Sadie. Jane Elliott

       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