As for the O’Donnell family – would they hire a killer on the Net? Surely that wasn’t their style? For a start, they still had their own enforcers, didn’t they? Combo was dead, but his son, Little John, that chip off the old block, was, she knew, still in the employ of the O’Donnells. And indeed, would they have the know-how to do so? Tommy O’Donnell probably would, but he was the one trying to lead his family away from the old ways of hit men and the like. Joanna was pretty sure old Sam O’Donnell wouldn’t have a clue about using the Internet, certainly not at the required level.
Nonetheless she wondered about Sam the Man. Just how ruthless was he capable of being with his own flesh and blood? She knew he would have hated the sex angle and the DNA evidence concerning his son must surely have given even him proof of what he had always chosen to deny. Had he finally accepted the inevitable and taken action he would previously not have countenanced? She could not believe Sam would ever put out a contract against his own son, but you did have to consider it.
She knew she would not be welcome, but she decided that the next day she would at least try to get to see Sam the Man.
Emily was indeed already asleep when Jo arrived home and the au pair was in her room watching TV. Very carefully, Joanna opened the door to her daughter’s bedroom. The light from the landing was sufficient for her to be able to see Emily without waking her by switching on any more lights, but it took a moment for Jo’s eyes to adjust. Emily was lying curled on her side, in deep sleep looking younger than her almost twelve years. Jo always reckoned that their daughter resembled Paul more than her; she certainly had his eyes, but she had inherited her mother’s blond hair, straight and grown to well below shoulder-length, just like Jo’s at Emily’s age. At least – that was the way it had been when Jo had last seen her daughter at breakfast that morning. She took a step into the room for a closer look. Yes, she was right. Emily’s hair was now cropped short and spiky with a purple streak running right through it Mohican style – although mercifully not shaven on either side. My God, thought Jo, she really is growing up.
She was smiling when she left the room, which a few minutes earlier she would not have thought possible. Some mothers might freak out at the sight of their young daughter with purple-streaked hair. Jo found it mildly amusing. Perhaps this was the start of the kind of idiosyncratic teenage shenanigans she was so perversely rather looking forward to.
She considered pouring herself a drink, but then realised she was very tired, although, in her own home with her family around her, Jo did not like to think about what had tired her so. She decided to go straight to bed, fell asleep immediately and was not even aware of her husband returning. He must have crept quietly into the bed beside her. He had certainly made no attempt to wake her. He rarely did nowadays. In the morning there was little chance to talk even if either of them had wanted to. They were woken by the phone just after 7.30 a.m. It was the news desk for Paul. Situation normal. Shortly afterwards came the sports editor and then somebody else with a problem only Paul could deal with. She and her husband breakfasted only on tea and orange juice, consumed on the run. Emily always ate a large bowl of muesli with fresh fruit which, in her usual grown-up way, she prepared herself.
It was one of Jo’s days in the office, but she wanted to drive straight over to the O’Donnells so she declined Paul’s offer of a ride in his chauffeur-driven car.
He had raised his eyebrows at his daughter’s hair but said nothing about it at first. Well, he hated confrontation, but Jo knew he wouldn’t approve. Paul was very conventional about appearance. Eventually he reached across the table and touched Emily’s hand. ‘You used to have very beautiful hair,’ he told her mildly. ‘Until yesterday, in fact.’
Emily was not abashed. ‘Oh Dad, it was sooo boring,’ she said.
Paul smiled. ‘Oh, well, we can’t have that, can we?’
Emily shot him a quizzical look. Like her mother, she obviously found it difficult sometimes to work out what her father was actually thinking. She would have known he wouldn’t make a scene, though, and she was right.
Paul passed no further comment. He left just before Jo and kissed her absently on the cheek. He was polite and distant. Same as ever. She couldn’t help comparing him, so self-contained, so controlled, so successful, with the volatile, mixed-up, disappointed man she could not get out of her mind. Then she resolved that she would put Fielding out of her mind. She really would. This stupid affair was doing her no good. When it began again she had known she must regard it as just an occasional roll in the hay and in many ways it still wasn’t much more than that – nor could it be. But with Fielding there was always more to it than that. And, in the cold light of dawn, it just didn’t seem worth it. So maybe the previous day’s confrontation had not been such a bad thing after all. It had jolted her out of a kind of trance. She would not sit waiting for Fielding to call again. And neither would she call him. She truly didn’t want to go on like this, she told herself.
In any case, she had a tricky job to do today. And the guilt was really kicking in.
She offered to drive Emily to school, a duty normally undertaken by the au pair. She was aware of her daughter, still sitting at the kitchen table eating her muesli, glancing at her in mild surprise. Jo stood up and ruffled the remains of Emily’s hair. ‘Well, I quite like the new look,’ she said. She wasn’t at all sure that she did, even though she found it amusing, but she somehow desperately wanted to feel close to her daughter that morning. She might have realised, of course, that the vanity of adolescence, however misplaced, had arrived along with its new spiky purple hairdo.
Emily pushed her hand away. ‘Oh, don’t, Mum, don’t,’ she muttered with a frown.
However, later in the car, just as Jo pulled up outside her school, Emily surprised her mother by leaning across from the passenger seat to give her a big sloppy kiss on the cheek and ask, ‘You are all right, Mum, aren’t you? There’s nothing wrong, is there?’
Jo was inclined to forget that Emily was every bit as perceptive as her father and it made her panic momentarily as she wondered if Paul had also picked up on anything amiss in her behaviour lately. ‘I’m absolutely fine, darling,’ she said, kissing her daughter back and then forcing a big bright smile. ‘Go on. Off with you. And have a really good day.’
Damn, she thought, as she drove off in the direction of Dulwich. She really must stop putting her family at risk.
She arrived at Sam O’Donnell’s house, unannounced again, just before 10.30 a.m.
Tommy answered the door, as before. He stared at her coldly for a moment or two and she quite expected him to slam it in her face. ‘You gotta cheek, I’ll give you that,’ he said eventually.
‘Look, Tommy, I just want to talk.’
‘Yeah, your kind always do,’ he told her coldly. But to her surprise he opened the door and beckoned her in.
She crossed the threshold and stood uncertainly in a chintzy hallway, thick-pile richly patterned carpet, a gilt mirror on the wall to the left of an ornate mahogany hatstand. To the right a gallery of framed family photographs, almost all including Sam and his wife, at their wedding, with their newborn children, their two sons and their only daughter, and at their children’s weddings. It was her first time inside Sam’s home. She had been told that the house was a shrine to Tommy’s dead mother and that seemed about how it was. Apparently all the furnishings and decorations were kept the way Annie O’Donnell had had them. Sam allowed no change. On the wall opposite all the family photographs was a huge framed portrait, maybe four foot by three, of Annie.
‘Right,’ said Tommy. ‘Everything you see and hear in this house is off the record. All right?’
She hesitated. It wasn’t all right. She hated off the record. You never knew what you were going to get and all too often it was useless unless you could use it fully and attribute it.
‘It’s either that or out,’ said Tommy.
Jo sighed.
‘And when I say off the record I me
an you can’t print anything. There is just something I want you to know. To be aware of. Yes or no?’
She said yes, of course, unhappy though she was about it.
Wordlessly he showed her into the sitting room. More chintz, patterned wallpaper, deep-pile carpet and family photographs. She barely took in any of it, though, such was the shock of her first sight of Sam the Man.
Arguably the most feared and respected villain in London, he was sitting slumped in a wheelchair in the middle of the room. One rheumy eye seemed to half focus on her. She wasn’t sure. The left side of his face was cruelly distorted and his left arm hung loosely over the arm of the chair. Sam was dribbling. He showed no reaction to her. He did not attempt to speak.
She gave a small involuntary gasp.
‘He had a stroke soon after Jimbo’s last trial,’ said Tommy. ‘Been like this ever since. His left arm and his left leg are paralysed. We don’t know what he can understand.’
Tommy walked across to the chair and stroked his father’s still abundant shock of white hair. More like father to son than son to father. But that’s the way all our parental relationships change in the end, Jo thought to herself.
‘Do we, Dad, eh?’ he murmured, his voice suddenly soft and ripe with affection. Then he patted the old man’s hand, but still Sam did not react.
Swiftly Tommy retreated to Jo’s side. ‘Right, that’s all you’re getting,’ he said, as he ushered her out into the hallway again. ‘I wanted you to see that,’ he went on, once he had closed the living-room door behind them. ‘We’ve kept Sam’s condition a secret. That’s why you can’t print anything. Dad would hate people to know that he had become a dribbling wreck. I mean, he’s still Sam the Man. As long as he’s alive he’ll always be that.’ Tommy spoke with quiet pride, reverence even.
Against her better judgement Jo found that she was moved. ‘I am very sorry, Tommy,’ she said. And in a strange way she meant it, too. She had no illusions about the villainy of Sam O’Donnell or what a nasty piece of work he could be, but there had always been something special about him. He had been big in every way, a character, one of the last of a dying breed. She knew better than to romanticise his sort but with Sam you just couldn’t help doing so just a bit.
Tommy was not interested. ‘I didn’t show you Dad to get your sympathy,’ he told her. ‘I wanted you to see what you’ve done, you and that bastard Fielding. You got that new trial staged against Jimbo and that was what did it. No doubt about it. Dad adored Jimbo. All that DNA stuff. He couldn’t take it. He was ill, really, right from when it all started again. He had a very slight stroke just before the hearing at Okehampton, that’s why you’ve seen him using a stick since then. But he was all right, in his head anyway, until after Jimbo disappeared. Then he had another stroke. And it was a big one. It was all just too much for him.’
Joanna felt suddenly irritated. ‘Tommy, you can hardly blame me and Mike Fielding. If you have to blame anybody you should blame your brother.’
Tommy shook his head stubbornly. Joanna knew that he was a bright, intelligent man, everyone knew of his determination to legitimise the O’Donnell family and how hard he had already worked towards it. The fresh prosecution against his brother couldn’t have helped with that. But apparently, in common with so many of these East End villains, when it came to family Tommy had all the old blind spots. ‘There was no call for it all to be dragged out again,’ he said frostily. ‘It was history. And it didn’t do anybody any good, did it? Not Angela Phillips’s family and not us. We’ve not only lost Jimbo, we’ve as good as lost Dad because of it too. He’s out of it. The only mercy is we don’t even think he knows Jimbo’s dead.’
‘Tommy, Angela Phillips died in the most horrific circumstances possible,’ Joanna responded tetchily, throwing caution to the wind. ‘Your brother killed her. The DNA proved it and if it had been available twenty years ago Jimbo would have gone down then. That’s what the new trial was about, that’s why it was all “dragged out”, as you put it, again. And if it weren’t for some bloody stupid anomaly of the law he would have been locked up and he wouldn’t be dead. He’d be safely behind bars. Where he belonged. He was a murderer and a rapist. You must accept that. I reckon your father did in the end and that’s probably what made him ill.’
‘I accept nothing. Jimbo’s dead, that’s all I know. And he was my brother.’
‘Look, do you mind if I ask you some questions while I am here?’ she ventured recklessly.
‘Yes, I fucking well do,’ he stormed at her. Then he repeated his earlier remark, but his voice was much louder and angrier now. ‘I just wanted you to see what you did to my father. And now you’ve seen it – get out.’ He didn’t take a step towards her. He said nothing that was specifically threatening. He didn’t need to. You don’t argue with an angry O’Donnell.
She opened the door to the house herself, shut it quietly behind her and hurried to her car, parked down the street.
When she put the key in the ignition she noticed that her hand was shaking.
*
Back in the office, she worked on her column through the afternoon. Just after five Paul called through and told her his deputy was editing that night. ‘I’m taking an early cut,’ he said. ‘If you’re clear, how about an evening at home? Maybe phone for a pizza or something.’
Joanna was pleasantly surprised. The Comet operated a system of duty editors at night. Either Paul, his deputy, or one of three assistant editors edited each night, staying in the office until well after the foreigns dropped, often until one in the morning and sometimes later. But Paul was a hands-on editor, as almost all of the good ones were. Except on Fridays, which was designated as a family evening, he would rarely leave Canary Wharf until ten or eleven even when somebody else was officially editing. She agreed with alacrity and told him she would give him a lift home if he liked and he could give his driver the night off.
They left the office soon after seven, the traffic was as amenable as it ever is at that time, and they made it to Richmond in just over an hour and a quarter. Paul was companionable enough, if a little distant. But she was used to that. It was the way things were. Indeed, he spent most of the journey home talking to the night desk on his mobile phone. That was the way things were, too. Always.
At home he settled down with Emily at the computer in her bedroom while Joanna made drinks and ordered a pizza. Emily was always excited to have Paul home and inclined to monopolise his time when he was there. Joanna didn’t blame her. She saw little enough of the father she idolised. The pizza arrived and all three sat down at the kitchen table together. That was rare enough, too, which was why Emily had been allowed to stay up and eat later than usual.
Paul teased her gently once or twice about the purple hair and Jo suspected from their daughter’s rather sheepish reaction that she might already be regretting whatever whim or peer pressure had led her into yesterday’s drastic hairdo. Paul had the knack of handling Emily, of bringing her round almost always to his way of thinking. He was very good with her, always had been. Indeed, they were like peas in a pod. Emily was a real chip off the old block. Joanna was inordinately proud of her, even if she did sometimes fear that she was old beyond her years. Apart from when it came to that hair!
In spite of the teasing Jo could tell how much their daughter was enjoying the family supper and vowed to try to make it happen more often. Paul promised to take her swimming at the weekend and Emily went to bed happily, although still reluctantly, around 9.45 p.m. Joanna poured the remains of the bottle of red wine she had earlier opened into her and Paul’s glasses, and asked him if he would like her to open another.
‘In a minute,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you. I’ve been waiting for us to have some time alone.’
She noticed that he was looking very serious. She had already stood up and was halfway to the wine rack in the corner. She turned around and walked back to the table. ‘Well?’
‘You should know that I am aware that you ar
e once again having an affair with Mike Fielding,’ Paul announced in an expressionless voice.
Joanna sat down with a bit of a bump. That was the last thing she had expected to hear. Her first instinct was to lie. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about …’ she began.
Her husband interrupted her. ‘Don’t insult my intelligence, Joanna,’ he told her. ‘I said I know. I know about the hotel in Southampton Row; I know that he spent every night with you when you were covering the Shifter Brown hearing in Exeter; I even know about your sleazy trip down to Taunton to the motorway motel. If you would like any more details I can assure you that I do have them.’
She realised at once that he must have had her followed. It was somehow typical of Paul that he could do that over an extended period and actually be able to say nothing, just live with what was going on, until he was ready to make a move. Any normal man would have confronted her long ago, she thought. She had often, by way of attempting to justify her affair, blamed Paul’s absence of passion, his calculating businesslike approach to all aspects of his life and his complete lack of spontaneity, for leading her into another man’s arms. She knew, of course, that was really no justification for her behaviour. She didn’t speak.
Apparently he did not expect her to.
‘It goes without saying that you end this affair immediately,’ he went on. ‘If you do not I will divorce you. Naturally you will lose your job. You will also lose your daughter. I will get custody, I promise you. You may well get access of some kind but I will make sure that it is as little as possible. And I will do my absolute best to turn Emily against you. For ever. I do not envisage that would be too difficult.’
A Kind Of Wild Justice Page 31