Good Girl Gone Bad

By Ben Westerham

Meeting the perfect woman can have its downsides, as London based PI David Good is about to find out.

Good girls can seem ten-a-penny at times and some people would have you believe they're sweet little things that wouldn't harm a hair on a squirrel's back. And in 1980s south London, private investigator David Good thinks he's been lucky enough to find his very own example of well-behaved perfection.

But he really ought to have known better and it's not long before he finds things are not all he was hoping for. In fact, he's not got much further than a less than intimate lunch for two, when things start to go seriously pear-shaped, and almost terminal.

Join a love-filled Good as he wanders blindly into someone else's nightmare and find out just what it is that ends up leaving such a sour taste in his cynical little mouth.

“Just love the way Ben Westerham writes, love his style, the humour and his normalness, is that a word? Don't care. Great book. Great story and lots of humour worth reading again.” Amazon UK review.

This book is part of the David Good, private investigator series, which can be read in any order you like.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ben Westerham
• Release date: Apr 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781911085034

Ben Westerham

Ben is the author of two crime and mystery series. The David Good private investigator stories are set in 1980s London, featuring a PI in tune with his neck of the woods and in possession of some distinctly pliable morals. The Banbury Cross Murder Mystery stories are classic murder mysteries set in the rural market town of Banbury during the early 1960s, featuring the curmudgeonly Inspector Leslie Dykeman and the irascible Sergeant Stanley Shapes.Ben's writing places an emphasis on strongly developed characters and invariably comes served with a side-order of humour.Born in London, Ben now lives in rural Northamptonshire in the English Midlands, with his family and a heavily over-worked computer.He writes just about every day and some of the resulting stories and other material is made available for free exclusively to readers who register here http://www.benwesterham.com/subscribe/.For more information please visit www.benwesterham.com.

Book preview

Good Girl Gone Bad

David Good Private Investigator Series

By Ben Westerham

Also by Ben Westerham

DAVID GOOD PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR SERIES

The Strawberry Girl

Good Investigations

Good Girl Gone Bad

Too Good to Die

Smart Way to Die

The Good Con

Good and the Vanishing Act

SHORTS IN THE DARK SERIES

Collector of Crimes

Shattered Dreams

50FOR30 SERIES OF MICRO SHORT STORIES

50for30 Series One

50for30 Series Two

Published by Close9 Publishing

Copyright (c) 2016 Ben Westerham

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-1-911085-03-4

To Phillip, the youngest of our brood, for all those times you were left with the orange flavoured sweets and, most of all, for being with us still. Love from Eddie.

When a Drawer is Nothing Other Than a Draw

In this book, I make full use of the version of English spoken by people from an area that takes in south London and north Kent. That does mean you will sometimes need to turn the other cheek when given offence by what would otherwise be seen as a grammatical error. Perhaps the best example of this, and certainly the one most often highlighted to me, is the use of the word draw in place of drawer. If this is the kind of thing that gives you sleepless nights then you might want to look elsewhere for your next read.

All the best,

Ben Westerham.

Table of Contents

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Part One

Don't ever tell me a good girl can't do bad. And I'm not talking about being late for work or telling someone a whopping big lie. If you ask me, good girls can be the baddest there are, if the fancy takes them. Maybe it's because they save it all up for one big splurge, then go mad bad. I don't know, but what I do know is that anyone who tries telling you some little darling of theirs wouldn't say boo to a goose is either stupid, misinformed or both. Any goody two shoes type should carry a health warning: 'Danger, Good Girl. May go bad at any moment'. At least then you'd know to be on your guard and ready for a nasty turn of events, instead of running the risk of getting caught out.

So, what, you might ask, brought about this unhappy view of the world? Well, for one thing, my little sis, Kim, is a good girl; there's no doubting that. But I know her inside out, back to front and upside down and I saw what she got up to when she was little. Knock and run, chilli powder in the food of the neighbour's dog and telling her best mate that the school hunk had the hots for her, when really he thought she looked like the proverbial back-end of a bus. Evil. Pure evil! If you could leave it at that, you'd still think all good girls are, well, good, but that's not really how it is and recent developments will back me to the hilt in this respect.

Wednesday afternoons are pretty quiet down the High Street in Peckham. Half the shops still close early and everyone's too grumpy to be much interested in spending, because it's the middle of the week and the weekend still feels like it's a long, long way off. Work does that to you; makes you grumpy. She was tall, dark and slim as a lamp-post and when she walked past me the world was filled with the smell of pineapple. I know, I know, but what can I say. She whiffed of pineapple and I mean that in a nice way. Well, she could have stunk of plenty of other things that would have been a lot worse. She didn't notice me, or pretended she didn't. I thought the smile I gave her was unmissable, but maybe not. Her jeans-clad tickety-boo bum and long legs had me staring happily and there was so much dark hair piled up on her head you could have housed a small family in there without anyone noticing. I was temporarily in love, or something along those lines. It had happened before, would happen again and wouldn't last long this time; once she was gone, that was that. Next please.

Funny, though, how these moments can come back to haunt you. It took less than a minute for her to disappear from sight and out of my life. Or so I thought. A woman I'd never seen before and probably wouldn't see again. Blimey, I