Хилари Боннер - A Kind Of Wild Justice

As he walked back to his car, intending to use the radio to call George Jarvis, a familiar dirty grey Ford Granada pulled into the yard and came to a halt alongside his blue and white panda. And it was with some relief that Trescothwick greeted Todd Mallett.

The two policemen stood for a few minutes while Trescothwick gave a report on his findings so far. ‘Which amounts to bugger all, Sarge,’ he admitted. ‘Not sight nor hair of her, nor do I think there will be, not around here. Some toe-rag’s had off with her. I reckon the family are dead right.’

‘Yes, well, let’s not jump to any conclusions,’ instructed the detective sergeant coolly. ‘Evidence, not hunches, eh, Pete? I’d like to talk to the family myself and the boyfriend, and then decide...’

He was interrupted by the noisy arrival of a Land Rover. A young man leapt out of the driver’s side and an older one opened the passenger door rather more slowly, his face quite grey. The younger man’s eyes were unnaturally bright. He opened his mouth as if he were about to say something but seemed unable to find words. Instead, he managed only a sort of low-pitched moan.

‘Mr Rob Phillips, I assume? I’m Constable Trescothwick and this is DS...’ began Pete, thinking a formal introduction might help.

‘Yes, all right, Pete,’ said Todd Mallett quietly and something in his voice stopped Trescothwick at once.

He glanced towards the DS and followed his eyes, which were fixed on the man Trescothwick took to be Angela Phillips’s father. Tears were starting to run down Bill Phillips’s face. In his right hand he carried a single stiletto-heeled black shoe.

The shoe changed everything. It was the same story when Ginette Tate’s bicycle had been found after the girl disappeared on her paper round two years earlier. Any slight chance that Angela Phillips might have taken off under her own steam had now been eradicated. Not with one shoe, she wouldn’t have done.

Todd instructed Trescothwick to look after the family as best he could and got straight on his radio to HQ in Exeter. Within an hour of his call a major missing person’s investigation, on the scale of a murder hunt, was under way.

Blackstone village hall was commandeered as the investigation centre, a senior investigation officer appointed, DCI Charlie Parsons out of Exeter, and a team of more than fifty officers, CID and uniform, swiftly drafted in. Parsons was a very modern policeman. He regarded himself as more of a manager than a cop. A neat, trim man with a neat, trim moustache, he was much better at planning and paperwork than he was with people. His favourite detective sergeant, Mike Fielding, a high-flyer who at twenty-nine had already passed his inspector’s exams, would be Parsons’s unofficial number two, in charge of far more of the on-the-scene policing than a DS really should be.

A search was launched that afternoon, in the usual fashion with officers beginning at the suspected scene of the crime, the stretch of lane where Angela Phillips’s shoe had been found, and working progressively outwards, taking in an increasingly greater radius of territory. A team of scene of crime officers, SOCOs, cordoned off the suspected scene itself for more detailed examination. In the soft muddy ground of an adjacent gateway to a field they found a set of distinctive tracks, which one of the SOCOs, whose hobby happened to be Land Rover rallying, was able immediately to identify as being from Avon Traction Mileage tyres, a popular brand fitted almost exclusively to four-wheel drives. The clarity of the impressions left by their unique combination of wavy lines and knobs, designed to give maximum grip on and off the road, indicated that the tracks were almost certainly from the last vehicle parked there. However, this did not take the investigation much further as there were probably almost as many four-wheel drives in the area, particularly Land Rovers, as there were ponies on the moor.

Then the search brought an early result. A customised red Ford Escort, equipped with overly large wheels bearing Avon Traction tyres, was found by the search team later that afternoon wrapped around a tree in the woodland to the west of Blackstone. The vehicle appeared to have careered off the road, and would have been easy for Rob and Bill Phillips to miss when they had walked and driven that way earlier in the day, because it had ended up surrounded by a dense tangle of shrubs and bushes. The car’s unusual appearance enabled the briefest of enquiries to establish that its owner was Angela’s boyfriend, Jeremy Thomas.

Joanna Bartlett had been chief crime correspondent of the Comet for only three weeks when Angela Phillips went missing. An appeal was almost instantly put out to the public on TV and in the press nationwide for anyone who might have seen Angela around the time of her disappearance, or anyone and anything else that might be relevant, to come forward. The press response was instant and across the board. Missing teenage girls were hot news. Good copy. Good TV. Photographs of Angela were issued and a press conference called at Okehampton police station for 5 p.m. It was clear that the case would make every TV news bulletin that night and was certain to be splashed all over the newspapers the next morning — apart from anything else, the story had broken on a Sunday, an invariably quiet news day, so a major crime yarn like this one would be pounced upon by every news desk in the land. Angela Phillips’s innocent smiling face would soon be everywhere.

Jo had been at home with her husband, enjoying a Sunday off duty, when she received the call from the Comet ’s news editor that sent her hurrying down the M4 to Devon. She was the new girl on the block, a woman just twenty-seven years old. She had a lot to prove and she knew it. The knives were out in the Comet ’s office just off Fleet Street. The policemen and press officers at Scotland Yard with whom she had daily contact were not a lot better, Jo thought. She had entered an exclusive men’s club, one of the last bastions of male chauvinism. She was Britain’s first woman crime correspondent on a national newspaper, the first-ever woman member of the Crime Reporters Association. It seemed incredible to her that this could be so in 1980 but it was. In Margaret Thatcher the country had a woman prime minister of such force and magnitude that she dwarfed her entire Cabinet. Jo didn’t like Thatcher’s politics, but she could not help but admire her strength and tenacity in the face not only of small-mindedness but also of open hostility.

The sadder elements of Westminster were known to try to make themselves feel better about their all-conquering woman prime minister by making silly jokes about her hitting people with her handbag. Whatever you thought of Margaret Thatcher’s politics, her exceptional ability could not really be questioned. But few men would ever allow that the success of any woman was down simply to merit. The Comet ’s two veteran crime boys, Frank Manners and Freddie Taylor, both approaching twice Joanna’s age, had a wonderfully simplistic way, she knew, of explaining away her own appointment, which had been over both their heads. It was, of course, because she was sleeping with the editor. She had no idea whether or not the editor, Tom Mitchell, was aware of the mythology — because that was exactly what it was.

Jo straightened her shoulders in the driver’s seat of her cherished MG roadster. Didn’t the stupid bastards realise that their schoolboy attitudes just made her all the more determined to leave them for dead? In any case, she didn’t have time to worry about them. She was a top crime reporter heading out on a top job: a missing teenage girl, quite probably a murder. Stories didn’t come any bigger than that. She was excited.