A Kind Of Wild Justice

by Hilary Bonner

  ‘What the fuck are you going on about?’ she demanded, instantly regretting her use of the four-letter word. It just slipped out. But she knew how much it annoyed him.

  ‘Keep that language for the scum you work with, will you? I’ve told you before it’s got no place in my home.’

  ‘Will you please stop being so dammed sanctimonious and tell me what has happened, because it’s obvious something has.’ Joanna’s heart was pounding. What was going on?

  He smiled. It was completely mirthless. ‘Some of your chums have being filling me in on your extramarital activities – all in the name of duty, of course,’ he told her, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

  ‘In English, please,’ she responded.

  ‘Please don’t try to be superior all the time, Joanna, it doesn’t suit you, really it doesn’t.’

  She hated it when he talked to her as if she were one of his six-year-old pupils. But she made herself not respond. Instead, she waited.

  ‘I’ve had some phone calls from someone explaining to me exactly how you get your stories,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ exploded Joanna. ‘Come on. Tell me about it, please.’

  She reached for his hand and this time he did not shy away from her touch, which at least was something. He allowed her to lead him to the kitchen table.

  ‘There’ve been a series of calls while you’ve been away,’ he said in a flat, expressionless voice. ‘The theme’s been the same each time. That you’re a slut who’ll do anything to get a story – particularly sleeping with policemen. Any policemen at all.’

  She was staggered. ‘Who made these calls to you?’ she asked quietly.

  He shrugged, not looking at her. ‘I don’t know, do I? The caller didn’t leave his name, surprisingly enough!’

  ‘Chris, for God’s sake!’ she said again. ‘Have we come to this? You’ve let some nutter making anonymous phone calls get to you?’

  ‘How would you like it?’ he countered. ‘Joanna, what am I supposed to believe? I don’t see you for days on end, you’re away on some story or other and then, when you are at home, you’re out till all hours drinking with your alleged police contacts. How do I know what’s going on?’

  ‘It’s my job, Chris,’ she said mildly.

  ‘Some job,’ he responded. ‘And who’s making these calls? Some of your so-called colleagues, I suppose. You work with such charming people, Joanna, don’t you?’

  Now that she was inclined to agree with and she opened her mouth to tell him that she had a damned good idea who was making those calls. In fact, there was only one person she could think of who really hated her that much: Frank Manners. But she changed her mind. Things were getting to the stage where the less Chris knew about her work and the people she worked with the more chance she had of at least a tolerable home life. ‘I don’t have a clue who could be making these calls,’ she lied. ‘And I would sincerely hope it isn’t someone I work with. Look, there’s a guy I know at the Yard who specialises in sorting out moody phone calls. I’ll have a word with him. Maybe he can get a tap put on the line or something.’

  ‘I don’t want a tap on my bloody phone line, Joanna,’ her husband shouted at her.

  ‘Oh, stop being so damned unreasonable, Chris. What the hell do you want, then? You want this sorted, don’t you? It’s obviously upset you.’

  ‘Yes, it bloody well has upset me. What I want is for my wife to stop behaving like some kind of tart. Then I wouldn’t have to put up with stuff like this, would I?’

  All Joanna’s good intentions disappeared in a wave of righteous indignation. ‘You pious prig,’ she shouted at him. ‘Cook your own fucking supper. I should be in the office anyway.’

  She was nearly through the front door when he called after her, ‘There’s one copper in particular, isn’t there? A bit of a favourite of yours.’

  ‘What the hell are you going on about now?’ demanded Joanna.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Mike Fielding. He’s your latest, isn’t he? I’ve seen him on the news. A real smooth operator. Just your sort. Going places, no doubt. Bit different from a poor bloody schoolteacher.’

  ‘Believe what you want to believe, you bloody fool.’

  Joanna slammed the door behind her and headed for her car. If there was anything more infuriating than getting that kind of treatment from your husband when you really had done absolutely nothing to deserve it, she didn’t know what it was. She had lapsed a couple of times since she and Chris had been married, but considering how young they had both been when they had tied the knot she didn’t think that was too bad. There had never been anything consequential with anyone else and she was pretty sure that Chris had lapsed once or twice, too. But she was also pretty sure that he had never had anything amounting to an affair either.

  Funnily enough, she had believed for years that she and Chris had rather a good marriage. Better than a lot she saw, anyway. But recently they seemed barely able to be civil to each other and she really didn’t think it was her fault most of the time. Sometimes she wondered if Chris was jealous of her success in her career, but she supposed that was a touch arrogant of her.

  She left the house at 5.45 p. m. and pulled into the Comet car park around 6.20. She had actually been in the same room as her husband for little more than five minutes, she thought wryly. World War Three had broken out in about as many seconds. So she had left Chiswick early enough to beat the bulk of the theatre traffic and her journey was a reasonably easy one.

  In the newsroom the day was just building towards its climax. Daily-paper offices in 1980 were noisy, smoky places where nobody cleared their desks and everyone tried to talk to each other at once, always at full volume, often while simultaneously conducting a phone call and frequently while also typing – still on clattering manual typewriters, of course.

  So why was it she always felt as if she had been given an intravenous shot of adrenalin every time she entered the building – particularly in the evenings? It was her favourite time there. Indeed, it was every true newspaperman and -woman’s favourite time because that was when the deadline was tightest, the fever pitch ran hottest and the presses were getting ready to roll. The news desk and the back bench were the hub of the paper at night. Passing the desk, she heard Andy McKane, the night news editor, on a call to a reporter apparently making a check call. Andy was one of the old-fashioned sort, a tough-talking Scotsman, convinced that any journalist who hadn’t done a stint north of the border had not completed his apprenticeship and should always be treated with grave suspicion. As should most women journalists, of course, whatever their pedigree. ‘When I want ye to know how I am, old boy, I’ll tell ye, all right,’ she heard him say in his thick Glasgow accent.

  He must be talking to one of those new kids, she thought. Only a reporter who was very new and green would ever begin a check call to McKane with the social nicety of asking him how he was. She chuckled to herself. It was McKane who was famously responsible for a 1 a.m. call to a former showbusiness editor of the Comet, the only point of which appeared to be to slag off one of her staff. The woman had apparently listened more or less silently for some minutes, no doubt just hoping McKane would go way. Eventually she decided she should show some sort of support for her man and had told the night news editor, ‘Oh, come on, Andy, Ron’s done some bloody good stuff lately.’

  McKane hadn’t argued with that. Instead, he replied in his guttural Glaswegian, ‘Huh, only because you sit on his fucking lap and squeeze his fucking balls.’

  The next day the showbusiness editor had approached McKane just as the editor was walking past. ‘Andy, when you said that Ron had only done some good stuff lately because I sat on his fucking lap and squeezed his fucking balls, did you mean by way of punishment or encouragement?’ she had asked in a loud, clear voice. Her timing had been impeccable. The newsroom had erupted in laughter. McKane had had the grace to flush slightly. The showbusiness editor’s response had been spot on, of course.


  The same woman, who was almost six feet tall, had once effectively dealt with a diminutive reporter who, upon returning from a heavy lunchtime session in the pub, had beerily informed her that he wouldn’t half like to give her one, as he so charmingly put it. She had drawn herself up to her full height and replied, ‘Well, if you ever do and I find out, I shall be very angry.’

  Jo grinned at the memory. Let the bastards think they’d got to you and you were dead. Banter and lack of concern. Looking as if you couldn’t care less – even when you did. Those were your only weapons. And they weren’t much when you were one of a handful of women among several hundred men.

  Paul Potter, a talented young feature writer, was still at his desk as Joanna had rather hoped he might be, working on a spread featuring unsolved murders of young women – the peg, of course, being the Angela Phillips case. Joanna knew that he was looking into what had happened in the investigations into each case, some of them going back many years. He was talking to the families and the police officers involved, and sometimes to suspects. In the UK, no unsolved murder investigation was ever closed. The only exceptions were when the police were damn sure they had found the murderer but either could not gather enough evidence to go to court, or their prime suspect was acquitted. Then inquiries were often quietly folded.

  There was plenty for Paul to work with. He was nice-looking in an unassuming sort of way, quiet, clever, thoughtful and a good listener. Sometimes she wondered what he was doing in Fleet Street. It didn’t seem his sort of place. He was excellent at his job; it was just that he was so different from the others. It certainly never occurred to her, or indeed anyone else in those days, that he was particularly ambitious.

  She paused to speak to him as she passed. ‘How’s it going?’ she enquired.

  He looked up in mild surprise. ‘Hi, Jo, didn’t expect to see you until tomorrow.’

  ‘No, well, it was one of those times at home when I reckoned I’d actually rather be here. Anyway, maybe I can get a quiet hour or so to catch up with the backlog of stuff that is no doubt waiting on my desk.’

  There was no one else in the Street of Shame to whom she would have confided even that much about her troubled home life. She knew all too well that another rule of survival in a newspaper office was not to bring your troubles to work with you. Not ever. The guys could do that occasionally, but never the women.

  Paul accepted her small confidence without comment, as he almost always did. He never asked questions. ‘Quiet hour or so? In this place? You have to be joking,’ he told her with his familiar tight smile.

  ‘Oh, well, quiet ten minutes, maybe?’

  ‘No chance.’ He smiled again. ‘I’ll have wrapped this up in the next hour, I reckon. It’s been a tough one. Not very cheery material, either. Then I’m going to the Stab for a pint. Care to join me?’

  The Stab in the Back was the name by which the Comet pub, the White Hart, was invariably known. ‘Sure, that’d be good,’ Jo replied casually. So much for working! But the truth was that the possibility of a quiet pint with Paul had been in the back of her mind since she had decided to go into the office. He was perfect company for her. Sometimes he seemed to be the only person in her life with whom she could spend time without some kind of stress. He did not indulge in the constant, often lewd, banter of so many of her colleagues. He made absolutely no demands on her. She could talk shop with him with more freedom than with anyone else and drown her sorrows without fear. Even if she later felt she had made a bit of a fool of herself, he had never let her down.

  He was not only sensitive but also safe. To her those were his finest attributes. And it did not occur to her that he might regard her as anything more than a casual drinking mate.

  Five

  Joanna was halfway along Knightsbridge on her way home from the Comet office just five days later when she was called on her car phone and told that a man had been arrested in connection with the abduction and murder of Angela Phillips. He had yet to be charged. ‘I’m on my way back,’ she said as, with a screech of tyre rubber, she instantly swung her car into an illegal U-turn just past the Beauchamp Place traffic lights.

  The black cab behind her had to brake and swerve to avoid hitting her and the driver shouted a mouthful of abuse at her through his open window. Joanna barely heard him. She belted back along Knightsbridge, racing two red lights, and roared the MG around Hyde Park Corner without even attempting to wait for a gap in the traffic. The other vehicles could dodge her. And thankfully, unlike in America where they kept driving at you because they were so unused to motorists breaking rules, in London they almost always did dodge you – even if accompanied by much horn-blowing and colourfully vocal road rage.

  On Constitution Hill, Jo switched her headlights on to full beam and drove down the middle of the road, hoping to God she didn’t encounter a policeman. It was nearly nine on an early September evening, most workers had gone home or were ensconced in a central London pub or restaurant for the night, the theatre crowd were safely locked in for at least another hour. The roads were mercifully clear, for once. She belted past Buckingham Palace, sped down Birdcage Walk and turned left at Westminster along the Embankment. Big Ben was striking nine as she passed the Houses of Parliament.

  There was only an hour to go until first-edition time, an hour in which to produce what would be regarded as an early story, to be expanded and updated for later editions. She knew Tom Mitchell himself was editing that night and was glad of it. Sometimes, when his deputy or one of the two assistant editors allowed to edit at night were on duty, they erred on the side of caution a little too much for her liking.

  The night desk would already be on the case and almost every reporter on late duty would have been assigned a task which would form just a part of the night’s coverage. When a big story like the arrest of the Beast of Dartmoor broke, every conceivable angle was covered as quickly as possible, somebody would be hammering out a recap of Angela’s disappearance, a number of reporters would be trying to contact Angela’s friends and family, and others would be trying to find out exactly who had been arrested. Frank Manners and Freddie Taylor would also have been alerted and put on the job. Manners had quite a track record of prising information out of police contacts. Joanna wanted to beat them to it.

  She pulled off the Embankment by the Howard Hotel and hurtled up the tiny side street which led up to the Strand and the Aldwych, where she drove straight over the cobbles past St Clement’s Church and turned right along Fleet Street. Jo swung a left into Fetter Lane, then a right into the office car park, manned twenty-four hours a day. She pulled noisily to a halt alongside the all-night attendant, jumped out of the car leaving the engine running, begged the man to park it for her and, within seconds, was belting up the back stairs to the newsroom. She was in far too much of a hurry to wait for the lift.

  The newsroom was buzzing. You could feel it as soon as you stepped on to the murky brown carpet-tiled floor. Joanna felt the familiar rush of adrenalin. It was like getting a shot of something. On occasions it could be as good as sex. She had felt it many times before. The excitement rising inside her, the desire to get on with doing what she knew she could do so well. It was at times like this that she remembered why she had fallen in love with the job in the first place.

  She went straight to the night news editor. McKane, shirtsleeves rolled up above brawny forearms, sat at the head of a clamorous news desk cluttered with piles of paper, grimy tea mugs and overflowing ashtrays. The phones didn’t ring on the desk, that really would have been bedlam. Instead, lights flashed relentlessly on mini switchboards. There were only two desk men on duty, the normal night staffing, and each seemed to be taking at least three calls simultaneously. McKane, holding a phone to an ear with one hand, passed Joanna a narrow sheaf of Press Association copy with the other. ‘Hold on a minute,’ he commanded into the receiver, then turning to her, he said, ‘This is about all we’ve got and it’s bugger all, Jo. Where did this joker come from? We didn’
t even know they were close, did we?’

  She shook her head. She had expected this approach. She knew exactly what McKane was getting at. The Comet was completely out in the cold on the arrest. She just hoped that none of the competition had been more on the ball. Had she let go her grip on the story a bit? She didn’t think so. Either the suspect had come into the frame extremely suddenly or the boys in blue had really kept their drum tight for once.

  ‘Any help you can give us, Jo. We badly need a line,’ continued McKane before returning to his phone call while at the same time studying a piece of copy handed him by one of the regular night duty casuals. There was no sexist nonsense with him tonight nor would there be. He was doing what he did best. McKane was always at his most impressive when he was up against it, handling a major late-breaking story or chasing up a belter of an exclusive when the foreigns, the first editions of rival newspapers, dropped around midnight.

  The only time he played games was when he was bored. And McKane got bored easily. So did most of them. It was one of things that made being married to a civilian difficult. The chaps seemed to manage it all right. Men had a way of moulding their women, or was it more that women had a way of turning themselves into the right kind of person for the man they married? Certainly women were inclined to try harder, Jo was damned sure of that.

  Frank Manners was at his desk. He had left the office long before her, but she guessed that he had probably been having a few pints in the Stab or Vagabonds around the corner. Frank was just finishing a phone call and, if he was under the influence at all, he didn’t show any signs of it. But then, much as she disliked the man she knew him to be a professional, both as a reporter and a drinker.

  He also was too busy to play sexist games.

  He put the phone down with a flourish as she approached. ‘James Martin O’Donnell,’ he said and he was apparently too caught up in the story to sound as triumphalist as she might have expected. ‘The Devon and Cornwall boys picked him up in London and took him straight back to Exeter. He’s not been charged yet, but they must be confident to bowl into Met territory like that.’