Best Friend, Worst Enemy

by Menon, David

Adrian was able to do Luca a big fry up which he watched him devour rapidly.

  ‘You must have been hungry’ said Adrian.

  ‘I was’ said Luca. ‘This is making me feel much better, thanks’.

  ‘How did you know where I live?’

  ‘I looked at your driving license when you were in the shower at my place’ Luca revealed. ‘I do it with everyone who comes to see me. It’s an insurance in case they don’t pay or get nasty for some reason’.

  ‘But you gave me a freebie’.

  ‘I know’ said Luca. ‘That’s because I fancied you’.

  ‘Oh Luca, what the fuck am I going to do with you?’

  ‘I can’t go to prison, Adrian, I just can’t. It was self-defence. Phelps was trying to get away and he came at me. I had the knife in my hand and before I knew it I’d not only stopped him but I’d taken revenge for him having been involved in killing my Mum and taking away the only person in the world I belonged to’.

  ‘So why did you run away?’

  ‘I was in shock, I was terrified. I didn’t know what else to do, I didn’t know if anybody would believe me’.

  Adrian wiped his face with his hand. ‘Look, go upstairs and take a shower. I’ll come up in a minute and collect your clothes and put them in the washer. Then we’ll sort out what the hell we’re going to do. Okay?’

  ‘Okay’ said Luca.

  A few minutes later, Adrian could hear the shower going and went upstairs to collect Luca’s clothes. As he did so he looked at the shadow of Luca’s body through the frosted glass of the shower cubicle. He was tempted. Christ almighty he was tempted but it just wouldn’t be right. He took the clothes downstairs and put them in the washing machine.

  Then after the clothes were washed and dried and Luca had showered and was looking halfway decent again, Adrian sat him down in the living room.

  ‘You know what I’ve got to do, Luca’.

  Luca kept his head lowered. ‘You’re going to turn me in’.

  ‘I don’t have any choice’.

  ‘What will happen to me?’

  ‘There are mitigating circumstances’ said Adrian. ‘I think the court will be lenient’.

  ‘Wait for me‘.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wait for me until I get out’ Luca asked. ‘Please, Adrian, I need something to get me through’.

  ‘Luca, mate, I can’t promise you anything, much as I’d like to’ said Adrian. ‘I’m not gay. I’m bisexual. I like you a lot but I can’t imagine being in love with you. I’m sorry but I think you deserve for me to be honest with you’.

  Luca thought for a moment. All he could see was his mother’s face. He missed her so much. ‘We’d better get going’.

  ‘Luca, if there was any other way …’

  ‘ … I know, I know. Can we just get this over with, please?’

  ‘I’ll drive you down to the local police station in Oldham’ said Adrian. ‘I’m really sorry but it has to be like this’.

  Luca didn’t answer as he stepped out of the house in front of Adrian. He looked round and Adrian smiled at him. Then instead of getting into Adrian’s car Luca ran out into the road and the path of oncoming traffic.

  ‘Luca, no!’ Adrian roared.

  But it was too late. Adrian lived on one of the main roads that crossed the moors and the traffic was never light. Luca was immediately struck by a transit van. He was thrown into the air and then landed on his head. He died instantly.

  Adrian put his hand to his mouth and then broke down and cried.

  TWENTY- TWO

  Senator Cheryl-Ann Bainbridge was sitting with Nicholas Trent in the safe house she’d provided for him in rural Virginia about 50 miles northwest of Washington DC.

  ‘Well I for one am glad that rent boy piece of scum who murdered Howard took his own life’ said Cheryl-Ann as she sipped her coffee. ‘It’s one less piece of scum on our streets. He went to bed with other men. He was part of what’s wrong with our societies, Nicholas, part of the liberal consensus taking over from folks fearing God and living up to his moral standards. Added to that he’d been born out of wedlock no doubt to some woman who made herself easy’.

  ‘He lost his mother in the Manchester bombing that we orchestrated’ Nicholas reminded her. He knew how much Howard had thought of Luca Johnson and it was beginning to impact on Trent just how much their actions were impacting on the individual lives of the innocent. He’d been more devastated about losing Howard than he’d been prepared for and it was leading him to doubt what he was doing with the whole North Atlantic Bridge group and with this cold hearted woman sitting before him.

  ‘That is of no consequence to me’ said Cheryl-Ann. ‘If it wasn’t for the fact that he stole that file from Howard and turned it over to the police we may not have had to abandon our mission’.

  Trent then noticed her looking up at something behind him and he instinctively turned round. A masked man was standing there with a handgun pointing straight at Trent’s head. In that moment he knew what was going to happen. He turned back to Cheryl-Ann whose face looked colder than the iceberg that sank the titanic.

  ‘You’re no longer of any use to me, Nicholas’ stated Cheryl-Ann. She’d covered herself. Nothing whatsoever would come back on her. The Lord’s work meant being as manipulative as the devil in order to defeat his evil. This was her own version of jihad but it wasn’t going to be the Muslims who’d end up on the winning side. ‘I have others who can fill your shoes who Mossad are briefing right now. I hope they prove more useful to me than you ever did’.

  Cheryl-Ann drove away from the house knowing that her instructions for Trent’s murder to be made to look like a suicide would be followed by the letter. It was all part of what God had intended her to do and though recent events in Manchester, England had proved to be a setback she was determined to recover and fulfil God’s destiny for her to be President in 2016. But now as she drove back to Washington DC she was running late for a prayer meeting of fellow born again Christian senators. Prayer would be compulsory for every American under her Presidency. Not enough folks are getting down on their knees and asking what the good Lord wants from them. They’re getting way too selfish. And they’re all going to be needed in this war that’s coming to annihilate Islam and bring about the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. They had a big job ahead but with their friends in Israel they were going to do it because it was the Lord’s work and even their best friends would have to learn that they would be turned into their enemies if they didn’t do as they were told.

  THE END

  Also by David Menon

  The first two in the DCI Sara Hoyland series, also published by Empire, are available from Amazon and other sales outlets.

  ‘FALL FROM GRACE’

  Paul Foster is a social worker trying to make a difference. But what links him to an aristocratic Nazi sympathiser accused of harbouring a war criminal? And what has happened to his soldier boyfriend Jake over in Afghanistan?

  In this, the first DCI Sara Hoyland mystery, the intrepid detective with a murky past enters a long-forgotten world of political intrigue. Long-held grudges and several families' secrets re-surface to further muddy the waters in this controversial thriller.

  ‘BEAUTIFUL CHILD’

  Sean Patrick, ‘Paddy’ O’Brien is about to complete a life sentence for murder in HMP Manchester. A psycho-therapist, Angela Barker, is counselling him as he prepares for freedom after being incarcerated for over twenty years. He isn’t an easy patient. Not because of himself. Angela finds Paddy a relatively easy nut to crack and enjoys his Australian accent. But the life story he unfolds is difficult and potentially fatal for anyone who knows it.

  Rita Makin is an ordinary woman in her late middle age who is reliving her first flush of youth. She’s having an affair and it’s making her feel more alive than she’s done for years. But when a brutal killer strikes she recognises her assailant and wonders in her last few seconds of life why he would want to kill her.


  Father Brendan O’Farrell at the Holy Saints Catholic church in Salford is being more rebellious against the church hierarchy as his retirement nears. But what about his relationship with the presbytery housekeeper Ann Schofield? A woman he’s known since the church had an orphanage that sent children to another life in Australia? A woman who has been married to her husband Bill for many years and been a devoted mother to her now grown up children, Matt and Susie? But a woman who carries a secret that nobody would believe of her almost saintly regular church going image.

  DCI Sara Hoyland and her team are challenged by another investigation that goes back through the years and inflicts blood and pain on those in the present day. As the murder count rises she and her officers work to find the connection between them and when they do it forms a damning indictment of Britain’s former policy of the forced migration of children to Australia that some of them still feel the pain of even to this day, driving them to seek revenge on those who’d abandoned them.