A well-coiffed woman in her sixties is playing the solo card game Australians call patience, and Americans call solitaire. She’s wearing the teal trousers and button-down shirt standard for Australian prison inmates, the shirt collar popped defiantly. Her left hand is in a cast, the result of a prison brawl. Her name is Jacs, and she is the reigning gangster queen of Wentworth Prison. She has two specialities: injecting her conversations with sinister subtext and getting her henchwomen to physically, and occasionally psychologically, torture her enemies.

She’s about to engage in the former.

She spots one of those henchwomen, who’s returning to her cell after committing the crime of doing something nice for one of Jacs’ rivals, an inmate who’s grieving the loss of her daughter. The henchwoman gave her some gossip magazines to cheer her up. But she lies, tells Jacs that her magazines were stolen, probably by that rival prison “family”.