Хилари Боннер - A Kind Of Wild Justice

After Joanna had hung up on him Fielding. predictably enough, went to the pub. He knew he should try to forget Jo. She was just too dangerous for him. And it looked as she was in any case giving him little choice.

Mike was still mystified as to how those e-mails had got on to his laptop. And he still had no idea who had framed him so effectively. He assumed it must have been one of the many police colleagues he had crossed over the years, some of whom he could quite believe disliked him far more than most villains had ever done.

And then the police had discovered Caroline O’Donnell’s diary, which started all their doubts. Though there was no mystery about that, of course. Fielding himself had been responsible for the tip-off. He had told his wife to write the letter which alerted Todd Mallett. He had told her exactly what to say, and how to type the letter and where to post it from in order to provide virtually no clues to its origin. Ruth had been confused and had asked a lot of questions he’d had trouble answering. But, as usual, in the end she had done his bidding.

Of course, only Fielding knew there wasn’t a word of truth in the diary. He had written it himself, on the dead girl’s computer sitting in that bedroom which her family had kept as a shrine. He had done it while her parents were on holiday. Down on the Costa del Crime, naturally. It hadn’t been difficult to break into the O’Donnell home. They didn’t go in for a great deal of security. They didn’t need to. It would be a brave villain who would do their house. And in any case Fielding was good at breaking into places, having a look round, retreating without leaving a sign. It takes one to catch one, he thought with a wry smile. The old adage again.

He knew he’d done a good enough job on the diary to make it appear convincingly authentic. That had been a doddle for him. He’d done his five years in child protection. He’d heard kids talking about being abused by their uncles, and their mother’s boyfriends, and yes, their fathers and grandfathers. He’d taken statements, he’d read childish outpourings. They quite often wrote stuff down, these poor mixed-up, mistreated kids. He knew how they sounded, the way they wrote stuff, the words they used and the words they didn’t because they couldn’t bring themselves to, or maybe because they didn’t even know them.

He’d typed it out laboriously on Caroline’s computer, hidden it in a homework file, but not too well and, for good measure, he’d printed the diary and left it half sticking out of a book. He knew Tommy and his wife spent time in this room, paying a sort of homage to her. You could see that’s what they did from the very look of the place. He’d done his utmost to leave the diary somewhere he felt pretty sure it would be discovered, but where it was possible that both mother and father had missed it previously. That had been the most difficult part of the job. But apparently he had managed it.

Tommy must have wondered who had tipped off the police about the diary, of course. Mike realised how unlikely it was that he would have told anyone about it. He wouldn’t have wanted the world to know about what he believed his brother had done, he just would have wanted to sort it. But the O’Donnells had plenty of enemies, and Tommy might well have thought it could have been somebody Sam had crossed years ago, who’d done some snooping. Or perhaps he’d believed that Caroline must have confided in another kid, a school friend who’d eventually owned up to what she knew. Kids did things like that.

Fielding had been surprised when he’d learned that Tommy had used e-mail to arrange the contract. But then he’d recognised the sense of it. It had allowed Tommy to distance himself and his family from the crime. Tommy was clever and no doubt quite knowledgeable enough about the Net to realise that an Excite address on e-mails sent and received at a cyber café would give him total anonymity. Swiss bank accounts all round had taken care of the payments he’d made to Shifter, of course, and that had really been Tommy’s style. As Shifter genuinely hadn’t known who had hired him, Tommy needn’t actually have made the second payment. But Fielding wasn’t surprised that he had. If Tommy O’Donnell made a deal he kept it. That was part of the code.

Fielding smiled. He had not killed James Martin O’Donnell. Nor had he hired the man who did. But he had been responsible all right. He had made quite sure that Tommy would not allow his brother to live. James O’Donnell, guilty of the worst crime he had ever known. Guilty of leaving poor bloody Angela Phillips to die alone, violated, disfigured, racked with pain, to be found by a policeman who had thought he had seen it all. A policeman so tough he didn’t get moved by dead bodies. Until he saw that one. Jimbo O’Donnell, guilty as hell of all that and guilty also of wrecking what had once been the most important thing in Mike Fielding’s life — apart from Joanna Bartlett. His career.

There wasn’t much left for Mike to smile about. But the thought of Jimbo O’Donnell lying dead in a hole in the ground with his cock in his mouth, that would always make him smile. That and the fact that he still had a pension.

He ordered another large whisky. Then, when he had drunk enough to numb the pain, he decided he might as well go home to his wife. As usual. Who knows, he thought, hauling himself uncertainly upright from his bar stool, perhaps that’s what he would have ended up doing eventually regardless of Joanna. It was, after all, what he had always done.

Fielding would not, however, be returning to the Devon and Exeter Constabulary. How could he? He had been cleared. His record remained unblemished. Officially. An early retirement deal safeguarding his thirty-year pension — there was only about a year still to go now — had been organised.

His wife had always wanted to retire to Spain. Some place she’d fallen in love with on the Costa Blanca. They’d never be able to afford the more southerly Costa del Sol where all the rich villains were. Maybe he would give Ruth something she wanted for once. Yes, that’s what he’d do, he thought, oozing drunken benevolence.

He made his way a little unsteadily through the pub door and out on to the pavement. The fresh air hit him like a blow in the face. He staggered, recovering himself with all the acumen of a professional drunk. Anyway, there was this barmaid he’d got to know over on the Costa a few years back...

A month or so later Joanna woke once more from a largely alcohol-induced sleep with no discernible hangover. You didn’t get them when you were in the habit of drinking as much as she had begun to. She feared she was picking up Fielding’s habit. Mike had not attempted to get in touch with her since she had hung up on him. And she was determined never to contact him again. Sometimes she couldn’t even believe she had allowed, even encouraged, the resumption of their affair. Now she just wanted to put Mike out of her mind. For ever. But trying to forget him wasn’t proving easy. In fact, it wasn’t easy to forget any of it.

She reflected on how many lives had been touched by the death of Angela Phillips and all that had happened since.

Most affected of all, of course — if you didn’t count the O’Donnells and she preferred not to — were the Phillips family. She had, however, been glad to learn through the Comet ’s new Devon man that the family had sold part of their land, close to Okehampton apparently, for building development. Planning permission had been given, against the odds on the edge of Dartmoor, because of the need for new homes in the area. Big money was involved, which probably meant that the family would be able to save the remains of their farm, even after the disastrous private court case against O’Donnell and the Comet reneging on their deal.