Читать книгу Sadie - Jane Elliott - Страница 5

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!’