Хилари Боннер - A Kind Of Wild Justice

She sat in the armchair opposite her husband. Dinah Washington was playing loudly on the music system. Paul liked to listen to classical music quietly in the background when he was working in the office and loud jazz when he was relaxing at home. He didn’t look very relaxed. Dinah was singing ‘What a Difference a Day Makes’, which, Joanna thought, was certainly appropriate.

She felt drained. She kicked off her shoes and closed her eyes. After a moment or two the music stopped abruptly and she guessed that Paul had turned it off with the remote control.

‘You took your time getting back,’ he remarked eventually.

She opened her eyes just a little. ‘I went to see the Phillipses.’ She carefully omitted mentioning her meeting with Fielding.

He didn’t reply.

‘They’re devastated by what’s happened.’

He regarded her coolly. ‘So am I,’ he said.

‘Look, I reckon Nuffield really let us down...’

‘Don’t search for scapegoats, Jo. It was you who convinced me this case could be won and I gave you the absolute top man in the country.’

That was true.

‘He does say we could take it to the Queen’s Bench...’

He interrupted her again. ‘Don’t even think about it, Joanna. There is no “we”. As far as you and the Comet are concerned, it’s over.’

She didn’t have the energy to argue. And in any event, even Nuffield, never one to pass up the opportunity of a further fee, had warned against attempting to take the case any further. There was one subject she could not stop herself broaching. ‘Look, Paul, you know costs were awarded against the Phillipses...’ She regretted the words as soon as she said them.

‘My heart bleeds for them.’

‘You are going to honour the contract...’ She regretted those words too. She knew she should have waited until at least the next working day, picked her moment. But she had been worrying about the financial side of it all the way home.

‘There is no contract, Jo.’

Her heart sank. It was all too true. There had not been any contract because she had convinced the family it would be prejudicial for the Comet to be seen to be financing the case. She had been right enough about that at any rate. She had also convinced them that her word was as good as a contract. ‘National newspapers don’t renege on deals,’ she had told them. ‘We don’t dare. We need our contacts and the people we do business with to trust us. If we make a deal we keep it.’ Once upon a time that really had been the truth. Nowadays, by and large, it was bullshit. But this time she had really willed it to be true. ‘Paul, if the Phillipses go public on this it will be even worse,’ she said. ‘They’ll deny it to the wall as long as we pay up.’

‘Joanna, think about it.’ He spoke with exaggerated patience as if to a small child. Obliquely she wondered why all the men in her life seemed to do this to her. It had been understandable, perhaps, with her primary schoolteacher first husband. From Paul it was especially infuriating.

‘It’s already public,’ Paul continued. ‘We have been accused in court of masterminding this whole farcical trial, of leading a campaign of persecution against an already acquitted man — which is more or less the truth, isn’t it?’ He picked up a couple of newspapers at random and threw them at her. ‘Look at this lot, for Christ’s sake. We’re being crucified.’

She had already seen the headlines as the papers were all lying around him on the sofa, open at the appropriate spot.

CRETINOUS COMET LEADS MURDER VICTIM FAMILY IN SUICIDE COURT CASE was an average offering. The strap on that one was good too: And they’re paying for it .

She knew what Paul was going to say before he said it. ‘We can’t pay the Phillipses, Jo, and you may as well accept it now. I should never have given you the go-ahead on this one. I should have known better.’

She suspected that he had known better. She suspected that, maybe for the first time during their marriage and his editorship, he had let the fact that she was his wife sway his judgement. He had known how important this story was to her. She was grateful to him for that but now she could feel the chill of his anger. He obviously felt she had let him down and maybe she had.

She could only continue with what she had begun. ‘Paul, if we don’t pay the Phillipses I think they could even lose their home,’ she said. She didn’t know if that was true but they had told her they had already been forced by the farming recession to remortgage their property to the hilt.

He was unimpressed. It wasn’t that he was an unfeeling man but, apart from any other considerations, it was a very long time since he had been on the road. She had noticed from her first days in Fleet Street the differences between front-line troops and the back-room boys, as she still in her mind divided up the staffs of newspapers. To the back-room boys a story was simply that — words on paper to be manipulated in whatever fashion would give greatest effect. The people behind the stories only existed to the front-line troops who, all too often, were out there on their own.

She tried again, a different approach. ‘Look, together with the Phillipses we tried to get a monster locked up where he belongs. That’s in the glorious old campaigning style of the Comet and I think we should do more of it.’

‘Some glorious campaign,’ he snapped at her and threw another newspaper across the room, front page towards her. I’VE BEEN PERSECUTED, CLAIMS INNOCENT O’DONNELL screamed a banner headline.

‘Innocent O’Donnell,’ she muttered irritably. ‘That’s a contradiction in terms. What about the poor bloody innocent Phillips family, that’s what I want to know.’

‘Do you, Joanna?’ He was as angry now as she could ever remember seeing him. ‘I’m not entirely convinced of that. I’m beginning to wonder if the reason for your blind obsession with this case isn’t exactly the same as it was twenty years ago. One Mike Fielding.’

She was startled. She had tried to mention Fielding’s involvement with the case as little as possible.

‘Take a look at page five of the Mail . It’s inside most of the others too.’

With growing apprehension she did as she was bid. There, staring her in the face, was the photograph which, if she had allowed herself to think about it, had been bound to appear. She and Mike were standing close together on the courtroom steps, smiling slightly at each other, his arm protectively round her shoulders. ‘Damn,’ she thought. ‘Damn and blast.’

Sometimes she forgot just how astute her husband was. He missed nothing. She suddenly felt sure he had guessed that she had been with Fielding that evening.

His next words convinced her that she was probably right. ‘Don’t take me for a fool, Joanna,’ he told her icily.

Two months later James Martin O’Donnell disappeared.

The Daily Mail broke the story, to Joanna’s intense irritation and her husband’s fury.

‘Where’s my boy?’ asked Sam O’Donnell in a lengthy centre-spread feature, which focused on what he claimed was a campaign of persecution against his eldest son. ‘The police and a major national newspaper have colluded in hounding my Jimbo. And now he’s disappeared. I fear I’ll never see my boy again.’

It was nauseating stuff, once more making O’Donnell sound like some innocent caught up in a whirlwind of events none of which were of his own making. Sam O’Donnell had apparently gone to the Mail in preference to reporting his son missing to the police. That made a kind of twisted sense. It was hard to imagine the O’Donnells calling on police help for anything. This way they brought the case into the public domain and ensured that police inquiries would be made without actually directly calling on plod for help.