A Kind Of Wild Justice (23 page)

There was silence when she had finished speaking.

Rob glanced nervously at his mother who did not seem to be reacting at all. It was almost as if she had not heard a word Joanna had said. His father was fiddling with a teaspoon on the table before him, turning it round and round, staring down, intent, as if what he was doing was of vital import.

Mary Phillips spoke first. ‘I don’t see what difference it makes,’ she said, holding out her hands palm upwards, which made the fleshy parts of the tops of her arms wobble alarmingly. ‘It was more than suspecting. We’ve always known that bastard killed Angela.’

‘The difference is that now it can be proved. Beyond reasonable doubt.’

Bill Phillips looked up. ‘Is there going to be another trial, then? Is that it? So why haven’t the police told us?’

Joanna shook her head. ‘O’Donnell can’t be tried again, not for murder. Not an acquitted man.’ She explained about double jeopardy. ‘The police decided not to tell you because they didn’t want to upset you all over again when they are not in a position to do anything constructive about it.’

She could feel Bill Phillips’s tired old eyes boring into her. Red-rimmed. Just as they had so often been all those years ago. ‘That wouldn’t worry you, of course, upsetting people, would it?’ he snapped at her. ‘Your lot don’t care who you hurt, do you, as long as you get a story. So what are you after this time, that’s what I want to know? Last time you paid O’Donnell to talk to you, tell you his lies, make money out of what he did to our poor dead Angela. This time you’ve come to us. What can we possibly tell you that will make a headline in that dreadful rag you work for?’ His voice grew louder and angrier as he spoke. ‘What do you want with us?’ he shouted at her finally. Then he slumped back in his seat, breathing heavily. The exertion of his outburst took it out of him. Joanna saw Rob glance at his father with the same weary concern he had earlier displayed towards his mother.

This poor bloody family, she thought. All their lives in tatters because of this awful thing.

She took Bill Phillips’s comments on the chin. It was what she had expected and what she had tried to warn Fielding about. Bill Phillips had indeed remembered the O’Donnell buy-up and her byline. She doubted he had ever been able to forget anything concerning his daughter’s disappearance and death. Joanna could find little to quarrel with in any of the charges Bill had levelled at her. She had always been quite deeply affected by the family’s plight and by what had happened to Angela, but she could hardly expect the Phillipses to believe that. ‘I want justice,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’ve come to see you. I want justice for Angela, as I know you do. And only through you, through this
family, can that be achieved.’ She knew she had attracted their attention. Each set of eyes was riveted on her.

She carried on then, explaining everything. Telling them how the CPS had turned down the police application to try O’Donnell for kidnap and rape and on what grounds. ‘But the CPS is a public service using public money. They rarely knowingly take chances, however slight. Not in the public interest is a euphemism for saying that there are other prosecutions pending with virtually no risk factor at all. I believe the CPS is being overly cautious on this one. I believe this is a situation crying out for a private prosecution. You see, the law is starting to change. Timing could be everything …’

She told them about the Human Rights Act and how it would become law in October, and the implications it would have on cases like O’Donnell’s; how even though the double-jeopardy exemption article in the European Convention was not being adopted, British courts would still be required to take it into consideration. ‘The right barrister could make hay with that,’ she said, unsure whether she had used the farming analogy deliberately or not.

She could see she had excited the family’s interest, won them round a little. She was good at winning people round. That was, after all, what she had done for a living almost all her adult life.

‘Would it really be possible, after all this time?’ asked Rob.

She nodded and was about to speak when Bill Phillips effectively killed the moment.

‘No, it won’t be possible, Rob,’ he said, his previously quavering voice quite firm. ‘Have you any
idea how much a court case like that would cost? If we lost, the costs would cripple us. You know better than anyone the financial losses we have suffered over the last few years. All this family has left is this farm – and the boy, of course.’ He glanced fondly towards his grandson. ‘I want him to have Five Tors and a chance to build it up again. The rest is history.’

Again Joanna was about to speak, to explain what it might be possible for the
Comet
to do for them, when she was prevented from doing so by Les Phillips.

‘No, grandad, it’s not history,’ he cried out suddenly. ‘All my life I’ve been haunted by what happened to Angela. I never even knew her and it’s as if she’s by my side day in and day out. Sometimes I don’t even want the farm. The memories it carries haunt me. Let’s take this bastard to court and maybe we can finally bury Angela at the same time as we bury O’Donnell.’

The rest of family stared at him in shocked silence.

Les flushed and spoke again at once, suddenly realising, it seemed, what he had said and the way it must have sounded. ‘Uh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that …’ he began.

His grandfather touched his hand with his. ‘We know, boy, we know,’ he said gently.

Joanna spoke then. Very quietly, very deliberately. ‘The
Comet
may be able to help,’ she said. ‘I may be able to persuade the editor to pay for the case. It won’t be easy … I’ll have to deliver. You’ll have to help me …’

‘Yes, and I can imagine only too well the kind of help you want.’ Bill Phillips still didn’t sound very friendly, although Joanna thought he was perhaps
more resigned to the way things were than anything else.

Rob shifted in his chair as if he was in physical discomfort and yet again glanced at his father anxiously. Joanna knew that after the trial and the
Comet
’s publication of O’Donnell’s side of the story the older man had never talked to the press again. And he had always been outraged when money had been offered, making it quite clear that the very thought of making money out of his daughter’s torment was repugnant to him. That was the way the whole family had always seen it.

Would that be the way they would see it now, too, she wondered. It was different. There was something concrete on offer. Something perhaps that could be done in the name of justice. Or was that as much of a joke to him as it all too often was for her? She waited, as did the rest of the family, for Bill to speak. He might be old before his time and frail, but he was still the acknowledged head of this family, there was no doubt about that. They were a traditional lot the Phillipses.

‘I’ll think about it,’ Bill told her eventually. ‘The family needs to talk. Alone,’ he added pointedly.

She took the hint and left.

Two days later Rob Phillips called her on her mobile. ‘OK, we’ll give it a go,’ he said. ‘But I tell you now, if this goes wrong it’ll kill my father.’

‘It won’t go wrong, Rob, not again, I won’t let it,’ she responded instantly.

She began to put the plan into operation then. First she had to convince Paul, who needed quite a lot of persuading to allow the paper to become involved. He
had no doubts about the newsworthiness of a reincarnation of the Phillips case, but he needed to be certain that the case would be won. No newspaper ever wanted to back a losing cause. He also wanted to be sure of the family’s commitment and of Joanna’s control over them. ‘If we go ahead with this I don’t want it known that we are funding the prosecution,’ he said. ‘That would put a question mark over the integrity of our coverage of the case and also, if I know your average jury, probably prejudice the likelihood of a successful prosecution. They all love to hate the tabloid press, which you’re every bit as aware of as I am.’

Jo gave him more assurances than she had any right to, as journalists almost always do when trying to sell a dangerous idea to their editors. As a rule the fact that she was his wife made no difference at all to any editorial decisions he might make concerning her. But she did wonder later if he had been influenced by his relationship with her on this one occasion. He knew how much it had always affected her.

‘OK,’ he said eventually. ‘I’ll go for it, but I want a proper legal assessment first. Get yourself an appointment with Nigel Nuffield.’

Joanna’s heart soared. She had never met Nuffield but she knew his reputation, based on a near hundred per cent success record. He was a top bleeding-hearts barrister. He saw himself as a leading human rights campaigner – at least that was the image he liked to cultivate. Joanna doubted his sincerity, as she did that of virtually all the barristers she had ever encountered, but Nuffield was high profile, a great performer and clever. He was also publicity-mad. Defence was his usual game, justice for the wrongly
convicted. Attempting to get justice for a victim in such unusual circumstances would be a new departure for him. But then, it was all going to be new. That was the whole point.

Jo didn’t think the man would be able to resist.

Nuffield saw her the very next day. Joanna wasn’t surprised. Any case a paper like the
Comet
was behind was likely to excite his interest and this one more than most.

It was with considerable satisfaction that she watched his reaction to her story, as she sat in an armchair – several inches lower than Nuffield’s own chair, which she did not doubt for one moment was a deliberate arrangement – in the famous barrister’s Lincoln’s Inn chambers. Gilt-framed English landscapes – Jo was almost sure one was an original Constable – hung from oak-panelled walls lined with unmistakably expensive antique furniture. Whether or not his concern for human rights was genuine, Nigel Nuffield certainly always made sure he got his pound of flesh.

He was tall, handsome and elegant with abundant white hair – the recipient of regular silver rinses, Jo suspected – swept back from a learned forehead and gold-rimmed spectacles perched on an imposing nose. He oozed Old Etonian charm and self-assurance. His personal vanity was legend. Nuffield was special and he knew it. Jo didn’t think she liked him much, but she didn’t care. There surely could not be a better man for the job. Approaching sixty now, Nigel Nuffield had been at the summit of his profession for more than twenty years.

‘It would certainly be a ground-breaking case,’ he
remarked languidly, unknowingly echoing Fielding’s earlier comment. ‘Of course, the rights of victims also deserve to be fought for. And I quite agree, if we make sure we go for committal after 2 October there will be a whole new slant to the proceedings. I think we could win. I really do. Tell Paul that’s my considered opinion.’

So Joanna high-tailed it straight back to Canary Wharf, secured the final nod from Paul, and produced a powerful story focusing on the Phillipses’ intention to take out a private kidnap and rape prosecution against the man they believed had killed their Angela. Whatever her husband’s reasons for allowing her to go ahead, he could not be anything but pleased by the result, in the first instance at any rate. Joanna’s story was highly emotive stuff. And it was of course the
Comet
’s splash the next day.

When Paul Potter made a decision he knew how to follow through, how to have the courage of his convictions. That was one of the many qualities which made him such an impressive editor. A leader article, written by Paul himself, called for Britain’s ancient double-jeopardy laws to be changed, and for Article Four of the Seventh Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights to be adopted into the forthcoming UK Human Rights Act. That was not feasible, of course, the process of Parliament being far too lengthy and involved for such swift action, but it was a nice attention-grabbing ploy. The leader also demanded a realistic, specific and up-to-date review of the laws concerning the use of DNA in Britain’s courtrooms.

Inside was the heart-string-pulling interview with
Angela’s mother, which Jo had already persuaded Lillian to give and had put together while still waiting for the final go-ahead.
NEVER A MINUTE PASSES WHEN
I
DO NOT THINK OF MY ANGEL
was the headline on the kind of centre spread calculated to leave not a dry eye at any breakfast table in the land.
May her killer rot in hell
screamed the strapline. ‘All we want is justice,’ was another line.

Potter and the paper’s lawyers had pored over the copy all the previous evening. O’Donnell was an acquitted man and they could lay themselves open to a crippling lawsuit from him. But Joanna knew that her husband had seen his paper to bed very happily – satisfied that the
Comet
had gone as far as it could in convincing the nation that O’Donnell was guilty as sin without ever actually saying so.

Next day there was uproar. Every other news outlet in the country, print, TV, radio and Internet, picked up the
Comet
’s story.

Fielding phoned Joanna some time around mid-morning. ‘I knew you’d do it,’ he said, to her immense irritation. Followed by, ‘Fucking great. You’re a genius. This time the bastard’s going down. I can feel it in my water.’

He would never get to be politically correct, would Mike.

The next four months flew by in a kind of mad whirl for Joanna. Having made the case happen, she was determined to be at the heart of it. She felt that the Phillipses needed her constant support, there were meetings with Nuffield in London and there was her column to write – in which she mercilessly flagged the forthcoming prosecution as much as she could without too blatantly flouting the law. And then there was Emma, seemingly so self-possessed and independent, but whose very lack of reproach made Jo feel all the more neglectful as she spent far more time away from home than usual in the office or in Devon, and half the time when she was at home on the phone or tapping into her computer.

However, this was the kind of campaigning journalism she had always wanted to be involved in. And although it was draining, everything went remarkably smoothly. Until the committal proceedings at any rate, for which a date was eventually set, more or less according to plan, at the end of October at Okehampton Magistrates’ Court. The Phillips family, once they had made their decision, displayed determination and tenacity in bringing about their private prosecution and even began to show signs of looking forward to this first step in the legal proceedings which could ultimately bring O’Donnell to justice. Joanna was with them all the way.