A Kind Of Wild Justice (12 page)

Jo grinned at the memory. Let the bastards think they’d got to you and you were dead. Banter and lack of concern. Looking as if you couldn’t care less – even when you did. Those were your only weapons. And they weren’t much when you were one of a handful of women among several hundred men.

Paul Potter, a talented young feature writer, was still at his desk as Joanna had rather hoped he might be, working on a spread featuring unsolved murders of young women – the peg, of course, being the Angela Phillips case. Joanna knew that he was looking into what had happened in the investigations into each case, some of them going back many years. He was talking to the families and the police officers involved, and sometimes to suspects. In the UK, no unsolved murder investigation was ever closed. The only exceptions were when the police were damn sure they had found the murderer but either could not gather enough evidence to go to court, or their prime suspect was acquitted. Then inquiries were often quietly folded.

There was plenty for Paul to work with. He was nice-looking in an unassuming sort of way, quiet, clever, thoughtful and a good listener. Sometimes she wondered what he was doing in Fleet Street. It didn’t seem his sort of place. He was excellent at his job; it was just that he was so different from the others. It
certainly never occurred to her, or indeed anyone else in those days, that he was particularly ambitious.

She paused to speak to him as she passed. ‘How’s it going?’ she enquired.

He looked up in mild surprise. ‘Hi, Jo, didn’t expect to see you until tomorrow.’

‘No, well, it was one of those times at home when I reckoned I’d actually rather be here. Anyway, maybe I can get a quiet hour or so to catch up with the backlog of stuff that is no doubt waiting on my desk.’

There was no one else in the Street of Shame to whom she would have confided even that much about her troubled home life. She knew all too well that another rule of survival in a newspaper office was not to bring your troubles to work with you. Not ever. The guys could do that occasionally, but never the women.

Paul accepted her small confidence without comment, as he almost always did. He never asked questions. ‘Quiet hour or so? In this place? You have to be joking,’ he told her with his familiar tight smile.

‘Oh, well, quiet ten minutes, maybe?’

‘No chance.’ He smiled again. ‘I’ll have wrapped this up in the next hour, I reckon. It’s been a tough one. Not very cheery material, either. Then I’m going to the Stab for a pint. Care to join me?’

The Stab in the Back was the name by which the
Comet
pub, the White Hart, was invariably known. ‘Sure, that’d be good,’ Jo replied casually. So much for working! But the truth was that the possibility of a quiet pint with Paul had been in the back of her mind since she had decided to go into the office. He was perfect company for her. Sometimes he seemed to be
the only person in her life with whom she could spend time without some kind of stress. He did not indulge in the constant, often lewd, banter of so many of her colleagues. He made absolutely no demands on her. She could talk shop with him with more freedom than with anyone else and drown her sorrows without fear. Even if she later felt she had made a bit of a fool of herself, he had never let her down.

He was not only sensitive but also safe. To her those were his finest attributes. And it did not occur to her that he might regard her as anything more than a casual drinking mate.

Joanna was halfway along Knightsbridge on her way home from the
Comet
office just five days later when she was called on her car phone and told that a man had been arrested in connection with the abduction and murder of Angela Phillips. He had yet to be charged. ‘I’m on my way back,’ she said as, with a screech of tyre rubber, she instantly swung her car into an illegal U-turn just past the Beauchamp Place traffic lights.

The black cab behind her had to brake and swerve to avoid hitting her and the driver shouted a mouthful of abuse at her through his open window. Joanna barely heard him. She belted back along Knightsbridge, racing two red lights, and roared the MG around Hyde Park Corner without even attempting to wait for a gap in the traffic. The other vehicles could dodge her. And thankfully, unlike in America where they kept driving at you because they were so unused to motorists breaking rules, in London they almost always did dodge you – even if accompanied by much horn-blowing and colourfully vocal road rage.

On Constitution Hill, Jo switched her headlights on to full beam and drove down the middle of the road, hoping to God she didn’t encounter a policeman. It was nearly nine on an early September evening, most workers had gone home or were
ensconced in a central London pub or restaurant for the night, the theatre crowd were safely locked in for at least another hour. The roads were mercifully clear, for once. She belted past Buckingham Palace, sped down Birdcage Walk and turned left at Westminster along the Embankment. Big Ben was striking nine as she passed the Houses of Parliament.

There was only an hour to go until first-edition time, an hour in which to produce what would be regarded as an early story, to be expanded and updated for later editions. She knew Tom Mitchell himself was editing that night and was glad of it. Sometimes, when his deputy or one of the two assistant editors allowed to edit at night were on duty, they erred on the side of caution a little too much for her liking.

The night desk would already be on the case and almost every reporter on late duty would have been assigned a task which would form just a part of the night’s coverage. When a big story like the arrest of the Beast of Dartmoor broke, every conceivable angle was covered as quickly as possible, somebody would be hammering out a recap of Angela’s disappearance, a number of reporters would be trying to contact Angela’s friends and family, and others would be trying to find out exactly who had been arrested. Frank Manners and Freddie Taylor would also have been alerted and put on the job. Manners had quite a track record of prising information out of police contacts. Joanna wanted to beat them to it.

She pulled off the Embankment by the Howard Hotel and hurtled up the tiny side street which led up to the Strand and the Aldwych, where she drove straight over the cobbles past St Clement’s Church
and turned right along Fleet Street. Jo swung a left into Fetter Lane, then a right into the office car park, manned twenty-four hours a day. She pulled noisily to a halt alongside the all-night attendant, jumped out of the car leaving the engine running, begged the man to park it for her and, within seconds, was belting up the back stairs to the newsroom. She was in far too much of a hurry to wait for the lift.

The newsroom was buzzing. You could feel it as soon as you stepped on to the murky brown carpet-tiled floor. Joanna felt the familiar rush of adrenalin. It was like getting a shot of something. On occasions it could be as good as sex. She had felt it many times before. The excitement rising inside her, the desire to get on with doing what she knew she could do so well. It was at times like this that she remembered why she had fallen in love with the job in the first place.

She went straight to the night news editor. McKane, shirtsleeves rolled up above brawny forearms, sat at the head of a clamorous news desk cluttered with piles of paper, grimy tea mugs and overflowing ashtrays. The phones didn’t ring on the desk, that really would have been bedlam. Instead, lights flashed relentlessly on mini switchboards. There were only two desk men on duty, the normal night staffing, and each seemed to be taking at least three calls simultaneously. McKane, holding a phone to an ear with one hand, passed Joanna a narrow sheaf of Press Association copy with the other. ‘Hold on a minute,’ he commanded into the receiver, then turning to her, he said, ‘This is about all we’ve got and it’s bugger all, Jo. Where did this joker come from? We didn’t even know they were close, did we?’

She shook her head. She had expected this
approach. She knew exactly what McKane was getting at. The
Comet
was completely out in the cold on the arrest. She just hoped that none of the competition had been more on the ball. Had she let go her grip on the story a bit? She didn’t think so. Either the suspect had come into the frame extremely suddenly or the boys in blue had really kept their drum tight for once.

‘Any help you can give us, Jo. We badly need a line,’ continued McKane before returning to his phone call while at the same time studying a piece of copy handed him by one of the regular night duty casuals. There was no sexist nonsense with him tonight nor would there be. He was doing what he did best. McKane was always at his most impressive when he was up against it, handling a major late-breaking story or chasing up a belter of an exclusive when the foreigns, the first editions of rival newspapers, dropped around midnight.

The only time he played games was when he was bored. And McKane got bored easily. So did most of them. It was one of things that made being married to a civilian difficult. The chaps seemed to manage it all right. Men had a way of moulding their women, or was it more that women had a way of turning themselves into the right kind of person for the man they married? Certainly women were inclined to try harder, Jo was damned sure of that.

Frank Manners was at his desk. He had left the office long before her, but she guessed that he had probably been having a few pints in the Stab or Vagabonds around the corner. Frank was just finishing a phone call and, if he was under the influence at all, he didn’t show any signs of it. But
then, much as she disliked the man she knew him to be a professional, both as a reporter and a drinker.

He also was too busy to play sexist games.

He put the phone down with a flourish as she approached. ‘James Martin O’Donnell,’ he said and he was apparently too caught up in the story to sound as triumphalist as she might have expected. ‘The Devon and Cornwall boys picked him up in London and took him straight back to Exeter. He’s not been charged yet, but they must be confident to bowl into Met territory like that.’

Jo stared at Manners in amazement. ‘Not
the
James Martin O’Donnell?’ she asked.

‘The same,’ he responded, this time sounding just a little triumphant. And she didn’t blame him.

Manners buzzed through to the news desk to give them the line, at the same time threading a sheet of copy paper into his typewriter and one-handedly typing a catchline in the top right hand corner –
O’DONNELL.

Although she was standing a good four or five feet away and the veteran crime reporter was using a standard telephone held to his ear, Joanna could clearly hear McKane’s roar. ‘
Fucking great, Frank me boy!
Right. I want every spit and fart. Got it?’

As Manners began to write, Jo took a moment to consider the information he had obtained. There wasn’t a crime correspondent in the country who didn’t know who James Martin O’Donnell was – and not many members of the public, either, not if they ever read newspapers or watched TV. The O’Donnells were a criminal family of some stature. In the fifties and sixties the Krays had ruled the London underworld. By 1980 the O’Donnells were almost as
big and had created around them the same kind of legendary personae. James Martin, known as Jimbo, was the eldest of old Sam O’Donnell’s brood. He was the natural successor to Sam’s dubious throne, although somewhere at the back of Joanna’s mind lurked the vague impression that there had always been something suspect about him. She couldn’t remember quite what.

Sam was one of the last of the old breed. You didn’t more or less run the London crime scene for years on end unless you were quite an operator. And whatever you thought about Sam you had to have a grudging admiration for the man. He and his family were also the last people Joanna would have suspected of being involved in the Beast of Dartmoor case. The O’Donnells ran their rackets and pulled their strokes. They didn’t harm civilians. Journalists, coppers, villains, they all talked about civilians. Poor Angela Phillips was a civilian. She’d been hurt. And how!

‘Christ, Frank, raping and torturing an innocent kid, leaving her to die like that, that’s not an O’Donnell sort of crime,’ she said eventually.

The older man was already typing steadily. He did not stop as he glanced up at her. He had that smug look on his face, which he always got when he was going to show off. That was all right. She had no objection whatsoever to Frank Manners in show-off mood. The man had a memory to die for, and his knowledge of criminals and often long-forgotten crimes was encyclopaedic.

He was justifiably pleased with himself because he had got there first, but even though Jo would have liked, as ever, to be the one breaking the news, she was the head of department and preferred that any of
her team should score, rather than the opposition.

‘Jimbo’s different,’ Manners told her. ‘He’s always had a reputation for being nasty with woman; word is he likes to knock ’em about. That’s how he gets his kicks. Back in sixty-nine he was jailed for rape. Served eighteen months. It was a big story at the time.’ He typed another sentence. Like almost all daily-paper journalists, Manners had perfected the art of performing several tasks at once.

That was it! A rape conviction. Joanna remembered it now, but not the details. She waited for Manners to continue as she was sure he would. He was invariably unable to resist displaying his superior knowledge of what he regarded as his patch. After just a minute or so he began to speak again. ‘It was what they call date rape nowadays, or Jimbo would have got longer. He’d picked up this girl at a club somewhere and she’d invited him back to her place. She claimed he’d taken it for granted she would have sex with him and when she resisted he pulled a knife on her – that fits too, doesn’t it, the bastard always liked knives – knocked her to the floor and forced himself on her. Big strong boy, our Jimbo. But she didn’t report it for almost a year after it allegedly happened. She claimed that when she realised who Jimbo was she didn’t dare because she was too scared of the O’Donnells. He said she’d had sex willingly and there’d been no knife. But then, he would, wouldn’t he?