Хилари Боннер - A Kind Of Wild Justice

Jo was confused. Bewildered. Consumed with agonising doubts.

She and Mike had shared a mutual obsession with the dreadful death of Angela Phillips. If Mike really had hired Shifter to kill Angela’s murderer she wondered when he had made that decision. And if he had confided in her she wondered what she would have done.

Would she have supported him? Would she have stopped him?

She didn’t know. She had no answers to anything. Not any more. And neither, it seemed, did anyone else. Except, perhaps, Mike Fielding.

She hated the very thought. But she feared she might have to come to accept it.

Then it all changed again. This time it was Tim Jones who told Joanna about the new development, calling her on her mobile early one evening while she was driving Emily to a school friend’s birthday party. ‘They’ve found this diary written by Tommy O’Donnell’s daughter,’ he reported. ‘It seems her Uncle Jimbo was a nonce, as well as everything else. He’d been abusing the kid for years and she’d written it all down.’

Joanna swerved to avoid a bicycle. She had reacted slowly to the cyclist, suddenly not concentrating properly on her driving. She was aware of Emily stiffening in the passenger seat beside her and put a reassuring hand on her knee. She was also instantly aware of the huge significance of what she had just heard. ‘Tell me exactly what has happened and how,’ she instructed Tim, struggling to sound calm and in control.

‘The police got another anonymous tip-off,’ the young crime man continued. ‘They searched Tommy’s home and struck gold.’

‘And Tommy?’

‘Nobody can find him. Already helping the police with their inquiries, I reckon. But neither Scotland Yard nor anyone else will confirm anything yet.’

‘So nothing official. How did you find all this out?’

‘I picked it up from a mate at the Yard, the place is crawling with rumours.’

‘Rumours, Tim? How hard is it?’

‘As nails, Jo. My source is that solid.’

He had little more to tell her. There was little more she needed to know. Motive alone never convicted anyone. But, God, what a motive this was. She had not really been able to imagine that an O’Donnell would ever turn on one of his own — until now.

Just as she had been forcing herself to accept that the man who had been so much a part of her life was guilty of arranging a murder, this latest bombshell had dropped. Perhaps Mike Fielding had been framed. Perhaps he was telling the truth after all.

The murder of Jimbo O’Donnell was Todd Mallett’s case and the detective superintendent considered that everything pertaining to the dead man was his territory. So it was Todd who had obtained a search warrant and led the team which descended on Tommy O’Donnell’s home. Todd didn’t like anonymous tips. And this was the second he had felt obliged to act upon concerning the O’Donnell case. It now seemed increasingly likely, however, that the first one, leading to the files lurking in Mike Fielding’s computer, could prove to have been an embarrassing red herring. Like Joanna, Todd began to wonder if Fielding might indeed have been the victim of an elaborate computer frame-up, just as he had always claimed.

Computers were playing their part again, in more ways than one. But then they always seemed to nowadays. The tip had come in the form of a letter, written in Word 97, printed on an Epson Laser printer. About as anonymous as you can get. Gone were the days when you could match up typed words and letters with the distinctive keys of individual typewriters. The postmark had been central London.

‘Go into Tommy O’Donnell’s kid’s computer,’ the anonymous tipster had suggested. ‘You’ll find her diary. Her dad did.’

They had, too, in the recycle bin. Barely hidden at all. The date indicated that it had been put there after her death. Months after her death. But just days before James Martin O’Donnell had disappeared.

Todd had actually wondered if Caroline’s computer would still be at her home. However the girl’s room, with its teen rock idol posters on the walls and CDs in untidy piles on a shelf, had looked to have been exactly how she must have left it when she had decided to kill herself — even down to a pair of jeans and a T-shirt casually discarded on the bed. Todd had heard that Tommy O’Donnell and his wife continued to keep the room as a kind of shrine to their dead daughter, it was pretty much common knowledge, but he found the reality eerily disconcerting.

He was grateful, however, that the diary had still been retained. It made fascinating reading.

There had been mystery surrounding Caroline’s death from the beginning in Todd’s opinion. He had never bought the exam-fever story. The O’Donnells were not that sort of family. They might be villains but they were down to earth, and they loved their children. Tommy O’Donnell believed in education, wanted to take the family legit and into the future, yet it was hard to accept the perceived wisdom that he would have driven his daughter so hard that she did not want to carry on living.

But abuse by her uncle. Harm coming from within this close-knit family. That was different.

The diary, written from when Caroline was eleven until shortly before her death, chronicled in detail the systematic sexual abuse meted out to her by her Uncle Jimmy. It shed a whole new light on why a thirteen-year-old girl should be distraught enough to take her own life. It was quite harrowing.

Uncle Jimmy was looking after me while Dad and Mum went to the club. He came into my bedroom and got into bed with me. He kept kissing and cuddling me and asking me if I liked it and telling me this would be our secret. I didn’t like it, but he wouldn’t stop.

Another entry read:

He kept pushing himself against me and he tried to get his willy into me between my legs. It hurt. But he wouldn’t stop.

I don’t know why I am writing this down. I can’t tell anybody. I feel dirty. I am so ashamed.

Shame. Amazing how the children in child abuse cases so often felt they should be ashamed. This was something paedophiles played upon, of course.

Todd shuddered at the thought of what the little girl had gone through. He did not doubt the authenticity of the diary for one moment. He had worked in child protection. He had taken statements, even seen diaries like this before. It was not that unusual for children to want to write these things down even when they felt unable to talk to anybody about what was happening to them. Maybe it was a kind of release. These sad tragic outpourings were stamped with the unmistakable ring of truth.

The policeman did not doubt either that Tommy would also have instantly accepted the truth of the diaries. Jimbo’s sexual preferences were always suspect. Throughout his life stories had abounded about his perverted sexual activities. There had been the earlier rape conviction and then the Angela Phillips case. However, it had always suited the O’Donnells to cover up for Jimbo, to keep up the pretence that he was a wronged man. Sam might actually have believed that. Todd didn’t reckon Tommy ever had. But it would certainly not have occurred to any of them that Jimbo would ever bring his unpleasant perversions into the family and abuse his own niece. After all, the O’Donnells took care of their own.

Sam himself, of course, was out of the frame. The old gang boss had finally died just after Mike Fielding had been arrested, but Todd knew that Sam had been incapacitated by a series of strokes for months before that. The O’Donnells had kept it quiet for as long as they could, but eventually the news leaked. Sam the Man’s death, when it came, was what Todd’s mother would have called ‘a happy release’ and they gave him one of those extraordinary traditional gangster funerals like the Krays’. A horse-drawn carriage carried his coffin through the streets of London and as many people gathered to pay their last respects as would to say farewell to royalty. More, possibly, nowadays, thought Todd wryly.