‘Listen, girl, I already told the Old Bill I’ve never seen ’em before – ’course, they know I probably wouldn’t tell them if I had, would I?’ Shifter grinned. He seemed to be almost enjoying himself. ‘Anyway, the filth always believe what they want to believe. Like a lot of bleeding cannibals, too, when it’s one of their own, aren’t they? Look. I like you, Joey doll, but I’ve given you your story. Our deal’s done and dusted. I’m not saying any more. I’d never have told you what I did if it wasn’t for my little princesses, would I?’
‘Just one thing – and I know its for the umpteenth time. Do you really not know who put the contract out? Have you really not got a clue? You wouldn’t be winding us all up, would you?’
‘Now would I do that, babe?’ Shifter replied. And he treated her to a big, juicy wink, just like he had in the restaurant all that time ago.
‘For God’s sake, Shifter,’ said Joanna, throwing her eyes heavenwards in exasperation.
Shifter smiled benignly.
A Shifter Brown wind-up in order to gain some cash for his family had always been a possibility, of course. He could have come up with the e-mail wheeze just in order to have a story to sell which did not break his precious code of never grassing. But was he that inventive? And could he really have been capable of planting the entire e-mail dialogue which had been found on Mike’s laptop?
Jo was confused. Bewildered. Consumed with agonising doubts.
She and Mike had shared a mutual obsession with the dreadful death of Angela Phillips. If Mike really had hired Shifter to kill Angela’s murderer she wondered when he had made that decision. And if he had confided in her she wondered what she would have done.
Would she have supported him? Would she have stopped him?
She didn’t know. She had no answers to anything. Not any more. And neither, it seemed, did anyone else. Except, perhaps, Mike Fielding.
She hated the very thought. But she feared she might have to come to accept it.
Nineteen
Then it all changed again. This time it was Tim Jones who told Joanna about the new development, calling her on her mobile early one evening while she was driving Emily to a school friend’s birthday party. ‘They’ve found this diary written by Tommy O’Donnell’s daughter,’ he reported. ‘It seems her Uncle Jimbo was a nonce, as well as everything else. He’d been abusing the kid for years and she’d written it all down.’
Joanna swerved to avoid a bicycle. She had reacted slowly to the cyclist, suddenly not concentrating properly on her driving. She was aware of Emily stiffening in the passenger seat beside her and put a reassuring hand on her knee. She was also instantly aware of the huge significance of what she had just heard. ‘Tell me exactly what has happened and how,’ she instructed Tim, struggling to sound calm and in control.
‘The police got another anonymous tip-off,’ the young crime man continued. ‘They searched Tommy’s home and struck gold.’
‘And Tommy?’
‘Nobody can find him. Already helping the police with their inquiries, I reckon. But neither Scotland Yard nor anyone else will confirm anything yet.’
‘So nothing official. How did you find all this out?’
‘I picked it up from a mate at the Yard, the place is crawling with rumours.’
‘Rumours, Tim? How hard is it?’
‘As nails, Jo. My source is that solid.’
He had little more to tell her. There was little more she needed to know. Motive alone never convicted anyone. But, God, what a motive this was. She had not really been able to imagine that an O’Donnell would ever turn on one of his own – until now.
Just as she had been forcing herself to accept that the man who had been so much a part of her life was guilty of arranging a murder, this latest bombshell had dropped. Perhaps Mike Fielding had been framed. Perhaps he was telling the truth after all.
The murder of Jimbo O’Donnell was Todd Mallett’s case and the detective superintendent considered that everything pertaining to the dead man was his territory. So it was Todd who had obtained a search warrant and led the team which descended on Tommy O’Donnell’s home. Todd didn’t like anonymous tips. And this was the second he had felt obliged to act upon concerning the O’Donnell case. It now seemed increasingly likely, however, that the first one, leading to the files lurking in Mike Fielding’s computer, could prove to have been an embarrassing red herring. Like Joanna, Todd began to wonder if Fielding might indeed have been the victim of an elaborate computer frame-up, just as he had always claimed.
Computers were playing their part again, in more ways than one. But then they always seemed to nowadays. The tip had come in the form of a letter, written in Word 97, printed on an Epson Laser printer. About as anonymous as you can get. Gone were the days when you could match up typed words and letters with the distinctive keys of individual typewriters. The postmark had been central London.
‘Go into Tommy O’Donnell’s kid’s computer,’ the anonymous tipster had suggested. ‘You’ll find her diary. Her dad did.’
They had, too, in the recycle bin. Barely hidden at all. The date indicated that it had been put there after her death. Months after her death. But just days before James Martin O’Donnell had disappeared.
Todd had actually wondered if Caroline’s computer would still be at her home. However the girl’s room, with its teen rock idol posters on the walls and CDs in untidy piles on a shelf, had looked to have been exactly how she must have left it when she had decided to kill herself – even down to a pair of jeans and a T-shirt casually discarded on the bed. Todd had heard that Tommy O’Donnell and his wife continued to keep the room as a kind of shrine to their dead daughter, it was pretty much common knowledge, but he found the reality eerily disconcerting.
He was grateful, however, that the diary had still been retained. It made fascinating reading.
There had been mystery surrounding Caroline’s death from the beginning in Todd’s opinion. He had never bought the exam-fever story. The O’Donnells were not that sort of family. They might be villains but they were down to earth, and they loved their children. Tommy O’Donnell believed in education, wanted to take the family legit and into the future, yet it was hard to accept the perceived wisdom that he would have driven his daughter so hard that she did not want to carry on living.
But abuse by her uncle. Harm coming from within this close-knit family. That was different.
The diary, written from when Caroline was eleven until shortly before her death, chronicled in detail the systematic sexual abuse meted out to her by her Uncle Jimmy. It shed a whole new light on why a thirteen-year-old girl should be distraught enough to take her own life. It was quite harrowing.
Uncle Jimmy was looking after me while Dad and Mum went to the club. He came into my bedroom and got into bed with me. He kept kissing and cuddling me and asking me if I liked it and telling me this would be our secret. I didn’t like it, but he wouldn’t stop.
Another entry read:
He kept pushing himself against me and he tried to get his willy into me between my legs. It hurt. But he wouldn’t stop.
I don’t know why I am writing this down. I can’t tell anybody. I feel dirty. I am so ashamed.
Shame. Amazing how the children in child abuse cases so often felt they should be ashamed. This was something paedophiles played upon, of course.
Todd shuddered at the thought of what the little girl had gone through. He did not doubt the authenticity of the diary for one moment. He had worked in child protection. He had taken statements, even seen diaries like this before. It was not that unusual for children to want to write these things down even when they felt unable to talk to anybody about what was happening to them. Maybe it was a kind of release. These sad tragic outpourings were stamped with the unmistakable ring of truth.
The policeman did not doubt either that Tommy would also have instantly accepted the truth of the diaries. Jimbo’s sexual preferences were always suspect. Throughout his life stori
es had abounded about his perverted sexual activities. There had been the earlier rape conviction and then the Angela Phillips case. However, it had always suited the O’Donnells to cover up for Jimbo, to keep up the pretence that he was a wronged man. Sam might actually have believed that. Todd didn’t reckon Tommy ever had. But it would certainly not have occurred to any of them that Jimbo would ever bring his unpleasant perversions into the family and abuse his own niece. After all, the O’Donnells took care of their own.
Sam himself, of course, was out of the frame. The old gang boss had finally died just after Mike Fielding had been arrested, but Todd knew that Sam had been incapacitated by a series of strokes for months before that. The O’Donnells had kept it quiet for as long as they could, but eventually the news leaked. Sam the Man’s death, when it came, was what Todd’s mother would have called ‘a happy release’ and they gave him one of those extraordinary traditional gangster funerals like the Krays’. A horse-drawn carriage carried his coffin through the streets of London and as many people gathered to pay their last respects as would to say farewell to royalty. More, possibly, nowadays, thought Todd wryly.
Which left Tommy the undisputed head of the O’Donnell clan.
Todd found it very easy to put himself in Tommy O’Donnell’s shoes, to imagine the man’s reaction on reading his daughter’s diary. Todd had kids, bright, well-adjusted, happy young people who, as far as he knew, had never had to endure anything like this. They were alive, moreover. Todd could imagine only too well what Tommy’s feelings must have been.
Todd was a law-abiding, solid citizen. A police officer. But he knew he would have wanted to kill anybody who had harmed his children like this. And if that person were his own brother then his anger would have been even more terrible. Tommy O’Donnell’s brother had done unspeakable things to Tommy’s daughter. And the girl had been so traumatised by it that she had killed herself.
Todd was quite sure that Tommy O’Donnell would have happily killed his brother with his bare hands. That would probably have been his first instinctive coherent thought. But, like his father, Tommy understood the importance of keeping his hands clean. Tommy’s second instinct would have been to seek terminal revenge while protecting himself and the rest of his family. And nobody knew better how to do that than an O’Donnell. Not only would Tommy not have done the deed himself, but he would not have wanted to use a regular O’Donnell enforcer. He would definitely have hired an outsider.
There was considerable significance, too, in the date the diary had been deposited into the recycling bin – just a week before Jimbo had gone missing. Tommy would have made his plan by then, coolly worked out what he was going to have done to the brother who had so terribly betrayed him.
The more of the diary Todd read the more he became convinced that Tommy had hired Shifter. But there was, of course, absolutely no proof that he had done so and neither was there likely to be. He did wonder who, apart from Tommy himself, would have known about the diary to report its existence to the police. But even villains had confidants, he supposed. And sometimes allegiances changed. Another possibility was that whoever appeared to be pointing an anonymous finger at Tommy was actually trying to do Fielding a favour. Somebody close to Tommy who owed Fielding, perhaps. After all, Todd knew the odds were against even being able to charge Tommy with anything, let alone successfully try him. Nonetheless, he brought him in for questioning.
‘Yeah, I found the diary, course I did,’ he said. ‘And once I’d read it I sent it straight to the recycling bin. I didn’t want the missus to see it, did I?’
Tommy made his admission freely and immediately – as far as it went. Todd was not surprised. After all, the computer’s record of the date on which the document had last been read would have made it nonsensical for him to deny that he, or at least one of his family, had found it. And in any case Tommy knew that he did not need to deny it. If there was anybody who understood about circumstantial evidence, it was an O’Donnell. Particularly this O’Donnell.
After that it was downhill all the way. The interview with Tommy turned out to be as much of a waste of time as Todd had feared it would be.
‘Mr Mallett, I can’t describe how I felt when I found Caroline’s diary,’ said Tommy. His voice cracked a bit as he spoke and Todd did not doubt for a second that his emotions were one hundred per cent genuine. ‘I’d probably never have found it cos she had the file tucked away among her homework. Essays, and maths tests and stuff, and then … then … this horrible thing. But there was a printout, you see. It was among her school books. I look through them occasionally. I couldn’t believe I’d missed it before. And then, when I read it, well. Do you know I actually thought it was a story at first? But it wasn’t.
‘The truth is I hated Jimbo enough to kill him. Yes, I did. But I didn’t do it. I didn’t hire Shifter. I’d only just found the diary when Jimbo disappeared. I was trying to work out what to do about it. OK, I wanted to hurt him badly. But there was Dad to think about and the rest of the family. Poor Caroline was dead. I couldn’t help her. I was just working it out – then Jimbo was topped. It was nothing to do with me. Honestly.’
Todd did not believed a word of it. The whole episode had the O’Donnell stamp all over it. Revenge. Rough justice. That was the code they lived by. But Todd couldn’t prove a thing and he knew it.
However, the obvious implication remained – that Fielding was probably innocent after all and that his protestations that he had been set up might indeed be true.
Fielding’s case was further helped by a computer expert called in by his defence lawyer who questioned the validity of the e-mail evidence discovered by the police hackers, pointing out that it was totally feasible to send a virus into a computer memory which could plant all kinds of files there. It was technically quite possible that the e-mail drafts could have been fraudulently placed.
Finally the father of a twelve-year-old-boy in Scotland, apparently even more of a computer whizz than most twelve-year-olds, contacted his local police station. It seemed that the boy had discovered intriguing files buried in the memory of the second-hand hard drive his father had bought him from Glasgow’s famous Burrowlands computer market.
These included e-mail correspondence between ‘contractor’ and ‘enforcer’.
None of the e-mails was the same as the ones found on Fielding’s laptop. Nothing matched at all except the user names. Even the language employed was different. Police hackers were able to trace the origin of the ‘contractor’ e-mails. They had been sent, as Shifter had originally predicted, from another cyber café. And there, once again, the trail ended.
The case against Fielding began to look very weak indeed. A full police report was submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service who promptly applied to Exeter and Wonford Magistrates’ Court to discontinue all charges in view of the changes in circumstances.
Mike Fielding was at once freed from jail.
Joanna followed the progress of events closely. Tim’s contact at the Yard turned out to be as good as he had promised and the young crime reporter acquired far more detailed information than was ever officially released, and indeed far more than could be printed.
Joanna was greatly relieved when the charges against Fielding were dropped. But she found she didn’t know how to deal with it when he called her twice on the day after his release and once more the day after that. On all three occasions she avoided his calls and failed to return them. But, maybe because she reckoned she owed him an apology, maybe because she was curious, or even because she still cared in spite of everything, she did eventually call him a week or so later. ‘I’m so glad you are free, and I am so sorry I doubted you,’ she told him at once.
Fielding’s heart lurched. He was so pleased to hear from her. He had feared he might never see her again. And regardless of all that he had said when she had visited him in prison, he wanted to see her very much indeed. He accepted her apologies. It still hurt, but not as much as being unable to be with her a
ny more would hurt.
‘I suppose it must have been Tommy, mustn’t it?’ she asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ he replied. ‘Tommy always had a low opinion of his brother, you know. He wasn’t fooled like his father was. I’ve no doubt he thought Jimbo was a despicable human being. Although he might not have realised Jimbo was a paedophile, Tommy’s got the old-fashioned villain’s abhorrence of all sex crimes. He would have hated what Jimbo did. But that wouldn’t have been enough, of course. Family was different. When he discovered that Jimbo had been abusing his daughter, driven her to suicide probably, his Caroline, the apple of his eye and the whole O’Donnell clan – he’d never let Jimbo get away with that. Never. He couldn’t. It would go entirely against his nature.’
‘You don’t think there’s any doubt, then?’
‘Nope. But I’ll be astonished if it’s ever proved. Tommy knows how to cover his tracks. He’s had enough practice.’
‘Could he have framed you, do you think?’
‘He could have. He doesn’t like me, but I don’t think it would have occurred to him that he needed a scapegoat. And I’m not sure that O’Donnell is that clever. He’s bright enough, but whoever did me would have to be very clever indeed and a real computer whizz. Mind you, I reckon Tommy would probably have known where to find the right person for the job.’ He paused, then added mischievously, ‘Someone a bit like you, Jo, really.’
‘Don’t start that again, Mike. Apart from anything else I don’t have that kind of knowledge and you know it.’
‘No. I’m kidding. I just keep going over and over in my mind who might have done it.’
‘Any ideas?’
‘Nothing definite,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve made a few enemies in my time. There’d be quite a list of people who’d like to see me done up like a kipper. How many of ’em would be capable of doing it, though, is something else.’
A Kind Of Wild Justice Page 34