by David Menon
DOING THE BEST I CAN
A NOVEL
BY DAVID MENON
Copyright Silver Springs Press 2018. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of any character to any real person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
With special thanks for the cover art to John at ebookdesigner.co.uk
This is for Janet and the rest of the Keene family who embraced me when I really needed it.
OTHER TITLES BY DAVID MENON
DSI JEFF BARTON series – Sorcerer, Fireflies, Storms, No Questions Asked, Straight Back, Thrown Down, No Spoken Word, Landslide, When I See You Again.
DCI SARA HOYLAND series – Fall from Grace, The Stolen Child, Best Friend Worst Enemy.
PI STEPHANIE MARSHALL series – What Happened to Liam?, Is Max Burley a Killer?
DCI LAYLA KHAN – In the Shadow of the Tower.
STAND ALONE TITLES – The Wild Heart, The Murder in His Past, Murder at Broken Ridge – an Australian murder mystery.
SHORT STORY COLLECTION – Short Cuts to Murder.
David was born in Derby, England in 1961 and lived all over the UK until he moved to Paris. He’s now back in the UK for the time being but he has a wandering spirit and hopes to soon be on the move again. In 2009 he gave up a long career in the airline industry to concentrate on his writing ambitions. He’s now published several crime thrillers including the Manchester-set series featuring Detective Superintendent Jeff Barton of which ‘Doing The Best I Can’ is the tenth. He’s also written a series of mysteries set in Sydney, Australia featuring PI Stephanie Marshall and three titles in the DCI Sara Hoyland series. There are also several stand- alone titles and a collection of short stories. His interests include travelling, politics and international affairs. He’s also into all the arts of books, films, TV, music, and he’s a serious fan of American singer/songwriter Stevie Nicks who he calls the voice of his interior world. He loves Indian food, a gin and tonic that’s heavy on the g and light on the t, plus a glass or three of red wine. Well, that doesn’t make him a bad person.
DOING THE BEST I CAN
PROLOUGE
She sat in her usual seat in the coffee shop on Piccadilly Gardens. She carefully placed her handbag on the floor beside her feet. The staff behind the counter spoke to each other in a language she didn’t understand but when they addressed her in their heavily accented English they were some of the kindest souls she’d ever come across. They seemed to take pity on her. They made sure she was comfortable and brought her coffee over to wherever she was. They seemed to appreciate her as a lady who was much older than her forty odd years. Perhaps it was the way she seemed to be so uncertain about the simplest of things. It was her way of dealing with the world. It was her way of trying to engage with people and to try and find the warmth she’d never been able to find within her own family.
She sipped her flat white into which she’d emptied four small packets of brown sugar and for a moment she turned her mind back to the wonderfully clement weather. It was one of those hot, sunny days that Manchester wasn’t famous for in all the folklore about the city. She liked to look up and feel that warmth on her face. She liked to watch the happy people because everybody seemed happy to her. She’d never been bothered by crowds. Indeed, she almost felt reassured by the presence of lots of strangers around her. She didn’t mind a lot of noise either. It was silence that scared her. Being in a house where she knew the others who lived there was what freaked her out but that was one of the fires that the medication helped to put out.
She looked up again.
And for now she just had to sit and wait.
ONE
Kaitlin Masters looked around and her husband Ben could almost see the end of her nose turn up in absolute disgust. If it wasn’t for the fact that he knew her so well he might’ve even laughed but the fact was that he knew that most of her disgust was actually aimed straight at him and what she would call his ‘kind’.
‘Why on earth have you dragged me down here?’ she asked, almost exasperatedly.
‘I thought we needed a night out together just the two of us’ answered Ben, knowing he was in for it the entire evening. She would nail him to the cross with her put downs until sleep prevented her from speaking. ‘You know? I thought we might be a bit romantic?’
‘Ben, I’m six months pregnant with our second child’ said Kaitlin as if she was addressing a child who wanted more chocolate than was good for him. ‘Don’t you think it’s rather late for all that?’.
‘You know I wouldn’t have minded if you’d decided not to have the baby’.
‘That was not an option and you know it’ she hissed angrily in a lowered voice. ‘You know I don’t believe in abortion. You know my family are strict Catholics and I’ve already gone against them by marrying out of the faith’.
‘You mean you’ve disappointed them by marrying someone who they don’t consider to be in their league’.
Kaitlin started to cry.
‘Look, why don’t you go and ring your mother? You haven’t done that for at least ten minutes. Tell her for the umpteenth time that I’m sorry I don’t earn enough for us to live in Alderley Edge but I’ve always thought that being a police officer was a decent enough profession and where we do live in Cheadle isn’t exactly a dump. Well go on. Go and call her before they serve the drinks we ordered. I’m thirsty’.
Ben had booked them a table at a new Italian restaurant at the top end of Deansgate in the city centre and his wife Kaitlin had reluctantly agreed. But now they were there he really wished he hadn’t bothered. Kaitlin was obviously determined not to enjoy herself and that made it all the more difficult for him to try and keep things level. He could hear laughter and easy conversation coming from the couples sitting at the other tables. Even the guy sitting on his own a couple of tables down and reading from an e-reader in the place of a companion to talk to seemed to be having a better time. He knew he shouldn’t have provoked Kaitlin’s temper. He’d end up on the receiving end of Kaitlin’s fists if he did. He’d watched the scales fall from her eyes so many times but as a male victim of domestic violence he didn’t think here was anywhere he could go for help.
‘So how is your mother?’ asked Ben when Kaitlin came back to the table. The drinks had appeared and he’d almost finished his beer. A glass of orange and mango juice with ice was waiting for her.
‘She’s absolutely disgusted with you’.
Ben shrugged his shoulders. ‘Water off a duck’s back’.
‘Don’t you care what my mother thinks of you?’
‘No. Do you care what my mother thinks of you?’
‘No way. I couldn’t care less about what a woman who can base an entire conversation around how cheap she’d found a bottle of vodka that day thinks of me’.
‘Then we’re equal’.
‘Not in our backgrounds we’re not’.
‘I’m your bit of rough that you couldn’t help falling in love with. And you hate yourself for it because I’m not what Daddy had told his little princess to expect when she grew up’.
‘You make me sound like some stupid little girl’ said Kaitlin whose attention was then taken by her phone ringing. She looked at the ID screen. ‘It’s Mummy’.
‘Then why don’t you tell her how I never hit you back when you’re using me as a punch bag but I’m still classed as the bastard’.
Kaitlin never hit him in public. She saved it for when they were alone and nobody else could witness her acts of violence. When he went to work he had to face unkno
wn horrors on the streets nd yet it was nothing like the horror he had to face at home sometimes. The bruises, the pain, the times he had to flinch when he sat down or stood up. Even when he had to make the stupidly lame excuse of having tripped and fallen against a door when she’d given him a black eye. If people he knew could be flies on the wall in their house they’d see him being constantly criticised for either not doing something or for not doing it according to what Kaitlin had decided were her standards. He was undermined at every opportunity by either Kaitlin or her mother, and generally made to feel like his only function in the house was to pay the bills and provide sperm. She’d hit him so hard one morning that he lost his balance, fell against the wash basin in the bathroom and almost passed out. All she could say as he came to was that he’d made her do it. But there was still such a stigma attached to men who were abused by women. People seemed to think that you were somehow less of a man if you let a woman hit you but if you hit her back you’d be labelled an abuser. Even as a serving police officer who could handle himself when apprehending the most difficult of criminals, he still didn’t know how he could handle the way Kaitlin treated him. He should leave but he didn’t want to leave his three year-old son and their unborn child on their own with a woman who could turn violent at the drop of a bloody hat.
But if she ever did hit one of their children he’d kill her.
Whilst he waited for her to return he looked around and conceded to himself that this really wasn’t Kaitlin’s thing and he couldn’t imagine what the hell he must’ve been thinking when he conceived the idea. The crowd weren’t Kaitlin’s kind of people. They were all from his end of the suburban tracks and were drenched in what she’d already described as ‘shopping catalogue chic’.
‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Kaitlin after she’d sat back down at the table. She decided she wanted some peace. She wanted a more harmonious life. She would admit to having a temper if she was sure it wouldn’t lose her any face. But she’d never admit to any of her shortcomings. That was a lesson she’d learnt well from her parents. Don’t admit to anything even when it’s obviously your fault and never even think about saying sorry. She loved Ben with all of her heart but that was the trouble. Her heart had been damaged by people long before Ben came along. And she still fancied the pants off him as much as she did when he first caught her eye in that pub in Altrincham. He was sat there now in his buttoned down collar white shirt and a pair of dark blue chinos and despite being six months pregnant she’d take him there and then. Yes he was her bit of smouldering rough with those blue eyes, black hair and stubble. She could eat him for dinner instead of the lamb ragu that had just been placed down in front of her. But she had to have her own way. She had to wear the trousers in their relationship and as far as she was concerned it was only when Ben tried to question her control over everything that there was a problem.
‘Ben, what’s happened to us?’
‘You have to ask? I’ll tell you what’s happened to us but you won’t like it’.
‘Are you going to say it’s all down to me?’ she wanted to know, her voice taking on that sharpness that he hated.
‘I’m saying that I made my peace with what I wouldn’t do for my so-called colleagues but until you make your peace with it we can’t move on’.
‘So you are saying it’s all down to me you little shit’.
‘When did you stop being reasonable and objective?’
‘When you decided to walk away from making thousands of pounds that your colleagues offered you’.
‘It was dirty money, Kaitlin. Money they wanted to give me in return for sending an innocent man to prison. It went against everything I stand for, not just as a police officer but also as a human being. I’m just not going there and would you please keep your voice down?’
‘And now you’re being moved into the team of this DSI Barton person who I hear is a real thorn in the side of Ronald Hermitage so your career is fucked’.
‘If Barton is a thorn in the side of the chief constable then he and I are going to get along very well’.
‘I never realised I’d married such a bloody boy scout. A mister clean goody two shoes who thinks he’s above joining in with the people who are prepared to get their hands dirty’.
‘With corruption rather than hard work’.
‘That deal they offered you would’ve made us for life, Ben’.
‘And is that all that’s important to you? No matter where the money came from?’
Kaitlin shrugged her shoulders nonchalantly. ‘No skin off my nose’.
‘Even if it had meant an innocent man going down? Don’t you remember that little detail? They wanted me to make the evidence fit Scott Delaney whether it did or not’.
Kaitlin sighed irritably. ‘Look, you’ve got to get in with them or else you’ll never make it in the service’.
‘Is that what your father says?’
‘My father would’ve taken the option knowing it would make my mother happy’.
‘I wonder what Jesus makes of the prayers your parents say at Mass every Sunday’.
‘What the Hell do you mean?’
‘Well I wonder what he makes of all people like them who profess to be Christians but only act like it for an hour on a Sunday morning. I mean, do they think it’s some kind of insurance policy for all the bad things they’ve done?’
‘You leave mummy and daddy out of it, damn you’.
‘It seems like I’ve touched a nerve’.
‘Oh I wouldn’t be so bloody smug if I was you’ said Kaitlin, sneering at him with all the contempt she could muster. ‘I know for a fact that the only reason Hermitage hasn’t gunned down your career before now is because I asked Daddy to tell him not to’.
‘So that’s the hierarchy in the circuit, is it? Your father as one of the leading prosecution lawyers in Manchester is above Ronald Hermitage the chief constable’.
‘I couldn’t give a shit about hierarchy’ spat Kaitlin. ‘All I know is that we could’ve done so much with the money they were offering you but you just didn’t have the guts’.
‘You mean I didn’t have the guts to be corrupt and join the good old boys in the circuit’ said Ben. ‘Well I actually think it takes more courage to resist those kind of temptations than to give in to them’.
Kaitlin waved her hand in the air dismissively. ‘Think what you like. Your opinions are of no interest to me’.
TWO
Driving up the M6 to the property that was just 5 miles north of Carnforth on the edge of the Lake District was always a pleasure for him. It had once been the home of his aunt and uncle but when cancer took his uncle away, his aunt decided for the sake of her arthritis that she was going to move to Tenerife. The climate there would serve her health better and she was firmly of the belief that outside temperatures had a bearing on her condition. His aunt and uncle had been together for forty years but were childless and he was set to inherit the house when his aunt died anyway. Moving to Spain meant that she’d been able to hand it over to him earlier than planned.
But she’d have been horrified if she’d known then just what he planned to do with it.
It was pitch dark by the time he arrived and he’d deliberately planned it that way for obvious reasons of cover, even though he wasn’t overlooked even by the nearest property to his. He could hear her starting to kick about in the boot. The chloroform must be starting to wear off. Damn it. He knew he should’ve given her more. He was still too bloody cautious but then again he was new to all this and didn’t like to overplay his hand whilst he built up his experience. It hadn’t been long since he’d completed the execution chamber in the basement but he’d known all along what he was going to use for a test run. Next door to where he lived in the Sale area of Manchester had lived an old and very cantankerous brown Labrador called Clyde. It used to snarl and snap at people as they went by and he once told Clyde that he was a Labrador and therefore should be nice and friendly with people. But to no a
vail. Clyde carried on acting like he thought he was a Rottweiller so one night he threw some meat at him that he’d poisoned. Clyde’s owners had left him outside whilst they went out for the evening and it was pathetically easy to climb over the back gate and lift Clyde once the poisoned meat had made him pass out. Stupid old greedy canine bastard. That’s what you get for being a swine with people. If dogs could laugh then Clyde must’ve been laughing on the other side of his face when he woke up strapped to the bare metal chair. He struggled against his restraints and he started off barking before the barks turned into whimpers and whines and cries and groans. His eyes were darting all over the place whilst he tried to work out what the hell was going on but then the switch was flicked and seconds later he could smell Clyde’s flesh burning as the current raced through his canine body and killed him. Serves the nasty old crud right. And it proved that his little creation worked like a dream.
Afterwards he skinned Clyde’s body before cutting it up and giving a couple of pieces to his neighbours, passing it off as a gift of beef from a butcher he’d done some work for. They were distraught at having lost their pride and joy and were too stupid to realise that they were eating him for dinner that night with vegetables and gravy and a bottle of Australian Shiraz.
But the cargo he had in his boot tonight was different. This would be human flesh that would burn and she would be well aware of what was going to happen to her in those last few minutes of her time on this earth when he planned to remove her blindfold and give her senses that time to fill her entire being with the ultimate fear and terror. Knowing that she was about to die and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. He smiled at the sense of power. He couldn’t wait to get started. After Clyde he’d decided to go for another rehearsal only this time with a human sacrifice. The stupid Polish slut who’d worked at Stepping Hill hospital in Stockport in the catering department would’ve opened her legs that night for any big English fella who plied her with enough wine and tequilla shots and the promise of marriage which would’ve meant she could stay in this country beyond Brexit. The daft presumptuous bitch. He took her home for one night and the next morning it was as if they were going to gallop off to the bank and put her name on his mortgage. Fuck off. She’d annoyed him so bloody much that he was delighted to make her his human experiment. How unlucky for her parents who’d waved her off on her travels that they would be receiving her back in a makeshift coffin after she’d got caught up in his little game of revenge. Well, serves her fucking right. Somebody had found her the morning after he’d disposed of her body near a canal in Castlefield. He’d even gone down and watched the police playing their crime scene games with the rest of the crowd that had gathered. More fool the lot of them.
