Street Soldier (2 page)

Five more minutes and he sensed that he was properly out of danger. Untrained eyes would have said it was just another shopping district, units lining the road on either side, some shuttered for the night, some still lit up for the late-night population. But Sean was finely tuned to the invisible barriers that carved up the city – different races, different religions, who was a friend, who wasn’t. The style and language of the graffiti had changed. There were different tags on the walls. This was the no-man’s-land between two sides. He wasn’t home and dry yet, but there would be allies here. He could slow down, a little.

With the engine revving hard beneath him, Sean scanned the way ahead for landmarks. After a moment he knew where he was. The glowing neon sign of the fast-food joint where he’d had a quarter-pounder with fries last week. Curly had been trying to chat up the girl who took their order. She had replied with a remark about
only serving burgers, not chipolatas. And she had held thumb and forefinger just far enough apart to make it clear what she was referring to.

Sean broke into a laugh at the memory. And then he was passing the restaurant and the memory came apart as he remembered what had happened next.

Two days later, the place had been blown up. One staff member and two customers killed, and a dozen others injured. The staff member had been Chipolata Girl.

The restaurant’s plate-glass windows had been boarded up so he couldn’t see into the blackened interior as he zipped past, but the devastation was clear. The brickwork was scorched where the flames had licked it. Weird that they had left the sign switched on.

In that brief moment Sean was too distracted to notice the car make its way out of a side street directly into his path.

He grabbed the Ninja’s brake – too hard: the rear wheel skidded out left and Sean dropped onto the ground.

His body slammed into the tarmac and he pulled his arms in tight as he rolled. The road scraped his skin raw through his jeans. The bike continued on its way, slipping under the vehicle, with sparks flying and the creaking sound of metal on concrete echoing as it disappeared from view.

Running feet stopped in front of him. ‘You OK?’

A tall black guy helped him stagger up onto legs that were bleeding and sore. Concern was stamped all over his face. Sean looked around desperately. The Ninja was a write-off and he wasn’t going to get any more transport. His best chance was to spin a sob story and get out before the cops arrived. He drew in a breath to begin – and suddenly a police cruiser was there, screeching to a halt with flashing lights.

The driver had the window down. ‘Hold him!’

The guy turned towards Sean and opened his mouth – but Sean was already running. Hands grabbed at him and he jabbed back, hard, with his elbows. He felt them grind into flesh and bone. The guy swore and the hands let go.

He ducked hard left into a shop. The door swung behind him into whoever was on his tail. More swearing.

Sean pushed on, between magazines and newspapers and canned food and bread. The only person in the shop was an old woman with a bucket and mop. She leaped out of his path and fell over backwards.

And there was the rear exit. Sean swerved towards it, but the floor was still wet. His foot slipped beneath him and he fell flat on his face.

He wasn’t given a chance to recover. A body fell on top of him, then another. He howled his anger and tried
to push himself up. A third body knocked him down again and drove the breath from his lungs.

Immediately his hands were pulled behind his back and pinned together.
Click, click
. Metal loops snapped into place around his wrists.

And, despite everything, he laughed.

It had finally happened. There was a first time for everyone, and this was his. Like getting laid – though doing that for the first time had been a lot more fun.

Breath, warm and heavy, fell across his right cheek. There was coffee on it, stale and sour.

‘Share the joke, son?’ the voice murmured.

‘Yeah,’ Sean gasped. ‘My mum always told me a night out in Ilford would be shit.’

‘She wasn’t wrong.’ Someone grabbed the back of his head and banged his face onto the wet tiles. The voice said the three words that Sean had always known he would hear one day.

‘You’re nicked, son.’

Chapter 2

Rain pattered against the small window above Sean’s shoulder. The custody van had waited in the secluded yard outside the court with its doors open, so the air was damp with an October chill that soaked into his bones.

They had climbed in one by one, under the cold, watchful eyes of a couple of machine-gun-toting cops whose fingers danced on the trigger guards: they were clearly taking their jobs seriously.

The inside was like a normal minibus, except that it smelled of sweat and damp clothes, and each seat was enclosed by a small mesh cage. Sean had sat where he was told and the cage door had been locked behind him. After three schools and two foster families – he’d actually wanted to stay with the families, but they couldn’t get rid of him fast enough – he had finally found somewhere determined to keep him when all he wanted to do was leg it.

A week earlier he had turned sixteen. He’d had better presents.

‘What is this?’ The angry, whining tones came from the guy seated behind Sean. ‘No seat belt! We could get killed!’

Oh God
. Sean closed his eyes. The prick had the kind of voice that was carefully tuned to pierce your eardrums.
Someone shut him up . . .

His head was still throbbing from last night’s farewell party. Matt had rounded up all the Littern Guyz – not just Curly, but Joe and Wayne and Spence and all of them – to mark Sean’s last opportunity to get well and truly wasted for a good long time. They all knew, and appreciated, that Matt and Curly were free because Sean wasn’t. But that was how it rolled. You took your hits.

It sucked that of the three people Sean loved most in the world – Matt and Gaz and Copper, his surrogate big brothers – Matt was the only one still at liberty to throw the party. But maybe it was also appropriate. Most of Sean’s first life experiences – first drink, first smoke, first binger – had taken place in Matt’s flat. A party for Sean’s first custodial sentence kind of completed the deal.

He rested his head against the plastic around the window and tried to wish his headache away. His ears popped and another stab of pain entered his brain as the guard slammed the rear door closed.

The driver turned round and addressed his passengers. ‘Hold on tight, ladies. Next stop, Burnleigh Palace!’

Sean rolled his eyes. He wished. Burnleigh Young Offender Institution might be an HM Prison, but it was hardly fit for royalty.

The van began to move, slowly trundling through the narrow tunnel, waiting while the metal gate rolled back to let it out into the world again. Then it was on the road and past the sculpted concrete blocks that acted as car bomb protection. It lurched as the driver shifted up, which simultaneously set off Sean’s headache and his whiny neighbour again.

‘Oi! You know we don’t have any cushions?’

Sean closed his eyes. By the end of the journey, he suspected, turning round and planting his fist in McWhiny’s face would feel like a really good idea. Apart from the mesh between them.

Peter, his caseworker, had explained it. No cushions because offenders ripped them off. No seat belts in case the prisoners hanged themselves. Sean had to grin at the image he had of a butcher’s truck, corpses dangling from the ceiling when they opened the doors.

The cops had wanted him on remand. They didn’t know about the attempted garage heist but they did have him for the bike. It was Taking Without Consent, not theft, because they couldn’t prove he hadn’t meant to
return it. But they had fingerprints. They couldn’t show that Sean had ever nicked a vehicle before, but they had him in several vehicles that had also been twocced.

But on the plus side, he had never been more than a few miles from Walthamstow in his life, and had no previous record for assault. His solicitor had successfully argued that he was not a flight risk, the public were in no peril from him, and the remand cells were already too full of far more dangerous cases. So, bail.

He had duly turned up for sentencing, hungover, in a borrowed jacket and tie, with a pair of armed cops lurking at the back of the stand. It must have taken all of thirty seconds. The judge had said he was taking Sean’s guilty plea into consideration, and this was a first offence, but it had involved violence in that he had assaulted the Ninja’s owner, and yadda yadda yadda . . .

Twelve months. Six in custody, six on parole in the community.

‘A year!’ his mum had sobbed. She and PJ, the latest boyfriend, had come to visit him in the holding cell with a change of clothes – his usual things, so that he didn’t have to wear the borrowed clothes in jail. A bit switched-on for Mum, so probably PJ’s idea. ‘But it’s OK, sweetheart, I’ll come and see you whenever I can . . .’

Then she’d broken down in tears. Like she always did. Whatever life did to her, she cried. At least PJ seemed
like someone Sean was prepared to leave her with, unsupervised. She had gone through a bad run of boyfriends who liked to hit her, which had finally ended when Sean grew big enough to start hitting them back. PJ seemed fond of her, and that was all he asked.

So Sean had given her a hug and a peck on the cheek, because she was a fat, soppy old cow – but hey, she was his mum. The chances of her getting round to visiting were, he knew, somewhere between zero and zilch.

Heavy drops were a metallic drumbeat on the roof as they rolled round the M25. The weather matched Sean’s mood. He had been nicked during the summer. It was now an early evening in autumn. Summer had come and gone – and what a great one it had been: three months under curfew at home on the Littern Mills estate, with a tag on his ankle. At least it meant he had been elsewhere the night of the riots, and when the White Hart Lane bomb went off. That summer there had been a distinct sense of the world going to shit, even more than usual, and it hadn’t all been because of his looming court date. With terrorist strikes getting closer to home, everyone wondering where the next one would fall, Sean was happy to be stuck on the estate.

Matt had joked that IS had a good sense of PR, so they wouldn’t blow up Littern Mills in case anyone mistook it for doing the world a favour.

Eventually the van jarred to a halt; its way was blocked by more bomb barriers and a massive, solid gate set in a towering red-brick wall. The driver had a brief conversation with the guys outside. Then there was the sound of moving machinery and the gate slowly slid aside. The van edged forward into a tunnel, and the journey was over.

‘Name?’

‘Sean Harker.’

‘S-E-A-N?’

Sean briefly considered responding with ‘No, D-I-P-S-T-I-C-K.’ But the glint in the eye of the large woman on the other side of the counter made him rethink. Her uniform blouse was stretched tight over the muscles beneath it.

‘Uh-huh,’ he said out loud.

‘Date of birth . . . ?’

Reception into Burnleigh was about as welcoming as Sean had expected it to be. This was a prison and that meant punishment, not group hugs and a welcome party. The woman bashed at her keyboard like she was personally insulted that, of all the prisons in the world, Sean Harker had to turn up in hers.

The windowless reception room smelled of sweat and fish and chips. The intake from the van sat in a row of
chairs down one wall. Half-arsed efforts had been made to decorate the place. There was a fish tank against the far wall, with grimy sides and three fish. A pot plant drooped sadly on a pathetic wire pedestal in one corner. The room’s harsh strip lighting brought every badly painted corner, every bit of dirt, into sharp focus.

The piss-poor attempts at making them feel at home were given the deathblow by the poster on the wall which warned of the penalty for biting staff. It hadn’t occurred to Sean that he would ever want to. Now he knew that if he did, he would get twenty-eight days added to his sentence. Presumably someone had needed telling.

A couple of uniformed guards –
screws
, Sean reminded himself, if he was going to fit in here – stood watch over them: white short-sleeved shirts with epaulettes, black clip-on ties. One of them had a brown and white dog – Sean was pretty sure it was a spaniel – which had made a fuss of them all as they entered, running around with its tail wagging, sniffing, letting them give it a pat. It had even butted its nose against Sean’s leg as he waited in his chair, looking up at him with hopeful brown eyes. He had given its head a fondle because it seemed like the right thing to do.

One by one they had been called over to the counter, and now it was Sean’s turn.

The woman gave the keyboard a final thump, and nodded abruptly to where one of the screws waited by a side door.

‘Go through with Prison Officer King for the body search.’

Oh, shit
. Everyone from the van, one by one, had been going through that door. Sean had seen each one of them hesitate, before a screw took them firmly by the arm and led them away. And now he knew why. If there was one joke at last night’s party that Sean hadn’t found funny, it was the one about the body search – lads miming snapping latex gloves onto probing hands.

Well, if he was going to tough it out for the next year, this was where he started. He nodded and let King guide him. The screw walked with all the grace and threat of an overweight Rottweiler. He had muscles, but he also had a belly straining against his shirt – not that Sean was considering having a go. What would be the point? Where would he go afterwards?

Through the door, a screw with a face like an angry rat waited in a small, bare room. His name tag read
PRISON OFFICER CAGE
. There was a table with a screen and some kind of kit on it, but Sean’s gaze went straight to the thing next to it. It looked a bit like the electric chair used in all the movies.

‘Remove everything except your underwear,’ Cage
snapped. Sean realized he had just been standing and staring at the chair. ‘Today, if you can.’