‘They say it’s just routine,’ said Harry. ‘But he’s been in there since three this afternoon apparently. The word is that they found the boy’s motor near where the girl disappeared. I’ve got a stringer over there on a watching brief.’
Joanna felt her excitement wane a little. If the boyfriend was guilty this might not turn out to be quite as big a story as she had anticipated. It was certainly likely to be cleared up quickly.
‘We might get something else soon,’ Harry continued. ‘Fielding’s supposed to be coming out to speak to us any minute.’
Joanna nodded. She knew who Fielding was. She had already been given the names of the principal investigating officers when the news desk had called her at home. She took a packet of Marlboro from her jacket pocket and offered Harry one.
‘No thanks, given it up.’ He tapped his abundant torso in the vague region of the heart.
Then she remembered. He’d been off work for six months following a bypass operation. Now back on the job on a story like this, something nice and stress-free, she thought wryly, lighting a cigarette as she leaned against the nearest parked car and settled in for a wait.
She hadn’t even finished her smoke when a squad car approached from the direction of the farm and pulled to a halt at the end of the lane. Two large men climbed out of the back seat. Both were well over six feet tall, but while the first to emerge was thickset and fleshy with dark hair and a swarthy complexion, the second was long and lanky with light sandy hair, which flopped over his face as he moved. The dark swarthy one, who was wearing a particularly ill-fitting brown suit, looked as if there were a million other things he would rather be doing. The fair lanky one, snappily dressed in a trendy navy-blue linen jacket and immaculate dark-cream trousers with what looked terribly like Gucci loafers on his feet, gave the impression that he was thoroughly enjoying himself.
He strode straight into the gathering of hacks. ‘For those who don’t know me, I’m Detective Sergeant Mike Fielding and this is DS Todd Mallett,’ he announced, waving his hand at his colleague, whose discomfiture seemed to increase. Then he made a brief statement. It was standard stuff, all about growing concern, no further development, a renewed appeal for anyone who might have witnessed anything suspicious to come forward. ‘Also, I would like to ask on behalf of the Phillips family that you respect their privacy at this difficult time,’ he finished predictably. ‘There’s no point in hanging around here, lads, really there isn’t. Nothing’s going to happen at the farm. We’re in the process of setting up an incident room in Blackstone village hall and I or one of the team will give a press briefing there tomorrow at 4 p.m. – and every day until we find Angela.’
As soon as he stopped talking the pack surged forward, surrounding him and Mallett, bombarding them with questions, almost all about Jeremy Thomas.
‘We do have a man helping us with our inquiries, but it really is just routine at this stage,’ said Fielding predictably. ‘There is no more I can tell you today, lads, I’ll see you tomorrow.’ As he spoke he was trying to force a way through the throng back to the squad car, the completely silent Todd Mallett at his shoulder. But the pack continued to harangue the two policemen, pushing and shouting.
Joanna was in the thick of it. That was what she was paid for, after all. ‘What about the car you found near the scene, Detective Sergeant?’ she called and felt she could hear her own voice clearly above the chorus, perhaps because her pitch was higher.
Maybe she was right, because Fielding swivelled round to face her, his surprisingly soft grey eyes seeking her out in the crowd. ‘And who are you?’ he asked.
‘Joanna Bartlett, the Comet.’
He flashed a lopsided grin at her. ‘Thought so. The first woman in the Scotland Yard corps, eh? Frank Manners has told me all about you.’
The bastard, thought Joanna. He’s even warned off his contacts. ‘I’ll bet he has,’ she said, half to herself.
Fielding heard her, though. ‘Don’t worry about it, darling, you can tell me all about Manners any time you like. And any place.’ He looked her up and down appreciatively.
There was loud laughter from the throng, particularly, not at all to Jo’s surprise, from Dewar and Hewitt. Another patronising sod, just like all the rest, thought Joanna, staring levelly back at the detective. She did not rise to him, choosing instead to remain silent.
‘Honestly, lads, that’s all for today,’ he said then.
He did not attempt to answer her question, although she didn’t blame him for that, but his eyes were fixed on hers. Suddenly his face broke into that lopsided grin again. It was actually quite an endearing grin, thought Joanna, and was instantly annoyed with herself.
Then the man winked.
Joanna felt an almost irresistible urge to slap his face. She was quite glad to be clutching a notebook and pencil in her hands. How could a policeman investigating a murder behave like that, she wondered.
Three
Jeremy Thomas was detained at Okehampton police station all night. He claimed he had crashed his car driving home from Five Tors Farm after giving Rob Phillips a lift. He also claimed that the last time he saw Angela was when she had left the dance in a huff.
The previous afternoon Fielding, along with Todd Mallett, had conducted the first formal interview with Jeremy. There had been no solicitor present. The young man had turned down the offer of one. Fielding hoped that wasn’t going to cause problems in the future in view of Jeremy’s youth. But no policeman would turn down the chance of interviewing a suspect without the interference of lawyers.
The SOCOs had found strands of dark-brown hair, some attached to follicles of skin, in the Ford Escort and a small amount of fresh blood on the frame of the passenger seat.
Fair, crew-cut Jeremy had admitted at once that the dark hair could well have been Angela’s. ‘She’s always in my car and well, you know, she’s my girl and, well, we’ve only got the car …’
Fielding understood what the boy was trying to say clearly enough. If they’d been using the car for a kiss and a cuddle, and maybe more, you would expect some signs of that to remain. Hair, yes. But blood?
‘I don’t know,’ said Jeremy. ‘Maybe she knocked herself. Maybe somebody else did …’ Maybe, thought Fielding. Maybe not. ‘Lead you on, did she?’ he asked. ‘Was that the problem? Things got out of hand …’
‘No,’ insisted Jeremy Thomas tearfully. ‘Nothing like that happened, honestly. I’d never hurt Ange.’
The boy didn’t seem all that bright and he was scared rigid. But his story never changed. Fielding’s attention span was short. When it became apparent that there was going to be no quick confession from Jeremy Thomas he began to lose interest. He was always the same. He needed to be on the move, dealing with fresh information. Parsons understood his sergeant’s strengths and weaknesses. That was why they were such a good team. Parsons pulled him off after the first hour-long interview. Todd Mallett carried on, along with a hard-case DS up from Plymouth, a man who specialised in losing his temper, or at least appearing to.
Mallett was right for the job, Fielding had conceded reluctantly. He didn’t like Mallett, never had done, thought he was too slow and ponderous. A real plod. In many ways Fielding couldn’t understand why Mallett didn’t still have a pointy hat on. But the man was meticulous, no doubt about that. And he had a way of wearing witnesses down. Fielding liked to joke that people talked to Mallett in order to get him to go away. Actually, he was only half joking.
Nonetheless, Mallett’s attention to detail was well known – it was what was said to have secured his promotion – and it was often detail that caught people out. Fielding believed that if Jeremy Thomas was the man they were looking for, Todd Mallett and his bad-tempered partner would break him sooner or later – after all, Thomas was no hardened villain, just a nineteen-year-old kid who might have lost it for a fatal few moments. Fielding had been happy enough to leave the interviewing team to get on with the job. He didn’t like to get bogged down
in any one area of a major investigation. He was better at the overview, the big picture.
While Charlie Parsons ran the show, directing the troops, controlling the policy, managing, Fielding would be his eyes and ears on the spot. That was the way they always worked.
And it suited Mike totally. He liked to be at the heart of a case. And the heart of this one was at Five Tors Farm. The press knew that, which is why they were staking out the place damn near twenty-four hours a day. Mike Fielding was one of the few policemen around who had a lot of time for newspapermen. They knew what they wanted and stuck at it till they got it. And most of them had an uncanny knack of being in the right place at the right time. They thought fast and knew how to follow their noses. Fielding only wished some of his fellow coppers were as quick on their feet.
He and Charlie Parsons, however, were very quick on their feet. They were already an acknowledged partnership and so far their results had been exceptional – so much so that Fielding reckoned he’d be an inspector even quicker than might be expected, certainly within weeks rather than months.
Eager as ever to get on with it, he had returned to Five Tors Farm immediately following his abandoned interview with Jeremy Thomas and from then on he shadowed the family. If the key wasn’t with Thomas, then it would be with them. It almost always was. He was, as ever, confident that he had the knack of seeing through the cotton wool that always seemed to clog up a major investigation. So he stayed at Five Tors Farm, watching, waiting, prodding and probing.
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.
A Kind Of Wild Justice Page 5
