Хилари Боннер - A Kind Of Wild Justice

Tommy, still in his early forties, was ten years younger than Jimbo. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, like all the O’Donnells, but he looked lean and spare, his light-brown hair, yet to show even a hint of grey, flopped over a protruding forehead, another family trademark. Unlike his elder brother, however, there was nothing remotely thuggish about his appearance. Jo knew his reputation as the brains of the family. An intellectual O’Donnell was actually quite a worrying prospect. Tommy had won a place to grammar school, passed A levels. He was keen on education. Perhaps too keen. Tommy’s fourteen-year-old-daughter, Caroline, had taken an overdose of her mother’s sleeping pills and killed herself six months or so earlier, allegedly in a panic over her end-of-term exams. Jo always found it hard to believe that young people would commit suicide over their school work. But she knew they did. Tommy and his wife had, of course, been devastated by the loss of their daughter in such a way. Like all the O’Donnells, Tommy was a devoted family man, although Jo knew he also had a tough side. He was his father’s son.

Tommy’s eyes narrowed when he saw her standing on the doorstep. There was no visible security around the house. Jo assumed the O’Donnells didn’t think they needed it. Fear was one hell of a deterrent. It was hard to imagine who would take this lot on. Even the police hesitated — which had always been one of the problems.

‘You’re not welcome here,’ Tommy greeted her challengingly.

‘Look, I just wanted to talk. I know how you and Sam stand on crimes like this. Jimbo’s a black sheep, isn’t he? I want to see Sam. I’d like to know how he is dealing with this.’

Tommy stood with a hand on each hip, elbows akimbo, blocking the doorway. As if Joanna would be daft enough to try to barge her way in. That was never what reporters did, as it happened. They wheedled themselves into people’s homes. They were sensitive in their approach, personable, well-dressed, easy of manner, full of wonderful self-deprecating stories. They used charm, not brute force. Their victims thought they were lovely and felt no pain at all — until the next morning’s newspapers plopped through the letter box. The old foot-in-the-door myth was exactly that. And in any case, to try it on an O’Donnell she, or any other hack, whatever their gender or size, would have to be totally and absolutely barking mad. Come to that she was probably pretty damned barking to try any kind of approach on an O’Donnell.

‘You’ve got no chance,’ Tommy told her laconically. ‘You ain’t seeing Sam and as for Jimbo, he’s been acquitted once and you lot have found a way of doing him again for the same crime. Now that can’t be right, can it?’

‘Last time your brother stood trial for murder. This time it’s kidnap and rape. Different crimes. Different evidence. One way and another Jimbo will be brought to justice. The law may have tied itself up in knots, but you can’t argue with DNA, Tommy, and you know that.’

‘Do I? What if, and I’m only saying what if, mind, Jimbo did have sex with that Angela Phillips. Who’s to say he didn’t pick her up on her way home, they get in the back of his truck and she’s as eager as he is, what about that, then?’

‘She was a seventeen-year-old virgin, Tommy.’

‘She’d had a row with her boyfriend. She wanted to get back at him. She went with Jimbo, then he dropped her off. Nobody can prove different.’

‘I know that story, Tommy, that’s what your brother told DS Fielding when he went round after the DNA match was discovered.’

Tommy raised both eyebrows. ‘You two still close then, are you?’ he asked with a knowing leer.

God, she thought, was nothing private in her world? She ignored the inference. ‘It’ll never stand up in court,’ she told him.

‘It won’t have to,’ he said confidently and he winked at her again as he closed the door in her face.

Jo was highly disconcerted. She couldn’t take in that the family still believed Jimbo was innocent, she really couldn’t, but they were continuing to stand by him. Maybe it was just that they felt they couldn’t be seen to turn on one of their own. Certainly appearances would be a big part of it. And what did Tommy mean when he said with such confidence: ‘It won’t have to’?

Jimbo O’Donnell continued to protest his innocence in spite of what everyone concerned considered to be overwhelming evidence. Predictably he was pleading not guilty. Yet he had not waited to be summonsed before agreeing to appear in his own defence against the private prosecution. What was going on?

Jo had not seen Mike Fielding during the four months preceding the committal, although she had spoken to him frequently on the phone. She couldn’t help wondering what the detective would be like twenty years on, but the opportunity to find out did not seem to present itself and her involvement with the case, coupled with her normal workload and family obligations, such as they were, meant that she had little free time. Once or twice, belting up and down the motorway between London and Dartmoor, she did consider arranging to meet up with him. But she never quite got around to it.

Later she also thought that maybe she had been putting off deliberately what was bound to be a strange and disturbing meeting. However, she reckoned Mike was probably keeping his distance from her for other reasons. He had already stepped out of line in the case. He probably felt he could not risk any further direct involvement.

Also, of course, she was totally preoccupied by all that was happening. At night she would lie awake sometimes, her stomach muscles clenched, wondering what the O’Donnells were up to, whether she had done the right thing. There was so much at stake. She knew the case that had been put together was a strong one and that Nigel Nuffield wouldn’t have taken it on were that not so. She also knew it wasn’t watertight. It explored a completely new avenue of law, for a start. There was bound to be an element of a gamble and a lot depended on Nuffield’s apparent invincibility. But what choice had any of them had? There would never be another opportunity to bring O’Donnell to justice for a crime that was already twenty years old, that was for certain.

On the day the committal proceedings began, Jo sat with the Phillips family at the back of Okehampton Magistrates’ Court waiting for O’Donnell to arrive. The place had not changed much, still little more than an extended white bungalow on the north bank of the River Okement, tucked away on the outskirts of town behind the same supermarket, which had now metamorphosed into a Waitrose, the proceedings still held in the unassuming room that also housed the meetings of West Devon District Council. Still the rows of ordinary office chairs giving a vaguely inappropriate air of informality.

Outside there had predictably been a considerable gathering of press photographers and TV news cameramen, but few members of the public. It was certainly a very different scene from the near riot of twenty years ago. In spite of the Comet ’s fanfare, in spite of the ground-breaking nature of this hearing, as far as the people of Devon went it seemed that the teenager’s murder was indeed history.

Except for Angela’s family, of course. Jo could feel the tension in each and every one of them. Bill Phillips sat staring straight ahead, his face giving little away except for a periodic nervous twitch of his right eyebrow. Lillian looked likely to burst into tears again at any moment. Rob Phillips kept licking his lips, as if he was thirsty. His wife Mary repeatedly turned her handbag round and round in her lap. Their son Les looked excited, expectant, eager even. But then, he hadn’t been through it all before.