A Kind Of Wild Justice

by Hilary Bonner

  But it appeared that he had been keeping his ear to the ground as much as he invariably did. She wondered fleetingly why she had thought he would ever really change.

  ‘They’ll get him eventually, Jo, no doubt about it. But the big question will remain, won’t it? Who paid him to do it? Guys like Brown only do it for dough.’

  Back in London, Joanna got Tim Jones to sort out a phone number for Shifter Brown. Then she called him and asked if he would like to meet her for lunch. And, unlike perhaps most members of the public who had never had dealings with a villain like Brown or his kind, plus perhaps the bulk of the current crop of rookie reporters, she was not at all surprised when he accepted.

  Her predecessors in crime reporting had all been on the Christmas lists of the Kray bothers, and Reggie Kray continued to write and send cards from Parkhurst jail to his ‘friends in the press’ right up to his death. Jo herself had got used to the same kind of treatment from Sam O’Donnell. Although she would never get another card from Sam, that was for certain.

  She knew that Brown had always seen himself as a kind of folk hero, a modern-day gunslinger who would maim and maybe even kill, but, in common with Sam the Man O’Donnell, whatever he did was strictly according to his own moral code. Like the good-guy gunfighters of the Old Wild West who would only kill in a fair duel and never shoot a man in the back, or so legend had it anyway, Brown would only administer what he saw as rough justice within the criminal world in which he moved. It was all business to him. He considered himself to be one of the last of a dying breed, the sort who looked after his own and harmed no one outside his own circle. And like the Krays and the O’Donnells, certainly Sam the Man, he saw himself as a kind of celebrity and could rarely resist an opportunity to talk to the press. He was certainly not afraid of media people. But Shifter Brown was the sort who would not admit to being afraid of anything.

  Jo arranged to meet him at a good but unfashionable Soho restaurant. She did not particularly want to be seen in his presence. He arrived looking immaculate in an expensive dark suit, snowy white shirt and flamboyant multicoloured silk tie. Gold and diamonds flashed on his fingers and at his wrists. Shifter doubtless reckoned that he looked the business and in a way he did, even though there was more than a touch of the Del Boys about his appearance. He did not notice the way the other diners paused in their conversations as he passed them by, but then he wouldn’t.

  It wasn’t just his great size, the broken nose, the weathered features, and the overly flash clothes and jewellery which marked Shifter as one apart. It was everything about him from the set of his jaw to the way he squared his broad shoulders and how his big, beefy hands hung at his sides almost like a shotgun carried loosely but cocked ready for use.

  He beamed a greeting at her when he was ushered to her table and proceeded to be charm itself. ‘I’m delighted to meet you, darling,’ he told her. ‘I’ve always had you down for one of the good ’uns.’

  Joanna smiled back as if flattered, but she wasn’t. She had met his sort before often enough. She knew perfectly well that he was another evil bastard, albeit with, like Sam O’Donnell, his own twisted morality.

  He did have rough charm, though. And, by God, he was funny. Particularly if you were into seriously black humour. Which of course, as an old crime hack, Joanna was. He told her some wicked gangland stories, playing to the gallery. First there was the tale of legendary London gang boss, Charlie Richardson, hard as they come but famous for his devotion to his mum and love of animals, who had an adored but wayward pet monkey which his newly acquired mistress insisted he get rid of after it effectively destroyed her collection of Capo di Monte porcelain. “It’s that creature or me,” she said. Now Charlie wasn’t too sure which to choose at first but eventually he gets on to Mad Frankie – Frankie would always do anything for him, loved Charlie, did Frankie – and asks him if he’ll look after this bleeding monkey for a bit, and Frankie says OK boss and takes it home with him. Well, the monkey’s shaking and shivering all the time, and it’s just the way its nervous system is, but Mad Frankie doesn’t know that. He thinks, poor little bleeder, come all the way from Africa, it’s cold, innit? So he wraps it up in an electric blanket. Then the monkey goes and pees itself in fright and gets electrocuted.’

  Shifter paused for effect. Jo began to giggle helplessly.

  ‘Well, Frankie gets together with the rest of the boys and they think up some yarn to tell Charlie about the sad demise of this blessed monkey, cos God knows what Charlie would’ve done if he’d thought Mad Frankie was to blame. Anyway, somehow or other they get Charlie to accept that it died of natural causes, but he’s gutted. Right gutted. He goes and fetches this monkey home to his house in Peckham and then he arranges a burial service for it in his back garden.

  ‘Well, he’s a man who commanded a lot of respect, Charlie. So you end up with about two dozen of the hardest nuts in the business all done up in their best whistles, black ties, the lot, standing in Charlie’s backyard doffing their hats at a funeral for a bleeding monkey.’ Shifter threw back his big head and roared with laughter. Jo laughed with him. Everybody in the restaurant stopped eating and drinking, turned and stared.

  He really was a showman. And it was annoyingly difficult not to find him likeable. Joanna hated it when she liked villains. She had gone to Brazil once to interview Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs and she had felt much the same about him. The man had been a serial thief, widely believed to have been the unfeeling bastard who had casually smashed the innocent train driver viciously on the head, ruining and cruelly shortening his life. She had arrived in Rio de Janeiro determined to dislike Biggs intensely. But Ronnie had played the role of lovable rogue so well that she hadn’t been able to stop herself falling for it, at least up to a point, even though she knew only too well that a large part of it was just a carefully cultivated act. And it was much the same with Shifter Brown.

  ‘’Ere, I’ve got another funeral story,’ Shifter continued. ‘Well, it’s a wedding story, really, about Charlie and Mad Frankie again. When Charlie’s daughter got married they had this posh do down in Kent and the invitations said “Morning dress”. Well, poor old Frankie, he didn’t know any different, he thought it meant mourning dress, so he gets this undertaker suit, everything black, black tie, shiny black shoes, and when he turns up Charlie says: “Fuck me, Frankie, I thought you were a bleeding gangster kissogram.”’

  Shifter grinned broadly, then his expression turned suddenly serious. ‘Whoops, sorry, Joey doll, I didn’t mean to use that language to you, girl, honest,’ he said.

  Joey doll? That was a new one. Joanna wondered what Shifter would have made of the vernacular of an old-fashioned newspaper office. Not a lot, she didn’t think. He might be a gangland hit man but he still considered himself a gentleman.

  Indeed. She made herself concentrate on what he did for a living. How he got his name. He shifted people. And, most particularly, what he might have done to Jimbo O’Donnell. Joanna was glad O’Donnell was dead. She was even glad that he had suffered such an appalling death. But it was bizarre to think that she was sitting in a smart restaurant with an engaging, immaculately dressed companion who had probably removed another man’s sexual organs and buried him while he was still alive.

  ‘You did him, didn’t you, Shifter?’ she asked eventually. ‘The cops know. It was a pro job. It had your mark all over it.’

  Arthur Richard Brown held both his hands out towards her, palms upwards in a gesture of supplication. ‘Now would I? Would I do a horrible thing like that?’ He grinned. Gold fillings gleamed among large yellowing teeth. ‘I’m innocent, darling, upon my baby’s life, I am,’ he told her.

  And then, just like Mike Fielding the very first time she ever met him, he winked broadly.

  Fourteen

  A month later Shifter Brown was rearrested. It was simple. The police found his Transit van which, although it had been washed and vacuumed and even given a new coat of paint of sorts, contained enough forensi
c evidence to prove that Jimbo O’Donnell had been transported in its rear compartment. Almost certainly under duress. The amateurish coat of paint had, in fact, contributed to Shifter’s downfall.

  Tim Jones got the full story from the Yard. It seemed that a sharp-eyed young constable had spotted the signs of a cheap, hasty respray on the now red Transit. A thin film of red paint had strayed on to both rear and front bumpers, along the bottom of one of the side windows and even into a corner of the windscreen. The constable had fed the registration number into the PNC and found that it did not match the vehicle he had spotted. At the time there was a major car theft scam operating in the capital and the young officer had been told to watch out for vehicles that might have been stolen and, if he had the slightest suspicion, to do a check. With the diligence of a newcomer to the job, he had done so even though the battered Transit, which had obviously seen better days, was not the kind of vehicle professional car thieves would normally target. And certainly he had no idea whatsoever that he might have stumbled across something far more serious.

  The van’s driver had been taken in for questioning. It turned out that he was a minor villain called Colin Ferris who ran a scrapyard in the aptly named Gravesend and had been suspected in the past of dealing with hot vehicles.

  Meanwhile further checks were run on the Transit. It turned out to have been registered to Shifter Brown. Under intense pressure, including threats to have his business closed down straight away, Ferris admitted that Shifter had brought him the vehicle and had paid him to destroy it. He was supposed to have crushed it in his crusher. But he hadn’t done so. ‘It was a good set of wheels and I needed a van, you see,’ he explained. ‘Shifter’d put a nearly new engine in it, hadn’t he? But it didn’t look much and Transits like that one are all over this manor. So I figured if I changed the colour and the reg I’d get away with it.’

  Ferris was not the brightest of characters, evidently. And if he had ever known or suspected what Shifter had used the van for and why he needed it destroyed he denied it hotly.

  Shifter Brown was rearrested at once. This time there was hard evidence against him. By the time the van was discovered in the dubious care of Colin Ferris there had been very little forensic evidence left – but just enough in an age when the science has become so exact that DNA can be extracted from the moisture left behind by breath on glass. Small spots of dried blood found on the floor and sides of the vehicle’s rear compartment matched O’Donnell’s.

  Shifter capitulated. He was an old-fashioned villain. He didn’t think he stood a hope in hell of bucking that evidence. He didn’t have a legal dream team behind him, either, as the man he had killed had always done. And he believed a court would go easier on him if he confessed and pleaded guilty. So Shifter was co-operative. He knew when he was beaten. Shifter was into damage limitation, only he didn’t call it that.

  Todd Mallett did the interrogation himself. The detective superintendent went back a long way on this case and still he didn’t reckon the investigations had got anywhere near to the bottom of it. He wanted to be hands-on.

  Although Shifter would not say who had hired him to kill Jimbo, he was quite happy to reveal that it was indeed someone who wanted revenge for the death and degradation of Angela Phillips. Shifter always liked to appear justified in his actions. However, there were a number of points which continued to puzzle Mallett. ‘Why did you use your own van, Shifter?’ the detective asked.

  ‘Well, you never know quite what’s best to do in a situation like this, you see, Mr Mallett,’ Shifter began to explain, frowning in concentration. He sounded as if he were giving the policeman a lesson in criminology. ‘I had to take Jimbo right back to Dartmoor where Angela Phillips was found, that was part of the deal. And I had to take him alive and do him there. On the spot like, buried, more or less the same way the girl was. Now – if I’d nicked a motor I could easily have got stopped on the way, couldn’t I? So I figured that it would be safer to use my own wheels. The Transit had seen better days anyway. I reckoned if I wrecked it I was being paid well enough to buy myself something better. That toe-rag Ferris, though, he landed me right in it, didn’t he? He gets paid to make a motor disappear and then he gets greedy. Thinks he’ll take his bung and keep the van. I’d like five minutes with him, I’ll tell you that for nothing, Mr Mallett …’

  ‘I’m sure you would, Shifter, but I think you may have a long wait,’ said Todd wryly.

  ‘I know that, Mr Mallett,’ replied Shifter.

  Todd had one final try at extracting the information he really wanted. ‘And you also know how much it would help if you told us who hired you, don’t you, Shifter? You could get a lot less time.’

  Shifter nodded. He knew all right. But he wasn’t budging. And frankly, neither had the detective superintendent expected him to. ‘I don’t grass, Mr Mallett,’ said Shifter flatly.

  Joanna phoned Fielding on his mobile to talk again about who might have been behind the contract. That was her excuse, anyway. She didn’t like admitting to herself how much she liked to hear his voice. Even when he sounded old and tired, and whined about his pension, it was as if someone else were speaking. Every time she saw him, every time she spoke to him, she could only remember the way he had been before. That was how she thought of him and that was how she still saw him.

  He told her he would be in London for a couple of days later that week. ‘Fancy a spot of lunch?’ he asked.

  Joanna took a moment or two to answer. She did fancy lunching with him. There was no doubt about that. However, it was against her better judgement that she finally heard herself agreeing to meet him in the same Italian restaurant, tucked away just off the Strand, where they had eaten together many times twenty years previously.

  She was surprised he even knew it was still there. She did, of course, and invariably felt a twinge of nostalgia every time she walked past it.

  ‘Well, we both know where it is, don’t we,’ he remarked casually.

  And she agreed with that too, as if she believed it really was his only reason for choosing the place.

  He was already there, sitting at a table for two in the far corner, when she arrived. She noticed that he no longer looked crumpled as he had done on the occasions she had seen him in Devon. Obliquely, she wondered if he kept his best clothes for London nowadays. Or maybe for her. No, she was flattering herself. But certainly he was every bit as smart as she remembered him from the old days, dressed in a fashionable dark-beige linen jacket, cream shirt and a brown and cream striped silk tie. His eyes still held that disappointed look she had become so aware of, but he no longer seemed tired and world-weary. He stood up to greet her. He was a funny mix. He could be so well mannered and charming, and he could be such a pig.

  There was a bottle of white wine on the table before him and she saw that he had already drunk about a third of it.

  Without asking first, he poured a glass for her as soon as she sat down.

  The mineral water culture would never be for Mike Fielding. She hardly knew anybody any more who bought wine by the bottle at lunchtime, she realised.

  They made small talk for a few minutes.

  ‘How’s it going with the rubber heel brigade?’ she asked.

  ‘Looks like I’ll be exonerated. They can’t prove a thing and they know it,’ he said. ‘The muck’s stuck, of course, like it always does.’

  She nodded and took a deep draught of the wine. She must have become as brainwashed as all the others by the new puritanical age, she realised suddenly. She had almost forgotten how good a chilled glass of wine tasted in the middle of the day. And this was very nice wine indeed, at the perfect temperature. She didn’t know much about Italian wine, but she did know that Mike always had bought better wine than he could afford. Mind you, the rate at which he was drinking it you wondered if it made much difference, she thought, noticing that he had drained his glass again already.

  ‘They’ve put me out to grass, Jo,’ he told her abruptly. ‘I’ve b
een appointed the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary’s Best Value Manager.’

  ‘What the hell’s that?’

  ‘Well may you ask! Officially I’m in charge of ensuring all our resources are managed properly; it’s a legal requirement now for every force in the country. Unofficially I’m being kept out of trouble, aren’t I? No more proper policing for me. Instead, the backwater of admin. I’m not even allowed to remain in a proper police station. I’ve been transferred to HQ at Middlemoor. My life is to be a merry round of seminars, working parties, and God knows what else. I’m in town for meetings at the Yard of the Met National Committee and, to tell the truth, I don’t even really understand what we’re supposed to be doing. I told you I’d be a paper shuffler from now on, didn’t I?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mike,’ she said. He had been a hands-on detective all his life. She knew how unhappy he must be about his new job.

  He grunted, refilled both their glasses to the brim and ordered another bottle.

  What the hell, she thought, taking another good long swig. She couldn’t remember when she had last had a real boozy lunch. And to think that she had been brought up in the days when a Fleet Street lunch wasn’t really considered lunch unless it ended after dark. In the summer. Any amateur can make lunch go on until after dark in the winter, the lads used to say.

  ‘So what about Shifter, then?’ she asked, eventually focusing on the subject she most wanted to talk about. ‘Are there any theories about who hired him?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Theories by the hundredweight. But the same old suspects, none of which really hang together. Any one of the Phillipses, Jeremy Thomas’s family, they always reckoned Angela’s murder did for their boy. Even Sam the Man himself, secretly disgusted by Jimbo and afraid of what he still might do. I don’t reckon that myself, though, family’s family to Sam regardless. Anyway, he always was blind about Jimbo.’