One man was hunched forward, coughing violently while a nurse rubbed his back. A few others lay motionless, staring numbly into space.
As they passed another room, Singh was treated to the same view, watching as one nurse scurried between beds to helpless patients, understanding the charts that sat at the end of their beds and the notices placed on the walls above. Singh watched with admiration as the young nurse smiled a beautiful smile at a cantankerous old man and calmly approached him.
The NHS had been fighting a losing battle for years, the government doing its best to bleed it dry before Americanising the healthcare system. Until then, Singh could only applaud the people keeping it ticking over, despite the barriers in their way.
They were heroes.
It angered her that some people were using that label for Sam Pope. Ex-forces or not, criminals or not, the man was taking the law into his own hands.
He was not a hero. He was a criminal.
And she needed to stop him.
As her thoughts drifted to slapping a pair of cuffs around Pope’s wrists, she nearly collided with the stern sister who had come to an abrupt halt. She turned, her weary face etched in a wrinkly smile as she nodded towards the open door before them. The room was well lit, with one of the blue curtains pulled out from the wall, containing the bed within. Through the gap, Singh caught a glimpse of a Nike trainer.
‘He’s in there.’ Sister Conway shook her head. ‘Poor soul. They really did a number on him.’
She nodded to Singh and stepped away, marching back towards the nurse’s station and an undoubted mountain of paperwork.
Singh could relate.
With a deep sigh, she stepped into the room and pulled back the curtain. Sister Conway wasn’t lying. Resting on the bed was the young man she’d seen at the High Rise.
Sean Wiseman.
Although he had been the right-hand man to one of the most ambitious criminals in London, Singh had never gotten a sense of evil from the boy. He was intelligent, too intelligent to be running drugs on an estate, but he had been able to help his childhood friend ascend through the criminal ranks. Wiseman, despite his frailties, had drastically improved Elmore Riggs’s criminal operation and put a lot of drugs into a lot of desperate hands.
As she thought about Riggs now being off the street due to a bullet through the skull, she refused to credit Pope with making the streets safer. Likewise, as her eyes scanned the brutal, purple swelling around the eyes of Wiseman, she held little sympathy for the pain he was in.
‘Mr Wiseman, it’s Detective Inspector Amara Singh from the Metropolitan Police.’ She noticed his head turn. ‘Can you hear me?’
The young man nodded. Singh had been informed by her colleagues that he had been found in the bathroom of his flat when a neighbour noticed his door open. His already injured hand had been mutilated with a screwdriver, the metal tip had been driven into the bullet wound Sam Pope had drilled through it a few nights earlier. The hand lay in a new cast which hung in a sling, the attacker breaking his arm in two places. Both of Wiseman’s eyes were swollen shut, evidence of pummelling fists battering him black and blue. One of his cheekbones was cracked. The opposite eye socket shattered.
The boy wept quietly on the bed, his lifestyle finally catching up with him.
‘I know you must be very scared right now and we are here to help you, okay? I’m the head of a task force set up specifically to stop Sam Pope.’ Singh spoke assertively. ‘You’re safe now.’
Wiseman murmured but Singh couldn’t understand it. Two of the young man’s teeth were missing. Three separate scars crossed his lips. Singh continued.
‘You were in the High Rise the night Sam Pope attacked, weren’t you? One of my team interviewed you about Sam Pope using you as live bait so he could escape. Is that correct?’
Wiseman smacked his tongue against his broken lips and stirred and Singh lifted a glass of water from the bed stand and lifted it towards him. He feebly sipped and then fell back to the blood encrusted pillow.
‘I interviewed Aaron Hill earlier today, who was also found at the High Rise that night. If there is any information you can give me about why Sam Pope is helping him or what they are planning to do, just remember you are safe. Pope cannot get you in here.’
‘He didn’t,’ Wiseman finally croaked.
‘What was that?’ Singh said, stepping closer, head cocked.
‘Pope … didn’t … do this,’ Wiseman spluttered, the pain of every word hurting his battered jaw.
‘He can’t hurt you now,’ Singh reassured. ‘We have eyewitnesses saying they saw him and another man at your estate.’
‘He is helping him.’ Wiseman struggled, trying to sit up. ‘Pope is helping that man. His kid is missing.’
‘Aaron Hill?’
‘I think so. My head’s a little fuzzy,’ Wiseman hissed in pain. ‘They need to find someone from that gang. I told them where to go.’
‘You sent Pope to Leon Barnett?’ Singh spat accusingly. ‘Do you know that he tortured him to the point that he had his arm amputated?’
‘The fuck I care. The man was a monster.’
‘Pope is a monster!’ Singh yelled, realising her personal need to catch him was living dangerously close to the fore. ‘He kills your best friend, leaves you to die, and tortures a man.’
‘Pope saved me,’ Wiseman interjected. ‘He got me out of that building without a bullet in my head. The man who did this to me wasn’t English. He had a strong accent, Russian, Polish, Ukraine … something like that. You should be looking for him.’
‘Why? Because he beat up a scum bag drug dealer? Isn’t that what Sam Pope does?’
Wiseman smirked and then winced in pain.
‘You’re right, I am a scum bag. I’ve done bad things to make bad people richer and I’ve paid the price.
