A Kind Of Wild Justice

Acknowledgements

Grateful thanks are due to:

Detective Constable Phil Diss who put the original idea into my head; Sylvia Jones who really was Britain’s first woman national newspaper crime correspondent, appointed by the Daily Mirror in 1980 (the same year as my fictional Joanna whom Sylvia would have left for dead should they ever have encountered each other on a story); Detective Sergeant Frank Waghorn whose endless patience and expertise in the trickiest areas of criminal law saved the day when I really thought I’d terminally lost the plot; Frank’s son Dean Waghorn who knows absolutely everything about computers; Detective Constable Chris Webb whose local policing knowledge was invaluable; Chief Superintendent Steve Livings for sharing with me his rich fund of case histories; Billy who knows first hand about crime and punishment from the other side of the fence but has no wish to draw attention to himself so Billy’s not his real name; civilian inquiry desk clerk Dave Jones of Okehampton Police Station and WO1 Stuart Woods and Col. Tony Clark of Okehampton Camp, without whom I would never have found my eerie Dartmoor crime scene; Richard Stott, former editor of the Daily Mirror, who forged a hole you could drive a truck through in my disgracefully sketchy knowledge of newspaper law and then bought me lunch while he filled it in, as it were; Mirror lawyer Charles Collier-Wright for his guidance and in the hope that he won’t sue me for misusing his famous nickname; Phil Walker, former editor of the Daily Star; Larry Haley of L.A. for giving me the FBI angle on DNA; Simon Patterson and Brian Bourne, who know what banks and bankers get up to; Mike Milburn for telling me about guns; John Pullinger for telling me about maps; Graham Bartlett at the National Meteorological Library and Archive for ensuring I got the weather right; Samantha Fox of Vodafone and Ken Lennox super-snapper for advice on phones and photos; the nice lady at Okehampton Magistrates Court who let me snoop quietly around without filling in 16 forms in triplicate; Maggie for listening to my desperate and incoherent ramblings; Oscar and Sophie for silent companionship; Paul and Joan Smith for providing the place of inspiration (or as near as I can ever get to it).

And last but not least all the characters of Fleet Street, the chauvinists, the drunks, and the deadbeats as well as the talented, the legendary and the near geniuses, who made up the crazy world in which I managed to survive, even very very occasionally flourish, for more than 20 extraordinary years, and without whom this book would not have been possible.

The bits I’ve got right are in no small way thanks to these guys — well, not really the drunks and deadbeats of Fleet Street, but the rest of them anyway — and, as they say, any mistakes are all my own work.