'Someone batters us, we batter them'

A year ago Louise Allen was beaten to death. This week her young killers are released. Ros Wynne-Jones reports from Corby, where no one is talking forgive and forget

On Tuesday, the first anniversary of her daughter's death, Ellen Allen will take her baby and her son to their sister's grave and lay a wreath. But even though the day has a shattering significance for the Allen family and for the town of Corby, Northamptonshire, where 13-year-old Louise Allen was killed defending a friend, it will be overshadowed by a second event. It is also the eve of the release of the two girls convicted of her manslaughter.

On Wednesday, the girls who kicked her to death at a fairground, now aged 13, will be welcomed with a party held by their families and attended by the girl-gang to which they both belonged.

Their light sentences are testimony to the fact that the girls, who cannot be named because of the age at which they committed their crime, never set out to kill Louise Allen. One, who had kicked her as she lay still, ran for an inhaler in the belief that Louise was going blue because of an asthma attack. It was a savage and senseless kicking, but nobody thought Louise would die.

The judge was lenient, but Corby knew only that two girls aged 11 and 12 had kicked a girl to death with all the horrific resonances of the Jamie Bulger murder. When the smaller, tougher girl's family moved away after her arrest they left their flat to a mob which ripped it apart. The larger, quieter girl's family stayed put under virtual house arrest. Their house is easy to find: broken windows front and back, "You will die scum" daubed by the front door.

Over 24,000 local people signed a petition to have the girls' two-year sentence extended. Now the girls are to be released after serving only one year in a nearby prison with facilities kids in Corby can only dream of, the talk is all of stringing them up.

Among the girls' peers, loyalties are divided. The Canada Square Girls, a gang of about 20 nine to 19-year-olds named after the desolate low-rise council estate where they gather, are excited by the prospect of their release. The smaller and tougher of Louise's killers was their leader and the other taller girl was a gang member, although her family came from a different estate. Meanwhile, girls from the harder edge of Louise's school, Our Lady and Pope John, are threatening an eye for an eye. "If we see them, we'll batter them," says a close friend of Louise's. "If one of them dies, so what? You only get a year for killing if you're under 14."

The CSG are ready for them. They have kept contact with the girls in prison by telephone. They have "made plans", they say.

At Canada Square, the most deprived estate of an area with devastatingly high unemployment since the steelworks which founded the town closed, a police camera in the shuttered precinct watches and waits.

Adults in Corby dismiss the CSG to outsiders as an invention of a hysterical media or of the police. But the graffiti tells a different tale. Girls' names are scrawled all over their estate alongside those of one or two token boy members, and under them: "Canada Square Girls '96". A 12-year- old boy, who only goes to school in the mornings because he threw a chair at his teacher, says he can arrange a meeting.

The gang's hard core assemble outside the local pub during the day. They are not at school because they have been excluded, because they are in late pregnancy or because they don't choose to go. The rest gather after school. Little wraps of drugs, "smack for a tenner, crack costs more," are flashed about by passing boys.

The talk is all tales of batterings and bravado, drug cocktails and sexual positions, but also of the imminent release of their friends. This is the world that Louise's killers came from, the smaller girl's dad in prison for stabbing a man to death in a pub, the larger girl's father with a conviction for violence.

"It was an accident," says a 16-year-old girl, recently returned from hospital after a drug overdose. "Louise's friend and [the smaller girl] were having a fair fight and then Louise jumped in so [the larger girl] had to get in. They never meant to kill her. There are fights like that all the time here." The court found the two fatal blows to Louise's head had come from the two girls, but it wasn't just them who kicked her as she lay on the grassy verge where her friend was ambushed on the way home. "Quite a few of us kicked her," says an 11-year-old boy who had never met Louise before. "I kicked her. She asked for it." Part of these teenagers' reluctance to condemn the two girls jailed for her manslaughter lies in the knowledge that it may only have been luck that their kick didn't kill her. "They took people's trainers away and did tests," says the boy. "I wouldn't have cared if it had have been me."

One girl, aged 10, says simply: "Louise deserved it. She shouldn't have tried to fight the CSG. It's a lesson to others." Another girl, aged 13, names someone at school who hasn't learned her lesson. "We're going to whack [kill] her next," she laughs. "Someone batters us, we batter them." Her mother is calling her from over by the pub. She punches her daughter in the face and gives her some money and the girl scurries off. "She's late getting her mum's skag [heroin]," says the 10-year-old, shrugging.

"Look, we didn't know Louise or her family. If we did it might be different."

Louise Allen's mother doesn't go out much these days, except to tend her daughter's grave where the Pope John school tie is wound round the simple wooden cross. When they buried football-mad Louise there was also a Manchester United strip but it barely lasted a day. The CSG say a boy from their estate drove a motorbike through the flowers left at the scene.

Mrs Allen says she can understand why the parents of her daughter's killers have stood by their own, but cannot understand why one of the families still lives half a mile away.

"I saw the mother once," she says quietly. "Why can't they do the decent thing and move away? I can't bear the idea that [the larger girl] could be back here." She also cannot understand why the girls have to be released this week of all weeks. "Couldn't they have been kept in a few days more? What is a year for a girl's life?" She laughs, bitterly. "The justice system is a joke."

Mrs Allen has thought about what it would be like if her daughter were the killer and someone else's daughter dead. "I know life isn't easy for them," she says. "Even if they move away it isn't going to be easy. But at the end of the day they've got their daughters. Mine isn't coming home."