There was a knock on the door. He looked up, his pleasant fantasy dissipating immediately as he remembered with a sinking heart that he had to do an adjudication. That was the reason he was sitting by himself in this whitewashed room on this uncomfortable metal chair.

The adjudication was just one more thing on his plate that he didn’t need right now, what with all the extra work he’d had to take on whilst they found an interim replacement for the Deputy Governor who’d just gone on maternity leave. They’d had someone lined up to fill her shoes, but the person had dropped out at the last minute due to other commitments and they were having problems finding a suitable replacement.

He sighed and opened up the inmate’s folder, which was lying on the desk in front of him. He’d lost count of the number of adjudications he’d done over the long course of his career as a prison governor. He generally found them tedious, but they were a necessary part of his job.

An adjudication happened when an inmate committed an offence. If the offence was serious, like being caught in possession of a mobile phone, or assaulting another inmate, then they would be dealt with by an external adjudicator, who could award up to an additional forty-two days of imprisonment for each guilty verdict.

This offence, however, wasn’t serious enough to warrant an external adjudication, hence his involvement. It was more of a simple disciplinary action.

‘Come in,’ he said.

The door opened and one of the male prison officers, Dylan, entered with an inmate. He nodded to Dylan, who left the room, closing the door behind him.

The inmate stood there, head bowed, hair hanging down over her face.

‘Well don’t just stand there. Take a seat,’ he said, nodding at the empty chair on the other side of the table.

She sat down in the chair, hands in her lap, glancing up at him, hanging her head in a funny way as if she was hiding behind her fringe, unwilling to look him directly in the eye. He noticed then that she had a nasty black eye, several bruises on her face and stitches in her lip. All in all, she didn’t look in a good way.

He looked down at her file. It contained details of her criminal history, her prison record and any other relevant information about her such as that gathered during her induction. She didn’t come across much better in the mugshot which was stapled to the top left corner of the file. Dark rings under the eyes, barely able to look into the camera. He’d seen so many of these files and so many of these criminals had the same look about them.

This one’s name was Bailey Pike and according to her criminal history she had been an accountant who’d embezzled money from her employers.

He looked up at her. Her apparent reluctance to meet his gaze only served to contribute to the kind of shifty furtive manner that he would have expected an embezzler to have.