The Final Mile: A SAM POPE NOVEL Read online

  After being rushed to the local hospital to have his body stitched back together, Sam had been taken to West Hampstead station, where he was booked in, told what he was being charged with, and then sent to his cell.

  It had been one of the best night’s sleep he’d ever had, which was sadly interrupted in the early hours of the following morning by Singh’s irate superior.

  Assistant Commissioner Ruth Ashton.

  A career woman if ever Sam saw one, her sharp features and well-groomed attire gave off an attractive, yet fiercely professional aura, and she regarded Sam with complete malice. She’d demanded he be taken to an interview room, where she alone would interrogate him.

  Sam refused the presence of a lawyer.

  There was nothing for him to hide.

  Nothing he wanted to fight.

  To him, the fight was over.

  They would read back to him the laundry list of crimes he’d committed ever since he’d embarked on his one-man war on crime, and unless they were inaccurate, he would gladly admit to them. While he knew taking the law into his own hands was a crime, he wasn’t ashamed of what he’d done.

  The people he’d stopped.

  The lives he’d saved.

  He was proud of what he’d stood for and while he knew that he would likely spend the rest of his life behind bars, he didn’t regret it.

  It had given him a purpose.

  Something he’d been missing for over three years, ever since his beautiful son, Jamie, had been taken from him. Killed by a drunk driver who Sam should have stopped, Jamie had been Sam’s pride and joy. He had been the pinnacle of his love with Lucy, his ex-wife who left him when he never recovered.

  Jamie’s death had broken Sam.

  And while taking down criminal empires and killing sex traffickers wouldn’t change what had happened, each one gave Sam a bit of that purpose back.

  Ashton didn’t see it that way. Without holding back, she vehemently ripped into Sam, comparing him to the criminals he’d eradicated. When Sam had countered that he’d done more to fight organised crime in a year than the police had in a decade, he thought she was going to strike him.

  As she rolled out the list of his crimes, Sam sat listening, his cuffed hands resting on top of each other, and his badly beaten face a picture of bloodied and bruised calm.

  After the London Marathon had been bombed the year before, Sam had investigated the death of a young officer, stumbling along a conspiracy that linked a high-ranking inspector to one of the most dangerous criminals in the country. As Sam had unpicked the horrible truth, he’d left a trail of bodies in his wake, all to save an innocent psychiatrist, Amy Devereux, who had been caught up in the disgusting cover-up.

  It had seen Sam break his promise to his beloved son. A promise that he wouldn’t kill anymore.

  With fifteen deadly and highly decorated years as the UK’s most lethal sniper, Sam had promised his son that he would shed no more blood.

  That and he would read as many books as possible, just to placate his son’s insatiable thirst for the written word.

  Memories of his son sitting in his beanbag reading were some of Sam’s fondest, but as with all memories, they begin to fade and it hurt Sam to acknowledge that those treasured moments were starting to lack the finer details.

  The colour of Jamie’s T-shirt.

  The title of the book.

  Soon, the very image itself would fade, a generic representation of what he thought his son looked like.

  Sam may not have kept his promise to not kill, but he’d intended to keep his promise when it came to the books.

  His mission to save Amy also cost him the life of his best friend.

  Theo Walker.

  One of the most respected medics in the forces, the two men had been firm friends as they toured Afghanistan, with Theo eventually stepping away from the army as Sam transitioned into General Wallace’s elite team. Although no longer a medic, it was engrained in Theo to save people and he began a warmly received youth project in Bethnal Green. As a black man who had turned to the army to get away from a life on the streets, Theo was driven to help as many young children walking in similar shoes as possible.

  Theo had given his life to protect Amy, a sacrifice that Sam refused to be in vain as he stormed Frank Jackson’s High Rise and brought his, and the corrupt inspector’s, empire crashing to the ground.

  Several men were killed along the way, many by the pinpoint accuracy of Sam’s trigger finger.

  Sam would serve time for every one of those deaths.

  As Sam had continued his war on crime, he soon stumbled across a desperate father, Aaron Hill, searching for a missing daughter the police had ignored.

  When Sam pointed out that fact, Ashton dismissed it, adamant that everything possible had been done to bring Jasmine Hill back.

  It was Sam who eventually did.

  With the horrific future of sex slavery at the hands of the Kovalenko crime family, Jasmine would have ended up as another statistic and another lost soul in a brutal trade. Sam had taken on the Metropolitan Police himself, engaging in a shootout with an Armed Response team before his all-out assault on the Kovalenkos.

  Several more were killed, including Andrei Kovalenko and his brother, Oleg.

  Sam took responsibility for their deaths, but also of the locating and successful rescue of Jasmine Hill and three other girls.

  Ashton refused to comment.

  With the destruction of the Kovalenko’s sex trade, Sam had also helped uncover a link between them and a leading mayoral candidate, which led Ashton to suspect that DI Adrian Pearce was working with Sam. It was an allegation Sam strongly denied, although his mutual respect with the detective had blossomed as they took down Frank Jackson and brought in Inspector Howell. Pearce had become a strong ally, not only offering Sam help from the inside, usually against his better instincts, but also guidance.

  Pearce had reminded Sam several times he was a good man.

  A good man doing bad things for good reasons.

  While Ashton couldn’t charge Sam with the subsequent assault on the Kovalenko’s Ukrainian hub, she assumed it had been his handiwork. She discounted it as an international issue, along with the incidents in Berlin and Rome.

  According to her, they didn’t matter. A statement that Sam refuted.

  Sergeant Carl Marsden, his mentor, had been murdered in Rome.

  Murdered by General Ervin Wallace.

  That mattered.

  Ashton scoffed at the accusation, her affection for the fallen general betraying her neutrality. Sam noticed it in a split second, the flicker of her eye as his name was mentioned. He was trained to absorb everything, drink in every detail, and use it to his advantage.

  Whether it would help him kill a man from a few kilometres, or aid his escape by a matter of seconds, there was no detail that was inconsequential.

  Ashton had history with Wallace.

  That much was clear.

  Ashton soon brought the conversation back to the panic Sam had caused at Liverpool Street Station two days prior, with the video footage of him being hurled from the promenade to the ground floor spreading across the social media platforms like wildfire.

  Sam calmly deconstructed her narrative, indicating his attacker was Farukh Ahmad, an assassin and associate of Wallace, who had elicited his help to track Sam down.

  Again, Ashton dismissed Sam’s besmirching of Wallace, but Sam countered with explicit details about the files he’d been given.

  The files that Wallace had killed for.

  That Marsden had died for.

  As Ashton’s face drained of colour, Sam painted the true picture of Wallace, a war monger who had more blood on his hands than Sam, Farukh, and any killer or soldier in the country. It was why Sam had been made target number one by Wallace and his Blackridge outfit, and why Sam staged the assault on Wallace’s motorcade.

  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, pined for the devotion and love a family provided, it wasn’t the life for her. Spurred on by her now deceased Grandfather Singh soon made them proud in a different way.

  Within two years of being a police officer, she’d been weapons trained and joined the Armed Response Unit, undertaking several dangerous missions and catching the eyes of those higher up. She soon transitioned to a detective, with her tenacity and sharp mind making her a valuable asset to the Met. Her work on Project Yewtree had seen her name cross the desks of many a senior officer.

  When the opportunity to lead the task force dedicated to bringing in Sam was established by Assistant Commissioner Ruth Ashton at the behest of the then mayoral candidate, Mark Harris, Singh put herself forward.

  Ashton backed her to the hilt.

  Singh had it made. All she had to do was bring Sam in.

  That was when everything changed.

  As her hunt for Sam intensified, so did his as he tore a hole through the London underworld to find a missing girl. As the bodies piled up and Singh’s grasp on the task loosened, it soon became clear to her that Sam wasn’t the enemy. Having dedicated her life to the law, she could never condone his actions.

  But he did save four young girls from a life of sex slavery, along with bringing down yet another criminal empire.

  That wasn’t the act of a criminal.

  Singh threw back the coffee like it was a shot of tequila and poured herself another. At three o’clock that afternoon, she would be there as Sam received his sentence and she was sure he would do it without fear.

  Without a hint of regret.

  She knew she wouldn’t feel the same.

  As she got dressed into a smart, well-fitted, dark grey suit and crisp, white shirt, she kept thinking back to ten nights before. Having watched as an innocent man, Helal Miah, had been hanged in his own home, she’d been attacked.

  Taken as bait.

  Used as leverage against Sam.

  There were a number of reasons why that could have been, and Singh allowed herself to speculate that it was because she meant something to
Sam. Their attraction had grown ever since Sam had evaded her at Etheridge’s house six months before, and it escalated to a passionate kiss in a lift at Liverpool Street. Moments later, Sam was brutally attacked by the very man who would take her hostage.

  She wanted to believe that she was taken because Wallace knew how Sam felt about her.

  But the crushing reality she’d accepted is that Wallace took her because he knew Sam would do the right thing. As much as it hurt, she couldn’t help but admire it.

  It was why she felt so guilty.

  After the showdown between Sam and her captor atop the High Rise, she tried her hardest to help Sam to his feet, to help him escape. He had suffered serious injuries, with his back bleeding profusely, but she urged him to move. He didn’t.

  The fight was over.

  As the police had surrounded the building, trapping them in, Sam had dropped to his knees, offering Singh the only way out of the situation that wouldn’t see them both behind bars. While the thought of Sam living the rest of his life in prison broke her heart, they both knew that a high-ranking detective thrown into prison was a lamb to slaughter.

  Sam pleaded with her to arrest him.

  Bleeding, beaten, and with his life over, Sam was still fighting for the right thing.

  The kiss they’d shared had stayed with her since the passion and sadness that’d passed between them had produced a permanent crack in her heart. While she’d never entertained the idea of settling down, the thought of not being able to have a future with Sam was one that would hurt her until her dying day.

  She would watch him proudly walk away once he was sentenced, knowing he was doing it to keep her out of jail.

  It may not have been love, but it was certainly something.

  Singh tried to distract herself once she got into her car, the feeling of not having a Blackridge tail for the first time in six months felt a little alien, and she still shot the odd cursory glance into the rear-view mirror just to be sure.

  There was no one there.

  An April shower was sprinkling the road ahead as she pulled out of Canon’s Park, through Edgware, and joined the M1. She headed north for one junction, before turning off at Watford and making her way around the outskirts of the town before joining the M25. The orbital motorway was one of the busiest in the country, circling the entire capital city, and was the bane of most commuters’ lives. At half ten on a Wednesday, it was relatively clear, and she pressed her foot down, her Audi A4 Sport zipping past the more cautious drivers. The rain clattered against her car, the black paint shimmering under the rain drops and the sun that was mockingly slicing through the downpour. Just over an hour later, she turned off and passed the sign welcoming her to Farnham and ten minutes after that, she pulled up outside the large gate that shielded the large home from the road.