A Kind Of Wild Justice (29 page)

She had even been forbidden by Paul from explaining the situation to them. ‘Joanna, there was no contract between this newspaper and the Phillipses,’ he had reminded her repeatedly. ‘That is the legal truth and we’re sticking to it. Classic denial. It worked for Jimbo O’Donnell and it’ll work for us.’

That had made her feel even more of a rat, of course, but what could she do?

‘It would be madness for you even to try to contact them, Jo,’ he had continued. ‘You must see that. If they’ve got any sense they’ll have a lawyer in on the act now. They’ve probably been told to tape any conversations they have with you or anybody representing this newspaper. You really mustn’t even discuss it with them.’

She had known he was right, which made it harder.

He’d put a hand on her arm, continuing more gently, ‘Look, Jo, I know you feel bad about this and so do I.’

She hadn’t been convinced of that, but she let it pass.

‘There’s just no alternative. At least we tried to help them, tried to bring O’Donnell to justice. Nobody could have predicted that it would all go pear-shaped again.’

She hadn’t been convinced of that either. Her own and Fielding’s judgements had so far proved to be faulty in every aspect of this case. And Nuffield had turned out to be a huge disappointment.

For once she did as she was told. She dodged all phone calls from the Phillips family and never called them back. Eventually they got the message.

Both she and Paul had since received letters from a firm of Exeter solicitors saying that they represented Bill and Rob Phillips who were planning to take them to the Press Complaints Commission and sue them for breach of contract if they did not pay the costs of the court case as agreed.

Paul said they didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of winning such a case and, anyway, he’d have a large bet that when it came to it they wouldn’t take the risk. ‘Let’s face it, they can’t afford to, can they?’ he remarked.

Joanna squirmed inside.

As for the Press Complaints Commission, Paul went on to say that he would be more afraid of them if he paid the Phillipses than if he didn’t. Inasmuch as any editor was afraid of the Commission, he concluded.

Again she had been forced to agree with him, even though she didn’t like it. Everything about this whole case continued to leave a nasty taste in her mouth.

Paul was proved right. There had so far been no follow-up to the letter from the Exeter solicitors. It seemed likely that the Phillipses were indeed not going to proceed with their threat to sue the
Comet
. But Joanna had got one prediction right. When they finally realised they were not going to get any more money out of the
Comet
without one hell of a fight, the family decided to go as public as possible, giving an interview to a local news agency, which put out their story to all the nationals.

Unfortunately, the family’s bad fortune continued
and their timing was atrocious. They had embarked on this course of action only yesterday, thus having to do battle for space with the story of O’Donnell’s disappearance. The
Mail
, glorying in its exclusive, did not even give the Phillipses’ allegations a line. The other papers ran stories in their first editions – although not as big as might have been hoped because more or less the same claims had already been made in open court – but the ‘O’Donnell missing’ revelation virtually wiped them out of later editions altogether. Rather guiltily, Joanna had to acknowledge that while unlucky for the Phillipses, it was quite fortunate for her that the two stories had broken on the same day. Jimbo’s disappearance had so overshadowed the Phillipses’ story that Paul seemed barely to have even noticed it.

Joanna tried to put out of her mind everything about which she could do nothing, and concentrated on attempting to find a really sensational follow-up to the
Mail
exclusive. She did not succeed but, fortunately for her, neither did anyone else.

The
Mail
, predictably, remained ahead. After all, they had the O’Donnells tied up and they were famously good at this kind of story. The
Comet
’s involvement with the private prosecution, however misguided it now seemed to have been, had until this latest development at least meant that the paper had been continuously ahead of the game. The
Mail
did not like to be beaten. Ever. Now it was firmly in front. The day after its initial exclusive the
Mail
carried a picture story of an old and frail-looking Sam O’Donnell, his walking stick to the forefront, outside the police station at which he had finally officially reported his son missing.

It was a brilliant image. However, the word was, in spite of official police protestation to the contrary, that Sam had been greeted with no great enthusiasm and there were few signs of any major police activity in looking for his son.

Joanna called Fielding again.

He had calmed down somewhat and seemed to be taking some pleasure at last from the prospect, however remote, that Jimbo O’Donnell might have come to harm. ‘You’re right, nobody’s rushing around on this one up at the Met,’ he told Jo. ‘But why should they? It’s not just that we all know the bugger’s a villain and of a particularly nasty kind, too. He’s also a grown man and, unfortunately, a free one. He’s not considered vulnerable – that would be a laugh. He could have gone anywhere off his own bat. There’s no evidence to show that he may have been taken against his will or harmed in any way – not like poor Angela.’ She had heard him sigh at the other end of the phone. ‘There’s no reason why there should be a major search on for him. He’ll go on the missing persons register, now that it’s been reported that he’s disappeared, and that will be about it. For a while, at any rate. Nobody could expect otherwise,’ he paused. ‘Except Sam the Man, of course,’ he reflected wryly.

Joanna’s discomfiture continued. Three days later
Private Eye
dropped with an uncannily accurate summary of Paul Potter’s public rollicking of his wife. In the notorious ‘Street of Shame’ section they referred to Potter as Smile in the Back and predictably dubbed Joanna his ‘pouting hackette spouse’.

Cracks are showing at last in the tabloid world’s dream marriage [pronounced the magazine with obvious satisfaction]. And Old Smile in the Back will be straight-faced indeed if any kind of scandal rocks his long-coveted desire for a knighthood – widely expected to be announced in the New Year’s honours list.

However, Potter needn’t worry. The
Eye
is assured that rumours of recent Ugandan discussions between the gorgeous pouting Lady Potter-to-be and DI Mike Fielding, her old flame now in deep water over the part he played in the revival of the O’Donnell case, are completely unfounded.

Joanna groaned inside when she, alone at her desk thankfully, encountered the barbed item in her early copy of the magazine. There was no telling how Paul would react. He too, of course, received the earliest possible edition of
Private Eye
, as did virtually everyone in newspapers. It was a bit like a house magazine, really. Paul would have scanned the rag already and read the piece. If he hadn’t, some kind soul would be sure to point it out to him.

She saw her husband several times during the day, including at morning and afternoon conference, but he made no mention of the
Private Eye
piece. She didn’t either, in spite of being well aware of occasional little giggling groups of staff falling into unnatural silence as soon as she approached. But she kept her own counsel, pretended not to notice, said nothing. Give nobody the satisfaction of seeing that you were hurt or in any way affected. That was one thing that had remained the same throughout all the
changes she had witnessed within newspapers. If there was one thing worse than being the subject of a typically snide
Private Eye
piece, it would be to let the buggers know they had got to you – in particular the buggers who had been responsible for supplying the relevant information.

Though Paul did not mention the item to her that day, or even give any indication that he had read it, she knew him well enough to be quite sure that he had, and that this was the reason for him looking unusually tight-lipped. She dreaded the confrontation that was surely coming.

At home that evening, over a nowadays increasingly rare late supper together, Paul at last brought up the subject. ‘I’m absolutely fucking furious about that
Private Eye
piece, Jo,’ he told her, and she knew he really must be, because he so rarely swore.

‘I know. It is bollocks, though; I hope you realise that.’

‘What?’ He glanced at her with his eyebrows raised as if not quite following her train of thought. ‘Oh, you mean the Fielding stuff?’ Paul’s tone was very reasonable. ‘I don’t enjoy reading that sort of thing about my wife, but I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later after the court case. That damned picture everybody carried didn’t help. And you do insist on still remaining in contact with the man.’

‘He’s the best contact we’ve got on this; in fact, he’s about the only one left, Paul,’ she said.

‘Yes, I know,’ he countered. ‘You still have a fixation for him, though, I’m aware of that even if you’re not yourself. But I don’t really think there’s anything between you any more. And anyway, it’s not
that which has made me so mad. It’s all that stuff from morning conference. If I knew which one of our guys had sold us down the river like that I’d sack whoever it was at once. Jesus!’

She couldn’t help a small smile. Paul’s reactions were rarely predictable. He never failed to surprise her and often to impress her.

The following day the law lords ruled that the appeal court which had overturned the murder conviction of Michael Weir had been wrong. This was the case which had been used as a precedent by the defence in the ill-fated private prosecution of Jimbo O’Donnell.

The appeal court’s judgement that DNA samples obtained during the investigation of one offence could not be used in an unrelated case had been crucial to the failure of the committal proceedings.

The law lords, however, were damning. ‘The austere interpretation which the court of appeal adopted is not only in conflict with the plain words of the statute but also produces results which are contrary to good sense,’ they said.

Too late, thought Joanna glumly. If only O’Donnell was in court now, that ruling could have made all the difference. But Jimbo had now faced every possible charge concerning the abduction and death of Angela Phillips. Double jeopardy was still the law. He couldn’t be tried again.

Four days later it all became academic. James Martin O’Donnell’s body was discovered on Dartmoor, not far from the disused tin mine which had become the tomb of the raped and murdered Angela Phillips twenty-one years earlier. He had been found early one morning by a group of ramblers and
it was as if his killer had planned for him to be discovered. Jimbo had been buried in the shallowest of graves which, although in a remote part of the moor, had been only roughly filled in and was almost on the edge of the kind of track that was bound to be popular with walkers. The grave was so shallow that the heavy rains of the previous evening had washed away enough of the loose soil covering Jimbo for the fingers of his right hand to be left actually sticking out of the ground. It was this grisly sight that had alerted the ramblers.

O’Donnell was naked, his body caked with his own blood. And his cut-off penis had been stuffed into his mouth. Medical examination was later to prove both that his penis had been removed with a none too sharp knife shortly before his death and also that he had been buried alive.

Joanna learned of the discovery of O’Donnell’s body from Fielding. He might be out of favour with his bosses but Dartmoor remained his patch. The seasoned detective didn’t miss much.

She was stunned. It was something else she hadn’t expected. Was this story never going to roll over? In her mind she had half dismissed the whole business of Jimbo’s disappearance as yet another O’Donnell stunt. But he had been murdered, and in such a dramatic and significant way. Buried alive. His cock in his mouth. Found near where Angela Phillips had died. The first constructive thought that crossed her mind was that it had to be a revenge killing.

‘It’s going to be announced at a press conference later today, after he’s been formally identified,’ Fielding told her in a telephone call just after morning conference. He was at Heavitree Road police station. He spoke very quietly. She could understand that he did not want to be overheard. It was good of him to call her. She supposed it was for old times’ sake. Mind you, she had stuck her neck out on his instigation and, thanks to him, her head was almost as much on the block in a different sort of way as his. She deserved his help. That did not mean he would necessarily always give it. On this occasion, though, Fielding had come up trumps. ‘Tommy O’Donnell’s on his way to the mortuary in Exeter as we speak,’ he
went on. ‘It’s a formality, though. We all know what O’Donnell looks like well enough. He hasn’t decomposed that much yet, and there’s that tattoo on his arm. I thought you’d like a lead on it.’

‘Thanks, Mike, I appreciate it,’ she told him. She did too. The
Mail
would already be working on it for certain. They would be keeping their grip tight on the O’Donnells. If Tommy O’Donnell was on his way to Exeter the chances were that a
Mail
team was hard on his heels – maybe even with him. She didn’t have the O’Donnells and she sure as hell didn’t have the Phillipses any more. All she had was one Mike Fielding.

She pumped him for any extra information he could give her. ‘Have you seen the body yourself?’ she asked.

‘Nope. C’mon, Jo, I’m off the case, aren’t I? If I survive this lot at all I’m not likely to be doing much more than shuffling papers till I can pick up my pension and get out.’

Not that again, she thought. But she passed no comment. After all, she did realise that her own financial situation was a very fortunate one.

There appeared to be little more that he could or would tell her. When she ended the call she realised that neither of them had expressed their feelings on O’Donnell’s death or the manner of it. Nor the significance of it. That was perhaps strange. For herself, she had been too shocked. She leaned back in her chair, stretching out her legs, and allowed herself the luxury of a minute or two to think over what she had just learned. She could not avoid a sense of satisfaction that Jimbo O’Donnell had met both an early and undoubtedly agonising death, but not
nearly as much satisfaction as she would have obtained from seeing him found guilty of the murder or at least the kidnap of Angela Phillips and properly revealed as the monster he had undoubtedly been. As far as the law was concerned he had died an innocent man and she was almost surprised to find that still mattered to her.