A Kind Of Wild Justice (7 page)

He hadn’t slept all that night. When there was a major investigation on the go and his adrenalin was flowing, he rarely seemed to need sleep. Indeed, the only person at Five Tors Farm who had actually been persuaded to go to bed had been Mary, weak and sick from her pregnancy on top of everything else.

Fielding had just sat at the big old table in the Phillipses’ kitchen along, most of the time, with the rest of the family. He had been acutely aware of their pain as he drank copious amounts of coffee and went over and over the case in his mind. It wasn’t that he really reckoned any of the Phillipses was responsible for Angela’s disappearance, although you never knew for certain, even with an apparently close and decent family like them. It was more that if anybody knew anything which would give a clue to Angela’s disappearance it was likely to be one of her immediate family, even if they didn’t realise it. As for the boyfriend, he didn’t really think so – the boy hadn’t broken for a start and he had looked a pretty soft touch.

Mike felt in his gut that the case had a long way to go. There were two possibilities: either that, dead or alive, Angela had been left in the immediate vicinity, or that she had been taken away from the vicinity, almost certainly in a vehicle.

But by mid-Monday morning the search team, including specially trained officers with dogs, had thoroughly combed a circle of more than a mile in
diameter with the scene of the crime at its centre. There had been no further results. It became increasingly likely that Angela had been taken from the scene in a vehicle. But was it Jeremy Thomas’s vehicle? Mike somehow thought it unlikely.

By two in the afternoon, lack of action had more or less brought his adrenalin flow to an end and he was starting to feel the effect of his sleepless night. Wearily, he was also beginning to wonder if he would, in fact, learn anything more from the family after all.

Then the telephone rang.

Lillian Phillips ran to answer it eagerly, as she had done each time it had rung since Angela’s disappearance. Even though all the calls to date had either been from concerned friends and relatives or the press, it was quite apparent that she kept hoping to hear her missing daughter’s voice on the other end of the phone.

This time, after putting the receiver to her ear, she seemed to freeze. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said. ‘Yes, yes. How? Yes.’

Then, ‘Wait, please don’t go, is my daughter all right? Can I speak to her …’

Fielding’s weariness left him at once. He launched himself across the kitchen where the entire family had been gathered round the old pine table and snatched the receiver from Lillian’s hand. All he could hear was the dialling tone. He turned to Lillian Phillips, who looked absolutely stricken. ‘Talk me through it,’ he said. And he knew more or less what he was going to hear.

A muffled voice had told Angela’s mother that if she wanted to see her daughter alive the family must pay a ransom of £50,000. ‘And you can tell the filth
they may as well call off the search. They’ll never find her.’

The caller had said that he would ring back the following morning, when he expected confirmation that they had the money in cash to give him. He would then give instructions for its delivery.

Fielding cursed under his breath. A kidnap and a ransom demand were the last things he and the team had expected. If they had they would never have called for media involvement. Kidnaps were a staggeringly rare crime. From the kidnapper’s point of view the success rate was minuscule. He knew that professional criminals would stage a kidnap only in exceptional circumstances and amateurs were highly unlikely to have the organisational skills required. They had had absolutely no reason to suspect that Angela’s abduction would result in a ransom demand. Fielding felt the muscles in the back of his neck tighten into a knot of tension. The nature of her disappearance had led him, and Parsons and Mallett, to suspect, almost exclusively, a sex crime. Phone calls to Five Tors Farm had not been monitored. All the probabilities had been against a kidnap for ransom. Christ!

He made himself concentrate hard. Was that really what they had on their hands? They couldn’t be sure yet, of course. There were all kinds of nutters out there who would get some sort of sick kick out of making a malicious phone call to the family of a missing girl. There was no proof so far that the call was genuine.

Lillian Phillips’s stunned silence had turned into hysterical weeping. The sound cut through Fielding’s thought process. ‘There, there, love, don’t carry on so,’ he heard Bill Phillips soothe his wife. ‘At least we
know she’s alive, think on that. She’s alive, Lil, and we’ll get her back, I promise.’

Abruptly Lillian stopped crying. ‘Oh, Bill, you’re right. Of course. She’s alive. Thank God. She’s alive.’

I wouldn’t bank on it, thought Fielding. But he kept the thought to himself.

Within an hour Parsons arrived at the farm with Todd Mallett. Jeremy Thomas had already been released. The boy wasn’t totally out of the frame yet. Particularly not while the ransom call could still be a hoax. But Jeremy continued to stick resolutely to his story and had, in any case, already been detained for almost twenty-four hours without any progress being made.

‘Thought we could do with Todd’s local knowledge,’ said Parsons.

Fielding grunted unenthusiastically. But he had to admit that Todd was a hell of a lot better than him at coping with the family. Better than Parsons, too. Everybody knew that Parsons’s biggest strength was planning, not dealing with people. He was, however, an ace delegator, which was another of his great strengths.

There was, of course, something reassuringly solid about Mallett. Fielding hoped he himself was solid enough in his way, but uttering reassurance was not one of his finer qualities. Mallett had a calming effect on the family, whose first reaction had been to rush to their bank. ‘First thing is to make sure this joker really does have your Angela,’ he told them. ‘The call may not be genuine, you know.’

They hadn’t thought of that. It stopped them in their tracks.

Parsons, who had been largely silent till that point, allowing Todd to smooth the way for him, took over then, issuing instructions in his clipped, businesslike tones. ‘Right, when this man calls again you ask him for proof that he’s got your girl. OK? He’ll be expecting that. Bound to be. If he can prove it, then you say yes, you’ll pay up. But when he’s given you your delivery instructions you play for time, say it’ll take you a day or two to raise the cash, that kind of thing …’

‘I don’t want to stall,’ interrupted Bill Phillips. ‘I’m not playing games with my daughter’s life. If the price of getting her back is £50,000 then I’m paying it. Right away.’

‘I’m not asking you to play games, Mr Phillips.’ Parsons was firm and authoritative, as sure of himself as ever. ‘I’m asking you to accept that we have learned a bit about this sort of thing over the years. If we are dealing with a kidnapper, he won’t expect you to move too fast; he might even be suspicious if you do. It’s important for us to take the initiative, not to let him make all the running. We need to know where he wants you to make the drop and consider all the implications. We have to think of a way to make sure that he doesn’t get the cash without your daughter being returned. If we move hastily and let him get the money without ensuring that he returns Angela – well, anything could happen …’

There was a silence while his words sank in. Lillian Phillips moaned. Her husband grasped her hand tightly. It was several seconds before he spoke. ‘OK. Just tell us what we have to do,’ he said eventually.

The call came as promised the next morning. This time fully monitored.

Bill Phillips had decided he would be the one to take it. His wife was more than happy to let him do so. Mike Fielding listened in on a specially installed extension.

At first Bill adhered strictly to his instructions. ‘You have to give me proof that you’ve got my daughter,’ he told the caller.

There was a brief silence, then a girl’s voice, weak and frightened: ‘Dad, Mum, it’s me, Angela, please give him what he wants. Please. I want to come home. I can’t stand …’ The voice ended abruptly. The listening police noticed the click of a tape recorder.

Bill Phillips, predictably enough, did not. ‘Ange, Ange,’ he called plaintively. ‘Are you all right, darling?’ Then, getting only silence in response, ‘Of course I’ll give him what he wants, darling. I’ll do anything to get you home. Anything.’

The muffled voice came on the line again: ‘At midnight tonight you will put £50,000 in used ten-pound notes into a rucksack and leave it at the foot of a pine tree in Fernworthy Forest. I want your son to do it. On his own. No filth. Nobody else. You want to see your son again, don’t you? Mess with me and he’ll go missing too. Tell him to take the road around the reservoir. It comes to a dead end. Park there and walk approximately 150 yards due west into the forest. Ordnance survey map OL 28, reference 8390.6574. The tree will be marked with a red cross. The kid will be nearby. You’ll find her.’

‘I haven’t got the cash, I can’t get it till tomorrow morning.’

‘Tell the filth to keep their snotty noses out. I know
they’re with you and I know their tricks. Tonight – or your precious Angela dies. Oh, and it won’t be a pretty death …’

The caller hung up. So did Bill Phillips. His complexion seemed to be growing greyer by the minute.

His wife looked at him questioningly.

He shook his head numbly. ‘So much about wanting to take control away from him,’ he said. ‘It’s got to be tonight and I don’t want any interference. I want it the way he’s said. I’m not taking chances with my children’s lives.’

Parsons and Fielding exchanged glances. ‘Can you raise the money that quickly, Mr Phillips?’ asked Fielding.

The other man smiled weakly. ‘One call to my bank manager,’ he said. ‘And I won’t have to explain why.’

Fielding glanced around the big farmhouse kitchen. It reeked of affluent well-being. The house must have a minimum of eight bedrooms, he thought. He glanced out of the window over Dartmoor, taking in the five tors that gave the farm its name. He had learned that the Phillipses were mixed farmers, big on beef, some dairy, and several thousand sheep on their higher ground and moorland. Their more lush land, on which they raised their beef including one of the country’s finest herds of pedigree Devon cattle, was to the rear of the farmhouse stretching back towards and beyond Okehampton. Fielding also knew the size of the farm, approaching 2000 acres, pretty big anywhere and huge in the West Country. He felt a bit silly having even asked the question that he did.

Parsons stepped in brusquely. ‘You’d better do it in
that case, Mr Phillips,’ he said. ‘And then we’ll discuss the next step.’

Phillips turned away and picked up the phone again.

Fielding spoke in the DCI’s ear. ‘A word, boss,’ he said.

Silently the older man turned on his heel and walked out of the room. Fielding followed him. ‘Boss, we can’t let Rob Phillips make the drop. Let me go in his place.’

Parsons looked thoughtful. ‘I’m not sure, Matey obviously knows this family. Or all about them anyway. We don’t know how well he might know Rob Phillips, do we? It’s not at all unlikely that he’s local, don’t forget. At the very least he’s done his homework. Almost certainly he knows what Rob looks like. That’s the problem.’

‘I’m about the same height and build. It’ll be pitch-black out there. I’ll keep my head down. The bastard’ll never know the difference.’

Parsons considered for a moment. Then he nodded abruptly.

Rob Phillips, however, who had already been notified by his father of the kidnapper’s instructions, needed a little more convincing. ‘We mustn’t take any chances,’ he said, echoing his father’s earlier remark. ‘I don’t want anyone standing in for me. I want to go get my sister. It’s my fault she was taken in the first place.’

Fielding wondered if the young man was waiting for somebody to say that it wasn’t his fault. But nobody did.

Parsons did have something to say, though. ‘Mr Phillips, at the very least your sister is in very grave
danger. I cannot allow you to put yourself in danger too.’

‘What do you mean, you can’t allow …’ Rob was bristling, quick to find a target for the anger inside him, which was really directed at himself.

His father interrupted. ‘No, boy, the inspector’s right. Your mother and I can’t risk losing you too. Let the sergeant take the money. He knows what he’s doing.’

Fielding just hoped Bill Phillips was right.

It took about half an hour to drive from Blackstone to Fernworthy Forest, mostly along dark deserted roads skirting the moor. Apart from Fielding himself, alone in Rob Phillips’s Land Rover, there did not seem to be a soul about. There are few roads over Dartmoor and the heart of the moor remains remote and inaccessible, but the last couple of miles or so, from Chagford to the reservoir, cut right across the stretch of rugged moorland known as Chagford Common. At one point, as the Land Rover reached the brow of a hill, a pony loomed abruptly in its headlights and Fielding had to swerve violently to avoid it. As he swung the wheel, his nerves jangled far more than they would normally do.

The thing about surveillance was that it was so much easier in urban areas. People are the best camouflage. Want to lose yourself, go to a city. Policemen and villains both knew that.

The number one priority was to retrieve Angela Phillips safely – if that were even still possible, Fielding thought wryly. There were plenty of police officers waiting nearby for the call everyone hoped Fielding would be able to make, the call to say that he
had Angela Phillips safe. But no attempt had been made to plant police officers at the delivery point. There was something about the kidnapper’s approach, the use of precise map readings, which tagged him as a military man. Indeed, kidnappers often were. They were the kind who enjoyed plotting complex operations. Parsons had reckoned that close surveillance would not be possible. ‘Not without Matey sussing it out pretty damned quickly,’ he had said. And he hadn’t been prepared to take that risk. So Fielding was pretty much on his own. His mouth felt dry, the palms of his hands were clammy.