A Kind Of Wild Justice

by Hilary Bonner

  ‘So what do you think …’

  He interrupted her. ‘Jo, when I called I didn’t want to talk about all this, particularly. I’ve just got to live with it now if I want any sort of future. And that’s what I wanted to talk about. My future. Our future. Us.’

  ‘I didn’t think there was an “us” any more.’ Her voice sounded distant.

  ‘There could be.’

  His temper had cooled, of course. He wanted to see her again. It was always her he had dreamed about in prison. Always her in his thoughts when he woke up in the mornings with an erection, or half a one more often than not nowadays. It had really knocked the stuffing out of him, all this, in every possible way. He couldn’t explain how he felt. He couldn’t explain how mercurial those feelings were either. Maybe it was because the strength and longevity of his desire for her frightened him. One minute he never wanted to see her again and the next he felt that life wasn’t worth living without her. He couldn’t regret that it had all started with her again, there had been too much pleasure involved, even a little bit of joy. But so much bloody pain too. That seemed to be inevitable for them.

  ‘Sometimes I think you and me will always be an “us”,’ he carried on. ‘I was angry with you because you didn’t believe in me, and particularly when I was in the clink that was very important to me. But it hasn’t affected my feelings for you.’

  ‘Mike, your feelings change with the wind, I should have learned that twenty-odd years ago.’

  Had she read his mind, he wondered. He couldn’t argue with her. He was well aware that she spoke the truth.

  ‘I met your wife when I was leaving the prison.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘She never even knew about you and me, did she?’

  Typically he avoided the question. ‘Look, can we at least meet and talk?’

  ‘I doubt it. Talking has never been our strong suit, has it?’ she said, her voice heavy.

  No, he thought. They never had time to talk much. Sex and their jobs. That had always been their bond. But it must have been more than that to have lasted all that time, to have been resurrected so easily.

  ‘We could try. If we are going to end this for good I really don’t want us to do it on the bloody phone.’

  He heard her sigh. ‘Mike, there’s no point. Anyway, I don’t dare. For all I know Paul’s still having me followed. If you and I even met he’d find out, I’m sure of it, and if he did he’d divorce me. He’s told me so and I believe him absolutely. He won’t put up with it again.’

  ‘And would that be such a disaster, then?’

  ‘Mike, don’t be ridiculous. I have so much to lose. Including my daughter.’

  ‘Since when has your daughter been so damned important to you?’

  ‘Mike, that’s a terrible thing to say. Of course she’s important to me.’

  ‘Really? More important than your job and that flash house and maybe being Lady bloody Potter?’

  He didn’t know why he was saying these things. The last thing he wanted to do was alienate her. He wanted to try again and yet he knew he was also doing his damnedest to destroy any chance of that. He was tying himself up in knots. Why was it so often like that with her?

  When she replied he thought there was a slight quaver in her voice but she spoke very patiently, as if addressing a wayward child. ‘Mike, I don’t think you listen to yourself sometimes. In any case it doesn’t make any difference. It really is over for us now. It has to be.’

  ‘Why, so you can stay with a man you don’t love just because he’s a rich cunt?’

  He knew he had shouted the last words. He had meant to be vicious but even as he yelled into the telephone he regretted it. Almost at once he began to stumble an apology.

  It was too late.

  There was a click as he opened his mouth to speak again and he ended up whispering the word ‘sorry’ into a buzzing receiver.

  She had hung up on him.

  Joanna sat on the edge of the bed in the cream and white bedroom of her Richmond home, staring numbly at the telephone she had just been using. It was typical of Mike to flare up like that. Nonetheless, she was stunned. She had never told him that she didn’t love Paul and in any case it wasn’t as simple as that. It was to Fielding, of course. He always saw other people’s actions in black and white even though his own were invariably anything but.

  Joanna had ensured that she was alone in the house before she made the call and she was very glad of that. It was just before six o’clock in the evening. Emily was staying the night at a friend’s. The au pair was also out. Paul wouldn’t be home for hours.

  So Jo could weep in private, weep for the end of the love affair of her life. It was the end. She had no intention of going back on her word. But God, it hurt and Mike’s words had hurt more than anything she could imagine. Far more, she thought, than he would ever suspect. She still did not think he truly realised just how strong an effect everything he said and did had on her.

  There was no future for them. Maybe there had never been a chance of one. They carried so much baggage now it was impossible. Angela Phillips. Jimbo and Tommy O’Donnell. Shifter Brown. So many images flitted through her mind whenever she thought of Mike. Which was still most of the time. And yet the pair of them were eternally plagued by doubts. In every direction. Their lives together, inasmuch as they had ever been together, tainted with suspicion and betrayal.

  Mike Fielding and Joanna Bartlett. An unlikely coupling caught up in a tangled web that was all too often of their own making.

  She accepted absolutely now that Mike had not hired Shifter and that he had been framed. But she still didn’t trust him. How could she? She could never be sure of anything about him. He was so unlike Paul in that. You could always be sure of Paul.

  She knew damned well that if she had gone along with him on the phone, told him what she suspected he had, at that moment at any rate, wanted to hear, told him she’d leave Paul, her daughter, everything to be with him, by the next day he’d probably have changed his mind.

  She knew she had made the right decision. She just knew it. It was the only decision. But that didn’t make it any easier.

  The tears came freely pouring down her cheeks. She’d done a lot of crying lately. But it never seemed to help.

  She flung herself full-length on the bed and buried her face in the pillows. An era had ended for good. It was over. And so at last was the case of Angela Phillips and James Martin O’Donnell.

  Even in her misery it occurred to her that there had finally been a kind of rough justice.

  Twenty

  After Joanna had hung up on him Fielding. predictably enough, went to the pub. He knew he should try to forget Jo. She was just too dangerous for him. And it looked as she was in any case giving him little choice.

  Mike was still mystified as to how those e-mails had got on to his laptop. And he still had no idea who had framed him so effectively. He assumed it must have been one of the many police colleagues he had crossed over the years, some of whom he could quite believe disliked him far more than most villains had ever done.

  And then the police had discovered Caroline O’Donnell’s diary, which started all their doubts. Though there was no mystery about that, of course. Fielding himself had been responsible for the tip-off. He had told his wife to write the letter which alerted Todd Mallett. He had told her exactly what to say, and how to type the letter and where to post it from in order to provide virtually no clues to its origin. Ruth had been confused and had asked a lot of questions he’d had trouble answering. But, as usual, in the end she had done his bidding.

  Of course, only Fielding knew there wasn’t a word of truth in the diary. He had written it himself, on the dead girl’s computer sitting in that bedroom which her family had kept as a shrine. He had done it while her parents were on holiday. Down on the Costa del Crime, naturally. It hadn’t been difficult to break into the O’Donnell home. They didn’t go in for a great deal of security. They didn’t n
eed to. It would be a brave villain who would do their house. And in any case Fielding was good at breaking into places, having a look round, retreating without leaving a sign. It takes one to catch one, he thought with a wry smile. The old adage again.

  He knew he’d done a good enough job on the diary to make it appear convincingly authentic. That had been a doddle for him. He’d done his five years in child protection. He’d heard kids talking about being abused by their uncles, and their mother’s boyfriends, and yes, their fathers and grandfathers. He’d taken statements, he’d read childish outpourings. They quite often wrote stuff down, these poor mixed-up, mistreated kids. He knew how they sounded, the way they wrote stuff, the words they used and the words they didn’t because they couldn’t bring themselves to, or maybe because they didn’t even know them.

  He’d typed it out laboriously on Caroline’s computer, hidden it in a homework file, but not too well and, for good measure, he’d printed the diary and left it half sticking out of a book. He knew Tommy and his wife spent time in this room, paying a sort of homage to her. You could see that’s what they did from the very look of the place. He’d done his utmost to leave the diary somewhere he felt pretty sure it would be discovered, but where it was possible that both mother and father had missed it previously. That had been the most difficult part of the job. But apparently he had managed it.

  Tommy must have wondered who had tipped off the police about the diary, of course. Mike realised how unlikely it was that he would have told anyone about it. He wouldn’t have wanted the world to know about what he believed his brother had done, he just would have wanted to sort it. But the O’Donnells had plenty of enemies, and Tommy might well have thought it could have been somebody Sam had crossed years ago, who’d done some snooping. Or perhaps he’d believed that Caroline must have confided in another kid, a school friend who’d eventually owned up to what she knew. Kids did things like that.

  Fielding had been surprised when he’d learned that Tommy had used e-mail to arrange the contract. But then he’d recognised the sense of it. It had allowed Tommy to distance himself and his family from the crime. Tommy was clever and no doubt quite knowledgeable enough about the Net to realise that an Excite address on e-mails sent and received at a cyber café would give him total anonymity. Swiss bank accounts all round had taken care of the payments he’d made to Shifter, of course, and that had really been Tommy’s style. As Shifter genuinely hadn’t known who had hired him, Tommy needn’t actually have made the second payment. But Fielding wasn’t surprised that he had. If Tommy O’Donnell made a deal he kept it. That was part of the code.

  Fielding smiled. He had not killed James Martin O’Donnell. Nor had he hired the man who did. But he had been responsible all right. He had made quite sure that Tommy would not allow his brother to live. James O’Donnell, guilty of the worst crime he had ever known. Guilty of leaving poor bloody Angela Phillips to die alone, violated, disfigured, racked with pain, to be found by a policeman who had thought he had seen it all. A policeman so tough he didn’t get moved by dead bodies. Until he saw that one. Jimbo O’Donnell, guilty as hell of all that and guilty also of wrecking what had once been the most important thing in Mike Fielding’s life – apart from Joanna Bartlett. His career.

  There wasn’t much left for Mike to smile about. But the thought of Jimbo O’Donnell lying dead in a hole in the ground with his cock in his mouth, that would always make him smile. That and the fact that he still had a pension.

  He ordered another large whisky. Then, when he had drunk enough to numb the pain, he decided he might as well go home to his wife. As usual. Who knows, he thought, hauling himself uncertainly upright from his bar stool, perhaps that’s what he would have ended up doing eventually regardless of Joanna. It was, after all, what he had always done.

  Fielding would not, however, be returning to the Devon and Exeter Constabulary. How could he? He had been cleared. His record remained unblemished. Officially. An early retirement deal safeguarding his thirty-year pension – there was only about a year still to go now – had been organised.

  His wife had always wanted to retire to Spain. Some place she’d fallen in love with on the Costa Blanca. They’d never be able to afford the more southerly Costa del Sol where all the rich villains were. Maybe he would give Ruth something she wanted for once. Yes, that’s what he’d do, he thought, oozing drunken benevolence.

  He made his way a little unsteadily through the pub door and out on to the pavement. The fresh air hit him like a blow in the face. He staggered, recovering himself with all the acumen of a professional drunk. Anyway, there was this barmaid he’d got to know over on the Costa a few years back …

  A month or so later Joanna woke once more from a largely alcohol-induced sleep with no discernible hangover. You didn’t get them when you were in the habit of drinking as much as she had begun to. She feared she was picking up Fielding’s habit. Mike had not attempted to get in touch with her since she had hung up on him. And she was determined never to contact him again. Sometimes she couldn’t even believe she had allowed, even encouraged, the resumption of their affair. Now she just wanted to put Mike out of her mind. For ever. But trying to forget him wasn’t proving easy. In fact, it wasn’t easy to forget any of it.

  She reflected on how many lives had been touched by the death of Angela Phillips and all that had happened since.

  Most affected of all, of course – if you didn’t count the O’Donnells and she preferred not to – were the Phillips family. She had, however, been glad to learn through the Comet’s new Devon man that the family had sold part of their land, close to Okehampton apparently, for building development. Planning permission had been given, against the odds on the edge of Dartmoor, because of the need for new homes in the area. Big money was involved, which probably meant that the family would be able to save the remains of their farm, even after the disastrous private court case against O’Donnell and the Comet reneging on their deal.

  She’d heard that Todd Mallett had finally closed down his investigation into Jimbo O’Donnell’s murder and Shifter Brown’s involvement – and the police never did that with an unsolved killing, even a partially unsolved one, unless they were damned sure they knew the truth but could do nothing about it. They obviously didn’t think they were ever going to prove anything against Tommy O’Donnell and that didn’t surprise Jo a bit.

  Paul, typically, carried on as if nothing had happened. More or less. The previous week, however, he had axed her column. She assumed it was a kind of punishment and had told him so. That had been a mistake, of course. Her husband didn’t like confrontation or indignation. Emotional outbursts never got you anywhere with him. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Jo, it’s what’s called an editorial decision,’ he had told her. ‘There is no place for that kind of journalism in the tabloid world any more. It’s old-fashioned and you know it. You must realise how out of place “Sword of Justice” is in the Comet, and has been for some time.’

  She did realise that, of course. That didn’t mean she liked it any the more. Paul had said she would remain an assistant editor, that he’d find a new role for her, but she really couldn’t see that working out. Her disappointment was far more than just for herself, however. She thought it a tragedy that all the great tabloid traditions were being eroded. The British popular papers she had once been so proud to represent were nowadays often not much different from America’s supermarket tabloids: just full of throwaway trash. She thought it was a shame. And so, she had always believed, did Paul, whom she had admired for at least appearing to try to walk the tightrope between the kind of journalistic standards now almost invariably ignored and the demands of the modern mass market. She was no longer even so sure of that.

  Nonetheless she knew she had little choice but to settle for what she’d got. Which was a hell of a lot more than most people had, after all. Paul had been right. And Fielding, too, in an awful sort of way. She liked her lifestyle, she had got used to the luxury home and even
Paul’s chauffeur-driven car, to never having to worry about money. She also loved her daughter desperately, even if she had yet to develop the kind of mother–daughter relationship she felt she should have with Emily.

  She wasn’t happy, of course. All the old demons had been released. She would not forget Fielding no matter how hard she tried. Not ever. Or Angela Phillips, come to that. All of it would be with her always. And alcohol only ever provided temporary amnesia.

  She resolved to cut down on the drinking and to rebuild her life. More than anything else she would concentrate on her family in future. The rest of it was over.

  As part of this new resolution Jo made a huge fuss of her daughter over breakfast, drove her to school and promised she would be at home waiting when Emily returned in the afternoon. ‘And at the weekend we’ll do some shopping together, buy you some new clothes, and then maybe go to the cinema,’ she went on. ‘You can chose the film, Em. Would you like that?’

  ‘Oh, yeah! That would be great, Mum,’ replied Emily, with a level of enthusiasm which quite took Joanna by surprise.

  Maybe, if she made a real effort, things would work out after all, she thought.

  Marginally cheered, she later set off for St Bride’s in Fleet Street, the famous journalists’ church, for a memorial service for Andy McKane, who had died at the age of sixty-one of sclerosis of the liver. Which was exactly how she’d end up if she didn’t watch it, Jo reflected wryly.

  McKane may have been a fearful old sexist, but he had also been an excellent news editor and a fundamentally good-hearted guy, beneath his bombastic chauvinism. In any case the memorial service provided a nowadays rare get-together for old Fleet Street hacks. Certainly she found she was looking forward to the diversion.

  The turnout was extensive and across the board, as she would have expected for Andy. After the service there was the usual wake in El Vino’s wine bar during which, in spite of her morning resolution, Jo drank far more house champagne than she had intended to. By the time she decided, three hours or so later, that she really must leave if she were to have any chance of keeping her promise to Emily, she was feeling quite mellow.