Hewmett Prison

Hewmett Prison is both a place of confinement and a stage on which state power becomes visible: Ryan McGregor is brought there for execution, reprieved at the last moment, and later killed while trying to escape, while his son Callum is ultimately led there to be hanged. The prison’s gates, visitors’ hall, electrified perimeter and scaffold shape the McGregors’ stories of punishment, resistance and loss, as families and crowds are made witnesses to the institution’s decisions.

Setting and access

Sephy reaches Hewmett Prison without being told the destination. Her family’s car arrives at ten to six among other vehicles, while Nought visitors come on foot through the pedestrian entrance, dressed in black and silent. Kamal Hadley presents his ID card to the guards, and the family is waved through. The different routes of entry place the Cross family’s privilege beside the solemn procession of Noughts, before Sephy understands why they have come.

The visitors are taken into a courtyard arranged for a public execution. Tiered seating occupies half the space; a scaffold stands at the far end, with the rest of the courtyard largely bare. Sephy and her family are seated at the front. Around them, Noughts stand rather than sit: some watch the scaffold, some cry, and some look at the Crosses with open hostility. The prison is thus not only a secure institution but a public arena in which the condemned man’s sentence is witnessed across the racial divide.

Ryan McGregor’s execution and reprieve

Ryan is announced as having been convicted of seven murders and political terrorism, with his appeal denied and hanging scheduled to proceed. Sephy only understands the purpose of the visit when the announcement identifies him as Callum’s father. The official ceremony makes the sentence sound settled, but the prison courtyard fills with people whose presence carries grief, anger and expectation.

The execution is abruptly stayed. Governor Giustini announces that Ryan has received a reprieve and that his sentence has been commuted to life imprisonment; there will be no hanging that day. The announcement does not produce immediate celebration. The assembled crowd is stunned, and Ryan’s family and supporters surge toward him but are held back by barriers. The reprieve changes the immediate outcome without ending his confinement or the conflict surrounding his conviction.

Two hours of argument by the family’s solicitor precede a visit in the visitors’ hall. Ryan enters with a prison officer looking pale and diminished after the ordeal at the scaffold; Meggie embraces him in silence. During the visit, an officer warns the family that escape is impossible: security gates are constantly guarded, and the perimeter fence is electrified at all hours. The warning establishes the prison’s physical defenses and anticipates the fate Ryan chooses to risk.

Four days after the scheduled hanging, Ryan is killed attempting to scale the electrified fence. A news report identifies him as the convicted bomber of the Dundale Shopping Centre, recalls the last-minute reprieve, and says officials have opened an inquiry. His death converts the reprieve into a brief postponement rather than freedom, and leaves the family devastated. The prison’s fence, described as an unbroken security measure, becomes the instrument of that outcome.

Confinement and its wider reach

Hewmett’s authority is felt beyond the scaffold. The text names the prison as the place from which Ryan’s family visits him and as the institution whose guards, gates and perimeter determine what they can do. Its security is presented in concrete terms: guarded entrances and a fence electrified twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. For Ryan, those protections close off escape; for his family, they turn visits into limited intervals under observation.

The prison also belongs to the wider story of political conflict. Ryan is sentenced for political terrorism and multiple murders, but the public execution scene gathers Crosses and Noughts into a shared spectacle of punishment rather than resolving their opposing views of justice. The crowd’s anger at the reprieve and the family’s efforts to reach Ryan show that the prison’s decisions have consequences beyond the prisoner himself. Its official procedure and its charged public setting remain in tension.

Callum’s final passage

Years later, Hewmett Prison is again the setting for a McGregor execution. Callum, who has risen through the ranks of the Liberation Militia, reflects that he learned the organization would never let a recruit go; his account of his subsequent actions connects his own hardening to the violence that has reshaped his life. Near the end, he is still held at Hewmett, and his thoughts turn to his missing brother Jude, the future of his child with Sephy, and what his family may be enduring.

On the day of Callum’s execution, Governor Giustini leads him from his cell with two guards while Jack walks beside him. Callum tries to make each moment last, then hears anonymous calls from other cells as he is taken along the corridor. Outside, he sees a large crowd, including many Crosses, and a scaffold with a noose. Sephy is present; as the trapdoor opens, she calls out her love for him. Hewmett’s second execution closes the prison’s narrative role in the McGregor family’s story: the site that briefly stayed Ryan’s hanging ultimately becomes the place of Callum’s death.