She had no idea where Nigel Nuffield had disappeared to so swiftly after the devastating verdict or, indeed, exactly how, but in any event she did not really want to see him. Not yet. She was too angry. Too defeated.
On autopilot she filed what story she could. The Comet’s news editor was a woman now, virtually unheard of twenty years earlier. And Pam Smythe’s measured approach was a far cry from that of the bombastic McKane and Foley, who had been traditional Fleet Street newsmen of a very different mould, but Pam was razor sharp and could be quite cutting enough when it was called for. On this occasion she actually sounded embarrassed. Banter was not what it was any more, but even the old guys would probably have held back in this situation. Joanna had screwed up big time and back in Canary Wharf they damn well knew it.
When she had finished her call to the office there was something else she felt she had to do before she could head home to the dubious reception which inevitably awaited her. She set off across the moor to Blackstone to visit the Phillips family. They too had managed to make a quick getaway, somehow getting past the press pack and presumably driving off back to Five Tors. Jo didn’t really want to see them but she felt she could not just walk away from them on this dreadful day. The pack were gathered, just as they had so long ago, at the end of the farm lane, having no doubt already knocked several times on the farmhouse door and been sent away.
Joanna drove straight past them, swung her BMW into the yard and parked right outside the kitchen door, which was opened almost immediately when she knocked on it. They would have heard her arriving, of course, and recognised her car.
Rob Phillips beckoned her into the big kitchen where the entire family were, yet again, gathered round the kitchen table. Without being asked she pulled back a chair and sat down. Just as before. Nobody spoke to her. But at least they had allowed her in.
She glanced around her. Bill Phillips sat head down with his hands clasped round a mug of tea as if drawing comfort from the warmth of it. She could see that his fingers were shaking. He did not look up and for that she was quite grateful. She did not want to see how much more pain there was in his eyes.
Lillian Phillips was sobbing quietly. Joanna thought she had probably been in tears ever since the verdict was announced. Her daughter-in-law had her arm round her but had obviously given up trying to comfort her. What comfort could anyone give this woman, Joanna wondered. Lillian stared at her through her tears, a stare which was a mix of accusation and pleading.
Mary was tight-lipped. Eyes bright in their folds of flesh. She was deceptive. The fat made her look like a West Country version of jolly Ma Larkin. Her voice was a gentle Devonshire burr, but it had a hard edge when she broke the silence. She was, of course, as damaged as the rest of the family by the legacy of the terrible twenty-year-old murder and in reality her personality could not have been further removed from that of the carefree Ma Larkin.
But how could it have been any other way? How could anybody in this family ever be carefree again? As his mother began to speak she glanced at Les, the youngest of them, Angela’s nephew. The lad looked as if he was carrying the cares of the world on his shoulders. Unlike the others, he had not gone through anything like this before. This was his first taste of it. She thought the look of panic in his eyes came from the grim realisation that this had been the family’s one chance to put an end to it all, finally to bury Angela, as he had put it. Now he must know that there would be no end, that Angela’s ghost would probably haunt him for the rest of his life. Joanna couldn’t imagine the bleakness he must be feeling.
Mary Phillips’s words washed over her: harsh, deserved, expected. ‘What was the point of it all? What was the point of dragging it all up again? There is no justice in this country. We should not have listened to you, Joanna Bartlett. Look at the state mother is in, look at her. You did this to her, you and your precious policeman boyfriend. We trusted him before and he let us down. Now we’ve been let down again. By you. By everyone.’
Joanna did not reply. What was there to say? She wondered a little at even Mary referring to Fielding in this way.
Young Les spoke up then. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said. ‘You promised us we’d get him this time. You promised us it would be all right …’ There was a catch in his voice.
Joanna sighed. ‘Les, I’m not the chairman of the bench. I’m as sorry as you are, as sorry as any of you.’ Even as she said the words she knew they were a mistake.
From Bill Phillips there came a kind of strangled sound; it was actually a sort of dry, mirthless laugh. He looked up for the first time. She tried to avoid his eyes but could not. If there had been pain before, now there was agony in them. ‘No you’re not,’ he told her in a quiet, even voice without much expression. ‘No you’re not and please don’t ever again say that you are. You don’t know what sorrow is. You have to lose what we have lost to know. We’ve lost our daughter and our own lives too. Look at that boy there …’ He gestured at Les. ‘What’s he known in his life but our misery?’
She didn’t dare speak.
‘Why have you come here tonight?’ he asked sharply.
Her reply was honest. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘After another story for that so-called newspaper of yours, are you?’ he persisted.
‘No, this is off the record, I promise. I just wanted to see you …’ Her voice tailed off.
‘We’ve had enough of your promises,’ he told her. There was another silence before he spoke again, his voice even sharper, his look challenging. ‘You are going to honour our contract, you are going to pay up, I assume. Or will that be another broken promise?’
‘You won’t be out of pocket, Bill, I suppose that was the only promise I could make and have some control over. Of course the Comet will pay you, as agreed.’
She spoke with a confidence she did not feel. So far the paper had only paid a nominal £5000 to the family for interviews given once it had been decided to put a private prosecution into motion and before the court case. As ever, and apart from any other considerations, what further material they could publish, if any, would be severely limited by the man’s acquittal.
Costs had been awarded against the Phillipses. That meant they had to pay O’Donnell’s legal fees as well as their own and he, as ever, had fielded the dream team. The total bill, even though the case had not got beyond the committal proceedings, could well end up approaching £100,000 or so. Brian Burns was famous for quite extortionate fees, which had become a part of his mystique and which his clients always seemed to pay without a murmur because of his extraordinary record of success. And Nigel Nuffield did not come cheap, in spite of his bleeding-heart pretensions.
Joanna’s heart sank to her boots as she made herself consider it all. She dreaded Paul’s reaction. He had agreed to the deal being struck. She was not just a senior columnist on his paper but also his wife. This was the kind of mess that could bring editors down.
She had a feeling he might refuse to pay. And sitting at that kitchen table looking around at those sad, broken people, she wished the quarry-tiled floor would split in two and swallow her up.
They didn’t hate her, really. They just wanted someone to blame. After a bit Mary offered her a cup of tea. Jo didn’t actually want it, but gratefully accepted the olive branch. In the end she stayed for just over half an hour and when she left to begin her drive back to London Lillian was still weeping. Her sobs grew drier and drier as if she had no tears left, but she carried on going through the motions.
Jo had at one point quietly asked Mary if she thought maybe she should call a doctor for her mother-in-law.
‘No,’ the other woman had replied with forceful certainty. ‘She’ll be better just left alone.’ Then, pointedly she had added, making Jo feel smaller than ever: ‘We’ll all be better left alone now …’
That seemed to be her cue to go. And once she was safely in the cocoon of the BMW, Joanna found she had to take deep breaths in order to prevent herself break
ing down. She rattled the powerful motor down the lane, not bothering even to attempt to avoid the potholes, and, much faster than she knew she should have done, hurtled past the assembled pack who were shouting out at her, desperate for a few crumbs from her table. As she pressed her foot a little further down on the accelerator, she wondered why on earth they should think she had any crumbs left after what she had been put through in the courtroom that day.
A photographer she knew vaguely and had never liked stepped out into the road in front of her, brandishing his camera. She accelerated even more and was mildly gratified by the surprised and frightened expression on his face as he was forced to leap into the hedge in order to avoid being run over.
She did remind herself, as she carried on in the direction of the A30, that there was nothing worse than poacher turned gamekeeper, and she lifted her foot, just slightly, off the accelerator slowing to an almost sensible speed. Her hands were shaking on the wheel. Her bottom lip was trembling and she had to fight like mad to prevent herself from bursting into tears. Apart from anything else, she was afraid that if she started, like poor Lillian Phillips, she would not be able to stop.
The A30 blended with the M5 just before Exeter and within half an hour or so of leaving Five Tors Farm the Exeter Services loomed ahead of her and she pulled off the road, telling herself that she might as well fill up with petrol straight away. There was, of course, another reason.
This time she intended to give in to her impulse. She didn’t have anything much more to lose anyway. She really did want to see Fielding. She used her mobile to call him. She guessed he would be in his office at Heavitree Road just as he had been on that other occasion all those years ago. For all sorts of reasons she did not dare turn up unannounced as she had then. Their relationship, whatever it was, and God knew she had no idea what it was, particularly as they had yet even to talk in person this time round, was now too public. They had somehow become almost as much a part of the story as O’Donnell and poor Angela Phillips.
But there was something else, too. Suddenly the memory of what had happened between them after that other trial, that long-ago acquittal of O’Donnell in Exeter Crown Court, had become overwhelmingly vivid. Once more, and after so long, she felt very strongly that only she and Fielding could help each other.
He answered his direct line at once. ‘I was hoping it might be you,’ he said quietly.
She was very slightly taken aback. Was he too thinking of that night twenty years ago? ‘Can you get out?’ she asked. ‘I thought we might have a drink.’
‘I’ve got a report to write. I’m in the shit over this, deeply in the shit.’
She interrupted him. ‘Me too.’
‘Yep,’ he murmured. ‘Story of my life, though, isn’t it?’
There was a slightly awkward pause.
‘Look, if I don’t have this report in the chief constable’s office by tomorrow morning I’m dead.’
‘It’s OK, you’re right, it was probably a lousy idea anyway.’
‘To hell with it,’ he interrupted suddenly. ‘Where are you?’
She told him.
‘Right. Not any of the pubs here.’
She understood his reasons well enough as he gave her directions to a pub she had never heard of. ‘See you there in twenty.’
She phoned Emily on the way, trying not to give any indication of how upset she was, but telling her daughter and the au pair that she would be late home and Emily shouldn’t even think about waiting up as she had school the next day.
Fielding was at the pub before her, sitting at a corner table nursing a pint. He’d taken his tie off and his jacket looked rumpled. She was reminded again of what a snappy dresser he had once been, always particularly noticeable in a member of a profession not known for sartorial elegance. He looked worn out and fed up. She was aware again of the disappointment and weariness in his eyes.
He got up and kissed her lightly on the cheek. Strange how natural that seemed. She accepted his offer of a drink and ordered a Diet Coke. She had a long drive ahead of her.
He bought the drink for her and sat down opposite. Neither of them spoke for what seemed a long time but was probably just a few seconds.
‘You look tired,’ she said eventually.
‘Thanks a bunch,’ he responded. ‘I’ve seen you look better too.’
‘I’ve just come from the Phillipses,’ she said.
‘Oh, fuck.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And now you’re off home. Something else to look forward to.’
‘Yup.’
‘I keep trying to figure out what went wrong.’
‘Yup,’ she said again.
‘I was sure the bastard would go down. Instead it’s all the rest of us who are down, right down the pan in my case.’
He looked so miserable. A completely different man from the one she had first encountered all those years ago. Like a small boy, really, but a very old small boy. She felt a sudden urge to give him a cuddle. But those days were long gone and this was certainly not the moment to rekindle anything. ‘We did the right thing,’ she said, as much to reassure herself as him.
‘Did we? And since when did the likes of you and me even try to do the right thing?’
She sighed. ‘We do sometimes.’
‘And sometimes not.’ He looked down at his hands, holding his pint glass on the table in front of him. ‘I was remembering when we met after O’Donnell walked the last time …’
He didn’t need to explain further. She had known that would be as much in his mind as it was in hers. It had to be. ‘So was I,’ she said softy.
He looked up at her. Suddenly there was just a spark of the old Mike Fielding. ‘God, we were good,’ he said. And his eyes twinkled.
‘We damn well were, weren’t we?’ she responded, and for what seemed the first time in for ever she managed a big broad grin.
But that was the only reference they made to their old relationship. One thing was obvious – and that was how much they both remembered it, how easy it was for them to relive their time together. Nonetheless, although they continued to talk about the old days they spoke more about other people than themselves.
‘You used to drive that old bastard Frank Manners crazy, you know,’ he said.
‘Didn’t I, though,’ she replied with some satisfaction. And they had almost managed a bit of a giggle at that. It was as if by silent consent they did not want to talk about anything that might be contentious in any way. They stayed in the pub together for more than an hour and also, perhaps surprisingly, talked very little about that day’s courtroom disaster. There was, after all, little point. Neither of them could see any way of taking the matter forward. Or their relationship, come to that. This stolen hour had been a great comfort to her somehow and also, she suspected, to him. But it could not be more than that.
‘I’ve really got to get back to that report,’ he said eventually. ‘If I want to keep the small chance I have of hanging on to my pension.’
She found it sad to hear him talk in that fashion. The Mike Fielding she had known before had been convinced that he was going straight to the top. That Mike Fielding would not have believed that twenty years down the line he would have progressed just one rung up the promotional ladder and be grimly hanging on to the remains of his career, desperate not to lose his bloody pension.
Was that really all his lifetime’s work amounted to? She was lucky in that respect, she reflected. She already had total financial security, albeit thanks largely to her marriage to Paul.
Paul. Seeing him that night promised to be a perfect end to a perfect day. ‘I have to go too,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.’
‘Good luck,’ he murmured. He still seemed to know what she was thinking. Did he also know that thanks to him, and for reasons she could not quite explain to herself, she now felt more able to deal with what lay ahead? Certainly both stronger and calmer than she had done when she arrived at the pub.<
br />
Outside the pub they kissed goodbye on the cheek, like the old friends she told herself they could only ever be again, particularly after this latest débâcle. How come they always seemed to cause each other trouble? How come she had not been able to stop herself feeling some of the old longing for him? And how come she was so convinced that he still felt it too?
He looked different. He was different. He was weary and disappointed, a failure, more or less, hanging on in there. And yet as she watched him walk away from her to his own car she did not see that at all. No. She saw the same bold, high-flying young maverick, with his to-die-for grin and winning ways, that she had fallen in love with twenty years earlier.
Whatever succour she had gained from her meeting with Fielding rapidly disappeared on the way back to London when she finally made herself call Nigel Nuffield on his mobile phone.
The barrister answered at once. She wanted, irrationally or not, to scream abuse at him, but there was no point. ‘I just need to know if you think there is anything else we can do, Nigel?’ she asked. ‘Is there any kind of appeal procedure at this stage? And if so, is there still any reasonable chance of success?’
‘My dear Joanna, I only wish there were,’ he told her, sounding as languid as ever. ‘We could appeal to the Queen’s Bench on a point of law over the Human Rights Convention issue, and we would be in with a chance on that. Somebody will have to get a ruling on it sooner or later. But I’m afraid we’ve been bowled a googly on the DNA admissibility issue and that is our only new evidence, as that infuriating woman magistrate pointed out.’
Bloody cricket again. She wished he wouldn’t do that. Her irritation got the better of her. ‘Nigel, you quite obviously didn’t know about the ruling on the Weir case …’
The barrister interrupted her. ‘Jo, you know as well as I do the confusion over interpretation of the law regarding DNA,’ he asserted. ‘If we’d had a different umpire we might have won the day regardless, worried about the next step then. As it is I played all the shots but the decision went against us. Badly, I’m afraid.’
A Kind Of Wild Justice Page 21