The Son Read Free Page B

view on the matter was you just had to help yourself.
    ‘I can’t keep doing this, Arild,’ Per Vollan said behind him as they walked down the corridor.
    ‘Doing what?’
    ‘I’m a chaplain. What we’re doing to the boy – making him take the fall for something he didn’t do. Serve time for a husband who—’
    ‘Hush.’
    Outside the door to the control room, or ‘the bridge’ as Franck liked to call it, they passed an old man who paused his swabbing of the floor and gave a friendly nod to Franck. Johannes was the oldest man in the prison and an inmate after Franck’s own heart, a gentle soul who sometime in the previous century had been picked up – almost by chance – for drug smuggling, had never hurt a fly since and over the years had become so institutionalised, conditioned and pacified that the only thing he dreaded was the day he was released. Sadly, inmates like him didn’t represent a challenge for a prison like Staten.
    ‘Is your conscience troubling you, Vollan?’
    ‘Yes, yes, it is, Arild.’
    Franck couldn’t remember exactly when his staff had started addressing their superiors by their first names, or when prison governors started wearing plain clothes rather than uniforms. In some jails the prison officers wore plain clothes as well. During a riot at the Francisco de Mar Prison in São Paulo, officers had shot at their own colleagues in the tear-gas smoke because they couldn’t tell staff from inmates.
    ‘I want out,’ the chaplain implored him.
    ‘Is that right?’ Franck was jogging down the stairs. He was in good shape for a man less than ten years away from retirement, because he worked out. A forgotten virtue in an industry where obesity was the rule rather than the exception. And hadn’t he coached the local swimming team when his daughter used to compete? Done his bit for the community in his spare time, given something back to this country which had given so much to so many? So how dare they overlook him. ‘And how is your conscience when it comes to those young boys we’ve evidence you’ve been abusing, Vollan?’ Franck pressed his index finger against the sensor at the next door; this took them to a corridor which to the west led to the cells, and to the east, the staff changing rooms and the exit to the car park.
    ‘I suggest you think of it as Sonny Lofthus atoning for your sins as well, Vollan.’
    Another door, another sensor. Franck pressed his finger against it. He loved this invention which he had copied from the Obihiro Prison in Kushiro, Japan. Instead of issuing keys that could be lost, copied or misused, the fingerprints of everyone who was authorised to pass through the doors were entered into a database. Not only had they eliminated the risk of careless handling of the keys, they also maintained a record of who had passed through which door and when. They had installed surveillance cameras as well, of course, but faces could be concealed. Not so with fingerprints. The door opened with a sigh and they entered a lock, a small room with a barred metal door at either end where one door had to be closed before the other would open.
    ‘I’m saying that I can’t do it any more, Arild.’
    Franck raised a finger to his lips. In addition to the surveillance cameras which covered practically the entire prison, the locks had been fitted with a two-way communication system so that you could contact the control room if, for some reason, you got stuck. They exited the lock and continued towards the changing rooms where there were showers and a locker for clothing and personal property for each staff member. The fact that the assistant prison governor had a master key that opened every locker was something Franck had decided his staff didn’t need to know. Quite the opposite in fact.
    ‘I thought you knew who you were dealing with here,’ Franck said. ‘You can’t just quit. For these people loyalty is a matter of life and death.’
    ‘I know,’ Per Vollan said;