A Kind Of Wild Justice

by Hilary Bonner

  A different umpire? Played all the shots? The man was infuriating. She really wasn’t going to let him get away with it. ‘Nigel, I’m sorry, I think our case was ill-prepared and I’m going to tell Paul so, and if I have my way the Comet will damn well sue you.’ She very nearly shouted the last few words into the phone.

  Nuffield replied in a slow, slightly amused drawl, his public-school vowels even more extended than usual, ‘Joanna, Joanna, calm down. This is litigation, not life.’

  She completely lost it then. ‘That may be how it is for you, prancing about in your damned silly wig, but for real people it is their lives, you overpaid, over-hyped patronising fucking bastard,’ she yelled at him. Then she switched her phone off.

  Unprofessional. Unhelpful. Yes. But oh, it was also the only fleetingly satisfying moment in a truly nightmare day. A day which had yet to end.

  Paul was sitting on the big black leather sofa in their spacious living room surrounded by the next day’s papers when she finally arrived home just after midnight. The walls and the floor were cream. The only colour came from Paul’s collection of vibrant abstract paintings. The scattered newspapers were the only clutter in the room. Probably in the house. Paul was like that. So too was their daughter, hopefully sound asleep upstairs by now. Emily took after her father in personality. She was self-contained, capable, organised, meticulously tidy. Unnaturally so, Joanna sometimes thought. All Emily’s contemporaries seemed to be congenitally lazy and specialised in leaving a trail of debris behind them. They were, well, sort of normal really. Jo shrugged away her vague disloyalty and forced herself to concentrate on the unwelcome confrontation she knew was about to begin.

  She sat in the armchair opposite her husband. Dinah Washington was playing loudly on the music system. Paul liked to listen to classical music quietly in the background when he was working in the office and loud jazz when he was relaxing at home. He didn’t look very relaxed. Dinah was singing ‘What a Difference a Day Makes’, which, Joanna thought, was certainly appropriate.

  She felt drained. She kicked off her shoes and closed her eyes. After a moment or two the music stopped abruptly and she guessed that Paul had turned it off with the remote control.

  ‘You took your time getting back,’ he remarked eventually.

  She opened her eyes just a little. ‘I went to see the Phillipses.’ She carefully omitted mentioning her meeting with Fielding.

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘They’re devastated by what’s happened.’

  He regarded her coolly. ‘So am I,’ he said.

  ‘Look, I reckon Nuffield really let us down …’

  ‘Don’t search for scapegoats, Jo. It was you who convinced me this case could be won and I gave you the absolute top man in the country.’

  That was true.

  ‘He does say we could take it to the Queen’s Bench …’

  He interrupted her again. ‘Don’t even think about it, Joanna. There is no “we”. As far as you and the Comet are concerned, it’s over.’

  She didn’t have the energy to argue. And in any event, even Nuffield, never one to pass up the opportunity of a further fee, had warned against attempting to take the case any further. There was one subject she could not stop herself broaching. ‘Look, Paul, you know costs were awarded against the Phillipses …’ She regretted the words as soon as she said them.

  ‘My heart bleeds for them.’

  ‘You are going to honour the contract …’ She regretted those words too. She knew she should have waited until at least the next working day, picked her moment. But she had been worrying about the financial side of it all the way home.

  ‘There is no contract, Jo.’

  Her heart sank. It was all too true. There had not been any contract because she had convinced the family it would be prejudicial for the Comet to be seen to be financing the case. She had been right enough about that at any rate. She had also convinced them that her word was as good as a contract. ‘National newspapers don’t renege on deals,’ she had told them. ‘We don’t dare. We need our contacts and the people we do business with to trust us. If we make a deal we keep it.’ Once upon a time that really had been the truth. Nowadays, by and large, it was bullshit. But this time she had really willed it to be true. ‘Paul, if the Phillipses go public on this it will be even worse,’ she said. ‘They’ll deny it to the wall as long as we pay up.’

  ‘Joanna, think about it.’ He spoke with exaggerated patience as if to a small child. Obliquely she wondered why all the men in her life seemed to do this to her. It had been understandable, perhaps, with her primary schoolteacher first husband. From Paul it was especially infuriating.

  ‘It’s already public,’ Paul continued. ‘We have been accused in court of masterminding this whole farcical trial, of leading a campaign of persecution against an already acquitted man – which is more or less the truth, isn’t it?’ He picked up a couple of newspapers at random and threw them at her. ‘Look at this lot, for Christ’s sake. We’re being crucified.’

  She had already seen the headlines as the papers were all lying around him on the sofa, open at the appropriate spot.

  CRETINOUS COMET LEADS MURDER VICTIM FAMILY IN SUICIDE COURT CASE was an average offering. The strap on that one was good too: And they’re paying for it.

  She knew what Paul was going to say before he said it. ‘We can’t pay the Phillipses, Jo, and you may as well accept it now. I should never have given you the go-ahead on this one. I should have known better.’

  She suspected that he had known better. She suspected that, maybe for the first time during their marriage and his editorship, he had let the fact that she was his wife sway his judgement. He had known how important this story was to her. She was grateful to him for that but now she could feel the chill of his anger. He obviously felt she had let him down and maybe she had.

  She could only continue with what she had begun. ‘Paul, if we don’t pay the Phillipses I think they could even lose their home,’ she said. She didn’t know if that was true but they had told her they had already been forced by the farming recession to remortgage their property to the hilt.

  He was unimpressed. It wasn’t that he was an unfeeling man but, apart from any other considerations, it was a very long time since he had been on the road. She had noticed from her first days in Fleet Street the differences between front-line troops and the back-room boys, as she still in her mind divided up the staffs of newspapers. To the back-room boys a story was simply that – words on paper to be manipulated in whatever fashion would give greatest effect. The people behind the stories only existed to the front-line troops who, all too often, were out there on their own.

  She tried again, a different approach. ‘Look, together with the Phillipses we tried to get a monster locked up where he belongs. That’s in the glorious old campaigning style of the Comet and I think we should do more of it.’

  ‘Some glorious campaign,’ he snapped at her and threw another newspaper across the room, front page towards her. I’VE BEEN PERSECUTED, CLAIMS INNOCENT O’DONNELL screamed a banner headline.

  ‘Innocent O’Donnell,’ she muttered irritably. ‘That’s a contradiction in terms. What about the poor bloody innocent Phillips family, that’s what I want to know.’

  ‘Do you, Joanna?’ He was as angry now as she could ever remember seeing him. ‘I’m not entirely convinced of that. I’m beginning to wonder if the reason for your blind obsession with this case isn’t exactly the same as it was twenty years ago. One Mike Fielding.’

  She was startled. She had tried to mention Fielding’s involvement with the case as little as possible.

  ‘Take a look at page five of the Mail. It’s inside most of the others too.’

  With growing apprehension she did as she was bid. There, staring her in the face, was the photograph which, if she had allowed herself to think about it, had been bound to appear. She and Mike were standing close together on the courtroom steps, smiling slightly at each other, hi
s arm protectively round her shoulders. ‘Damn,’ she thought. ‘Damn and blast.’

  Sometimes she forgot just how astute her husband was. He missed nothing. She suddenly felt sure he had guessed that she had been with Fielding that evening.

  His next words convinced her that she was probably right. ‘Don’t take me for a fool, Joanna,’ he told her icily.

  PART THREE

  Twelve

  Two months later James Martin O’Donnell disappeared.

  The Daily Mail broke the story, to Joanna’s intense irritation and her husband’s fury.

  ‘Where’s my boy?’ asked Sam O’Donnell in a lengthy centre-spread feature, which focused on what he claimed was a campaign of persecution against his eldest son. ‘The police and a major national newspaper have colluded in hounding my Jimbo. And now he’s disappeared. I fear I’ll never see my boy again.’

  It was nauseating stuff, once more making O’Donnell sound like some innocent caught up in a whirlwind of events none of which were of his own making. Sam O’Donnell had apparently gone to the Mail in preference to reporting his son missing to the police. That made a kind of twisted sense. It was hard to imagine the O’Donnells calling on police help for anything. This way they brought the case into the public domain and ensured that police inquiries would be made without actually directly calling on plod for help.

  No doubt the O’Donnells had already scoured their own dubious contacts nationwide before taking this step. They must have drawn a blank. That in itself was intriguing. In fact, the whole thing was fascinating. However, Joanna could not sit back and enjoy any kind of objective assessment. She was too involved. And the Daily Mail story was yet another kick in the teeth for the Comet.

  At one point Sam O’Donnell damn near accused the police of having played a part in Jimbo’s disappearance. Fielding got a specific mention:

  That detective down in Exeter is obsessed with getting my boy. It’s more than harassment. He’s stalked my Jimbo. That’s what ’e’s done. Stalked ’im. I know for a fact he was behind this so-called private prosecution. Him and that dammed woman from the Comet.

  Joanna groaned. Here we go again, she thought.

  Twice now, my boy’s been cleared of having anything to do with Angela Phillips’s death. Twice he’s had to stand trial. And that’s not supposed to be the law in this country.

  The Mail had tried to get to Fielding, of course, doorstepping him, no doubt. The paper reported that he had refused to speak to them and the only other police comment was from a Met spokesman pledging that of course inquiries would be made in the normal way into Mr O’Donnell’s disappearance, but pointing out that he had not even been officially reported missing yet. There was a small picture of Fielding hurrying out of Heavitree Road police station looking extremely fed up and harassed.

  On its leader page the Mail made it clear that it was not in any way supporting Sam the Man, many of whose business activities had frequently been the subject of police investigations, but the events leading up to O’Donnell’s disappearance must undoubtedly have some significance. If he were guilty of any involvement in the abduction, rape, or murder of Angela Phillips then police mishandling must surely be evident. If he were not guilty, and he had after all now been found innocent of all three charges in courts of law, then his father was probably quite correct in alleging harassment. Certainly Jimbo O’Donnell’s disappearance and the varied events leading up to it should be thoroughly investigated by independent officers.

  It was all good stuff. But not for the Comet.

  ‘This whole story is turning into a fiasco, Joanna,’ Paul stormed at the end of morning conference, giving her a roasting in front of the entire senior editorial team, which she was quite sure they all thoroughly enjoyed witnessing. The days when female staff were fair game for any kind of nonsense and sexual harassment in a newspaper office might be over – but an assistant editor and high-profile columnist who was also the editor’s wife fell into a unique category, and to see her lampooned in this way was bound to be regarded as excellent sport.

  ‘First we get publicly humiliated. Now the opposition is running rings round us. Again. I let you have a free hand with this one, Jo, because I believed you were on top of it. Let’s see if we can’t retrieve something out of this mess, shall we?’

  It was fair comment. Joanna could not argue with him and did not.

  Instead, she went to work. She had already called the O’Donnell house, in fact, had done so when the first edition of the Mail had dropped the previous night. A Daily Mail reporter had answered the phone. She had not been surprised. The Mail had obviously done a deal. And in the circumstances the O’Donnells would hardly have come to her and the Comet.

  She phoned Fielding. She had called him before, leaving messages at Heavitree Road and on his mobile message service that morning. He had not replied. This time she got lucky.

  He answered his mobile at once.

  ‘Another fine mess,’ she began.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re worried about, the rubber heel boys are over me like flies again,’ he said. He meant Complaints and Discipline investigators.

  And she wasn’t surprised to hear it. Or all that interested. She had her own troubles. ‘Christ, Mike, you could have called me yesterday when the Mail got on to you.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Joanna. Don’t you think maybe I had something else to think about?’

  There was none of the unspoken warmth between them that there had been that evening at the Exeter pub. They were both under too much stress. The mess was getting worse rather than better. In normal circumstances Jo could imagine nothing she would like better than to think that O’Donnell might have come to a sticky end at the hands of some of his particularly venomous cohorts. But these were not normal circumstances.

  It seemed that she and Fielding were getting blame thrown at them at every step.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly.

  He mellowed a little. ‘Look, if I hear anything and if I possibly can, I’ll call you,’ he told her before saying an abrupt goodbye.

  She pondered for a moment. She dared not call the Phillipses. That relationship was over for good. Paul was still refusing to pay the family and she had to realise that by his own standards he had good reason not to.

  She had even been forbidden by Paul from explaining the situation to them. ‘Joanna, there was no contract between this newspaper and the Phillipses,’ he had reminded her repeatedly. ‘That is the legal truth and we’re sticking to it. Classic denial. It worked for Jimbo O’Donnell and it’ll work for us.’

  That had made her feel even more of a rat, of course, but what could she do?

  ‘It would be madness for you even to try to contact them, Jo,’ he had continued. ‘You must see that. If they’ve got any sense they’ll have a lawyer in on the act now. They’ve probably been told to tape any conversations they have with you or anybody representing this newspaper. You really mustn’t even discuss it with them.’

  She had known he was right, which made it harder.

  He’d put a hand on her arm, continuing more gently, ‘Look, Jo, I know you feel bad about this and so do I.’

  She hadn’t been convinced of that, but she let it pass.

  ‘There’s just no alternative. At least we tried to help them, tried to bring O’Donnell to justice. Nobody could have predicted that it would all go pear-shaped again.’

  She hadn’t been convinced of that either. Her own and Fielding’s judgements had so far proved to be faulty in every aspect of this case. And Nuffield had turned out to be a huge disappointment.

  For once she did as she was told. She dodged all phone calls from the Phillips family and never called them back. Eventually they got the message.

  Both she and Paul had since received letters from a firm of Exeter solicitors saying that they represented Bill and Rob Phillips who were planning to take them to the Press Complaints Commission and sue them for breach of contract if they did not pay the
costs of the court case as agreed.

  Paul said they didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of winning such a case and, anyway, he’d have a large bet that when it came to it they wouldn’t take the risk. ‘Let’s face it, they can’t afford to, can they?’ he remarked.

  Joanna squirmed inside.

  As for the Press Complaints Commission, Paul went on to say that he would be more afraid of them if he paid the Phillipses than if he didn’t. Inasmuch as any editor was afraid of the Commission, he concluded.

  Again she had been forced to agree with him, even though she didn’t like it. Everything about this whole case continued to leave a nasty taste in her mouth.

  Paul was proved right. There had so far been no follow-up to the letter from the Exeter solicitors. It seemed likely that the Phillipses were indeed not going to proceed with their threat to sue the Comet. But Joanna had got one prediction right. When they finally realised they were not going to get any more money out of the Comet without one hell of a fight, the family decided to go as public as possible, giving an interview to a local news agency, which put out their story to all the nationals.

  Unfortunately, the family’s bad fortune continued and their timing was atrocious. They had embarked on this course of action only yesterday, thus having to do battle for space with the story of O’Donnell’s disappearance. The Mail, glorying in its exclusive, did not even give the Phillipses’ allegations a line. The other papers ran stories in their first editions – although not as big as might have been hoped because more or less the same claims had already been made in open court – but the ‘O’Donnell missing’ revelation virtually wiped them out of later editions altogether. Rather guiltily, Joanna had to acknowledge that while unlucky for the Phillipses, it was quite fortunate for her that the two stories had broken on the same day. Jimbo’s disappearance had so overshadowed the Phillipses’ story that Paul seemed barely to have even noticed it.

  Joanna tried to put out of her mind everything about which she could do nothing, and concentrated on attempting to find a really sensational follow-up to the Mail exclusive. She did not succeed but, fortunately for her, neither did anyone else.