Slowly, pieces began to connect for Ashton, who had been told by Pearce that Wallace had had Singh abducted.
She didn’t want to believe it, but Sam confirmed it.
Wallace wanted to use Singh as leverage against Sam, who captured Wallace in return.
It was a violent, dangerous game of one-upmanship, one which eventually cost Wallace his life. After Sam had handed over the files in exchange for Singh’s safe release, Sam had revealed the wire under his shirt, recording the confession of Wallace and one that implicated Farukh. Abandoning his usual repertoire of hanging his victims, Farukh impaled Wallace by the throat, slashed his jugular open, and sent him hurling from the top of the High Rise.
Ashton refused to believe it, tears forming in the corners of her hate-filled eyes.
Sam killed Wallace.
She was adamant.
Sam accepted his fate, that he’d killed a number of people, all of them criminals. That included Farukh, who, after slashing open his back and beating him to within an inch of his life, Sam had brutally killed by impaling him on a pole before ramming a blade into the man’s skull.
The brutality of the death was not lost on Sam, who agreed that he should be taken off the streets.
Killing criminals had been a necessity.
To save lives.
But the barbaric deaths of some of his opponents had worried Sam that he may be enjoying it. With each criminal he put in the ground and with every empire brought crashing down, whether it was the Kovalenko’s human trafficking business or Wallace’s stranglehold on global terrorism, it had all been for the greater good.
It had restored something in Sam, something that had been lost ever since his son was taken from him.
But there was never any enjoyment in it.
Now, with the fight over, the truth exposed, and Wallace dead, Sam was ready to put the gun down and accept his punishment.
He confessed to killing all those men, except Carl Marsden and Ervin Wallace.
Irate, Ashton told him she’d make sure he never saw the light of day again.
She took his signed confession and the next day, Sam was taken by armoured vehicle to the magistrates’ court, where he pleaded guilty to the confession and was given a crown court date of eight days from then.
Those eight days had been as peaceful as Sam could remember.
There was the odd sneer from a prison guard during the arrival of meals, but surprisingly, Sam found a number of the officers approved of what he’d done.
In their eyes, he’d been able to do the things they wished they could, but the bureaucracy and the judicial system had their hands tied. While they were bogged down with paperwork and minimising the bad press thrown their way for the slightest infringement on a criminal’s rights, Sam had kicked down doors and put bullets in rapists, pimps, and crime lords.
One officer even brought Sam a copy of Jurassic Park, which he never knew was a book. He read it cover to cover within a day and subsequently read it through once more before his trial date.
According to some of the friendlier guards, his entire case and impending trial had become one of the biggest stories in quite some time, and they were relishing the subsequent let down.
Sam had already confessed.
There would be no dramatic trial with pieces of evidence falling out like a trail of breadcrumbs exposing further corruption within the powers that be.
Sam would be sentenced to life in prison, or to be exact, sixty-eight years behind bars.
He would take his sentence with his head held high, his shoulders straight, and his conscience clear.
Everything he’d done, from bringing down the High Rise, to turning London inside out to find Jasmine Hill, to causing an international incident in Rome to engaging in a fire fight on Tower Bridge, he would do again if he had to.
It was the right thing to do.
Wallace’s horrendous misdeeds had been exposed, with Paul Etheridge, and old army friend who had helped Sam when possible, following through on the plan to leak the files and confession to The Pulse. Blackridge had been dissolved immediately by the government, with an elaborate search for the rest of Wallace’s assets underway.
Word had reached Sam that one of The Pulse’s reporters had been murdered, found hanged in his own home.
No doubt just another unfortunate casualty of his war, this time at the hands of the Hangman of Baghdad.
Sam mourned him, the guilt of the man’s death along with the subsequent devastation to his family, would hang heavy on Sam’s mind.
Another innocent person caught in the crossfire.
As Sam laid back on his uncomfortable bed, he gritted his teeth. The stitches that held his back together hummed with pain and he slowly closed his eyes.
Thinking of his son’s innocent smile, Sam drifted off to sleep, ready to face his future in the morning.
Chapter Three
The horrid inevitability of the day hung over the day like an angry rain cloud. DI Amara Singh hadn’t slept a wink, emerging from her bed before five in the morning before kicking her coffee machine into life. As the caffeine rumbled out into her mug, she felt sick.
Today was the day.
Sam Pope was going to be sentenced to life in prison.
It had been a strange six months that had changed her irrevocably. As Sam Pope’s war against organised crime had escalated, she’d seen it as the biggest opportunity of her career. To be the person to bring him to justice would skyrocket her career within the Metropolitan Police, continuing her sharp rise through the ranks. Ever since she’d joined in her early twenties Singh had been labelled a prodigy. While some sneered at her hastened elevation through the ranks, dismissing it as a quota ticking exercise, she knew better.
The fact she was a female or of Indian descent made no difference.
Her strict Hindu parents had always encouraged her to follow her sister’s lead, by marrying into wealth and providing them with grandchildren. While she adored her sister and at times,
