Хилари Боннер - A Kind Of Wild Justice

His grip tightened yet more. His fingers were digging into her so hard it felt as if they were going to meet in the middle. That was something else she had not ever been so aware of before about him — his tremendous physical strength. She had found him physically threatening just once before, in the Exeter motel room, but that was nothing compared with this. She nodded. There was no point in pretending.

‘You wondered if I had hired Shifter, didn’t you? You wondered if I were the mystery e-mailer. And you thought you’d have a sneaky look around in my laptop to see what you could find...’

There was real menace in him, but she supposed she could hardly blame him. She nodded once more.

He snatched his hand from her shoulder. Involuntarily she glanced down and put her own hand there, as if to take the soreness away. She saw that his fingernails had drawn blood.

He backed away from her, sat down abruptly on the edge of the bed and lowered his face into his hands. She still couldn’t think of anything more to say.

When he looked up he seemed more sad than angry. ‘I can’t believe you would think something like that of me,’ he told her.

She removed her hand from her shoulder and rested it against her forehead, took a deep breath and went for it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I started wondering about how far you would go to get O’Donnell. You’ve always been very determined, Mike, always been someone who wants to win. And this case, well, it’s always been the one, hasn’t it? Don’t they say that we all have one great love in life and a policeman has one great case? Good or bad. One case that overshadows all others. This was always yours, wasn’t it, Mike? And it’s always been a can of worms, hasn’t it? I just wondered how far you would go to close that can of worms, that’s all, I just wanted to know...’ she finished lamely again.

‘You could have asked me.’

‘I didn’t know how.’

He grunted derisively. ‘So what about you, then?’

‘What do you mean, what about me?’

He smiled humourlessly. ‘What about you, Joanna?’ he repeated. ‘This case got to you too, didn’t it, from the beginning, and in the end O’Donnell made a fool of you. He mocked you, didn’t he, humiliated you and that apology for a newspaper you work for. God knows, you don’t like being made a fool of. And in front of your peers...’

‘You’re being ridiculous Mike,’ she began.

‘Am I?’ he interrupted. ‘And you, I suppose, are not — ridiculous, offensive, insulting? I’m a police officer, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Yes, and a good one, always — but...’ The weak attempt at flattery proved to be a big mistake.

‘Save it,’ he said. ‘I really don’t want to know. If you can believe, even for an instant, that I’m evil enough to hire a fucking heavy to slice another man’s dick off and bury him alive then there’s not much point in anything any more, is there? Not between us, anyway.’

To her immense irritation she felt tears forming in her eyes. She was suddenly overcome with guilt and remorse. Now that he was talking to her like that, sitting in front of her, the whole thing seemed absurd. Fielding was impetuous, yes. Impatient. Sometimes too willing to cut corners. Over eager to get a conviction. All those things. But a cold, calculated killer, albeit at a distance? No, he couldn’t be that. It was just not possible. ‘I’m so sorry, Mike,’ she stumbled. ‘I don’t know where I was coming from, I really don’t.’

‘Neither do I, Jo. Now you’d better get dressed and go. I’m certainly not leaving you alone in my room again. If you want to go through my pockets you’ll just have to do it while I’m here.’

‘Mike, please!’

‘Just get dressed,’ he told her, in such a way that there could be no more argument, no more discussion. Perhaps, she thought fearfully, not ever. Perhaps this time it really would be over.

She drove home feeling thoroughly ashamed of herself. She had been cheating on her husband without compunction, she had been neglecting her daughter, maybe even endangering Emily’s secure future. She had been carried away by her affair with Fielding, it had taken over her life again just as it had done all those years ago. Hard as she fought against it, his fascination for her, which she had never been able to explain, had become all-consuming. And yet she was still able to believe that her lover could be guilty of arranging such a horrific crime. Able to suspect that of a man for whom she had been putting her marriage and her whole existence at risk.

Joanna’s emotions were in turmoil. She found herself consumed with guilt over her behaviour towards both her family and her lover. She could not wait to get home to Richmond and sneak a look at her hopefully sleeping daughter, and maybe even prepare a late supper for her husband, who she knew loved her — although she wished he wouldn’t always be so self-contained and controlled about it. At the same time she wished she could swing the car round, go back to Fielding, grovel her apologies and shag him rotten for the rest of the night.

She took one hand off the steering wheel and thumped the passenger seat in frustration. What was wrong with her? She had a damned good life, a damned good husband, a lovely daughter, a lovely home, plenty of money. She was indeed the woman with everything. And yet again she had let this bloody case and that bloody man Fielding put it all under threat. The biggest threat, she knew, came from within her own head and heart. Fielding was under her skin again and half of her sincerely did not want him there.

Her thoughts strayed to what he had said to her when she had more or less accused him of hiring Shifter Brown: ‘And what about you, Jo?’

Laughable, of course. But any more laughable than her accusing him? And Mike did have a point, she supposed. There was nothing in the world she hated so much as being made a fool of. Even after all these years it irked her ever to be beaten, to be in any situation which she felt gave the opposition, particularly her rival crime journalists, reason to be able to gloat over her.

She made herself focus on the case. That at least was a safer preoccupation than Fielding. For the umpteenth time she went over in her mind the list of people who might have wanted to take terminal revenge against James Martin O’Donnell.

She knew that Todd Mallett and his team had questioned the Phillipses and the O’Donnells all over again since her e-mail killing story. Modern farming is a highly complex operation and, like so many farmers these days, the Phillipses virtually ran their whole business on computer. Apparently all the family were reasonably computer-literate. But were they streetwise enough to have found a killer on the Net and to know how to cover their footprints? It was also fairly laughable even to consider them coming up with a user name like ‘contractor’. And, at the end of the day, devastated though they had been by all that had happened to them and their daughter, would they really take the law into their own hands in that way?

As for the O’Donnell family — would they hire a killer on the Net? Surely that wasn’t their style? For a start, they still had their own enforcers, didn’t they? Combo was dead, but his son, Little John, that chip off the old block, was, she knew, still in the employ of the O’Donnells. And indeed, would they have the know-how to do so? Tommy O’Donnell probably would, but he was the one trying to lead his family away from the old ways of hit men and the like. Joanna was pretty sure old Sam O’Donnell wouldn’t have a clue about using the Internet, certainly not at the required level.

Nonetheless she wondered about Sam the Man. Just how ruthless was he capable of being with his own flesh and blood? She knew he would have hated the sex angle and the DNA evidence concerning his son must surely have given even him proof of what he had always chosen to deny. Had he finally accepted the inevitable and taken action he would previously not have countenanced? She could not believe Sam would ever put out a contract against his own son, but you did have to consider it.