Intake Day at Ashgrove – Part 1: Processing

Ashgrove County Prison had been decommissioned in the nineteen-nineties. Its admissions block was now a tidy museum, a long brick room with a scarred wooden counter, a ledger on a stand, a row of pegs for coats and a green-painted door that led to the cells. After hours, with the museum closed and the manager away, it belonged to a woman in a navy uniform jacket.

Rosamund was fifty-one, a former probation manager, tall and spare, with iron-grey hair under a plain cap. She had been, for twenty years, the person on the other side of a desk from men who did not want to be there. Piers was thirty-nine, a landscape gardener, big and soft-spoken and unmistakably nervous, who had told her one rainy afternoon, very simply, that more than anything he wished to be processed, issued with a number and told where to sit.

She looked at him over the counter.

"Name."

"Piers Hallam."

"Stand straight, Hallam. Hands on the counter."

He laid his hands on the wood. Before the door had closed, they had agreed on the terms, at the same counter, over a flask of tea. She slid the Regulations across the wood now, two pages, signed by both. No marks. Nothing painful beyond what he had listed. No real humiliation. No photographs. No one else in the building. The cell door had a plain latch on the inside. The word was Visiting.

"Say it."

"Visiting."

"If you say it, the Governor takes off her cap. I am Rosamund. We make tea in the staff room."

"Yes, Governor."

"Good." She turned a page in the ledger. "You will be issued with a number. It is Fourteen. You will answer to it. You will keep your eyes down. You will not speak unless spoken to."

"Yes, Governor."

"Empty your pockets."

He emptied them onto the counter, a wallet, a set of keys, a packet of mints. She listed each in the ledger with a slow scratch of the nib, and swept them into a canvas bag. She handed him a folded bundle, a grey shirt, grey trousers, a pair of canvas slippers.

"Change. The cubicle is behind you."

He changed. When he came out, in the plain grey, she looked him over from head to foot, tilted his chin with a single finger, and noted something in the ledger. His heart was thumping. He had not felt so completely, strangely safe in years.

"Are you content, Fourteen?"

"Content, Governor."

"You will not be for long." The ghost of a smile. "Walk."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Visiting.