A headline flashed up that caught her eye.
‘Mark Harris, leading candidate in the Mayoral Election, has withdrawn his candidacy amid wide-spread rumours of illegal operations.’
Singh began to scan the article, smirking as a picture of the smarmy politician looking bedraggled filled the page. Apparently, his robotic assistant, Burrows had been dealing with nefarious businessmen to secure funding.
Singh clicked the button again and the Tassimo machine rumbled to life, eager to provide her with another helpful shot of caffeine.
If she was going to catch Sam Pope, she was going to need all the help she could get.
A week had passed since he had brought Jasmine back to the house and Aaron was still unsure what he should say. At first, she’d clung to him, not leaving his side all day and spending the nights curled up next to him. But as he tried to reintegrate her back into normal life, he could see the pain in her eyes.
Whenever the doorbell went, she jumped. If a cupboard door slammed shut, she screamed.
Aaron had been forced to put his phone on silent, just to keep her heart rate down.
He didn’t blame her. He couldn’t.
His precious daughter had been snatched, beaten, and stuffed in a metal prison, forced to sleep and shit in the same room and given barely enough to survive. All they were promised was a life of drug abuse and sexual degradation. It was horrifying, and he had sat next to her every night, watching her toss and turn with tears falling from his eyes.
Yes, he had gone to extreme lengths to get her back, but he hadn’t saved her. She still saw demons when she closed her eyes and she still feared every person who came anywhere near them.
He sighed deeply as he took his seat at the dining table, envisaging the cup of tea he had had with Sam Pope, begging the stranger to help save his daughter. Aaron would forever be indebted to Sam for the lengths he went to save his Jasmine, the unspeakable acts he committed all in the name of her survival. Even when Aaron himself had stepped dangerously close to the edge, Sam had reached out and pulled him to safety.
For a man who was trained to ruthlessly kill, Sam Pope was the most caring person he had ever come across.
It saddened Aaron that he had never gotten to thank him. To shake his hand and tell him, despite the horrors of his own past, that Sam Pope was a good father.
As he tried his best to sip his cup of tea, Aaron wondered if he was. Jasmine had asked to return from their walk early, unsure of the two youths who had gathered on the pavilion across the field. They had posed no threat, were over two hundred yards away and hadn’t even clocked their presence.
But Jasmine was terrified.
Now, she was locked in her room, crying until she fell into a light, horror-filled sleep.
Aaron began to cry, tipping his tea down the sink. It was a long road back for the both of them.
He had gotten Jasmine back.
But he hadn’t saved her.
Pearce thanked Etheridge for the drink and rose from his seat, offering a warm smile and a firm handshake which was returned with gusto. Pearce liked Etheridge, the multi-millionaire was still a soldier at heart, and they’d casually spoken for over an hour about their careers before Pearce had complimented him on his home. Pearce had joked about the demolition job Pope had done on the place when he had disabled a tactical unit. Etheridge had played along, agreeing that he had been held at gun point.
So said the medical report, which had found the bruising of a gun barrel being pressed against his skull.
Both men knew that they would never turn on Sam, but Pearce had to follow up his own investigation, especially when his own digging had uncovered a mayoral campaign with cancerous veins inside it. As they approached the front door, Pearce nodded towards the for sale sign in the front garden, the large, blue card looming over the pristine Porsche below.
‘Not sticking around, Paul?’ Pearce asked, popping his arms into his jacket. The rain had finally given up but had been replaced by a bitter cold that chilled to the bone.
‘I think it’s time for a change,’ Etheridge commented, his limp noticeable to a trained eye. ‘This life isn’t for me anymore.’
‘Oh?’
‘Well, what with Kayleigh leaving, I’ve decided to sell the business and maybe do a bit of good.’
‘A bit of good, eh?’ Pearce raised his eyebrows. ‘I have a question?’
‘Shoot.’
‘How would someone get forged documents nowadays? I mean, with all passports going digital and the whole word deciding to live in the cloud, how would someone bypass all of those things? You know, so they were still official documents.’
‘Good question.’ Etheridge rubbed his chin. ‘You’d probably have to be able to configure a profile within the government database and manipulate the information to render historically as well as digitally. It would be very tricky.’
‘I bet,’ Pearce said, zipping up his coat. ‘Thing is, I doubt Sam Pope has that kind of knowledge on a computer but would definitely need someone to do it for him.’
Etheridge nervously chuckled.
‘Probably.’ Etheridge swallowed. ‘Is there anything else I need to think about?’
Pearce smiled and offered his hand once more. Etheridge took it.
‘Don’t worry about it, Paul. I’m not much of a computer person.’
Etheridge smiled and Pearce patted him on the shoulder before exiting out into the freezing cold but was warmed by the idea that Sam Pope had an ally in his ever growing war against organised crime. The things Etheridge could do with a computer and the doors he could open would be vital and as Pearce drove
