Thrown Down Read online

  THROWN DOWN

  A NOVEL

  BY DAVID MENON

  Silver Springs Press 2015

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of any character to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Other titles by David Menon

  The DSI Jeff Barton series.

  - Straight Back

  - No Questions Asked

  - Storms

  - Fireflies

  - Sorcerer

  The Stephanie Marshall series

  - Could Max Burley Be a Killer?

  - What Happened to Liam?

  The DCI Sara Hoyland series

  - Best Friend, Worst Enemy.

  - Beautiful Child

  - Fall from Grace

  Other titles

  - The Murder in His Past

  - The Wild Heart

  Short story collections

  - Sisters of the Moon.

  - Losing Grip

  - Kind of Woman.

  David was born in Derby, England and has lived all over the UK but he’s now based in Paris. In 2009 he left a long career in the airline industry to concentrate on establishing his writing career and he's now published several books including the Detective Superintendent Jeff Barton series and the Stephanie Marshall mystery series. When he has time he also teaches English to Russian students for a school in St. Petersburg. He takes a keen interest in politics and international affairs and he’s into all the art forms of books, film, TV, theatre, music, and he’s a devoted fan of American singer and poet Stevie Nicks who he calls his 'voice of my inner being'. He loves Indian food, he likes a gin and tonic of an evening followed by a glass or two of red wine. Well, that doesn’t make him a bad person.

  www.davidmenon.com

  www.facebook.com/davidmenoncrimefictionauthor

  www.pinterest.com/davidmenon

  www.linkedin.com/davidmenon

  twitter @ifanyonefalls

  With special thanks to Paul Barker for helping me to get things in the right shape. To my critics, good and bad, and most of all to my readers who’ve made my dream come true.

  This is for Maddie who struggles to keep me picking up everything I’ve thrown down but to whom I have to thank for everything.

  THROWN DOWN ONE

  Manchester, England.

  He closed the door behind him and leaned back against it. He breathed out a sigh of relief. It had been a long journey and not just the one he’d made today. It had been a lifetime of coming from a place where his life had been taken over and everything he’d done had not been of his own choosing. Today should’ve been the beginning of the end. That’s what he knew they’d all been hoping for. And that’s what he knew would be the only thing to bring peace to their sad little minds.

  When the afternoon sun was beginning to fall towards the oncoming of dusk it made his pokey little flat feel like a sauna. The heat of the rays came straight through the window of his all in one kitchen and living room to the point when he often retreated to the bedroom at this time of the day with its much smaller window that was on the side of the house and so therefore didn’t catch any direct sunlight. He’d never been one for the sun. His fair skin had just never been able to take it and when he was a little boy his mother had fretted about him getting burnt virtually the whole summer from June to September. It had driven his father mad. His father had been the kind of stern working class Irishman who believed he was God in his house and that the affectionate side of raising children was something that should be left to the mother. When his father got home from work at night he sat down with the evening paper and waited for his tea to be placed on the table and if there was any noise from any of the kids there’d be trouble. The girls would come off lightly. They’d get a slap across the back of their legs and that would more or less be that. But for the boys he’d take off his belt and lash them two, three, four, sometimes more times than that. It wasn’t uncommon to hear the sound of at least one of them wailing in agony and fear most evenings. His father seemed to enjoy the imposing of discipline and it would be left to their mother to say ‘your daddy’s only doing it for your own good’. He’d never had his own children but he knew that none of his brothers had ever raised a hand to any of their children.

  The sun was beginning to lose its power to make him sweat whilst he was sat down and so he stood up and went over to the kitchen unit in the far corner of the room. No expense had been shared by the landlord. The most basic of units had been fitted in what looked like a partly haphazard way. Weren’t there regulations about these things these days? Didn’t the unit have to be fixed to the wall all the way along? Should there really be that gap at the corner where he’d once seen a mouse go charging down? He may be on the first floor of the converted old house but that didn’t stop the little bastards from running up the drainpipes and in through the window when he had it open.

  He filled up the kettle and switched it on. Then he stood there and thought for a moment. It had been quite a day all things considered. He’d been with people who he knew hated him and they’d expected him to give them answers that could help fix their hearts that had been broken for almost forty years. But try as he might he hadn’t been able to. He just hadn’t been able to connect it all in his head and take them to the right place. When it had become clear that they weren’t going to get anywhere some of them had got quite angry and for the first time in his life he’d been glad of the protection of the Northern Ireland police. They’d got him to the airport pretty sharpish after that and onto the next flight back to Manchester. The police had been concerned that they might have been followed to the airport that had been named after that drunkard George Best. But they hadn’t been. Or at least it hadn’t seemed like they had been. There were no signs as they processed him through to the departure lounge and then stayed with him until he was safely on the plane. All part of the peace dividend that they were all protecting the likes of him. A generation ago they’d have cheerfully hung him from the nearest tree.

  He supposed Carol would be knocking on his door later when she came home from work. She lived in the ground floor flat and something had struck up between them not long after he’d moved in. She was a bit of a one so she was. Everything about her body had headed south but she still thought it was the thing to wear a leopard skin mini dress with a gold latex belt whenever she went with him to the pub on the corner. And that was one of the more tame outfits she wore. With all the makeup she slapped on it made her look like Dolly Parton with a crow’s feet face and sagging skin on her arms. She often said she’d been unlucky in love all her life until she met him which always made him laugh. He was no bloody catch. They were just two lonely old souls who’d been thrown together by circumstances and were doing what they could to bring a little light into their respective twilight years. Carol was good company though. She made him laugh and for many years he never thought he’d ever be that close to a woman again. Maybe he hadn’t offended the gods as much as he once thought he had. He smiled when he thought of what his mother would say if she knew he was thinking like that. There were no such things as gods. There was one God who had to be feared if you wanted eternal life and he’d notice if the collar on your shirt wasn’t straight when you went to Mass on Sunday. It would be a mark against your entry into His Kingdom.

  He remembered those days of his youth sometimes as if they’d only happened yesterday. The memories were still as fresh. Everything in their house had been all about his father and Sunday mornings were no exception. Everybody went to Mass and afterwards his father went off to the pub whilst his mother would have to go home and prepare the Sunday dinner. There would have to be a roast and there would have to be a million vegetables to go with it and a pot of steami
ng hot gravy. And it would have to be ready when his father got home. Not a minute before and not a minute after. His father would come home and sit at the table. Then the boys would follow him and the girls would help their mother bring the meal in. Knowing what he did about the boys and girls of today they certainly wouldn’t stand for any of that nonsense and rightly so but at the time he and his brothers were just glad to be on the right side of their father for a while and so played along with it. They were glad not to be treated to a few lashes of his belt. They especially loved it when the priest came for Sunday dinner because then their Dad would be on his best behavior whilst the priest would lavish praise on him for being a God fearing Catholic family man. And on the rare occasions when the meal wasn’t ready the door to the kitchen would be closed and they would be able to hear their father shouting at their mother and then they heard the sound of him slapping her followed by her tears. He’d been talking to one of his nieces the other day who had this romantic vision of all things Irish and explained away her grandfather’s violence as being part of the times for Irish men and women and her grandfather had to be pitied because he didn’t know any different. He told her she was talking complete shit. Not every household in their neighbourhood was blighted by violence like theirs had been. His niece was so naïve about her ancestors and her declared intention to find only the good in people irritated the fucking shit out of him. She wasn’t there. She didn’t know what it was like to live in a house that was ruled by fear. All those years in the Maze hadn’t been wasted. He understood more about the real motivations of people than she’d ever know despite all the American self-help crap she filled her head with. All the excuses in the world didn’t excuse his father’s violence.

  He still missed his Mammy. Even at the age of sixty he still missed her. She was a saint as far as he was concerned and yet he knew he’d caused her so much pain and heartache. He’d never forget the night they came for him. She screamed for them to let him go but the British soldiers who were backing up the officers of the RUC turned out to be as brutally inclined as his father and in pushing her away they broke her arm. His father had stood by and passively watched all the mayhem going on around him. It was funny how a man who liked to batter his wife and children could be so weak against a more powerful foe.

  His Mammy had died of a heart attack a couple of years after he’d been sent down. They said it had been all the stress of what had been happening and he of course had been at the centre of it all. He’d never get over the guilt he felt about that. The bastards wouldn’t let him out to attend his Mammy’s funeral. It had been the worst day of his life. They’d made him do every dirty job they could find that day, the dirtier the better. He’d cleaned up shit and piss and he’d had to clean up after one of the prison guards stood and pissed on the floor right in front of him. He’d been driven almost to the point of madness that day but he knew that if he’d cracked he’d have really been in for it.

  Oh yes, he missed his Mammy. He’d have given anything just to say sorry to her before she died. He missed her. He always had and he always would.

  He sat down with his mug of tea and succeeded in balancing his digestive biscuit on the top of his hand. He wasn’t a dunker. He ate the biscuit clean and clear of his tea but then he realised he hadn’t bought the evening paper which was part of his usual late afternoon ritual. He’d been incarcerated for way more years than he’d been free and routines had been instilled in him to such an extent that he’d grown tired of fighting the urge to make them part of his life now. But sometimes he couldn’t help it and every afternoon just before five he went over to the newsagent’s shop across the road for the Manchester Evening News. But today it had just slipped his mind after he’d got off the bus from the airport. He quickly gulped down his tea and put his jacket on. He was about to leave when there was a knock on his door. It wouldn’t be Carol. She wouldn’t be back from work yet and anyway she had a key.

  He opened the door and couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw who was standing there.

  DSI Jeff Barton was still getting used to going into work every day and not seeing Rebecca Stockton. The team would survive and Ollie Wright who’d been promoted to DI was more than a worthy replacement for Rebecca. Indeed, Jeff himself had championed Ollie’s appointment. But Jeff missed Rebecca personally. He missed the smell of her as she walked into a room and made her presence felt. He missed the way she shook her head when she let her hair down and it was all so alluringly free flowing. He missed the way sometimes her nail polish was chipped and the style of clothes she wore. He missed the conversations they used to have and the concern she always showed about his son Toby. He missed his mate. He missed the woman who was Rebecca Stockton.

  The day of her funeral had been a terrible and yet fitting affair for Rebecca the police officer. She’d been given full police honours even though she’d been acting on her own volition when she’d decided to confront a known sex offender. Jeff understood why she’d done it. The team had worked long and hard on an investigation that had been pulled from them when they got a little too close to official corruption and whilst Rebecca had been facing investigation for a blunder that yes, could’ve cost a young girl her life, but compared to what the team discovered had been covered up for years it just didn’t add up. She’d made her feelings clear to Jeff and everyone else on the team but none of them had envisaged she’d go out on a limb long enough to get herself bloody killed. The whole episode had led to a cooling of relations between Jeff and Chief Superintendent Geraldine Chambers. They’d been alright at the time and had managed to maintain the closeness of their relationship. But the more he’d thought about it the more he’d begun to think that if Chambers had been more fulsome in her support of Rebecca at the start of that previous investigation then the outcome might have been different. If Chambers had only stood up to whoever had been pulling her strings at the time then it might have all been so very different and Rebecca would still be alive. So much easy wisdom with the benefit of hindsight but still so many lessons to be learned as far as Jeff was concerned. But the fact remained that Rebecca was gone and none of all the crap that followed would bring her back into Jeff’s life which is where he’d belatedly realised she should’ve been.

  Jeff entered through the front door of the conversion property and noted the collection of electricity meters, one for each of the five flats in the house. He had a cousin who rented out properties like this and he’d said that meters were the only way to keep the debt of fuel down to zero in rented out places. Jeff had been uncomfortable with the whole idea of a meter for electricity in this day and age but he nevertheless did take his cousin’s point. He didn’t know why he should though. His cousin was as rich as shit and didn’t have to work again so what difference did it make to him? He should hate the little bastard really.

  DI Ollie Wright came down the stairs and gestured for Jeff to meet him outside at the front of the house.

  ‘I have to say, sir, that is one of the worst scenes of this kind I’ve ever come across’ Ollie declared as he breathed in and out to quell the nausea rising in him.

  ‘You’ve spared my feelings?’ Jeff quipped. ‘I find that touching, DI Wright’.

  ‘No, sir, I didn’t mean … ‘

  ‘ … I know what you meant, Ollie’ said Jeff, laughing and tapping Ollie’s arm reassuringly. ‘So do we know who the victim is?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir’.

  ‘Why do you say it like that, Ollie?’

  ‘Well this one, sir, is just a little bit special’.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘His name is Padraig O’Connell’ Ollie revealed. ‘His wallet was in his pocket enabling us to do a quick ID and then I ran his name through the system. He was released five years ago from the Maze prison in Northern Ireland having served over thirty years for the murder of an RUC officer called James Carson back in nineteen seventy-six. Carson was attached to a special branch unit that had been charged with undermining IRA activity in th
e area’.

  ‘So O’Connell was IRA?’

  ‘Yes, sir’ Ollie answered. ‘He admitted to being an active member of the provisional IRA at the trial. When he was released he moved over here to Manchester because most of the rest of his family had done so in the years he’d been incarcerated’.

  ‘So we could be looking at a revenge attack?’

  ‘And if the attacker was someone who is or was a member of special branch, for argument’s sake, then they would’ve known how to get in and out of here without being noticed. Same goes for someone who still believes in the IRA’.

  ‘But why would someone from his own side, the IRA, want him dead after all this time?’ Jeff questioned. ‘Although some of the ways these organizations work are pretty baffling’.

  ‘Well nobody has come forward to say that they saw anything but we will of course be starting house to house enquiries and setting up the mobile incident van with the local neighbourhood policing team’.

  ‘Good’ said Jeff who was mulling it all over in his mind. ‘Now let’s go upstairs’.

  The design of the flat meant that the front door opened straight into the bedroom. The body of Padraig O’Connell was lying on his back in the space at the end of the double bed. To say there was blood everywhere would be to understate it. The walls, the wardrobe, the bed, the small window by the side of the bed, all of them were covered in blood and it made the whole scene look like a butcher’s back room. But before Jeff and Ollie could proceed they had to put on the protective plastic clothing that was necessary when entering a crime scene, especially one as small and as intimate as this. They did so on the landing just outside and then the pathologist June Hawkins looked up when she saw the two of them.

  ‘Dressed in your finest, gentlemen?’ she said. ‘Then come on in and don’t stand on ceremony’.

  Jeff and Ollie bent down and went under the crime scene tapes. Jeff really had to take a deep breath after he’d looked down at the victim.