Хилари Боннер - A Kind Of Wild Justice

‘He’ll know, he’ll not fall for it,’ intervened Todd Mallett. ‘He’s been spooked once by a man with a gun in the wood.’

‘If we get ’em in position quickly enough he shouldn’t even see ’em.’

The Phillips family, of course, were not told of the new plan. But at 10.30 p.m., half an hour or so before Rob Phillips was due to leave the farm to follow in Mike Fielding’s footsteps of the night before, the kidnapper called again. ‘Change of plan,’ he said. ‘Make the drop at Hay Tor. Leave the rucksack at the top of the tor itself. The very top.’

‘Shit,’ said Fielding. ‘He’s giving us the run-round. And Hay Tor, too — no cover for him, or the girl, come to that.’

‘Or, indeed, us,’ commented the DCI. Hay Tor was Dartmoor’s highest point, bleak, exposed and at the other side of the moor from Blackstone.

‘Maybe that’s the point. I just don’t know. I wonder what he’s up to...’

He and Fielding were conferring in the main hallway of the farmhouse, out of hearing of the distraught family gathered, as usual, in the kitchen.

‘I’m going to call off the armed-response boys from Fernworthy and see if they’ve got any bright ideas on how they can give some sort of cover at Hay Tor without being seen,’ Parsons said quietly.

Fielding listened uneasily as his boss got on the radio and began to issue fresh instructions. He had no sensible alternative suggestion, but was this really such a good move? he wondered. Within minutes it became clear that it wasn’t.

Just as Rob was about to leave for the new assignation point, the kidnapper called once more. Bill Phillips answered the phone.

‘Tell the pigs I didn’t see the gun boys go into the forest, but I sure as hell saw ’em come out. Oh, and tell ’em — when your daughter dies I won’t have killed her. That’ll be down to them.’

He hung up at once, leaving a stunned Bill Phillips looking at a buzzing receiver. He turned to Fielding and Parsons. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing,’ he shouted at them. ‘He’s right. The bastard’s right. If my daughter dies it will be down to you lot. All I ever wanted to do was to give him the money and get my girl back. But you couldn’t settle for that, could you, not any of you.’

DCI Parsons looked him coolly in the eye, still the manager, still the chief executive. If he was as shaken by the turn of events as Fielding, he certainly didn’t show it. ‘Mr Phillips, I had to take responsibility for your son’s safety as well as your daughter’s. I’m afraid the kidnapper double-bluffed us on this one. We couldn’t have guessed that.’

‘Then you should have left well alone,’ stormed Phillips. ‘Let me do it my way. He’s been scared off, now, and if we’ve lost him then we’ve lost Angela too. God knows what he’ll do to her.’

If he hasn’t done it already, thought Fielding. Aloud he said, with a confidence he did not feel, ‘Try not to worry, Mr Phillips. He’ll be in touch again very soon, I’m sure of it. He wants your money not your daughter.’

The kidnapper did not call again. Not that night. Not the next morning. Kidnaps were such a rare crime in the UK that there were few precedents. Those that did exist encouraged little optimism among the police team. And in the case of Angela Phillips some of the most important lessons learned in the past did not fully apply. The débâcle surrounding the abduction and murder of Lesley Whittle by the infamous Black Panther taught the importance of taking the press into police confidence and insuring a media clamp-down over kidnaps for as long as there was a chance of safely retrieving the victim. Parsons and his team had not had the luxury of choosing that option, because following the discovery of Angela’s shoe, they had promptly announced her missing and called for public help. Fielding suspected they would all be criticised for that sooner or later, but it was easy to be wise after the event.

By noon that day — it was already Thursday and five days after Angela had been taken — a kind of restrained panic was setting in. Still no further calls. Still no further clues. Parsons decided to throw caution to the wind and step up the hunt. Territorial Army soldiers on their annual training at Okehampton camp were called in to continue the systematic searching of Dartmoor and the surrounding farmland. After the first ransom demand was received, Parsons had decided to keep the search fairly low-key, in order not to alarm the kidnapper. Now he changed tack and threw everything at it. Angela Phillips could have been taken miles away from where she had been abducted, of course, but nobody had come up with a better game plan than to stick to standard police procedure and to continue to search outwards from the crime scene, gradually taking in a wider and wider expanse of the moor and the surrounding farmland. The vast majority of victims of violent crimes were ultimately found in their own backyard.

But Dartmoor was notoriously difficult to search. Bodies, even after quite a short time, were unlikely to be discovered. Everyone remembered the nightmare faced by the parents of the children murdered by Brady and Hindley, and buried on the Yorkshire Moors. Without the help of the murderers, their graves could not be found. Even taking the optimistic view that Angela Phillips was still alive and hidden on the moor, the team knew she could be anywhere. There were cairns and old quarries, disused mines with a whole network of shafts, old sheds and storm drains. George Jarvis, who had policed the moor longer than anyone, was fond of saying that he reckoned the results of half the unsolved murders in England could be lying rotting somewhere on Dartmoor and nobody would ever know.

By Thursday evening, a number of locals had joined the police and the Territorial soldiers and upwards of 150 people were involved in the search. They combed the moors, sifting through the bracken, checking out all the military lookout posts and hideaways, poring over the remains of crofters’ huts and old deserted tin mines, prising open boarded-up entrances, peering into long-abandoned shafts.

At ancient Knack Mine, in Steeperton Gorge, a remote granite-strewn classically rugged Dartmoor valley sandwiched between Okement Hill and Steeperton Tor, there were no visible shaft entrances left and the casual passer-by would probably be unaware that there had ever been a mine there at all. Little more than the foundations, covered with grass and fern, remained of the ruined buildings. But some years previously a group of Territorials from the camp had discovered a narrow overgrown entrance to a shaft, which they had used as a hideaway during exercises. They had contrived to roll a granite boulder in front of the shaft, which in any case had, at a glance, looked to be just a hole in the rocky hillside and had been already more or less concealed by an overhang. The searchers did not notice the old shaft entrance, nor could they have been expected to, so well was it hidden from view. And the part-time soldiers who had known it well were long gone and had never had call to return there. All except one, that was.

He lay in the bracken half a mile or so away on the brow of Okement Hill, home to the source of the River Okement, studying the scene below through powerful binoculars. He was wearing army-style camouflage fatigues and made sure he kept very still, hopefully hidden from sight. He shifted position slightly in order to get a better view. Suddenly one of the antlike figures down in the valley put a hand above his eyes and seemed to be peering directly at him. Then the figure began to raise a pair of binoculars.

The man in the bracken immediately slipped his own into the pocket of his jacket and started to wriggle backwards on his belly until he had manoeuvred himself over the brow of the hill and a little way down the other side where he knew he would be out of the view of the searchers. Then he rose to his feet and ran.