A Kind Of Wild Justice

by Hilary Bonner

  He opened his briefcase, which had been at his feet by the table, and took out a large manila envelope. He waved it at her. ‘This is a very full and detailed account of your recent activities. I think if I showed it to our daughter she would make up her own mind, don’t you?’

  Joanna felt very cold. She believed absolutely that he would and could do all he said, including showing such a dreadful dossier to his only child. She knew just how ruthless he could be when it came to getting his own way. And yes, she also knew that Emily would be quite capable of forming her own judgement of her mother’s behaviour and that it would be a damning one. Emily loved her mother, but she was her father’s daughter. Nonetheless, she told him, ‘I can’t believe you’d do that.’

  ‘Yes you can and do, Joanna.’ He emptied some of the contents of the envelope on to the table. There were even photographs of her and Fielding entering the Taunton motel, albeit separately, and together both entering and leaving the Southampton Row place. She didn’t give her husband the satisfaction of picking them up for a closer look, but as far as she could see there were none of her and Fielding actually in bed. Paul and his representative had mercifully drawn the line at that, it seemed.

  ‘You have too good a life to allow it to be spoiled,’ he went on. ‘And it will be spoiled, totally, if you don’t do as I tell you. You will be swapping all that you have, all that we have, for life with a failed, near-alcoholic, mid-rank copper. I do not actually think you have any idea what that would be like, Joanna.’

  That made Joanna wince. The description of Fielding was accurate enough. She supposed she probably didn’t have any idea what it would be like to live out in the sticks on a very limited income with a disappointed and often angry man who habitually drowned his miseries in alcohol. Nor was she ever likely to – not even without Paul’s ultimatum, as it happened. That was the final irony. At the end of the day she doubted if Fielding would ever have tried to make a life with her, in any circumstances. Such small likelihood as there had been of them being properly together had ended almost twenty years before. And after their last confrontation over her trying to hack into his laptop, there had been barely a chance of the affair continuing, even without external intervention. Strange that Paul had decided to make his move at that moment.

  ‘I’m sorry, Paul,’ she said. ‘I really didn’t mean for any of this to happen.’

  ‘And you think that makes it all right,’ he said flatly.

  ‘No, of course I don’t.’

  ‘You’ve let me down, your daughter down and yourself down. Do you realise that?’

  She nodded. She wished he wouldn’t lecture her but she supposed she deserved it. And he was right, of course. Cool. Logical. Controlled as ever. He sounded more as if he were admonishing a member of staff for some professional misdemeanour or negotiating a business deal than confronting his wife with infidelity. He showed absolutely no emotion at all. But then, he never did.

  ‘Look, Paul, I think it’s over anyway between Mike and …’ she began to explain.

  ‘You think?’ He raised his voice almost imperceptibly. ‘Joanna, I will give you twenty-four hours in which to assure me that you know it is over. If you cannot do that then I shall ask you to leave this house and I shall start divorce proceedings immediately. The decision is yours. But do not for one moment think that you can carry on cheating on me. I shall know at once.’

  She didn’t doubt it. And she couldn’t understand how she had thought she would ever get away with it in the first place. Not with Paul. He was just too clever. Too astute. She supposed the truth was that she hadn’t thought at all.

  Paul had started speaking again. ‘I shall sleep in the spare bedroom tonight,’ he told her almost conversationally.

  She found herself once again comparing him with Fielding, that infuriating, emotionally confusing man whom, she had to admit, she had probably half loved for over twenty years. Fielding would have screamed and shouted, ranted and raved, wept, maybe even hit her. He had never actually done that but she had seen his temper, always suspected him capable of violence if sufficiently provoked. He would have confronted her, probably while drunk, the moment he had any suspicion that she had cheated on him. He would have been irrational and illogical and very, very human. He was always that. Human.

  Her husband, on the other hand, seemed to be as cold and as matter-of-fact as ever. His behaviour towards her indicated on one level that he loved her very much. The very fact that he was fighting to keep her in the way that he was, that he would be prepared even to keep her in the circumstances, demonstrated that, she supposed. And yet, as ever, there was something about the way he went about things which was barely human at all. Jo would have preferred an explosive no-holds-barred row. Much preferred that. Come to think of it, they had never had one of those throughout their marriage.

  She felt overwhelmed with a deep, abiding sorrow. She couldn’t help questioning Paul’s motives, which was terrible. After all, she was the one at fault. Paul wouldn’t want a scandal, of course. His impending knighthood was almost certainly a factor in his determination to keep her.

  Her head ached. She did feel guilty about having deceived Paul, but not as guilty as she suspected she should. She did not even know whether she still loved him. In fact, she was not sure whether she had ever loved him, not really, certainly not in the way in which she had loved Fielding. But her husband had left her with no choice. ‘It’s all right, Paul, I don’t need twenty-four hours,’ she said. ‘I will end it tomorrow.’

  He watched her leave the room and head upstairs for bed, then he went to the drinks cupboard and poured himself a stiff whisky, which he carried into the garden, shutting and locking the kitchen door behind him. He walked across the lawn, past the copse of young fruit trees, to a small wooden shed at the far end. The night was brightly moonlit and he was able to see his way quite clearly. Inside the shed, however, it was pitch-black. A single electric light bulb hung from the wood-panelled ceiling, but he did not switch it on. He did not need to, and he welcomed the blackness which enveloped him when he closed the door. Paul knew where everything was in this shed. It was as orderly as everything in his mind, in his office, in his home, indeed in his life. The mower was to the left, alongside a couple of neatly folded garden chairs and on the right, carefully stacked, were sacks of fertiliser, plant pots and all manner of other gardening paraphernalia. He felt his way to the little wooden stool he kept in the right-hand corner and sat down.

  He was as far away from his house and from the neighbouring houses as it was possible to be. The shed was solid, made of two skins of wood and without windows. He could not be seen and it was reasonable to assume that he could not be heard. He took a sip of his whisky, then lowered his glass to the floor. He threw back his head and let out a kind of howl of anguish. With it came the tears.

  He wept and howled, and howled and wept, his arms wrapped round his torso as if he were hugging himself, until he ached from the sheer physical effort of the sobs which racked his body. The tears coursed down his face, burning hot. His throat hurt. But he could not stop, not until he had allowed all the anguish that was inside him to be released.

  It was not the first time he had used the shed for this purpose, creeping there in the dead of night. But this was the worst, the very worst.

  It was almost twenty minutes before he felt the spasms begin to lessen.

  Eventually the howling ceased and so did the tears. When he gave in to these outbursts it was the only time in his life that he did not have total control. He reached down with a trembling hand for the whisky and took a deep drink.

  He was not sure he felt any better. How could he, with the knowledge he now had of what Joanna had done? But he was at last beginning to calm down. He wished he had been able to tell her, in the depths of his despair, how much she had hurt him. But that wasn’t his way. His sister, with whom he had long ceased to have any contact, had once informed him that he was emotionally dysfunctional. Maybe he was. Bu
t it was more than that. How could he tell Joanna how much she meant to him? How could he, when he knew that he felt so much more for her than she had ever felt for him? He had no illusions. He had been able to make everything happen for him and Joanna. Everything except make her love him. The way he loved her.

  He finished the whisky, rose from the stool, left the shed, locking it carefully behind him, and walked back to the house.

  He would carry on as usual, of course. He also had too much to lose. Joanna remained the perfect wife for him, from the outside at any rate, as long as she behaved. And he knew he could make sure that she did so. Then there were both their careers. And, most vital, the knighthood. As Joanna had suspected, he didn’t intend to let anything queer his pitch there.

  Life was never perfect, but he rather liked the idea that his appeared to be.

  Most importantly, he could not imagine even existing without Joanna at his side.

  By the time Paul Potter had unlocked and opened the kitchen door and stepped inside his house the episode of the garden shed was over. The moment had passed. It was almost as if it had not happened.

  Eighteen

  Exactly one week later Pam Smythe, nearly bursting with excitement, rushed through the Comet’s big open-plan newsroom to Joanna’s desk by the far window. ‘Mike Fielding’s been nicked for fixing Jimbo O’Donnell’s murder,’ she yelled.

  Joanna felt as if she’d been slammed against a wall. The shock was numbing. Neither her body nor her brain could function for a few seconds. She was incapable of speech.

  The news editor didn’t seem to notice Jo’s stunned expression. Pam barely paused for breath. ‘I just don’t believe it,’ she enthused. ‘Christ! What an amazing story. This one is never going to die down. The police have put out a statement on PA. Arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder, that’s the official form. We need all the help you can give us, Jo.’

  Still Joanna said nothing. She remained unable to.

  ‘Jo?’ There was just a note of puzzlement in Pam’s voice now.

  Joanna managed a nod. Could Fielding really be a murderer? Even when she had been trying to hack into her lover’s laptop, checking him out, had she actually believed that he could have done such a thing? Certainly when he had confronted her she had felt merely foolish and disloyal. Her hands were trembling. She clasped them tightly together underneath her desk as she struggled to maintain control.

  ‘Right,’ Pam Smythe continued. ‘Can you get on to Mallett? We’ve got the new Devon area man going round to Fielding’s family house.’

  With a huge effort of will Joanna forced herself at least to appear to react and function like the experienced professional journalist she was supposed to be. ‘Of course, Pam,’ she said. ‘I’m on it.’

  She immediately picked up her phone and pretended to dial a number until the other women turned away and hurried back to her position at the head of the news desk. Then Jo replaced the phone and slumped back in her chair. Jesus! So had her half-formed suspicions been right all along? She hadn’t seriously considered it again since that disastrous last meeting with Fielding in the Southampton Row hotel and her even more disastrous confrontation with Paul the following day. She had tried a couple of times to contact Fielding since then, leaving messages both on his mobile and on his voice mail at Middlemoor. It had been her intention to follow through her promise to Paul and to tell Mike that their affair must end. Neither call had been returned, and she had come to the conclusion that Fielding had meant exactly what he had said in that dreadful hotel room and that their relationship was over without her having to do anything at all about it.

  ‘There’s no point in carrying on, Jo, is there?’ She remembered his words well enough, but now she wondered if there had been more to his silence than just that.

  All she could do, however, was to go through the motions professionally and do as the news editor had asked. Although she didn’t expect to get much joy from Todd Mallett. One thing Pam Smythe had in common with all the news editors she’d ever known was a selective memory. Pam seemed already totally to have forgotten, or more likely had just chosen to appear as if she had, the breakdown in any workable relationship between Jo and the senior police officer she was expected to contact. A typical desk reaction, that. But she should be grateful for small mercies, she supposed. At least she hadn’t been asked to visit Mrs Fielding. She was pretty sure that nobody in the office had had any idea about the resumption of her affair with Fielding after all these years. Indeed, they might have giggled about the Private Eye story, but she didn’t think there was anybody much around who even remembered that there had ever been an affair. Pam Smythe had certainly given no such indication.

  She picked up her phone again and, in spite of her sincere belief that the man disliked and distrusted her, attempted to call Todd Mallett as she had agreed she would. Unsurprisingly, he was not taking press calls. Not from her, anyway.

  The following morning Fielding was formally charged at Exeter and Womford Magistrates’ Court in Exeter, and remanded in custody at the city prison. Yet another twist in the tail. Shifter Brown, the man he had allegedly hired to commit a brutal murder, was, of course, still being held in the same jail.

  Later that day it was again Tim Jones who came up with the background. Not for the first time Jo found herself thinking what an excellent reporter young Tim was. ‘The rubber heel boys hacked into Fielding’s laptop and uncovered a heap of deleted e-mail correspondence between “contractor” and “enforcer”,’ the Comet’s crime correspondent told her excitedly.

  ‘Apparently Todd Mallett got an anonymous call from someone claiming to be “an associate” of Shifter, saying Shifter suspected all along that Mike Fielding had hired him. Shifter denied it to the wall, but then he would, wouldn’t he? Todd Mallett’s the old-fashioned sort, of course, particularly when it comes to a bent copper. He’d always stick to procedure with the public, he’s a by-the-book man, but for Mallett cops come under different rules. And anyway there’s always been bad blood between him and Fielding, hasn’t there? Mallett didn’t hang about getting a warrant or anything like that, just walked over to Fielding’s desk out at Middlemoor, apparently, picked up his laptop and said, “Right sunshine, we’d best have a look in this and clear things up once and for all.”

  ‘Every force has its super-hackers now, computer-born crimes are becoming more and more commonplace. Apparently it didn’t take ’em long to find those hidden files.’

  ‘And what did Shifter say then?’

  ‘“Never seen ’em before in my life, guv.” You know Shifter. What else would you expect? That’s his code, isn’t it? Wouldn’t point the finger even at a copper. Although word is he finds it highly amusing that Mike Fielding’s been banged up. But one way and another he’s no help at all.’

  Neither would he be. Particularly not with a police officer in the frame. Joanna thought for a moment. So much didn’t quite add up.

  ‘Shifter did say he was paid fifteen grand for topping Jimbo,’ she said eventually. ‘Mike Fielding wouldn’t have that kind of cash going spare.’

  The young man shrugged. ‘Maybe doing Jimbo was so important to him he borrowed, got himself a second mortgage or something. Nobody seems to know yet, but chances are it will come out eventually. In any case there’s plenty of other possibilities. You know Fielding’s reputation. He’s always sailed close to the wind. Maybe some toe-rag owed him, or there’s a face paying him bundles to keep his mouth shut. Coppers can always get cash, Jo, if they’re bent enough, can’t they?’

  She winced. She had never thought that Fielding was bent. Overeager. So sharp he could cut himself and frequently did – but actually bent enough to take backhanders from criminals? Surely not. But maybe she’d really never known Mike at all. She made herself concentrate on the job in hand.

  Like her, she thought, it was unlikely that Todd Mallett had actually believed Fielding had hired Shifter, not even when he commandeered his laptop, but Mike had already b
een publicly accused, albeit by the O’Donnells, of doing so. It must have been as obvious to Mallett as it had been to Joanna that in view of the way in which Shifter had been hired and paid, the clues could still be lurking on somebody’s hard drive somewhere. Maybe Fielding was guilty and, not for the first time in his life, had not been quite so clever as he thought he had. Joanna was more confused than ever. All she knew for certain was that she had to do her best to find out the truth. Did Fielding really do it? Could he have been calculated enough to hire a contract killer?

  As soon as Tim left her she wrote to Mike at Exeter prison. It was a brief, carefully worded letter fundamentally expressing her sorrow at his predicament and requesting that he would let her visit him.

  Paul had so far avoided talking to her about the Fielding development, which suited Jo totally. The editor was relying on Tim Jones for day-to-day handling of the story and left it to Pam Smythe to liaise with Jo. But that night at home there was a discernible tension between Jo and her husband. The extraordinary sequence of events which for almost two days they had both been unwilling or unable to discuss was obviously to the forefront of both their minds.

  Paul played jazz even louder than usual and Joanna did her best not to let it show that anything at all was bothering her. Eventually, just before bedtime, Paul enquired casually, ‘What do you think of your boyfriend now, then?’

  Joanna thought that was a fairly cheap remark, both unworthy of Paul and unusual for him. ‘I don’t know what to think, and he’s not my boyfriend. I gave you my word.’

  ‘You gave me your word nineteen years ago when we got married, Joanna.’

  ‘What happened between Mike Fielding and me is over for good and nothing like it will ever happen again, Paul. There’s no more I can say to you.’