Cages by David Mark (reading fiction TXT) 📗

we can to minimize the pain for those left wondering what has happened to those they love best.’

THIRTY

Governor Laiquet Hussain looks as though he has gone beyond ‘tired’ and has somehow transcended into a different reality. He looks as though he is fragmenting: his outline disintegrating into pixels and particles and mingling with the fog and dust and dandruff that makes up the grey air of his joyless office. Annabeth has never seen a man looking so thoroughly broken. His olive skin has taken on a waxy, bloated look that makes her think of drowned corpses. His eyelids are puffy, hanging low over his half-closed eyes like a rain-filled awning over a shop. He’s wearing a clean shirt and a nice suit but it’s a bandage over an infected wound. The room smells of unwashed skin and coffee breath. She wants to look up at the ceiling light: to check whether it would support a noose and take his weight. Fancies, given his current luck, that he would just end up on his backside covered in plaster dust and, quite possibly, a forgotten escapee.

‘Please,’ he says, squinting at some papers on his desk. He waves vaguely at a chair. ‘Take a seat. Move any clutter. Burn it, if you feel the urge.’|

Annabeth does as requested, minus the arson. She’s been in the governor’s office twice before. On the first occasion, he was welcoming her and three other new-starters to HMP Holderness – telling them all not to believe the headlines about conditions within the jail, and that all he asked of them was that they be the best version of themselves. Nine weeks later she was here again, discussing a minor amendment she might care to make on a witness statement. Another officer had broken the eye socket of a minor drug dealer on C-Wing, and Annabeth had neglected to mention that the alleged victim had lunged for her colleague and struck him with a cosh. Annabeth had done as she was asked. She wonders what other moral adjustments she will have to make today. Wonders what Hussain will request of her, and how it will dovetail with what she knows Cox will insist upon when she makes her way to his bedside.

‘Nasty business,’ he says, licking dry lips. ‘Did Cathy ask you if you wanted coffee? Tea? Berocca?’

‘I’m fine, sir.’

‘No problem, no problem. Yes, as I say. Nasty.’

‘So I’m told, sir.’

‘He’s OK, of course. Mr Windsor. Probably be back in a month or so, provided that’s what he wants.’

Annabeth can think of nothing to say. She doesn’t see Windsor as a great asset to the profession, but with staffing levels as they are, she’d rather have as many colleagues around her as can be found. She’s the only one of the four new starters who sat here on their first day who haven’t already walked out, citing stress or dangerous working conditions.

‘You weren’t in yesterday?’ He eyes her, sleepily. ‘Ill, I’m told. Mr Windsor stepped in. You’ll be able to provide a doctor’s note, I’m sure.’

‘Yes sir,’ she says. She’s struggling to work out what to do with her hands. She has them clasped in her lap, trying to obscure the scuffs and bruises on her knuckles. She doesn’t want anybody seeing them, but she doesn’t like seeing them herself. She doesn’t need reminding of what she did to Rufus. Ethan isn’t talking to her. She can’t find the courage to ring Rufus and apologize. Even to explain. She feels like she’s floating, somehow: as if she’s tethered to reality by a fraying thread and that if she doesn’t keep concentrating, she could simply drift away. She knows that she won’t hear from Rufus again. His car was gone when she woke in the early hours of the morning. The house had seemed empty without him. He’d only stayed one night, but he’d left some elemental trace of himself: the way a house that has experienced great joy or grief can provoke shadow feelings in its new occupants. She’d felt him all around her: a big personality brought low by the violence of a woman he’d thought of as a friend.

She’d set about tidying up. Put her folders back in the cupboard. Tidied away the sticky glasses and folded the blanket she had cocooned herself within on the sofa. Sat and looked at the snow globe for an age. Then she had put on her uniform and come to work. She has bigger things to concern herself with. Rufus was good company; she likes the way his mind works, but after what comes next, he’ll be glad of the distance she has created between them. He won’t want any part of the fallout that accompanies the denouement of Cox’s scheme. She has run through endless permeations about what Cox will demand of her. All she’s been through, all she’s endured, and she will spend the next few months in debt to a monster. He’ll want special privileges. Will want her to turn a blind eye to drugs; money; mobile phones – hell, he could tell her to bring him pornography and if she said no he would tell the world she was a murderer. He owns her. Her son is part made of a dead man’s DNA. She can do nought but comply.

‘Anything serious?’ asks Hussain, concerned for her health.

‘Stomach upset, sir. Had to wait the recommended twenty-four hours.’

‘And you’re OK now?’

‘I wanted to be what help I could, sir.’

Hussain nods. His eyes slide shut. He gives a little shake of his head, and sighs. It seems to contain the ghosts of countless hopes. Annabeth scans the room. It’s not a bad office. High ceilings, painted Racing Green. Long mahogany desk, made lopsided by the chunky computer at one end, shoved to one side to accommodate his sleek little laptop. There are citations and certificates in frames on the wall, and a framed photograph of Hussain shaking hands with Prince Charles, hanging wonkily beside a double-page spread in