Хилари Боннер - A Kind Of Wild Justice

It was Joanna, in the Comet , who originally dubbed Angela’s killer the Beast of Dartmoor. It came to her as she filed her first piece after her recall to the West Country when Angela’s body was found.

Joanna had trained on local papers in Plymouth and Torquay. As a cub reporter she had frequently worked on Beast of Dartmoor stories. There had also been a Beast of Bodmin and a Beast of Exmoor. Several of each, in fact, if truth be told. But previously these had always concerned sightings of big cats, possibly zoo runaways, or wild wolf-like dogs. This was something different. Very different. Yet the name could not have been more appropriate.

Like all really big stories, the Angela Phillips story damn near wrote itself. Her kidnap and killing had indeed turned out to be tragically reminiscent of the Black Panther and Lesley Whittle case. In common with Lesley, she had apparently been left to die horrifically in a dreadful hideout. Joanna knew that the general view was that this time the media side of things had probably been handled by the police as well as possible, in difficult circumstances. Although Angela’s disappearance had been announced before it was known that a kidnapper was involved, Parsons had kept news of the ransom demands successfully under wraps and, when it became apparent that the case was not likely to be quickly resolved, he requested the Scotland Yard press office to contact relevant editors and news chiefs and ask for press silence on the kidnap angle. This was observed until after Angela’s body was found. Even Fleet Street editors would not wish to be blamed for the death of a teenage girl.

However, when further details of their operation began to emerge, Joanna was not surprised that police action in several areas was called to account, and Parsons and his team accused of making a number of potentially catastrophic mistakes.

It was Joanna herself who found out about the armed-response unit fiasco through an old local paper contact and her story predictably made the front page yet again. The decision to call for the unit at all was widely condemned as a grave misjudgement. The leader writer in one newspaper went as far as to suggest that if more resources had been piled into stepping up the moorland search for Angela earlier, and less wasted on playing soldiers, the young woman might well have been found in time and her life saved.

Indeed, the post-mortem examination — the results of which would not be officially revealed until the inquest on Angela, but almost all hospitals leak information like sieves — showed that the girl had only died around two weeks before her body was discovered. Jo could hardly bear to think about that. It meant that Angela had lived for twelve days after her abduction, almost certainly imprisoned the whole time in the old mine shaft that became her tomb. She had been raped, beaten and abused, but had ultimately died of dehydration.

All the papers painted a suitably lurid picture of this. The Comet carried a leader questioning the scale of the original search operation and criticised Charlie Parsons for concentrating on a maverick plan to do business with the kidnapper at the expense of fundamental police procedure.

One way and another the story broke with a vengeance. The Beast tag caught the imagination of the nation, with every other paper following Joanna’s lead and using the name in all future reports.

Frank Manners, also on the case in Devon and smarting at Joanna’s success, did his best to take the credit for it, apparently telling the pack he’d mentioned the Beast idea to his senior colleague and she’d promptly pinched it when she filed the first story. Shortly afterwards, though, Manners — who was a total pro, Joanna had to admit, even if she did consider him a thoroughly unpleasant human being — came back with a corker. He got the splash in every edition with his story of how Mike Fielding had impersonated Rob Phillips when the first ransom drop was attempted in Fernworthy Forest. This brought both Fielding and Parsons further criticism, of course. ‘Family fears kidnapper knew he was being tricked by cop,’ stormed the Comet alongside an unfortunate and no doubt hand-picked picture of Fielding looking inordinately smug and grinning broadly.

Joanna’s first instinct was delight that her newspaper’s coverage was so far ahead of the rest of the field — this was, after all, by far the biggest crime story there had been since her appointment to the top crime job and she was far too secure to worry about it being Manners’s yarn. Her attitude was that whenever the Comet looked good on crime, as head of department at least some of the credit would always be hers. But she couldn’t help feeling just a little sorry for both Fielding and Parsons. If their ploy had worked they would be heroes now instead of scapegoats. Particularly Fielding. She shrugged such thoughts aside. She had a job to do and, as ever, what she really cared about was doing it better than anyone else.

All the tabloids, as usual, were competing over who could supply the most gruesome details of the murder. And Joanna got a lucky break in that direction too. Out of the blue, Fielding called her in her Okehampton hotel room early one morning and asked her if she would like to have a quick drink with him. She wondered briefly if he was still playing sexist games, but he didn’t seem to be in the mood. He sounded far more sombre and less cocksure than the man she had last seen almost four weeks earlier. Well, he had taken a bit of a hammering, she thought. And when he suggested they both drive separately to the Drewe Arms at Drewsteignton she knew that whatever he was up to it was something different. Any approaches he had made to her before had always involved giving himself maximum opportunity for showing off and he had only been interested in talking to her where he knew the other hacks would be gathered. So it seemed the policeman might genuinely want to have a quiet word with her.

She arrived in the pretty thatched village at the agreed time and found a parking place in the square.

Fielding had got there before her and was already in the tap room nursing a pint of bitter, sitting on the wooden bench next to the hatch through which drinks were served. In the traditional style of old Devon pubs there was no actual bar at the Drewe Arms. ‘What’ll you have?’ he asked.

‘No, let me.’ Joanna might not have been around as long as Manners and Co., but she knew the form right enough. If there was even the slightest chance that a cop was going to give you an exclusive lead you did the buying. She ordered herself a gin and tonic, a small one as she was driving, and raised an enquiring eyebrow at Fielding. ‘’Nother pint?’

Fielding shook his head. ‘Large Scotch,’ he said.

Joanna had heard he was a drinker, but it was only six o’clock and he had his car parked outside. He was as snappily dressed as ever, smartly casual in lightweight jacket and polo shirt, and he was not a man who gave a lot away. But she suddenly noticed how grim he looked. Perhaps he reckoned he needed a large Scotch.

He downed the whisky in one go, then turned to her. ‘In case you’re wondering, Frank Manners will never get another line out of me,’ he said suddenly. ‘He got me at a weak moment and I told him about making the drop. It was off the record, though, and he damned well knew it. I’d begun to think of him as a mate, I suppose, more fool me. The bastard’s landed me right in it, but he may live to regret it yet. That’s why you’re here.’

She inclined her head in mock graciousness. It was beginning to make sense now. Frank would have been so eager to get back at her after the success of her ‘Beast’ story that he would have broken the confidence of the Pope himself. And the old crime hack was an allegedly devout Catholic too.