through what were normally my loneliest hours.
            It was only a matter of minutes before I once again heard the jangle of keys in my door and she waved the best-looking bottle of Jack Daniel's I had ever seen around it and in front of my eyes. "I thought this might help loosen your tongue some more," she said locking the door after her and throwing two packets of Embassy Number One onto the bed next to me. Pouring our drinks into two plastic beakers, she enquired, "So this was when? December 2002?"
            I nodded, "Three weeks before Christmas -- I never went home."
            "So let me get this right: you left your job, your home and all your friends and family for a woman you'd known twenty-four hours?" She asked, incredulity prevailent in her voice.
            I smiled, aware of how bizarre it sounded. "I didn't really have any proper family, but yeah..." I shrugged, "the rest of it's about right."
            "A woman, who turned out to be a crazed, power-hungry serial killer," she added.
            "Gabrielle's no killer." I rebuffed simply, shifting to a more comfortable cross-legged position. "And she certainly isn't crazy; power-hungry maybe." I said with affection, "But crazy? Definitely not."
            "But she controlled you Jessie." Lisa said, obviously believing it to be the truth. "She had some kind of hold over you, brainwashed you even, she must have, why else would you have done what you did?"
            It was a perfectly reasonable question under the circumstances and I knew she was entitled to an answer, she had, after all, bothered to ask.  In silence, I got up and walked the short distance to the other side of my cell, I picked up the one and only possession they had allowed me to keep, tracing fingertips gently over the ornate script decorating the book's cover, remembering.
            I handed it to her and sat back on my bed, patient, as my guest read the title and gazed in awe at its external beauty. She frowned slightly and harboured a look of curiosity as she digested the elaborate gold script and then gave me her eyes, full of questions. She chose the most obvious to ask. "What does it mean?" She referred to the pattern that adorned the cover, foreign to her, but she was well educated enough to know that it could be translated.
            "It derives from ancient Sanskrit," I explained, "it means 'balance'."
            She shook her head. "I don't understand, how....?"
            I took the book from her and put it to one side. "It was the reason for everything that followed," I said, lighting her a cigarette before my own. "The reason they needed me at all."