Хилари Боннер - A Kind Of Wild Justice

If Shifter Brown really had bundled O’Donnell into the back of a van that way, then the vehicle could well hold forensic evidence which would convict him. However, when he was arrested Shifter simply claimed that his van had been stolen. And certainly nobody could find it.

Intensive police interrogation failed to make much impression on Shifter. He was a pro. He said nothing. Even if he had believed that the police had enough to charge him and that fingering whoever might have hired him could help his case, Shifter was firmly of the ‘I don’t grass, governor’ breed. Ultimately the arresting officers had to admit they had insufficient evidence with which to charge Shifter and he was released after the maximum thirty-six hours in custody.

A couple of weeks after that the inquest into James Martin O’Donnell’s death was held in Okehampton — once again in the familiar room in the grubby white extended bungalow which was the moorland town’s unprepossessing Magistrates’ Court. The verdict, of course, was death by unlawful killing.

Joanna travelled down to Devon for the hearing, carefully avoiding telling Paul that she planned to be there. She somehow could not resist witnessing this final chapter in O’Donnell’s life and she knew her husband would not approve. He appreciated her contributions to the story and the additional information she was sometimes able to provide, but he still seemed to want her to back off from any public involvement.

The Phillipses were not at the inquest. Joanna reckoned they’d had quite enough of courts — and of the police. She had not expected them to be there and would indeed have been horrified had she had to confront them.

Tommy O’Donnell was there. He glowered at her across the courtroom but made no attempt to speak to her. His father Sam didn’t make an appearance and neither did Mike Fielding.

Joanna knew that Mike, too, was being forced to take a back seat and thought that maybe he had in any case reached the stage where that was all he wanted to do.

She called him on her mobile afterwards and they agreed to meet again at the same pub as before. She didn’t like to think about what was continually drawing her to him, but she had to admit it was something more than just what he could give her professionally.

He looked even wearier and as if he had been drinking already, which was probably par for the course, she suspected. He arrived in a taxi. Gone were the days when policemen dared to take liberties others might not with drink-driving laws. In the present climate a drink-driving offence almost invariably meant instant dismissal. And the end of the pension, the prospect of which, as Mike had so frequently indicated to her, seemed to be about all he was looking forward to in life.

In response to her query about his welfare he told her the story of his interview with Todd Mallett.

She couldn’t help smiling. ‘How to win friends and influence people, the Fielding edition,’ she said.

‘Tell me about it,’ he responded. ‘Too much to bloody drink again, I suppose. Mind you, I always drink more when I’m bored and I’m bored rigid. It’s not just this case the bastards won’t let me near, you know. It every damn thing. They’re giving the impression they’re doing me a favour just by letting me work out the next twelve months or so for my thirty years.’

Here we go again, she thought.

He drank deeply from his pint, his second since they had arrived there ten minutes earlier.

‘So Mallett didn’t take any official action against you, then, or you wouldn’t have that to worry about maybe.’

‘No maybe about it. I suppose Mallett did me a favour really.’ He sounded very grudging, but then Jo knew enough about the relationship between the two men to understand how difficult Fielding must find it to accept their respective positions. ‘He didn’t report me. Just called me in the next day and suggested we do the interview all over again. Told me to consider that I was being given a final warning, though. Step out of line once more and he’d make sure I was out. And stuff my pension.’ Mike smiled wryly. ‘Anyway you don’t want to hear all that; all you want from me is information, isn’t it?’

Was it her imagination or did he sound bitter yet again? She played it straight and spoke lightly. ‘If you say so.’

‘It’s OK, I know I owe you.’

He’d told her that before, too. But, rather stupidly perhaps, she hoped that wasn’t the only reason he was helping her. And in any case, he might be a bit down and out by his standards, but Fielding was not at all beyond using her to pass on information he wanted to see in print. His reasons were invariably his own. He was the kind of man who had always had a private agenda, always found it hard to toe the official line. The difference was that when you were young and flying high, and cracking cases others couldn’t get to grips with, it was all right to be a bit of a maverick. When you were pushing fifty and drinking too much and you had lost that early flair, albeit because it had been knocked out of you rotten, then it wasn’t all right any more.

She knew that and was honest enough with herself to wonder how she would be faring in her world were it not for her marriage to her editor. All too many of her peers had been either unceremoniously cast on the scrap heap when they were in their forties or early fifties, or else so badly humiliated they had felt forced to resign in order to save their sanity. And, all too often nowadays, without the buffer of the huge payoffs that had been pretty well standard right up to the early nineties.

She studied Fielding sympathetically. She had to pity him, although she knew how much he would hate to know that. ‘You don’t owe me anything,’ she said flatly. If it was a lie, what did it matter?

He grinned at her. In spite of everything the grin had barely changed. Extraordinary. Still to die for, still cheeky and challenging and warm and inviting all at the same time. It was just that she reckoned it was a pretty rare sight nowadays.

‘Whatever you say,’ he told her, and there was even that old hint of laughter in his voice. But he continued in matter-of-fact more serious tones, ‘Mallett’s convinced Brown did it, Jo. Don’t waste your energies on any other theories. I haven’t got a lot of time for Todd Mallett, but there’s little doubt he’s right.’

She studied his face and his voice as he spoke. He had always been different when he talked about policing in this way. It was what he did, what he had once done so well. He sounded almost authoritative and sure of himself, the way he used to, even though this was not his case any more and any further unofficial involvement in it could only damage, if not destroy, the remains of his career.

But it appeared that he had been keeping his ear to the ground as much as he invariably did. She wondered fleetingly why she had thought he would ever really change.

‘They’ll get him eventually, Jo, no doubt about it. But the big question will remain, won’t it? Who paid him to do it? Guys like Brown only do it for dough.’

Back in London, Joanna got Tim Jones to sort out a phone number for Shifter Brown. Then she called him and asked if he would like to meet her for lunch. And, unlike perhaps most members of the public who had never had dealings with a villain like Brown or his kind, plus perhaps the bulk of the current crop of rookie reporters, she was not at all surprised when he accepted.

Her predecessors in crime reporting had all been on the Christmas lists of the Kray bothers, and Reggie Kray continued to write and send cards from Parkhurst jail to his ‘friends in the press’ right up to his death. Jo herself had got used to the same kind of treatment from Sam O’Donnell. Although she would never get another card from Sam, that was for certain.