A Kind Of Wild Justice (35 page)

He liked the look of her, the feel of her and, by God, he adored the taste of her. He wondered if he were still in love with her – indeed, if he had ever stopped being in love with her. He knew that he wanted to see her again, but just like the first time he was afraid of seeing too much of her.

He comforted himself that geography and both their other commitments, particularly hers, would probably look after that for them. It was unlikely that they would be able to meet very often, even if they both wanted to. He knew that this time it would not be like before. That at best it would be no more than occasional snatched meetings. Never again would they dream of being properly together. That, at least, was over.

In July 2001 Shifter Brown stood trial at Exeter Crown Court. He didn’t stand a chance of leniency. Not under the most intense police pressure, nor in court, would he say who paid him to kill Jimbo O’Donnell. He was sentenced to the mandatory life for murder and the judge recommended that he serve a minimum of twenty-two years. It was even worse than Shifter had expected, perhaps, but he had resolutely refused the one piece of information that could have helped. There was no jury, because Shifter pleaded guilty, and the hearing lasted only two days. Joanna went to Exeter to cover it, arriving the day before the proceedings began and leaving the day after.

Until then, she and Fielding had been together just three times during the four months which had passed since their afternoon in the Southampton Row hotel room. Geography had indeed taken care of it. That and fear.

Joanna had a very practical side to her. She did not want to wreck her marriage or her life. In her mind she had tried to think of Fielding as a failed policeman, a bit of a sad case. But there was nothing failed or sad about Mike when they were making love. She had been forced to admit that regardless of his failings and what she knew he regarded as the failure he had made of almost everything except, most perversely, perhaps his marriage, he remained the love of her life. That frightened her. Perhaps it had been partly curiosity that had led her to that Southampton Row hotel room. She wasn’t sure. Partly anger at her husband, of course, no doubt about that. But she hadn’t really expected the old feelings to be quite as intact and it had been something of a shock.

She couldn’t stop herself sleeping with Fielding
whenever the opportunity presented itself, although she was not prepared to take any silly risks. It seemed he felt the same. So they had to settle for very occasional torrid afternoons.

The trial, however, gave them, albeit for such a short time, almost unlimited opportunity.

God knows, she thought, what Fielding told his wife, but he more or less took up residence in her Exeter hotel room for the three nights she was there, slipping in and out via the fire escape, which she opened for him at agreed times, so that he would hopefully not be seen by anyone who might recognise him.

She couldn’t believe the sexual energy they managed to maintain.

‘Not bad for two middle-aged folk,’ she said one night after their lovemaking had been particularly extravagant.

‘I forget what a tired, worn-out old bugger I am when I’m with you,’ he told her. And his eyes went all crinkly as he smiled and reached out for her yet again.

When the trial ended she had not wanted to return to London, even though she did feel guilty whenever she thought about Paul and Emily. Particularly Emily, whom she had found herself phoning much more often from Devon this time than she usually did when she was away.

She realised she was going to miss her lover dreadfully. And yet she knew that something else had not changed with the years: she and Mike Fielding were not going anywhere. Not ever.

Two weeks after his sentencing, Shifter Brown phoned Joanna from jail and asked her if she would visit him.
He had something to tell her, he said, something he was sure she would want to know. And he was planning to tell her exclusively. ‘I’ll get a visiting order sent to you, personal, like. You can be my cousin. I wouldn’t want them to know who you really were.’

It would take a bit of getting used to, being Shifter Brown’s cousin, but Joanna was consumed with curiosity.

‘I’ve got a story for you, Joey,’ he said. As ever, it made her want to giggle when he called her that. ‘It’s a corker,’ he went on. But he would give her no clue as to the subject matter.

She could not resist, of course. She accepted his offer with alacrity. Shifter was in the Devon county prison at Exeter, where he had been held on remand before his sentencing and then returned for assessment. It would be another couple of months before he would be despatched to serve out the rest of his term at a maximum-security jail like Parkhurst or Long Lartin.

On the appointed day, less than a fortnight later, Jo set off down the M4 heading west. She was so focused on what she was doing that she did not even arrange to see Fielding, although she was going into his patch. ‘Maybe I’ll call him after I’ve seen Shifter,’ she had thought to herself as she swung off the M5 at the Exeter exit. But her mind was intent on the task at hand. Maybe this was the big exclusive she had been chasing. Certainly any sort of interview with Shifter inside jail had to be a story, whatever he eventually told her. She was hoping, naturally, that he was going to tell her who had hired him, although she couldn’t think what would have changed his mind about that. Shifter didn’t grass, after all.

He was convicted now, though, so sub judice no longer came into it. Shifter would be well aware of that. He was a pro. She wondered about his motive, as well as his intentions.

She was quite preoccupied with the prospect of talking to him, but had decided not to tell anybody else about it. Not even her husband and editor. In fact, particularly not him. She had made sure that her visit to Exeter prison had been arranged on one of the days when she was not expected in the office, and had deliberately delayed leaving home until her husband had already departed for Canary Wharf and Emily was safely despatched to school.

At the grim old county jail on the hill opposite Exeter Castle she was searched and her VO pass inspected before being led to the visiting room. She had been seated first at one of the small wooden tables and then Shifter was led out to her. He was wearing prison denims, which stretched over his huge shoulders. The clothes did not seem quite big enough for him. She thought that would probably offend a man who wore the kind of beautifully tailored suits she had last seen him in. He walked just as he had in the restaurant, however. As he always did, she suspected, with his huge hands hanging like weapons waiting to be loaded and put into action. He did not show the great strain he must surely be under. She had to remember that to the Shifter Browns of this world doing a stretch in prison was just a part of life, he was of the breed who prided themselves on being able to survive it. But twenty-two years! That was some sentence and surely must have shaken even him. If he served the full time recommended by the judge Shifter would be well into his sixties before he
got out, even with full remission. She studied him closely as he walked towards her. She had noticed in court that he looked even fitter than when she had lunched with him. His waist was slightly narrower, stomach flatter, jaw a little more squared. He would be spending his days working out she supposed, that was what the old lags did. They believed that if you kept the body in top condition, the mind would stay that way too. The one thing they all feared was losing their minds. Stir crazy, they had called it once.

Shifter loped across the room towards her and beamed a greeting as he sat down. ‘All right, Joey doll?’

‘I’m fine, Shifter. How about you?’

‘Been better, doll, but I can handle it.’ There was something about his expression which made her realise then what an effort he was making, not just with her for this visit, but probably every day of his life inside, determined not to go under, not to let himself be beaten.

‘You copped the big one, didn’t you?’

He nodded sagely. There was not a hint of self-pity in him. ‘Yeah, well, it wasn’t any more than I expected.’

‘You could have done yourself a favour, told them who put out the contract on Jimbo.’

‘But I don’t grass, do I?’ He smiled again.

‘So what have you brought me here today for, then? What is this corker you have for me exactly?’

‘I want to tell you the truth behind Jimbo’s murder, of course. All of it. The works, Joey. It’s yours, doll.’ He paused. ‘At a price, naturally.’

‘Ah,’ she said. So that was it. He was after money. She made no further comment.

He continued almost at once. ‘I’ll give you the lot, everything I know. If the price is right.’

She shook her head. ‘You know papers can’t pay convicted criminals any more, Shifter. You know the way things are as well as I do.’

‘All I want is for you to look after my family,’ he said then.

‘Well, that’s pretty much the same thing.’

‘Leave it out,’ he responded. ‘There’s always ways. You can do it if you want to. You know you can.’

Joanna wasn’t too sure of that, not after the Phillips deal fiasco. She would never forgive herself for that. It had made her wary of deals. But at least the courts had already done their worst with this one. Everybody knew where they stood before she and the
Comet
had been invited to get involved. ‘Is that why you didn’t speak out before?’ she asked. ‘Because you wanted to do a deal?’

He nodded. ‘Yeah. I knew I was done up like a kipper the moment the police got their hands on my van, that whatever I did I was going down for a long, long time. I figured I couldn’t do a whole lot about that whatever I told them. But then I thought that if I gave the story to a paper, exclusive like, maybe at least I could do something for my family. And I knew it was no good to anybody before the trial because you couldn’t have printed it, could you? So I reckoned the only way was to keep stumm till after I got sent down and then do a deal.’ He paused. ‘It was always going to be you, Joey doll, cos I like you, girl, trust you too.’ He smiled his strangely ingenuous smile.

God, not again, she thought, wishing for the first time in her life that she were not quite so good at
getting people to trust her. All except her husband, it seemed. And with justification now, she reminded herself. ‘I’ll do my best, Shifter, but it truly won’t be easy,’ she said.

He reached in his shirt pocket and produced a photograph, frayed around the edges from much handling, of two angelic-looking little blonde-haired girls. ‘That’s Melanie, she’s ten, and that’s Abigail, she’s nine, they’re my little princesses,’ he said, his voice full of pride.

She looked at the picture and then at him. Shifter, a professional much-feared hit man and heavy, was smiling softly down at his daughters, his eyes misty, his whole face suddenly gentle. What was it with these East End villains that they so often had this other side to them, particularly with their children? ‘I have a little girl, too, Shifter,’ she said. ‘Well, not so little, she’s almost twelve now.’ She’d told him that not because she had any desire to share any part of her family life with him, but because it was a knee-jerk reaction for her to seek out common ground with an informant or an interviewee. It was what journalists did. It was automatic.

‘You know what it’s like then, Joey, don’t you, doll? You’ll do anything for them, won’t you, anything at all.’

Joanna nodded. She didn’t think she’d ever been a particularly good mother and her daughter was absolutely the most self-possessed eleven-year-old she had ever encountered, but Shifter was right, of course. She would do anything for Emily. Whatever it took. Then an unwelcome little niggle, stemming from guilt no doubt, flitted into her mind. Even give up Mike Fielding? She pushed the thought away for
the time being and focused all her attention firmly on Shifter, who had started to speak again.

‘It’s them I want looked after. I’ve had it, doll, haven’t I? I just want to do what I can for my little princesses now.’

And if you hadn’t gone around topping people for a living you could be doing the one thing they need most, being with them and being a proper father to them, Jo thought. She didn’t say it, of course. She wanted this story dreadfully. And in any case she wasn’t sure she was in a position to make moral judgements, not even on a professional hit man. ‘Look, Shifter, you’ll have to come up with someone you trust, someone unrelated to you we can pay. We’ll set up a trust fund for your kids, how’s that? But we need a third party – and preferably not some villain with a record even longer than yours.’

Shifter grinned ingenuously. ‘I can do that. No problem. I still got some diamond mates. But how much, that’s what I want to know? It’s got to be worth having, Joey doll, worth something to the kids, you know …’

She knew. There was no point in offering a derisory amount, or he just wouldn’t talk. She thought fast. It was that tricky moment. You got nothing unless you offered money, but you didn’t really know what you were going to get until after you had. This one had to be good, though, it just had to be. ‘Ten grand,’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘No way. I want thirty minimum.’

‘You won’t get it, Shifter, not from me, not from anyone. Not any more.’

‘Well, you’ll have to do better than ten.’

She checked her watch. ‘Shifter, there’s less than half an hour left of this visit. I’m not going to waste it playing games. I’ll double my offer. Let’s call it twenty grand. You’ll not do better.’

He studied her closely. He wasn’t a fool. He was streetwise and surprisingly bright. Certainly his grasp of how newspapers worked and how he might best at least get something out of his predicament was quite impressive. As so often with villains, she thought what a shame it was that Arthur Richard Brown hadn’t used what brains and ability he had for something more worthwhile. And in his case, she had to remind herself, something less horrible and violent. Shifter, she knew, justified what he did as a kind of rough justice in the weird underworld in which he moved. It was true that you couldn’t imagine him mugging old ladies. He’d be much more likely to help them across the road or pay their bus fare. Similarly he had the abhorrence of most professional villains for sex crimes and child offences. He’d probably been quite pleased to get the contract on Jimbo, come to think of it. But he was still a thug – albeit a curiously gentlemanly one. And what he had done to Jimbo, much as she thought the bastard had deserved it, was too awful to contemplate and demonstrated all too well what Shifter was capable of.