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!’
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.