Tidetown Read Free Page B

her bed and snuggles deep under the covers with her sisters in arms.

    It is lunchtime in the women’s prison. Sitting alone and composed at her desk, the governor looks out the window and across the courtyard. She drains the dregs from her glass of milk. When Georgina Burgess (Georgie to her family, Madam to her staff) took up the post of governor at the Provincial Women’s Maximum Security Prison she resolved to achieve two goals by the end of her third month in the post. One, to read all the notes on each prisoner, including court and coroner’s reports; and, two, to interview them all, in their cells, unaccompanied by a guard. This was her style: be thorough, be accessible. She had said as much to the panel charged with replacing Governor Bridges (who finally retired, grieving the loss of gifts and bribes much more than the end of salary and position). She had no sentimental notions of being friends with the prisoners, but she wanted to understand them and for them to understand her. Her thirty years in the penal system have taught her a number of lessons. Not least of all, and one she often reminds herself of: put thought between impulse and action.
    Today is the final day of the third month and she has left Perch and Carp Fishcutter until last. Not because their case is the most gruesome or dramatic. That accolade, she feels, should be shared by Molly Beaumont and Mrs Marchmont. The former had slain her six children and then mummified and left them as if sleeping in the beds inside their isolated croft. Of equal notoriety was Mrs Marchmont, owner and manager of the highly reputed Oyster Emporium. On the day that would lead to her life sentence she added arsenic to her fiercely guarded sauce recipe. The lunch she then served to the ladies of the town at a charity event for the Women’s Institute (which had turned down her membership request due to her ‘immoral ways’) resulted in seven dead through poisoning and a further sixteen hospitalised with serious long-term medical complications. No, the Fishcutter story intrigued rather than appalled her. She was familiar with the trial of five years past: the peculiar motive linked to their messianic religion, the singularity of thought and action of the twin girls, and the way they had embroiled and engaged the young boy, Oscar Flowers, into their plans.
    The previous night she re-read the transcripts from the trial, stopping to pause at each twist and turn. How , she wondered, could any religious doctrine convince two young girls that murdering their father would bring him hope and resurrection? What powerful hold had they on Oscar Flowers, such that he would willingly participate in the murder? Sitting in the old armchair in her private residence on the top floor of the prison, the thick folder of the trial report on her lap, she could hear the shouting out of the women locked away for the night. She liked the closeness, the proximity. It was a kind of balm and comfort to her, like the rustle of the pages of a newspaper being turned, or the sound of a dog crunching on a bone. It was well past midnight before she finished her reading. Snug in bed she pulled the blankets up to her chin and considered who among her staff might be able to throw more light on the mystery of the twins. Soon enough she fell asleep. It came as no surprise to her dreaming self that the images to join her were of burning bushes, drowning men and the agonised Jesus on a flaming cross.
    Her first impression upon entering the cell of the Fishcutter twins is how sparse it is. The walls are blank. No photos, no pictures, no attempt at decoration of any description. The twins sit at the table beneath the small barred window. Each wears a floor-length grey prison smock; their long black hair is tied in ponytails. In unison they look up at the visitor as she places her chair at the table.
    â€˜As you know I am Governor Burgess, the new governor of the prison,’ she says, looking