A Kind Of Wild Justice (45 page)

He knew he’d done a good enough job on the diary to make it appear convincingly authentic. That had been a doddle for him. He’d done his five years in child protection. He’d heard kids talking about being abused by their uncles, and their mother’s boyfriends, and yes, their fathers and grandfathers. He’d taken statements, he’d read childish outpourings. They quite often wrote stuff down, these poor mixed-up, mistreated kids. He knew how they sounded, the way they wrote stuff, the words they used and the words they didn’t because they couldn’t bring themselves to, or maybe
because they didn’t even know them.

He’d typed it out laboriously on Caroline’s computer, hidden it in a homework file, but not too well and, for good measure, he’d printed the diary and left it half sticking out of a book. He knew Tommy and his wife spent time in this room, paying a sort of homage to her. You could see that’s what they did from the very look of the place. He’d done his utmost to leave the diary somewhere he felt pretty sure it would be discovered, but where it was possible that both mother and father had missed it previously. That had been the most difficult part of the job. But apparently he had managed it.

Tommy must have wondered who had tipped off
the police about the diary, of course. Mike realised how unlikely it was that he would have told anyone about it. He wouldn’t have wanted the world to know about what he believed his brother had done, he just would have wanted to sort it. But the O’Donnells had plenty of enemies, and Tommy might well have thought it could have been somebody Sam had crossed years ago, who’d done some snooping. Or perhaps he’d believed that Caroline must have confided in another kid, a school friend who’d eventually owned up to what she knew. Kids did things like that.

Fielding had been surprised when he’d learned that Tommy had used e-mail to arrange the contract. But then he’d recognised the sense of it. It had allowed Tommy to distance himself and his family from the crime. Tommy was clever and no doubt quite knowledgeable enough about the Net to realise that an Excite address on e-mails sent and received at a cyber café would give him total anonymity. Swiss bank accounts all round had taken care of the payments he’d made to Shifter, of course, and that had really been Tommy’s
style. As Shifter genuinely hadn’t known who had hired him, Tommy needn’t actually have made the second payment. But Fielding wasn’t surprised that he had. If Tommy O’Donnell made a deal he kept it. That was part of the code.

Fielding smiled. He had not killed James Martin O’Donnell. Nor had he hired the man who did. But he had been responsible all right. He had made quite sure that Tommy would not allow his brother to live. James O’Donnell, guilty of the worst crime he had ever known. Guilty of leaving poor bloody Angela Phillips to die alone, violated, disfigured, racked with
pain, to be found by a policeman who had thought he had seen it all. A policeman so tough he didn’t get moved by dead bodies. Until he saw that one. Jimbo O’Donnell, guilty as hell of all that and guilty also of wrecking what had once been the most important thing in Mike Fielding’s life – apart from Joanna Bartlett. His career.

There wasn’t much left for Mike to smile about. But the thought of Jimbo O’Donnell lying dead in a hole in the ground with his cock in his mouth, that would always make him smile. That and the fact that he still had a pension.

He ordered another large whisky. Then, when he had drunk enough to numb the pain, he decided he might as well go home to his wife. As usual. Who knows, he thought, hauling himself uncertainly upright from his bar stool, perhaps that’s what he would have ended up doing eventually regardless of Joanna. It was, after all, what he had always done.

Fielding would not, however, be returning to the Devon and
Exeter Constabulary. How could he? He had been cleared. His record remained unblemished. Officially. An early retirement deal safeguarding his thirty-year pension – there was only about a year still to go now – had been organised.

His wife had always wanted to retire to Spain. Some place she’d fallen in love with on the Costa Blanca. They’d never be able to afford the more southerly Costa del Sol where all the rich villains were. Maybe he would give Ruth something she wanted for once. Yes, that’s what he’d do, he thought, oozing drunken benevolence.

He made his way a little unsteadily through the pub door and out on to the pavement. The fresh air hit him like a blow in the face. He staggered, recovering himself with all the acumen of a professional drunk. Anyway, there was this barmaid he’d got to know over on the Costa a few years back …

A month or so later Joanna woke once more from a largely alcohol-induced sleep with no discernible hangover. You didn’t get them when you were in the habit of drinking as much as she had begun to. She feared she was picking up Fielding’s habit. Mike had not attempted to get in touch with her since she had hung up on him. And she was determined never to contact him again. Sometimes she couldn’t even believe she had allowed, even encouraged, the resumption of their affair. Now she just wanted to put Mike out of her mind. For ever. But trying to forget him wasn’t proving easy. In fact, it wasn’t easy to forget any of it.

She reflected on how many lives had been touched by the death of Angela Phillips and all that had happened since.

Most affected of all, of course – if you didn’t count the O’Donnells and she preferred not to – were the Phillips family. She had, however, been glad to learn through the
Comet
’s new Devon man that the family had sold part of their land, close to Okehampton apparently, for
building development. Planning permission had been given, against the odds on the edge of Dartmoor, because of the need for new homes in the area. Big money was involved, which probably meant that the family would be able to save the remains of their farm, even after the disastrous private court case against O’Donnell and the
Comet
reneging on their deal.

She’d heard that Todd Mallett had finally closed down his investigation into Jimbo O’Donnell’s murder and Shifter Brown’s involvement – and the police never did that with an unsolved killing, even a partially unsolved one, unless they were damned sure they knew the truth but could do nothing about it. They obviously didn’t think they were ever going to prove anything against Tommy O’Donnell and that didn’t surprise Jo a bit.

Paul, typically, carried on as if nothing had happened. More or less. The previous week, however, he had axed her column. She assumed it was a kind of punishment and had told him so. That had been a mistake, of course. Her husband didn’t like confrontation or indignation. Emotional outbursts never got you anywhere with him. ‘Don’t
be ridiculous, Jo, it’s what’s called an editorial decision,’ he had told her. ‘There is no place for that kind of journalism in the tabloid world any more. It’s old-fashioned and you know it. You must realise how out of place “Sword of Justice” is in the
Comet
, and has been for some time.’

She did realise that, of course. That didn’t mean she liked it any the more. Paul had said she would remain an assistant editor, that he’d find a new role for her, but she really couldn’t see that working out. Her disappointment was far more than just for herself, however. She thought it a tragedy that all the great tabloid traditions were being eroded. The British popular papers she had once been so proud to represent were nowadays often not much different from America’s supermarket tabloids: just full of throwaway trash. She thought it was a shame. And so, she had always believed, did Paul, whom she had
admired for at least appearing to try to walk the tightrope between the kind of journalistic standards now almost invariably ignored and the demands of the modern mass market. She was no longer even so sure of that.

Nonetheless she knew she had little choice but to settle for what she’d got. Which was a hell of a lot more than most people had, after all. Paul had been right. And Fielding, too, in an awful sort of way. She liked her lifestyle, she had got used to the luxury home and even Paul’s chauffeur-driven car, to never having to worry about money. She also loved her daughter desperately, even if she had yet to develop the kind of mother–daughter relationship she felt she should have with Emily.

She wasn’t happy, of course. All the old demons had been released. She would not forget Fielding no matter how hard she tried. Not ever. Or Angela Phillips, come to that. All of it would be with her always. And
alcohol only ever provided temporary amnesia.

She resolved to cut down on the drinking and to rebuild her life. More than anything else she would concentrate on her family in future. The rest of it was over.

As part of this new resolution Jo made a huge fuss of her daughter over breakfast, drove her to school and promised she would be at home waiting when Emily returned in the afternoon. ‘And at the weekend we’ll do some shopping together, buy you some new clothes, and then maybe go to the cinema,’ she went on. ‘You can chose the film, Em. Would you like that?’

‘Oh, yeah! That would be great, Mum,’ replied
Emily, with a level of enthusiasm which quite took Joanna by surprise.

Maybe, if she made a real effort, things would work out after all, she thought.

Marginally cheered, she later set off for St Bride’s in Fleet Street, the famous journalists’ church, for a memorial service for Andy McKane, who had died at the age of sixty-one of sclerosis of the liver. Which was exactly how she’d end up if she didn’t watch it, Jo reflected wryly.

McKane may have been a fearful old sexist, but he had also been an excellent news editor and a fundamentally good-hearted guy, beneath his bombastic chauvinism. In any case the memorial service provided a nowadays rare get-together for old Fleet Street hacks. Certainly she found she was looking forward to the diversion.

The turnout was extensive and across the board, as she
would have expected for Andy. After the service there was the usual wake in El Vino’s wine bar during which, in spite of her morning resolution, Jo drank far more house champagne than she had intended to. By the time she decided, three hours or so later, that she really must leave if she were to have any chance of keeping her promise to Emily, she was feeling quite mellow.

Then she bumped into Frank Manners. Literally. The old crime hack who had once caused her such trouble turned abruptly away from the bar just as Jo was heading for the door and they collided. She hadn’t seen him since his enforced early retirement deal nineteen years earlier now and Manners, who must have reached his late seventies, looked to be in far better fettle than he deserved. His complexion was a little more florid, which might in any event have been down to his obviously well-oiled state, but other than that he had changed astonishingly little.

‘Good God, it’s the golden girl,’ he bellowed. ‘Got any other poor sod sacked lately?’

A slight hush fell in their part of the bar. Manners’s attitude hadn’t changed either, she thought. Why did he have to be such a bastard? He must have known he’d been asking for trouble after what he’d done all those years ago, surely. Remembering the shock and distress of it, the anger washed over her. ‘If you’ve got something to say, Frank, say it straight,’ she snapped. ‘If you hadn’t taken to making bloody poisonous anonymous phone calls you’d have kept your job for as long as you wanted it, and you know it!’

Frank stared at her in slack-mouthed bewilderment. ‘Have you finally gone totally and utterly barking mad, woman?’ he enquired. ‘I haven’t got the faintest idea what the fuck you’re talking about.’

She opened her mouth to make a suitably cutting reply. Something in his expression and in the way that he had spoken stopped her in her tracks. Suddenly she knew, with terrible devastating clarity, that he was telling the truth. She pushed past him, desperate to get away from the crush of noisy drinkers.

Outside she took deep breaths of the autumn air. Her brain was spinning. There was an all too clear alternative to the various assumptions she had made so long ago about Manners, which had just never occurred to her before. Now it seemed glaringly obvious. And she was horrified.

‘Oh, my God,’ she thought. ‘Paul!’

For the rest of the afternoon and evening Joanna operated on autopilot. She travelled home to Richmond in a kind of daze, somehow managing both to arrive there as promised before Emily and to go through the normal motions of family life. She cooked them both a meal and forced herself to sit down and eat with her daughter whose chief topic of conversation was Saturday’s planned shopping trip and how her life would be ruined unless, as well as new clothes, her mother bought her yet another trendy new computer game, which of course absolutely everybody else at school already had.

Joanna, totally preoccupied, found she kept drifting off, but after a while a thought struck her. ‘You like playing computer games, and going on the Net and stuff with your dad, don’t you, Em?’

‘Oh, yeah.’ Her daughter’s face lit up. ‘He’s brilliant.’

‘Is he really?’

‘Oh, yeah. Dad can do anything on a computer.’

‘Anything?’

‘Pretty well. Alice Rivers’s father’s a real geek and he doesn’t know half as much as Dad.’

‘Bit of a super-hacker, is he then, your dad?’

Emily looked doubtful. ‘He said I wasn’t to tell,’ she said.

‘Tell what? I can keep a secret.’

Emily still looked doubtful.

‘Anyway, if it’s your father’s secret I expect I know it already.’

Joanna had the grace to feel ashamed of herself. Not only was she pumping her daughter for information about her father, but she was also playing on Emily’s special relationship with him. She thought there was a fair chance that Emily would not be able to resist demonstrating that Paul confided more in her than in his wife. And she was right.

‘Once he let me watch him hack into the
Daily Mirror
,’ Emily blurted out.

Jo tried not to let her surprise show. ‘Ah,’ she said non-committally.

‘It took him a long time and he said he couldn’t get into the whole system but he was actually able to look at some of their stories for the next day. It was awesome.’ Emily’s eyes shone with pride.