Street Soldier Read Free Page A

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 ofchairs 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