Thrown Down Read Free Page B

Why did you wait until you were no doubt pushed and coerced into doing it? And who would kill you with such ferocity that you probably wouldn’t have known anything after the second stab. So why does the killer carry on many more times digging their knife into you? Why did they want to make sure you were well and truly dead over and over again? What was driving all that fury and hatred? There were scores of former IRA terrorists and murderers now living freely in the community. They didn’t end up dead in the way Padraig O’Connell had done.
    ‘Of course it might not have anything to do with his past’ said June as if she’d been reading Jeff’s thoughts. ‘It might’ve been something to do with his more recent life after he came out of prison?’
    Jeff paused. ‘You could be right, June’ he said. ‘We shall have to wait and see’.
    ‘DI Wright is calling for you again’.
    Jeff went downstairs and joined DI Wright who was talking to a visibly shocked and shaken looking woman of clearly advancing years in a bright red skirt, white t-shirt and leather jacket. Her hair was a mass of long peroxide blond curls, her make-up was thick and unyielding and her finger nails were painted in a deep, dark red.
    ‘Sir, this is Carol Anderson’ said DI Wright. ‘She says she was O’Connell’s girlfriend’.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    THROWN DOWN TWO
    Melbourne, Australia.
    It was the morning after the night before and Patricia Knight managed to drag herself out towards the end of the afternoon and drive to the shopping mall at Ferntree Gully to pick up a couple of last minute supplies. Last night she’d celebrated her sixtieth birthday with a party thrown by her darling husband Dennis down at their local pub at which all their friends were there plus their three kids, two grandkids, and various members of Dennis’s family. It had been an absolutely wonderful night but rather a lot of champagne and wine had been drunk that had given Patricia the pounding headache she’d woken up with and was only just starting to go away. She kept her sunglasses on all the way and hoped she didn’t bump into anybody she knew because she must look bloody awful. She was looking forward to tonight though. . It was just going to be her and Dennis and he was going to cook her favourite meal which is a nicely tender piece of sirloin steak followed by a pavlova with strawberries and fresh cream. She’d never had a pavlova until she went to Australia but now she adored them. She was starting to feel hungry now. She hadn’t been able to manage more than half a slice of toast all day.
    It had been sort of food related when she and Dennis had first got together just a couple of months after she’d arrived in Australia nearly forty years ago. She’d flown across to the other side of the world like a bird that was wondering where to go for the summer. She had no qualifications for anything that could be put onto a job application but she’d placed her faith in making a new start that would take her away from everything. She felt so alone and out on a limb in those first few weeks but despite that she knew it was right to have broken herself off from the rest of her family back home. How on earth would she ever explain to her Mammy how complicated life had become for her and those around her? There would be nothing gained from stepping backwards and in any case the reason for her migration to the other side of the world was to wipe herself clean. She flushed her past down the toilet and literally started her life all over.
    Before too long she managed to get herself a job in a snack bar used by truck drivers, some of whom were local guys and some were from interstate, but all had large appetites and many of them thought they were God’s bloody gift to women. Dennis had been a local Melbourne boy who did some interstate stuff as far as Canberra and Sydney.  She knew that Dennis had noticed her in that way that men do