A Kind Of Wild Justice

by Hilary Bonner

  ‘I’ll walk the way she should have come home. I ought to have thought of that already. Maybe the policeman is right. Maybe she did fall and hurt herself, maybe she was taken ill, maybe she’s lying in a hedge somewhere …’

  Rob tried to sound optimistic. Any of those possibilities was infinitely preferable to the one they were all dreading. But his voice tailed off almost plaintively. He didn’t believe what he was suggesting and the rest of the family knew it. However, it was action of a sort, something to do. Anything was better than sitting around the house waiting. The guilt was like a dull pain nagging away in the pit of his stomach. He had got drunk, played the fool, not bothered to see that his sister got home safely. And now the potential consequences of his completely out-of-character bout of irresponsibility were too dire even to think about.

  ‘I’ll come with you, boy,’ said his father. ‘Let’s take the Land Rover and walk it in stretches. Then we’ll have a vehicle to bring her back in.’

  But Rob didn’t think his father sounded as if he believed he would be bringing Angela back. Nobody had criticised Rob. Not yet. But he knew that would come. He could hardly bear to think about what this would do to his family.

  As soon as the men had departed, Lillian Phillips and her daughter-in-law started to telephone people: Jeremy Thomas and any other friends of Angela’s whose homes she could possibly have reached on foot.

  Jeremy answered the phone sleepily, as if he had been woken by it, even though it was mid-morning. No, Angela had not been to his house last night, he said. And then, as if the significance of what he was being asked had suddenly dawned on him he exclaimed abruptly, ‘Oh, my God! I’ll be right over.’

  ‘No, Jeremy,’ said Lillian at once. ‘We couldn’t cope with anybody else here right now. We’ll call you as soon as we have any news.’ Then she hung up before she had to explain or discuss the situation any further.

  Her daughter-in-law had given up and Lillian was speaking to the final friend of Angela’s she could think of when Constable Pete Trescothwick’s panda car pulled into the yard. Mary, even more pale and drawn-looking than she had been throughout her troubled pregnancy, opened the door and ushered the constable in.

  Pete Trescothwick was young and green. He was bright enough, though, and it didn’t take him long with the two women to begin to fear, as they obviously did, that something very serious had happened to Angela. His instinct was to believe that he was being told the truth and that Angela had indeed never returned home from the dance. Nonetheless there were procedures to go through. ‘Do you mind if I have a look around?’ he asked.

  Lillian Phillips appeared slightly bemused. ‘She’s not here, Constable, I told you. Do you think I wouldn’t know if she were here?’

  Trescothwick coughed to hide his embarrassment. A search of the home of a missing person or victim of a violent crime was standard procedure. So many crimes were committed within the family set-up. Where there should be the greatest safety there was so often the greatest danger. Everybody in the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary knew about the major hunt for a missing woman over in Plymouth that had gone on for several days and all the time she was in the garage wrapped up in a carpet. There were certain police officers involved in that one whose careers had come to a sudden dramatic halt. Pete Trescothwick had no intention of allowing that to happen to him, despite his gut reaction that the distress of the Phillips family was one hundred per cent genuine. But he did try to be as tactful as he could. ‘Just routine,’ he said in a casual voice.

  Not casual enough to fool Lillian Phillips, it seemed. ‘You’re not suggesting that we’ve got her here somewhere, are you?’ she asked sharply. ‘You’re surely not suggesting anyone in this house has hurt our Angela?’

  ‘Of course not, Mrs Phillips, just routine, like I said. There’s a way we have to go about things.’

  But the distraught woman interrupted him and now she sounded close to breaking point. ‘Just go and find her, find my Angela, please,’ she screamed at him, her voice high-pitched, desperate, her tears suddenly flowing freely. ‘Don’t waste your time here. Go and find her. Something terrible has happened to her, I just know it …’

  Pete Trescothwick shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.

  Mary Phillips came to his rescue. ‘C’mon, Mum,’ she said soothingly. ‘Let me make you a cup of tea and we’ll let the constable get on. He’s only doing his job …’

  ‘I don’t want any tea …’ the older woman began, but she fell silent and let Mary lead her over to a chair.

  Trescothwick slipped out of the room and began his search. First he went through the bedrooms, looking in the wardrobes and under all the beds. Then he checked all the downstairs rooms before starting on the yard. He did his best to search the big cowshed, the stables and the barn where they kept the feed, all with no result as he had more or less expected. It was now gone 10 a.m. The girl had been missing for almost eleven hours. She was wearing party clothes, a skimpy black dress if Trescothwick had ascertained it correctly. The only money she had was a few pounds in a small handbag. She had no coat. All right, it was the end of July, but nonetheless she was hardly equipped to do a runner. Trescothwick had extremely bad vibes about this and decided he wanted to shift responsibility for it on to broader shoulders as soon as possible.

  As he walked back to his car, intending to use the radio to call George Jarvis, a familiar dirty grey Ford Granada pulled into the yard and came to a halt alongside his blue and white panda. And it was with some relief that Trescothwick greeted Todd Mallett.

  The two policemen stood for a few minutes while Trescothwick gave a report on his findings so far. ‘Which amounts to bugger all, Sarge,’ he admitted. ‘Not sight nor hair of her, nor do I think there will be, not around here. Some toe-rag’s had off with her. I reckon the family are dead right.’

  ‘Yes, well, let’s not jump to any conclusions,’ instructed the detective sergeant coolly. ‘Evidence, not hunches, eh, Pete? I’d like to talk to the family myself and the boyfriend, and then decide …’

  He was interrupted by the noisy arrival of a Land Rover. A young man leapt out of the driver’s side and an older one opened the passenger door rather more slowly, his face quite grey. The younger man’s eyes were unnaturally bright. He opened his mouth as if he were about to say something but seemed unable to find words. Instead, he managed only a sort of low-pitched moan.

  ‘Mr Rob Phillips, I assume? I’m Constable Trescothwick and this is DS …’ began Pete, thinking a formal introduction might help.

  ‘Yes, all right, Pete,’ said Todd Mallett quietly and something in his voice stopped Trescothwick at once.

  He glanced towards the DS and followed his eyes, which were fixed on the man Trescothwick took to be Angela Phillips’s father. Tears were starting to run down Bill Phillips’s face. In his right hand he carried a single stiletto-heeled black shoe.

  *

  The shoe changed everything. It was the same story when Ginette Tate’s bicycle had been found after the girl disappeared on her paper round two years earlier. Any slight chance that Angela Phillips might have taken off under her own steam had now been eradicated. Not with one shoe, she wouldn’t have done.

  Todd instructed Trescothwick to look after the family as best he could and got straight on his radio to HQ in Exeter. Within an hour of his call a major missing person’s investigation, on the scale of a murder hunt, was under way.

  Blackstone village hall was commandeered as the investigation centre, a senior investigation officer appointed, DCI Charlie Parsons out of Exeter, and a team of more than fifty officers, CID and uniform, swiftly drafted in. Parsons was a very modern policeman. He regarded himself as more of a manager than a cop. A neat, trim man with a neat, trim moustache, he was much better at planning and paperwork than he was with people. His favourite detective sergeant, Mike Fielding, a high-flyer who at twenty-nine had already passed his inspector’s exams, would be Parsons’s unofficial number two, in charge of far mor
e of the on-the-scene policing than a DS really should be.

  A search was launched that afternoon, in the usual fashion with officers beginning at the suspected scene of the crime, the stretch of lane where Angela Phillips’s shoe had been found, and working progressively outwards, taking in an increasingly greater radius of territory. A team of scene of crime officers, SOCOs, cordoned off the suspected scene itself for more detailed examination. In the soft muddy ground of an adjacent gateway to a field they found a set of distinctive tracks, which one of the SOCOs, whose hobby happened to be Land Rover rallying, was able immediately to identify as being from Avon Traction Mileage tyres, a popular brand fitted almost exclusively to four-wheel drives. The clarity of the impressions left by their unique combination of wavy lines and knobs, designed to give maximum grip on and off the road, indicated that the tracks were almost certainly from the last vehicle parked there. However, this did not take the investigation much further as there were probably almost as many four-wheel drives in the area, particularly Land Rovers, as there were ponies on the moor.

  Then the search brought an early result. A customised red Ford Escort, equipped with overly large wheels bearing Avon Traction tyres, was found by the search team later that afternoon wrapped around a tree in the woodland to the west of Blackstone. The vehicle appeared to have careered off the road, and would have been easy for Rob and Bill Phillips to miss when they had walked and driven that way earlier in the day, because it had ended up surrounded by a dense tangle of shrubs and bushes. The car’s unusual appearance enabled the briefest of enquiries to establish that its owner was Angela’s boyfriend, Jeremy Thomas.

  Joanna Bartlett had been chief crime correspondent of the Comet for only three weeks when Angela Phillips went missing. An appeal was almost instantly put out to the public on TV and in the press nationwide for anyone who might have seen Angela around the time of her disappearance, or anyone and anything else that might be relevant, to come forward. The press response was instant and across the board. Missing teenage girls were hot news. Good copy. Good TV. Photographs of Angela were issued and a press conference called at Okehampton police station for 5 p.m. It was clear that the case would make every TV news bulletin that night and was certain to be splashed all over the newspapers the next morning – apart from anything else, the story had broken on a Sunday, an invariably quiet news day, so a major crime yarn like this one would be pounced upon by every news desk in the land. Angela Phillips’s innocent smiling face would soon be everywhere.

  Jo had been at home with her husband, enjoying a Sunday off duty, when she received the call from the Comet’s news editor that sent her hurrying down the M4 to Devon. She was the new girl on the block, a woman just twenty-seven years old. She had a lot to prove and she knew it. The knives were out in the Comet’s office just off Fleet Street. The policemen and press officers at Scotland Yard with whom she had daily contact were not a lot better, Jo thought. She had entered an exclusive men’s club, one of the last bastions of male chauvinism. She was Britain’s first woman crime correspondent on a national newspaper, the first-ever woman member of the Crime Reporters Association. It seemed incredible to her that this could be so in 1980 but it was. In Margaret Thatcher the country had a woman prime minister of such force and magnitude that she dwarfed her entire Cabinet. Jo didn’t like Thatcher’s politics, but she could not help but admire her strength and tenacity in the face not only of small-mindedness but also of open hostility.

  The sadder elements of Westminster were known to try to make themselves feel better about their all-conquering woman prime minister by making silly jokes about her hitting people with her handbag. Whatever you thought of Margaret Thatcher’s politics, her exceptional ability could not really be questioned. But few men would ever allow that the success of any woman was down simply to merit. The Comet’s two veteran crime boys, Frank Manners and Freddie Taylor, both approaching twice Joanna’s age, had a wonderfully simplistic way, she knew, of explaining away her own appointment, which had been over both their heads. It was, of course, because she was sleeping with the editor. She had no idea whether or not the editor, Tom Mitchell, was aware of the mythology – because that was exactly what it was.

  Jo straightened her shoulders in the driver’s seat of her cherished MG roadster. Didn’t the stupid bastards realise that their schoolboy attitudes just made her all the more determined to leave them for dead? In any case, she didn’t have time to worry about them. She was a top crime reporter heading out on a top job: a missing teenage girl, quite probably a murder. Stories didn’t come any bigger than that. She was excited.

  She drove straight to the scene of the crime at Blackstone. There was plenty of activity and it wasn’t difficult to find the spot where Angela Phillips was believed to have been abducted, but the area was cordoned off and there was little to see, so Jo drove on to the missing girl’s farmhouse home. It was almost seven o’clock by the time she arrived, but the earlier rain had cleared, and it was a warm and pleasant evening. There was a single uniformed police officer standing at the end of the lane which led to Five Tors Farm. The pack were staked out all around him. With some difficulty Jo found enough of a grassy verge to park her car just about off the road. As she climbed out she narrowly avoided a rather large cowpat and wrinkled her nose with distaste. Sidestepping smartly, she was vaguely aware of admiring glances from one or two of the waiting journalists, not directed at her, she was quite sure, but at her car, which was an absolute beauty: British racing green with gleaming wire wheels.

  Joanna was tall and slim, with mid-blond hair that hung straight and sleek halfway down her back – a legacy from her teenage years during the hippy-influenced sixties and early seventies. However, she thought her hair was lank and boring, and was all too aware that her slim figure owed more to cigarettes and nervous tension than healthy diet and exercise. Although she wasn’t pretty, she had a good strong face, high cheekbones, clear skin and nice eyes. And she certainly didn’t have an inferiority complex, not about anything. But it simply did not occur to Joanna that her appearance was particularly attractive. And certainly the behaviour towards her of most of the men she had dealings with did nothing to alter that.

  She picked her way carefully across the narrow road to the assembled group. The countryside was great when you were driving through it in a nice warm car or looking out of the picture window of a luxury hotel, Jo thought, as she glanced around her. However, though she might not be mad about it, unlike many city folk she did at least understand that the countryside did not look after itself. The big Devon hedges all around her had been freshly manicured, the farm lane was no rough track but a tarmac driveway flanked by imposing granite pillars, the gate, standing open, was painted immaculate white. The Phillipses obviously kept their land beautifully, and had the money and workforce to do so. Their farmhouse was hidden from the road, but Jo imagined that the family lived in some style. Through the gateway opposite she could see a sweeping view of Dartmoor, hazy and purple in the evening light, its unique tors, those piles of granite boulders at the summit of sharply pointed hillocks, piercing the skyline a bit like falling-down church spires. It was a lovely spot, Jo admitted grudgingly to herself.

  There were about a dozen men standing around, talking and smoking, at the lane junction. Some were obviously camera crews and radio reporters; others, she guessed, were local reporters and regional men for the nationals, and there were already a couple of Scotland Yard press corps lads who had rather irritatingly got there before her. But then, she had wasted time trying to smooth things over with her husband before leaving. Chris had not been best pleased to have one of their rare Sundays together interrupted. Male hacks rarely seemed to have those kinds of problems with their wives.

  Harry Fowler, the Comet area man, who she knew had covered the earlier press conference, was also already there, as she had expected him to be. She was the only woman, as she had also expected.

  Harry looked across and gave her a slightly uncerta
in wave. Fortyish, a little on the plump side, pleasant-faced, you could tell almost by looking at him that here was a man who had found his niche in life in a part of the world he loved. She had met him before, of course, and he was a nice enough guy without any of the chips on his shoulder of the London crime lads she had to work most closely with. But he would be well aware of the furore her appointment had caused in Fleet Street.

  The Scotland Yard reporters already at the scene, Nick Hewitt and Kenny Dewar, were two of the most contemptuous of her after her own alleged colleagues. They were watching her arrival with expressions of amusement and disdain. Patronising bastards, she thought. And, from the expression on his face, it was clear Harry Fowler didn’t know quite how to deal with any of it. She decided to take the bull by the horns and strode towards him, trying hard to display a kind of confidence she was not really feeling.

  She had to walk straight past Hewitt and Dewar, and she made sure her steps did not falter as she wished them a curt good evening.

  ‘My God, the Comet’s sent in the heavy brigade,’ announced Hewitt with a derisive laugh.

  And both quickly and loud enough to be sure she was still well within earshot, there followed Dewar’s clear stage whisper: ‘You know something, Nick, I’d like to give ’er one really hard and bite ’er lip till it bleeds.’

  Joanna ignored both comments. Women who couldn’t stand the jolts were not expected to join the Street of Shame. She knew the rules and how to live by them.

  Harry Fowler, however, began to look even more ill at ease.

  Joanna pretended nothing had happened. ‘All right, Harry? Anything new?’

  Harry smiled uncertainly. ‘Hi, Joanna. Not a lot. I expect you know they’ve got the boyfriend in Okehampton nick.’

  Joanna shook her head. That information was obviously too fresh to have made any of the radio news bulletins she had listened to on the way down. Harry would already have passed it on to the news desk, of course, but although the MG did have one of the new car phones, linked by radio to a Post Office operator, it was unreliable. The reception had proved to be almost non-existent outside the London area and she hadn’t talked to her office since setting off.