It was early morning when they came to get her. She had just stumbled out of bed, heading for the kitchen, turning on the TV, calling out to the kids to make sure they were OK – Marie was only three but she had had a bad chest since she was born, and now the baby had picked up this stomach bug that wouldn’t go away – and then the door bell rang.
Mr Bourke is a magistrate of the gentle school, courteous to the point of deference, rather like the old English character actor Wilfred Hyde White with his air of barely suppressed confusion. He sits on his high-backed wooden chair, peering over the top of his spectacles at the ceaseless flow of wretches and rogues through the dock below him and, from time to time, he likes to shake his head and sadly murmur what has become his catch-phrase. “Well,” he says, more or less to himself. “So there it is.”
The Anglican Cathedral of Liverpool is like a mountain. Its great brown bulk soars up over the life below and, high above the houses with the boards across their windows, beyond the sight of the shops with grids of steel across their glass, the summit of its spire is lost in the clouds of a grey English evening. It is the biggest Anglican church on the planet and, tonight, it will be full.
At first, when she walks in to see Dr Dowson, her problem seems quite clear: she has two small boys who are as mad as monkeys. They slide and wrestle around the floor, they yell and scream, they drag anything loose off Dr Dowson’s desk and start a tug-of-war with his stethoscope, while she sits with her shoulders slumped and says that she gets headaches and needs some tablets.
There is a small boy in the playground, probably about eight years old, and he is crying while his young mother stands and looks away. In a flat voice, she says “Shut your mouth”. He cries on. “Shut your mouth”. He cries on. She turns and leans into his face. “Shut your mouth or I’ll slap you.” He shuts his mouth and starts to cry through his nose instead, and his mother looks away again.
It is nearly 18 months now since Tina Sampson was famous. In the early days of 1994, she was one of the notorious “Home Alone” mothers, who was said to have left her five small boys alone in a house so foul with dog mess and general filth that police officers were physically sick and social workers described it as a toilet. To a national chorus of approval, all five of her boys, aged between six months and six years, were taken away from her.
No one ever said it was going to be easy. Daniel had spent years getting in and out of trouble. He’d been thrown out of school without taking his exams, he’d fallen out with his parents, he’d started thieving for a living in Brixton, he had been taking drugs and then he’d got shot. So when, last summer, at the age of 18, he decided to change his whole life and go to college instead, he knew it was going to be hard.
She was a middle-class white woman with an elegant style and piles of blonde hair. Her husband was an insurance broker with a taste for the good things in life. They had two daughters, aged 14 and 9, and they lived together on the edge of a provincial city in a £250,000 house with two tall poplar trees and a brand new BMW parked in the drive. Often, in the evening, they would go off together to a restaurant or a club, picking up a fine time on his American Express Gold Card.
The little thief sits on the old park bench with his chin on his chest and his feet in the dust, wrapping a long blade of grass around the knuckles of his hand and trying to explain his dream. Do you know the thief’s dream? He wants to go to college.
Bob Easton was half asleep the first time he saw her. He was lying in the doorway of the Vaudeville Theatre on the Strand, well wrapped up in his sleeping bag and his blankets, and on an ordinary night he would probably have been fast asleep by now. But it was Friday, the worst night of the week on the streets, when you’re more likely than ever to get a kick in the ribs from some lager lover, so Bob Easton had one eye open for trouble, which is how he came to spot Sharon.
