The fact Mike didn’t die on impact was what allowed him time to think it over. For fifteen grotesque hours, surgeons tried their best to fix his broken body. The pain must have been insufferable and as he watched them rush his shattered body into surgery, Harry had wept. Through his tear-stained hands, he thought of their time together, roughhousing in the living room. Mike had always looked after him, ensuring no one ever picked on his little brother.
Now it was Harry’s turn to protect the only thing he had left of his brother. His memory.
A local dealer, a sinister man with dreadlocks named Sy, took Harry under his wing, telling Harry he felt somewhat responsible for the death. A rival dealer had targeted Sy’s patch and Mike was an unfortunate victim of the game they played.
Harry smiled politely, accepted the lame apology, and worked round the clock to become Sy’s number two. By the age of twenty, Harry had killed three people.
The two men responsible for killing his brother, and the man who had sent them. He was christened the ‘BC’, as he’d slit their throats with a rusty box cutter.
Another year later, he’d nailed Sy to a chair and set him on fire in front of the rest of his crew, taking control of the drug empire and changing the course of his future forever.
The following two decades were a whirlwind of money, women, and drugs. The harder he crunched the numbers, the quicker he expanded, and by making smart moves with suppliers, he was able to triple his income year on year. A bigger target was painted on his chest, from both sides of the law, but the mammoth wealth he amassed not only ensured his safety, but the blind loyalty of his men.
They killed for him.
They died for him.
Harry Chapman, on the eve of his forty-second birthday, was christened The Guvnor for the first time. One of the tabloid papers coined the term and it soon stuck. By building an empire of so many levels, it was almost impossible for the police to pin anything to him. With his eye on an early retirement, he traded the gangster lifestyle for a luxurious estate in Surbiton, where he went through two messy divorces and sadly, never fathered a child.
It was his only regret of a life that had far exceeded the insurmountable odds placed against it.
Two years before his eventual capture and incarceration, The Guvnor changed the criminal underworld permanently. By combining the estates of other empires and offering a share of the spoils, he soon brought together an enterprise so powerful that even the police wanted in.
A series of buildings, known effectively as ‘High Rises’ were purchased and renovated, with each one offered to a crime boss. Harry’s money meant the police stayed away and his contacts ensured a steady flow of product was available for the customers. Women, men, children, drugs. Whatever was desired by the paying customer was reachable and soon, The Guvnor was not only tripling his multi-million fortune, he also had every major criminal in the damn country begging to be on his staff.
‘Money is what really equals power. Not position.’
No truer words had a greater man spoken.
The press would run features on the supposed Guvnor, christening the rumoured High Rises as ‘The High Street’, a place where the elite could live out their most depraved fantasies but with no evidence to back it up, valuable witnesses going missing, and over half of the Met Police in his back pocket, he was untouchable.
Or so he thought.
A needless trip to the theatre with a young lady turned out to be a honey trap where he was caught on camera confessing his implicit involvement in the trafficking of women. Unfortunately for him, one of the detectives, Adrian Pearce, was an incorruptible bastard who ensured those working the case saw it through to the end.
At the age of fifty-one, Harry Chapman was sentenced to life in prison and soon found himself locked down in the most secure facility in Europe.
It wasn’t too bad. His reputation and his manner soon got him a seat at the top table, with the inmates bending over backwards to work for him. The prison guards were either paid off or their families threatened.
When Harris was in attendance, Chapman towed the line. He was too old to fight back, but after a decade under his watch, he’d come to respect Harris for his dignified leadership.
Sharp, on the other hand, was a joke of a man but he had a thirst for power that Chapman could manipulate.
Once Harris retired, and it was soon coming, Sharp may be in line for the throne, but The Guvnor would be running The Grid.
And now, as he sat opposite Sam Pope, he couldn’t help but smile at the hand fate had dealt him once more.
* * *
Despite the ominous warning of the large, bearded man before him, Sam ploughed into the dinner like a man possessed. Having survived off the one measly bowl of cold porridge afforded to him in solitary, the taste of vegetables was welcome. It was the first proper meal he’d had since his time spent in West Hampstead Police Station, where an affable officer had ensured he was well fed and had also brought him something to read.
Sam was under no illusion that this dinner was being provided out of the goodness of his fellow inmate’s heart. As he mopped up the last remnants of gravy with his final fork of meat, Sam looked up at the man opposite and took his last mouthful. The man warmly smiled, nodded, and then relaxed back in his seat.
‘Good?’
‘Not bad.’ Sam wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘I should think so. It came from my
