The pain was unbearable.
Sam added to it with a hard slap to the face.
‘Where is she?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where?’ Sam slapped him again.
‘I don’t fucking know, blad,’ Leon spat.
Sam trickled another few droplets onto his other thigh, the same cries of pain accompanied the same smell of burning flesh. The chair rocked back and gravity took over, welcoming the squirming, naked man with a hard thud. As Leon squirmed in agony, Sam stepped forward, roughly pushing a boot down on the man’s tattooed chest and squatting down, calmly looking into the terrified eyes of his prisoner.
‘Please. Please stop,’ Leon begged, his eyes full of tears, the skin of his thighs burnt clean off.
Any power the man had once held was gone.
Beaten.
Naked.
Begging for his life.
Sam had come to realise that every criminal, when pushed to their limit, when just dangled over the edge of their pain threshold, always begged. The odd few, like the Mitchell Brothers, he had faced in hand to hand combat six months before, were titans, willing to fight until the last of their life was forced from them.
But the ones sat in the thrones, they were the ones who begged once everything had been stripped away.
Leon was begging now.
Which meant he would talk.
Sam lowered his face so it was a few feet from Leon’s, his unblinking stare causing Leon to blink nervously. More tears slid down his face.
‘Leon, you need to tell me how I can find her, or this is really going to hurt.’
Sam held up the small receptacle that held the acid and motioned to pour it on his chest. Leon instantly squirmed and cried out through his tears.
‘We never meet them. Okay?’ he spoke through sharp, panicked breaths.
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. Some Ukrainian family. Three of them. Two brothers and a mighty fine bitch. They came to me a few years back and since then we been doing jobs for them.’ Leon spoke hurriedly. ‘They want young English girls. Virgins go for more money. We collect and they pay.’
Sam turned away, his mouth curling into a snarl under his mask. His knuckles whitened around the acid container.
‘How do they pay?’
‘We get a bank transfer after every drop. We put the girls in a van that they park on one of three streets every week and on that Friday we get paid.’
‘How much?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You’re not sorry,’ Sam spat angrily. ‘How much do they pay you? Huh? How much is the life of an innocent girl worth?’
Leon looked away, the shame causing more tears to form. The burning had stopped and his thighs were now numb, the acid having eaten away at the layers of muscle like bacteria.
‘Answer me!’ Sam yelled.
‘Five grand,’ Leon said, shaking his head and choking back more tears. ‘It’s worth five grand.’
‘Which street was the van on?’
‘I don’t know, I didn’t do the drop…’
Leon was cut out as Sam reached back with his gloved hand and pushed two knuckles deep into the exposed muscle of his burnt leg. Leon howled in agony.
‘My boy, Curtis, he said it was by KFC. Down by the stadium.’
Sam made a note, the possible location of that vehicle could lead to an address. It was a door Sam very much wanted to knock on. He stood up once more, allowing Leon a moment to catch his breath. Beneath his boot, the feared and respected leader of the Acid Gang was a quivering, naked wreck who had cracked and begged.
‘Where does the money go?’
‘It goes into an account under the name of a shell company.’ Leon didn’t even try to hold back the information. ‘Burn Group Inc. That’s all I know, man.’
Sam shook his head, the man openly mocking the severity of his crimes with the name of his corporation. But he had an account and a possible vehicle location. He believed Leon knew little else and finally stepped back, relinquishing the gangster from under his boot. Still strapped to the chair, Leon looked on helplessly.
‘I helped you, right?’ Leon questioned. ‘We cool, yeah?’
Sam begged himself to walk away, to head out the door and spend every precious moment ripping the under belly of the city apart to find Jasmine and any of the other missing girls.
But this man made maiming people an entry fee to his crew. The willingness to ruin lives, be it through the acid attacks, the abduction of innocent girls to be sold into a life of sex slavery, or just the fear with which he had run his estate.
They were not cool.
He turned, his eyes burning deeper into Leon than the acid he had subjected him to earlier and he stepped forward. Leon squirmed, realising the imminent danger.
‘You have taken so much from so many people. You have snatched them from their lives all to make money. How many girls have you sent into the back streets of Europe? How many people have gone through hours of surgery in the faint hope of restructuring their face after you ordered an acid attack?’
Leon turned away, not wanting to meet the furious glare from Sam.
Not wanting to face the truth.
Eventually, he mustered up the courage to utter two words.
‘I’m sorry.’
Sam closed his eyes, sending a silent apology to Jamie. He thought of all the young girls being pushed into rooms in foreign countries, while hungry men subjected them to a horrifying awakening.
How they had no way out.
All thanks to the man lying before him.
He took one more breath before reply.
‘Me too.’
Sam overturned the cup of acid, dropping it all over Leon’s right arm. The instant sizzling of his skin caused him to scream, the pain shooting through his body and overwhelming his brain. As Leon passed out through shock, Sam watched, his fists clenched, knowing that extreme crimes call for extreme measures.
Within two minutes, the room was cleared and empty, with nothing but bloodstains and acid burns adorning the tiles like a sickening rug.
Time was running out.
Chapter Sixteen
The following morning was one of the worst days of Mark Harris’s career.
Since he burst onto the political scene as a twenty-three old prodigy in Croydon, he had been presented by the press as a new hope. The chiselled features, the well-groomed hair, the muscular physique. It all blended with his ‘voice of the people’ shtick that had been rehearsed and fine tuned into a tremendous symphony. In front of the cameras he was a natural, always ready with a tasty sound bite or a charming quip.
The smile was a mixture of reassurance and desire, his handsome features going a long way to building his popularity.
When he finally took the seat of his political party at the tender age of twenty-six, he quickly became the media darling they’d been hoping for, and as the public latched onto him, so did the party themselves. He was pushed to the front of the queue, the future power of the current regime trying their best to cling to his coattails like barnacles to the Great Barrier Reef.
Ten years on, he was waiting to ascend to the throne of London, where he would be Mayor of the city that had moulded him.
With crime at an all-time high, the terror alert dangling precariously like the dagger of Damocles, and the public screaming for the country to fight back, Harris could almost touch the seat with his fingertips.
Destiny was so close to proclaiming him the white knight of London.
But now, with Sam Pope raging a one-man war against every crime syndicate in the city, the press were having a field day. Especially since it had only been two days since he had officially backed the task force as a sure-fire step on his way to the top.
They would bring an end to a dangerous vigilante.
He would get the credit.
Probably even a couple of rounds with the attractive Singh once she relaxed her obvious guard.
&nbs
p; But as he stepped back into his office, he felt deflated. Suddenly, the panache with which he tackled every task had been sapped from him, replaced with hunched shoulders and tired, heavy eyes. He stomped around the large oak desk, unbuttoned the expensive grey suit and slumped into his chair, his eyes vacantly scanning the useless artefacts on his desk.
He looked at the picture of his wife, her smiling face full of joy and love. A look she hadn’t given him for over five years, not since she’d found out about his indiscretions. It didn’t stop him, and she was fond of the lifestyle.
But separate beds and the odd, disgusted glance only caused his body to yearn for Singh.
The press had been unrelenting, all of them querying the effectiveness not just of the Sam Pope Task Force, but of Harris’s ability to lead a full-scale project against crime. It was the life force of his entire campaign and it was starting to unravel, each journalist pulling on a separate thread. Although flustered, Harris was able to deflect a lot of the negativity, a skill he had acquired through years of schmoozing the public, offering them hard quotes that would likely make the paper.
Then the press conference turned in the direction he had been terrified of.
A young woman he didn’t recognise raised her hand, claiming to be from an online paper he had never heard of. He had almost pitied her from her introduction. Then, when she spoke, he found himself loathing her. The lady, who he had since demanded that Burrows have banned from future events, had suggested that Sam Pope was in fact doing the very job that Harris himself had claimed to be doing.
That Sam Pope was doing more to tackle crime than Harris or the entirety of the Metropolitan Police Service. Rattled, Harris had snapped back, belittling her as nothing more than a blogger who believed the whispers of desperate people, obsessed with the notion of heroic justice.
Then she read out the facts. The laundry list of hits that Sam Pope had been responsible for in the last six months.
Frank Jackson and the High Rise.
Four safe houses.
The make shift High Rise in Shepherd’s Bush, with over eleven wanted criminals arrested.
The uncovering of corrupt, senior police officials.
And in the late hours of the night, Leon Barnett, who had since been identified as the head of the notorious Acid Gang, had been found naked, beaten and tortured, with his entire right arm mutilated to the point of amputation.
All from a highly decorated soldier who had fought valiantly for his country.
The room turned soon after, with many other journalists jumping on the bandwagon, all of them probing Harris for a response to the notion that Sam Pope was what was best for the city.
Sam Pope.
A highly trained, dangerous vigilante with a death wish.
Harris had never felt lower.
The sound of the door clicking shut snapped him back into the room, his gaze falling upon the neatly groomed Burrows as he shuffled towards his desk. Harris sighed, turning slowly in his chair until he faced the window, the depressing grey sky once again littering the city below with rain. The traffic was grid locked on Marylebone Road, with car horns polluting the air with their impatience. Unfortunate pedestrians ran, many of them holding the Metro over their heads for shelter, the free paper finally offering something of use to commuters.
‘Now is not the time to sulk, sir.’
Burrows spoke confidently, his back straight. He had served as an assistant to a number of party leaders and was respected throughout the political world as a man of unshakable loyalty. Harris knew he was lucky to have him, so allowed the jab at his maturity to slide.
‘What a fucking mess,’ Harris eventually mumbled, glumly staring out at the horrible weather.
‘Every mess can be cleaned, sir.’
‘The man is essentially shitting on our door step.’ Harris gestured angrily. ‘Less than ten miles from this fucking door step.’
Burrows allowed a moment to pass, for Harris to regain his usual composure. Harris was grateful.
‘I spoke to Detective Inspector Singh this morning, she said they are following up on a lead from the attack on the second High Rise. She sounded positive.’
Harris shrugged.
‘Until she gets me a result, she’s got nothing,’ Harris barked. ‘Is there anything else, Carl?’
Burrows seemed slightly awkward at the informality of being addressed by his first name. He smiled, the wrinkles dominating his face and offering a fatherly warmth.
‘The usual, sir. A few emails regarding your investments, but nothing that I cannot handle if you would like.’
‘You always do,’ Harris said numbly, the anger still gripping him in a bear hug.
‘Quite, sir.’ Burrows turned on his heel to leave but then stopped. Harris spun the chair back around to face him.
‘Yes, Carl?’
‘I know it may be stating the obvious, but you cannot afford Sam Pope to continue on his rampage too much longer.’ Before Harris could angrily react, Carl raised a calming hand. ‘Not only would it jeopardise your campaign, but these investments you have made will also be affected.’
‘Thanks, Carl,’ Harris snapped. ‘Why don’t you go make me a cup of tea?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Burrows hurried to the door, feeling the glare that Harris had aimed at the centre of his spine. Despite the fury he felt, Harris knew that his trusted aide was right. He slumped back in his chair and gently massaged his temples.
Sam Pope needed to be stopped.
That same morning, Aaron Hill stood in his kitchen, the kettle boiling when he caught a glimpse of himself in the window. With the sun hiding for the majority of the morning, the orange glow of the street lights outside his house caused his window to double as a mirror.
A week ago, he would have been faced with a middle-aged man, dressed smartly who was making a packed lunch for his beloved daughter. Clean shaven, thinning blonde hair neatly brushed to a more flattering style.
Not fat but years of living well had given him what the magazines had recently labelled the ‘dad bod.’
The reflection staring back at him was unrecognisable.
His skin was grey, the bags under his eyes were dark and heavy, a memento for another sleepless night.
His chin was covered in a dark, grey stubble and his hair shot off in wild directions like he had been electrocuted.
His body craved for sleep but Aaron knew his brain wouldn’t shut off.
Not while she was still out there.
Not while there was still a chance.
As the kettle rumbled to a bubbly conclusion, he slowly raised his skinny hand to the top of it, gently holding it above the spout. A barrage of piping hot steam filtered out, enveloping his hand and instantly burning him.
He held it for a few more seconds.
Then, with a yelp of pain, he retracted it, using the jolt of anguish to snap him back to the current world, awakening him enough to make a cup of coffee and face another hopeless day. Aaron flicked on the cold tap and held the palm of his hand underneath it, the skin turning a shade of raw pink and the freezing water instantly cooled it. After a few more moments, he turned back to the kettle, pouring the water into a mug, watching as the coffee granules swirled like dirt in a tornado.
He stirred and just as he raised the mug to his lips, a firm hand slammed against the front door.
Startled, he placed the mug down on the side and instantly felt terrified. The world had recently shown him just what lived in its dark shadows and in all likelihood, his daughter would spend the rest of her life in them.
He pulled his dressing gown tight against his belly and shuffled towards the door.
Another firm knock. Then a voice.
‘Mr Hill.’ It belonged to a female. ‘My name is Detective Inspector Singh. I’m with the Metropolitan Police.’
Aaron shuffled closer, unlocking the door and pulling back, allowing the chain to catch and a crack, large enough for him to peer through to emerg
e.
A striking woman was stood on the door step, her dark hair pulled back, her brown skin as clear as a summer’s sky. She offered him a friendly smile before holding up her badge.
‘Can I come in, please?’
‘What’s this about?’ he asked, feeling his knees weaken.
‘I think it would be best to do this inside,’ she said, looking around at the neighbouring houses as if to suggest they may be listening.
Aaron closed the door and took a breath. The afternoon before, he had watched as Sam Pope, the most wanted man in London, easily took apart four youths before swarming one of the most dangerous estates in Wembley. Minutes later, he had stuffed a naked man into the boot of the car and demanded Aaron drive. They stopped at the B&Q near Park Royal Station where Sam told him he needed the car. Aaron made his way home via the London Underground and Sam drove away with a gangster and a number of bottles of liquid.
Aaron had no idea what Sam had planned, but he was sure it wasn’t a cocktail evening.
‘Mr Hill, please,’ Singh spoke through the door, a hint of frustration in her voice. With a trembling hand, Aaron removed the chain and pulled the door open, welcoming the DI and a gust of freezing, wet wind with one of his best smiles.
‘Please, come in.’ He stepped aside, ushering the law into his house. Singh obliged. ‘I just made some coffee, if you would like?’
‘No thanks,’ Singh responded, looking around the house as she stepped through the hall way. Aaron closed the door and sheepishly made his way back to the kitchen, focusing on his coffee as the Detective Inspector stared at him.
‘Mr Hill, I know you came to the station a few days ago to report your daughter missing. I believe you had been drinking at the time and I think it was myself who asked you to leave.’
Aaron squinted, trying hard to locate the memory as if he was searching for a door on his advent calendar. Singh continued.
‘Now since then, you happened to be at the High Rise in Shepherd’s Bush the night Sam Pope took out a dozen men and your car was discovered late yesterday in Wembley, not far from where reports say Sam Pope attacked another gang.’
The Takers Page 13