Хилари Боннер: A Kind Of Wild Justice

He was a big man, almost six feet three inches tall, but rangy rather than burly. He had thickened a little with the years, particularly round the waist, but had never had a weight problem and remained surprisingly trim and fit-looking for his age — which was knocking fifty now. It was a miracle, considering his lifestyle — and his drinking habits. He rubbed his chin reflectively, his fingers scratching over the stubble. By around sixish in the evening he could invariably do with another shave, really. He had always had a heavy beard, unusually so for a man with light sandy hair. Thinning hair, now, and greying. His beard would be grey too if he ever let it grow. Still, it could be worse. His father had been almost totally bald at his age. Thinking back twenty years made you wonder about ageing. Fielding knew he’d fared pretty well, certainly better than he deserved. He had retained the easy lopsided grin which, somewhat to his surprise nowadays, women still seemed to go for. He had never been a particularly handsome man but for some reason had always been attractive to women — and once he’d realised that, he had rarely been able to resist any opportunity that had come his way.

She’d been that, to begin with, just another opportunity, a quick lay. Sex had been like getting a fix for him back then. Mind you, it was much the same now except he didn’t need it nearly so often. He’d rarely had much use for women other than sex.

He had married his wife when she was twenty and he was nineteen. She had been pregnant, of course, and it had been 1970, for God’s sake. That was what you did in 1970. Ruth was all right. A pretty girl back then, with auburn hair so bright it made his look dull, the palest of skin and a ready smile. He had been at university when they’d had to get wed and she’d worked behind the bar in the pub they all went to. She’d carried on working, too, right up to and after their first child was born, getting her mum to mind the baby, all so that Fielding could finish his degree and fulfil his ambition of fast-track entry into the police force. That had been the plan, anyway. And whatever had gone wrong over the years had certainly never been Ruth’s fault. She’d brought up his children, turned them into almost reasonable human beings, in fact. And she’d put up with him. Pretended not to notice the bulk of his indiscretions. He knew that and he loved her. He supposed that he’d always loved Ruth in his own way. But the other one. Well, they say everybody has a single great passion in his or her life. The other one, she had been his, no doubt about it. And it was inextricably connected in his mind with the Beast of Dartmoor case. Delve into any one area of that and all of it came back to him.

He could only think of one thing left to do about the Beast. And in a way this was a wonderful excuse to make the call he had half wanted to make for something like eighteen years. Half not. Certainly never had. Well, it wasn’t an easy call to make.

Resolutely he squared his shoulders and walked back to his desk. ‘Right,’ he said out loud.

He sat down in his chair and, once again, picked up the phone and dialled the same three digits of the London number he had begun to call earlier. This time he continued with the call. It was to the switchboard of a national daily newspaper.

He could hear the tone clearly as an extension rang somewhere in a dockland building he had merely seen pictures of — not Fleet Street any more. He had had a sort of romantic affection for the Street of Shame, strange for a copper, but because of her, most likely. Impatiently he drummed the fingers of his free hand on his desk. He supposed he would end up with voice mail; that seemed to be the norm nowadays. He found himself rehearsing a message to leave and was mildly taken aback when a live human voice came on the line.

‘Joanna Bartlett.’

Tones clear and precise. No nonsense. No ‘hello’ or ‘can I help you’. No embellishments at all. Fielding could not suppress a half-smile. It didn’t sound as if she had changed a bit. But then, he wouldn’t have expected her to.

‘Hi, Jo,’ he said quietly.

It began in the summer of 1980 on one of those rare warm and balmy English days when even on Dartmoor the midday heat had been stifling and only the cool of nightfall brought welcome relief. Nobody was grumbling, though. It had until then been another miserable summer and, in fact, the coldest July for fifteen years.

Angela Phillips lived with her parents, her brother Rob and his new wife Mary, at Five Tors Farm — so named, predictably enough, because, on a clear day, you could just see the rocky summits of five tors — on the edge of the moors not far from the lovely old granite-built village of Blackstone. Their home was a beautiful rambling Devon longhouse, one end of it converted to provide a more or less separate unit for Rob and Mary.

A smart new stable block had recently been built on to the rear wall of the main milking shed, and from it could be enjoyed as fine a view over the moors as from anywhere on the Phillipses’ land. But during the late afternoon of that particular day, seventeen-year-old Angela noticed little of her surroundings as she fed her three horses, two hunters and a showjumper, and prepared to turn them out for the night in the adjoining paddock.

Angela was going to the village dance with, for the very first time, a boyfriend. Her casual friendship with Jeremy Thomas, her brother’s best friend, had begun to turn into something else at the hunt ball the previous winter when he had unexpectedly kissed her during the last dance.

Feelings Angela did not know she possessed had overwhelmed her. And since then Jeremy, and their occasional heavy petting sessions, had become a major absorption for a young woman who had previously shown little interest in anything other than her beloved horses.

The sun was just beginning to drop in the sky and Dartmoor glowed gloriously before her as she shut the paddock gate and turned to walk back to the farmhouse. Angela remained totally preoccupied with the evening ahead. After all, she had made rather momentous plans for it.

In that very focused way teenage girls sometimes have, she had decided that the time had come to rid herself of the burden of her virginity, that she was going to do so in a proper bed and that tonight, as she knew Jeremy’s parents were away, was the ideal opportunity.

So far Angela and Jeremy had conducted the physical side of their relationship almost entirely in the back of his car. Neither had parents of the modern liberated kind who would allow their young offspring to sleep with their girlfriend or boyfriend under their roof. An unfortunate attempt at a passionate encounter in one of Five Tors’ more remote copses, which had ended abruptly with a number of ants finding their way into her underwear, had put Angela off the idea of outdoor venues. Jeremy had been unusually grumpy when she had stopped him from going any further that day. She didn’t really blame him, though, because she had already learned enough about sex to know that she had led him on shockingly.

Tonight she was not planning to stop him at all.

She glanced at her watch as she made her way across the farmyard. She’d better hurry. It was well gone five, Jeremy was picking her up at seven, she had yet to wash her hair, and as she intended this to be such a memorable night it would probably take her much longer than usual to get ready. She had some new make-up to experiment with, too, which would take her ages to put on because she hardly ever wore the stuff.

She also had a new outfit, the most grown-up she had ever owned. Normally Angela was not particularly interested in clothes, favouring jeans and baggy shirts on the rare occasions she was not wearing either her school uniform or jodhpurs. But she had persuaded her mother to take her shopping in Exeter to buy something special for the dance, traditionally held after the fête on the final day of Blackstone’s annual festival, which this year had fallen on the last Saturday in July and for which the weather had so mercifully cleared.