The Alex King Series, A BATEMAN [good books for high schoolers .TXT] 📗

gangs like the Twenty-Eights, well, they use rape as a means of asserting their authority. They give new inmates a choice: be their woman or they’ll be killed. Often, they use a new inmate in the opposite way: kill this guy, or you’ll be raped by every member of the gang.”

“And the guards know this goes on?” she whispered.

Kruger nodded. “From what I’ve heard, the guards encourage it,” he whispered back. “It keeps everyone busy.”

The captain waited at the Perspex door and looked up at a camera. The door slid open smoothly, and a miasma of heat, body-odour, screaming, jeering and the banging of metal bars on reinforced steel doorframes filled their senses. Caroline took an involuntary step backwards, then checked herself and followed the captain. Kruger followed. Caroline suspected the agent had been here before.

They walked on a steel grate, a skywalk away from the prisoners, who were milling around below them, or leaning on the railings adjacent. Caroline felt wetness on her face, realised that a man was spitting into the palm of his hand and flinging it her way. She screwed up her face in disgust, wiped the spit away with her sleeve. Resisted the urge to vomit.

“You’re lucky it’s just spit,” the captain said through a lecherous smile. “We might go back another way, before he gets busy with himself and gives you a real surprise!”

Caroline grimaced. She could hear what the men were shouting, picked up the odd line between the cacophony of noise that seemed to reverberate inside her chest. She looked down on the men, glanced to her right as they walked, realised what a hell on earth this place was.

There was an identical set of steel bars and another Perspex door at the other end of the skywalk, and thankfully it was in sight. There were curious-looking viewing towers protruding from the walls. Caroline saw a man sitting inside one with a shotgun. She realised that these were most likely used in case of a large fight or riot. The guard didn’t look interested in anything much, not even the attractive blonde-haired woman striding across the walkway in front of him. The captain stood for the camera and the steel gate opened. They stepped through and it closed behind them, briefly boxing them in before the Perspex door slid open. Caroline and Kruger followed the captain and the Perspex door closed behind them, drowning out the noise so suddenly that they felt light-headed and off kilter for a few moments.

“Takes some getting used to, eh? I used to hear it in my sleep,” the captain smiled. “Prisoner Badenhorst should be in an interrogation cell for you by now,” he said.

They walked on around a long curve in the corridor and came up on a desk and a bank of monitors. It was a CCTV station of the general population and specific isolation cells, and a guard was ignoring it and reading a paper at the desk. He looked up but didn’t abandon his paper. He nodded at the captain and the two exchanged words. Caroline didn’t understand any of it, so broad, so pidgin that it sounded like another language. She supposed it could have been a shared tribal tongue, but didn’t feel she could ask Kruger. She glanced at one of the CCTV screens, saw two prisoners beating another. The prisoner went down, and the two men started kicking him.

She pointed at the screen. “There’s a fight taking place,” she said.

The guard glanced up at the screen, then looked back at his paper.

The captain ignored the screen also. He nodded down the corridor at them, cocking his head towards a series of doors. “Cell four,” he said and pulled out a chair. He sat down without another word and picked up another copy of a well-read paper that was folded on the desk.

Caroline led the way to the door and studied the handle. It was a simple pull-down lever. She opened the door and saw a hunched and cowed figure sitting at the stainless-steel table. There was a ring on the table and the man was tethered by a set of handcuffs. The chain was short, and he was attempting to scratch his nose when they entered, but was having difficulty.

“Mister Badenhorst, I am Caroline Darby and I’m an agent with Interpol,” she said, her tone somewhere between warm and authoritative. “Thank you for meeting with me.”

The man looked thin and gaunt and Caroline noticed the reason he had been struggling to carry out the simple bodily function. His left arm was gone from what would have been just above the elbow.

“I wasn’t exactly given a choice,” he said.

Caroline nodded. “Well, it is appreciated. Now, Mister Badenhorst,” she paused, looking at his arm. “I wish to know about the man who did that to you. I want you to help me to find him.”

25

 

King looked out across the valley to the Jameson’s farmhouse. Two-thousand-five-hundred metres away. He could see the window that the shot had been taken from. He could remember the look of surprise on the woman’s face, the man’s bruises and cuts, the neat little bullet hole in his forehead. He thought about Liam.

Callously and meticulously suffocated.

He had seen worse, that was human nature. He had seen atrocities in the war-torn areas of Northern Iraq and Syria that were indescribable. But this wasn’t a warzone. This wasn’t some foreign scrap of dirt in the middle of the fighting grounds of an Islamic State. This was leafy Cornwall, and this was the grisly and unnecessary end to a family who been pulled into a campaign which was being praised by people all over social media.

Ordinary people were publicly accepting and even condoning innocent deaths as collateral damage in a war on the wealthy. The absurdness that people spouted online was beyond comprehension for King. The anonymity of