Хилари Боннер - A Kind Of Wild Justice

‘I’m sorry, Mike,’ she said. He had been a hands-on detective all his life. She knew how unhappy he must be about his new job.

He grunted, refilled both their glasses to the brim and ordered another bottle.

What the hell, she thought, taking another good long swig. She couldn’t remember when she had last had a real boozy lunch. And to think that she had been brought up in the days when a Fleet Street lunch wasn’t really considered lunch unless it ended after dark. In the summer. Any amateur can make lunch go on until after dark in the winter, the lads used to say.

‘So what about Shifter, then?’ she asked, eventually focusing on the subject she most wanted to talk about. ‘Are there any theories about who hired him?’

‘Oh, yeah. Theories by the hundredweight. But the same old suspects, none of which really hang together. Any one of the Phillipses, Jeremy Thomas’s family, they always reckoned Angela’s murder did for their boy. Even Sam the Man himself, secretly disgusted by Jimbo and afraid of what he still might do. I don’t reckon that myself, though, family’s family to Sam regardless. Anyway, he always was blind about Jimbo.’

‘So what do you think?’

‘I don’t have a clue, Jo, to be honest. Even if I thought it was, say, Rob Phillips, he’s a Dartmoor farmer, for Christ’s sake, who’s never been in trouble with the police in his life. How would he know how to set about hiring Shifter Brown or his like? Of course, Shifter’s done jobs before for the O’Donnells, but topping one of their own, however nasty a piece of work he is — I just don’t see it. There’s another possibility. Jimbo’s made enough enemies in his time. It could still be somebody completely unconnected with the Angela Phillips case.’

‘But even Shifter believes he was hired for a revenge killing; he’s admitted that much, hasn’t he? Why else would he have taken Jimbo to Dartmoor and killed him the way he did? Shifter was told what to do, presumably. For Christ’s sake, he cut Jimbo’s dick off — the inference is obvious. If it wasn’t revenge for Angela, then it’s one hell of a coincidence.’

‘Unless all that was a smokescreen designed to deflect attention away from those really responsible. But as there’s nobody remotely in the frame apart from people involved in the old Beast of Dartmoor case, what would be the point of that? The more you think about it the more you keep going round in circles.’

‘Maybe Shifter will come clean eventually. He must know it’ll go easier for him.’

Mike shrugged his shoulders. ‘Of course. But you know his sort. Do their bird and keep stumm. It’s a way of life.’

They ate grilled sardines and fresh pasta, and began to reminisce about old times again.

‘Do you remember the day we came here and left before the main course?’ he asked her mischievously. She did, of course. They had eaten a starter of some sort and had suddenly become so desperate to be in bed together that they couldn’t spare the time for the rest of the meal.

She didn’t know whether she wished he hadn’t mentioned it or not. They were on the third bottle of wine now. He had drunk considerably more of it than she had. She was, however, mellow enough to accept that the attraction was still there. For both of them. But she was admitting nothing. Not to him. ‘Vaguely,’ she said, as if in any case it were not very important.

Suddenly he became very serious. He leaned across and touched her hand. ‘I still regret that I didn’t leave home for you,’ he told her abruptly.

She studied him carefully, his eyes a little bloodshot now, his voice just very slightly blurred around the edges. The truth was, she suddenly realised, that she knew she still regretted it too, but she was dammed if she was going to admit it.

She did not respond to his comment. Instead, after a few seconds she said in an even voice, ‘I think we could both do with some coffee, don’t you?’

‘Nope,’ he said. ‘The only thing I could do with is you. Nothing’s changed there.’ He closed the fingers of his hand around hers.

She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear that kind of comment from him, not after all this time, it was a little too glib. She tried to withdraw her hand.

He tightened his grip.

‘Let go, Mike, please,’ she said, her voice calm.

If anything, his grip tightened even more. He leaned forward so that his face was very close to hers. She could smell the alcohol on his breath and the old attraction did not seem quite so strong after all.

‘How about we skip the coffee, for old times’ sake. My hotel’s ten minutes from here in a cab...’

Underneath the table she felt his other hand grasp her knee.

Suddenly she became very angry. It was as if she was overwhelmed by all the unhappiness he had caused her. She could not believe that he could be quite so crass as to grab her and make a comment like that in the middle of a restaurant, particularly this restaurant. It really was the clumsiest pass she had ever been on the receiving end of and his excessive alcohol consumption was no excuse. A few minutes ago Joanna had felt warm and mellow, even a little elated, in his company. Now she was angry and humiliated. And she wondered if his choice of restaurant had been more than nostalgia, a deliberate ploy in some plan he had hatched to seduce her. Part of her fury, of course, stemmed from the knowledge deep inside that, had he handled it better, he might have succeeded. ‘Take your hands off me, you bastard,’ she told him very quietly. Her voice was very cold and so were her eyes.

He obeyed at once, holding the offending hands out towards her, palms up in a gesture of supplication, but still grinning the grin that she had so often found disarming and now, perhaps because he was half drunk and perhaps just because of her anger, simply thought made him look really stupid.

‘All I ever was to you was a cheap lay, wasn’t it?’ she enquired conversationally.

He began to protest.

She stopped him at once. ‘Save it and fuck off,’ she said. ‘I really don’t know why I had anything to do with you again.’ Then she stood up and walked out of the restaurant, leaving him sitting there, aware of his eyes boring into her back.

He didn’t try to stop her. Perhaps he knew that he really had gone too far. It gave her some small satisfaction to think that she had left him to pay a bill he could doubtless ill afford and that, taking into account the amount and quality of wine that had been consumed, it would undoubtedly be quite substantial.

Fielding had one more day to spend in London before returning to his Exeter base. He knew what an idiot he had been in the restaurant. He’d downed a swift pint and a couple of large Scotches before even going there to meet Jo, and then he’d probably drunk the equivalent of two of the three bottles of wine he had ordered. It was getting to be disconcerting just how much he could drink nowadays without feeling much different from the way he felt when he hadn’t had a drink at all. But that kind of quantity was excessive even for him. He’d been deeply distressed by his dreary new appointment, which he’d been well aware he had absolutely no choice but to accept if he wished to survive at all, but that was no excuse.

At his desk on his first day back at HQ in Exeter he found it difficult to concentrate on anything much. Par for the course nowadays. There was always so much on his mind. His thoughts kept turning to Joanna. He made himself work through the morning at the various dull routine tasks which were now his lot, reminding himself that the way things had been going he was lucky still to have a desk. Even if it was at Middlemoor, and even if that was about all he had.

With a great effort of will he kept himself out of the pub at lunchtime, reasoning that it was time he kept his head clear for a while. Several times during the day he very nearly picked up the phone to call Joanna in London. Each time he stopped at the last moment. He didn’t think she’d want to hear from him. He bet she was going into the office every day. He knew that she was supposed only to work a three-day week, but he also knew that Jo was desperate to come out on top in the Shifter Brown case. He had been intrigued to realise over the past few months that she was just as ambitious as she had ever been. She hadn’t changed a bit. She had so much in life, wealth, a family, an impressive professional track record, a column, which he suspected most of the other hacks envied, and day-to-day crime coverage was no longer her responsibility, officially at any rate. Yet she couldn’t bear to be beaten by the rest of the pack. She had to be number one. That was Jo. And she’d be pulling out all the stops right now to make sure she stayed number one. Mike managed a wry chuckle. He bet she was working seven days a week on this one, whether or not she was actually in the office. She wouldn’t stop trying. Not Jo. He knew her.