Sadie

Dedication

‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Contents

Title Page Dedication Prologue Part One Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Part Two Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Epilogue Also By Jane Elliott Copyright About the Publisher

Prologue

A Manchester Prison, 1985

Something was going to happen today.

The screws could tell. The inmates could tell. Nobody knew when or where; they just knew. Whispered rumours in the corridors of the prison had not gone unnoticed by the authorities, but it’s hard to put out a fire when you don’t know where the flames are. All they could do was watch and wait.

The air of the canteen was thick with the smell of grease and eggs. It would have turned the stomachs of most people, but the prisoners queuing for their breakfast hardly seemed to notice it. They smelled it every Sunday, after all, when their cereal and yoghurt was replaced by fatty bacon, eggs and fried bread. Normally there were boisterous shouts as the inmates queued, but not this morning.

Something was going to happen today.

Vic Brandon was eight years into a life sentence, so he was more used to the bland stodge of prison food than most of the small-timers around him. It still wound him up, though, queuing for his meals with everyone else. He’d been in six prisons since the day he went down for shooting some copper who got in the way of him and a waiting VW – an occupational hazard of being an armed robber – and in each of those prisons he had stamped out his authority within forty-eight hours of arriving. It was amazing how all you had to do was take a blade to some hapless lag if you wanted to have everyone else eating out of your tattooed hands.

‘Bacon?’

Vic looked up unsmilingly at the inmate who was serving. New face, he thought. Didn’t know who he was. It wouldn’t last. He said nothing, but held his tin tray in front of him.

‘Just give him some,’ another server whispered to the bacon man, before turning back to Brandon. ‘All right, Vic?’ he asked with a slightly nervous smile.

Vic nodded curtly as food was placed on his tray, and then went to take his seat at the place that was always reserved for him.

Respect. Hierarchy. That was what it was all about in these places. The screws might insist that he queue up with all the others, but he had his own ways of keeping things the way he liked them. No matter that half his eight years had been spent in isolation wings; no matter that his violent behaviour meant that his chances of parole were minutely small. Cop-killers always served the full stretch anyway. Look at Harry Roberts. Besides, he liked it in prison. On the outside he was a nobody; in here he was a somebody. His missus turned up once a month, done up to the nines and turning heads the way he liked her, and his eyes on the outside told him that she was keeping on the straight and narrow. If she was a trophy in the real world, she was double that in here.

Every now and then, though, he needed to make his presence felt. Today, he had decided, was going to be one of those days.

Something was going to happen today.

Of course, he was spoiled for choice in this place, as it was one of the few lock-ups he’d been in that housed a Vulnerable Prisoners’ wing. The VP wing was like jam to an insect as far as Vic was concerned. Bent coppers, convicted paedophiles – it was where they stuck all the scumbags whose very presence offended both inmates and screws alike. They were kept apart from the rest of the prison population – different sleeping quarters, different recreation times – for their own safety. The only space they shared was the canteen on a Sunday morning, when the promise of bacon and eggs lured them out of their protective bubble. There had never been any doubt in Vic’s mind that his next target would be one of the dogs from the VP wing: that way he could reassert his authority and do everyone a favour at the same time.

He had even chosen his man.

His name was Allen Campbell, another new boy, and if ever one of these sick fuckers wanted the smile wiped from his face, he was it. The word on the corridors of Brandon’s wing was that he was just starting a five-stretch for spiking the drink of a fourteen-year-old with Rohypnol and then doing God knows what with her. Five years, out in two and a half. It wasn’t right. Made Vic’s flesh creep just to think about it, and he saw it as his duty to make sure those two and a half years were as bad as they could be.

The prison authorities were doing their best to keep him safe, but nobody was untouchable. Not if you wanted to get at them badly enough.

Brandon chewed his breakfast slowly as two other inmates came and sat with him. They made a mismatched trio. Brandon was short and sinewy, his balding hair closely shaved. On his left sat Matt, an ageing bare-knuckle fighter doing a six-stretch for GBH, much of his muscle bulk now turned to fat, but still useful in a fight. To his right was a thin, bookish, bespectacled man with a deeply lined face. This was Sean, a counterfeiter at the start of a sentence for flooding the streets with a wave of funny money. A weaselly sort of man who would do whatever it took to ingratiate himself with the right people – not the type Brandon would usually associate himself with, let alone let sit by at mealtimes. But Sean had no history of violence, which made him essential for today’s work. Neither Brandon nor Matt would be allowed to walk out of the workshop without being searched down; Sean was a different matter, and had been instructed to smuggle something out during one of his woodwork sessions.

‘Well?’ Brandon asked eventually.

‘Philips screwdriver, Vic,’ Sean informed him in a reedy cockney voice. ‘Small one, like you asked for.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In my pocket, Vic.’

‘Hand it over.’

There was a fumbling below the table as Sean passed the tool over to Brandon. Vic grasped the handle and ran his finger along the business end of the screwdriver. It was a good weight, and small enough for him to conceal up his sleeve. Not as sharp as he’d have liked. But sharp enough.

‘Off you go, then,’ he told Sean.

Sean looked nervously at him. ‘I thought I might stay, Vic,’ he chattered. ‘Give you a hand.’

Vic just gave him one of his looks.

Sean read the signs well. He stood up from the table, took his half-eaten breakfast over to the slop bucket and then left the canteen.

As he left, the men from the VP wing shuffled in, flanked by three bored-looking screws and ignoring the unfriendly stares from all the other inmates. A youngish man, in his mid-twenties perhaps, Allen Campbell was halfway down the line. His dark hair was close-cropped, his skin closely shaved. A handsome man in his way, but Brandon watched him with loathing. As Campbell accepted his breakfast, a misty calm descended on the lifer. He clutched the screwdriver in his right hand and watched with satisfaction as his prey took a seat at the end of a long table.

He turned to Matt and nodded subtly. ‘Let’s do it.’

The two men scraped their plates into the slop, and then casually walked over to where Campbell was sitting and concentrating on his meal.

‘Nothing like a fry-up, eh?’ Brandon asked quietly.

Allen’s fork stopped halfway to his mouth, and he turned to look up at the two men towering above him. He looked each of them in the eye, sneered faintly and then turned back to his bacon and eggs.

Brandon bent down and whispered in his ear, ‘Not ignoring us, I hope.’

‘Fuck off,’ Allen murmured in a heavy Mancunian accent, not even bothering to look up this time.

Brandon felt the mist descending a little further. ‘No one talks to me like that, you sick little bastard,’ he spoke even more quietly. ‘’Specially not sex cases like you.’

Allen still refused to look at him. ‘And what are you in for, bad boy? Speeding?’

‘It ain’t the same,’ Brandon hissed through gritted teeth. He felt a nudge in his ribs and looked up. Matt was pointing to two screws in the corner of the room: they had spotted what was going on, could clearly sense trouble and were closing quickly in.

‘Do it, Vic,’ Matt urged in a low growl.

Brandon needed no more encouragement. ‘Hold the screws back,’ he told Matt.

Allen Campbell became instantly aware that the situation was about to explode, and he started to push himself up from the table to try to get away. But he was too late. With a deftness that seemed to belie his squat frame, Brandon grabbed Campbell with his left hand around the neck and pulled him up from his seat. The buzz of voices in the canteen suddenly fell silent, and one of the screws shouted as he ran, ‘Put him down, Brandon!’

But Vic wasn’t going to do that. Gripping the screwdriver firmly, he used his right hand to punch the tip into the belly of the squirming Campbell. As it punctured the skin, Brandon felt his victim’s T-shirt become saturated with blood, and his hand became warm and sticky. Campbell exhaled sharply, like a bellows. Vic twisted the weapon fiercely, first one way and then the other. Campbell shouted out in pain and fell to his knees. The screwdriver slid out of his body as he did so, and the blood started to seep out even more copiously, forming a shallow puddle around his midriff.

Brandon looked around. The screws were nearly on him, but he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, he thought. Matt would be able to hold them off for a little bit. He bent over the weeping Campbell, picked up his meal tray and crashed it down on his head. The metal tray had a small, jagged nick on the edge that tore coarsely into Allen’s skin just above the eye.

Suddenly Vic felt the screws’ coshes raining down on him. With a roar, he pushed his arms out to the side, but the screws soon grabbed him, one to each arm. ‘All right, all right,’ he shouted, but as he struggled with them, he could not help aiming a kick firmly in Campbell’s side. Blood stuck to his shoe as Allen groaned loudly, but the screws seemed more intent on dragging Brandon away than helping the bleeding inmate on the floor. They started shouting to their colleagues, ‘Lock down! Lock the place down!’ The hubbub had returned, and there was a palpable feeling of mutiny in the air as a siren started up.

And above it all, there was one voice shouting. It was Vic Brandon.

‘Fucking nonce,’ he yelled. ‘You got what was coming to you. You’re lucky you ain’t dead. You fucking nonce!’

Chapter One

Wandsworth, south London, five years later

The woman who held the door open was still in her dressing gown and already on the third Rothmans of the morning. Her skin always looked a bit greyer before she’d done her lipstick, but her daughter was used to that. It didn’t worry her too much nowadays. It used to, after the funeral and everything, but her mum seemed better now. Happier.

‘Don’t be late back, love.’ Smoke billowed from her nostrils as she spoke.

‘But I wanted to go round Carly’s.’

‘Not tonight, love. I’ve got a surprise for you.’

She had such a mysterious twinkle in her eye when she said it that the girl immediately relented, looking up at her with a mixture of suspicion and pleasure.

‘All right, Mum,’ she said quietly.

Sadie Burrows kissed her mother, and then slung her beaten-up leather school satchel over her shoulder. It didn’t contain much, but Sadie would never be persuaded not to use it. Her dad had proudly presented it to her two years ago, and even though she knew it was off the back of a lorry, it was her most prized possession. Even more so now he wasn’t around any more.

She slammed the door shut and ran down the path of the tiny front garden of the run-down house that Dad had blagged so hard for them to get; then she hurried down the road that led through the centre of the estate. It was just past eight o’clock, but already the sun was warm and bright as Sadie half ran, half skipped to the small playground where she met her friends before school every morning. As usual, she was the first one there, so she slung her satchel on the ground and sat on a graffiti-covered swing to wait.

Sadie liked it at this park, but it made her sad too. Her dad used to bring her here almost every day. No one ever dared push her as hard in the swing as he did, and sometimes, if Sadie was persuasive enough, there was ice cream on the way back. But it was also here, in the same park where they used to have such fun, that Sadie heard the news. That had been a couple of years ago, on a much colder day than today when she and her friends were wrapped up in mittens and hats. They had seen the ambulance scream past them, but of course they hadn’t paid it much attention – ambulances were always for other people, after all. Perhaps there had been a fight; maybe one of the junkies on the estate had overdosed. Minutes later, though, old Mr Johnson from next door had come hurrying out to find her.

‘Sadie, sweetheart,’ he’d said, out of breath and in a voice made rough by the stinky brown cigarettes he smoked, ‘you’ve got to come with me.’

She was only eleven years old at the time, but she could tell something was wrong. ‘What is it?’ she asked, her eyes wide and her lips trembling.

‘It’s your daddy, sweetheart. He’s not well. The ambulance is taking him to hospital now.’

The rest of the day had been a horrible blur. Mr Johnson had taken her in a minicab to the hospital, where her dad was lying in intensive care, an oxygen mask on his face and tubes coming out of his hands. The nurses had been nice to her, bringing her glasses of orange juice and even some chocolate biscuits, but she knew that people were only that nice when something was really wrong. She kept asking what was the matter with her dad, but nobody wanted to tell her. It was only afterwards that she learned that it was a heart attack. At about six o’clock in the evening, the machine to which her unconscious father was wired started to beep alarmingly. Doctors were called and Sadie and her mother were ushered away from his bedside.

Ten minutes later he was dead.

They didn’t want Sadie to see the body, but she had insisted. She was thankful that they had removed the mask and the tubes – it made him seem more human. More like her dad. In fact, he didn’t even look as if he was dead. Just asleep. Sadie stood on a chair so that she could see him more clearly, but she didn’t cry. She just stared at him, drinking in the sight of the face that she knew she would never see again.

Not until she got home, under her duvet, did the tears come. Then she cried until she could cry no more.

That was two years ago, but it felt like yesterday.

Carly was the first of her friends to arrive at the playground this morning, her hair pulled back tightly as it always was and her face made up so that she appeared older than her thirteen years. She was closely followed by Anna, whose black skin and closely plaited hair always seemed somehow exotic to Sadie, even though black faces were as common as white ones on the estate. None of them greeted each other; they just fell into conversation, which was casual at first but soon became excited and loud as they made their way to school. None of them had any money, but they all had an appetite for sweets. And they had a plan.

‘Who’s going to do it?’ Anna asked as they walked to the edge of the estate.

‘It’s your turn,’ Carly told her.

‘No, it’s not.’ Anna’s voice became louder in her own defence.

‘I did it last time,’ Carly insisted.

‘Yeah, but—’

‘It’s all right,’ Sadie interrupted them quietly. ‘Leave it to me.’

In the old days, Sadie had been able to get anything anyone at school wanted. Or to be more accurate, whatever Sadie brought to school everyone wanted. Her dad would indulgently let her take what she asked for from his ever-changing stocks, and she would supply them, mirroring his wheeler-dealer attitude with stardust that fizzed on your tongue and erasers that came in every shape, colour and smell under the sun. Sometimes she would sell them, sometimes she would give them away – making herself the most popular girl in the school. For a while.

Now, though, she had to find other ways of coming by her stash of goodies.

They were outside the newsagent’s by now. It was part of a parade of shops in the main road that led to the estate, between a dry-cleaner’s and an off-licence. Carly and Anna loitered to one side while Sadie marched brazenly in. It wasn’t a big shop, but there were two small aisles selling groceries and a huge counter of sweets, behind which sat the shopkeeper, who eyed Sadie with suspicion. He had dark skin, white hair and a deeply lined face.

‘Got any milk?’ Sadie asked with a smile.

The shopkeeper pointed in the direction of a tall, glass-fronted fridge in the aisle furthest from him. ‘In the fridge,’ he told her.

Sadie nodded and wandered over to where he had indicated. She opened the fridge, and although she saw three cartons of milk on the lower shelf, she made the pretence of scanning up and down as though unable to find them. Then she shut the door and walked back up to the shopkeeper. ‘Couldn’t find it.’

‘It’s in the fridge,’ the shopkeeper repeated with a frown.

Sadie shrugged, and continued to smile at him.

The shopkeeper muttered something beneath his breath; then he stood up from his stool, walked out from behind the counter and made his way over to the fridge. Sadie watched him carefully. As he opened the door and bent down to take out the milk, she quietly snatched two big handfuls from the sweet counter, shoved them into her satchel, grabbed another couple of handfuls and slipped outside again. She had left the shop before the man had straightened up to close the fridge door.

The three girls ran silently round the corner of the parade, stifling their giggles. Then Carly and Anna huddled excitedly around Sadie.

‘What did you get? What did you get?’

‘Did you get any ciggies?’

‘Course not,’ Sadie scoffed, but not unpleasantly. ‘Ciggies are behind the counter. Anyway, you don’t smoke, Carly.’

‘Course I do.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since last week. Tom gave me one of his, didn’t he?’

Sadie and Anna looked at each other with raised eyebrows, and then exploded with laughter.

‘What?’ Carly asked defensively. ‘What?’

‘We knew you were after Tom,’ Anna screeched.

‘I’m not after him. He just gave me a ciggie, that’s all.’

‘Bet that’s not all he gave you,’ Anna laughed.

‘Shut up.’

‘Look,’ Sadie interrupted them, more to defuse the argument than anything else. She opened her palms to display her haul – chocolate bars, gum, sweets. Carly and Anna moved to grab what they could, but suddenly they heard a man’s voice behind them.

‘Oi, you lot!’

As one, they turned their heads to see who was calling them. The newsagent was running towards them. ‘Give me that stuff back. I’ll call the police on you.’

The three girls were like pigeons dispersing at the sound of gunshot. Quick as a light switching on, they ran in three different directions, Anna and Carly disappearing in opposite ways down the street, Sadie speeding down the alleyway that led past the bins and back into the estate.

As she ran, she nervously congratulated herself on not risking their little shoplifting escapade on the estate. Everyone knew her there, even the shopkeepers – it was difficult to get away with anything. She looked back over her shoulder to see the shopkeeper running after her, and felt a little surge of adrenaline in her stomach as she upped her pace. The alleyway turned a corner and then led out on to an area at the foot of a grey concrete tower block where people parked their cars. There were about fifteen vehicles, all fairly old and run-down. Without stopping to think, Sadie hurled herself into the middle of the car park and hid down by the side of a rusty old blue Fiesta. She tried not to breathe too heavily as she crouched, holding her sweets, and she strained her ears to hear the patter of the shopkeeper’s feet as he emerged from the alleyway – only to find that she had disappeared. She heard him swearing to himself in his pronounced Asian accent. ‘Bloody kids. Always the bloody same.’

Suddenly, to her horror, she saw someone approaching. He raised an eyebrow at her just as she heard the shopkeeper calling to him, ‘’Scuse me, my friend. You seen a young girl running through here? About thirteen, maybe a bit older, long brown hair.’

The man paused, and seemed to be wondering if he should reply or not.

‘She just stole something from my shop, you see,’ the man continued, a bit desperately.

Sadie threw an imploring look up at the man.

‘Sorry, pal,’ he replied in a northern accent. ‘Didn’t see anyone. She can’t have come this way.’

The shopkeeper breathed out in annoyance. ‘Bloody kids,’ he muttered again.

The man watched him go. ‘It’s all right,’ he said finally. ‘He’s gone.’

Slowly Sadie stood up, flashing the man her most winning smile. ‘Thanks,’ she said. As she spoke, the alarm on her digital watch beeped twice. Nine o’clock.

‘Shouldn’t you be going to school?’ the man asked her.

Sadie’s grin grew a bit broader. ‘Yeah,’ she replied, clutching her sweets and starting to slip away. ‘Yeah, I suppose I should. Um … Anyway, thanks again.’

The others, she knew, would be back at their usual meeting place by the swings. Flushed with the success of her adventure, she ran off to meet them.

Stacy Venables had wanted to be a teacher ever since she was a little girl. Her mum had been one, and her dad too, so she supposed it was only natural. Of course, teaching now wasn’t as it was then. Her mum had never had to deal with pupils using four-letter words to her face, and whenever Stacy told her about the things she had to put up with, she would shake her head, tut and start talking about standards. But standards in the cosy corner of Wiltshire where the Venables family lived were very different to standards in inner-city London. Stacy remembered the time her parents had given her what for when she had asked if her eighteen-year-old boyfriend could stay the night. If they only knew what kids nowadays were up to: drugs, sex – they needed so much more than education, she always thought. They needed a bit of care – a bit of what they weren’t getting in the home. That was why she tried to make herself seem accessible to the children. Unlike her female colleagues, who wore severe suits in rough, cheap material, Stacy wore jeans. In summer she wore a white T-shirt and a black leather jacket – much to the disapproval of the disciplinarian headmaster, Mr Martin; for winter she had a succession of thick, woolly thigh-length cardigans that seemed to match her full head of long, curly hair and made her appear, she thought, a bit more homely.

Of course, she was still a teacher, and subject to the disdain and abuse most of the kids at school gave anyone in authority; but every now and then she felt as if she had made a difference, and that made her efforts worthwhile.