A Kind Of Wild Justice

One

It began in the summer of 1980 on one of those rare warm and balmy English days when even on Dartmoor the midday heat had been stifling and only the cool of nightfall brought welcome relief. Nobody was grumbling, though. It had until then been another miserable summer and, in fact, the coldest July for fifteen years.

Angela Phillips lived with her parents, her brother Rob and his new wife Mary, at Five Tors Farm — so named, predictably enough, because, on a clear day, you could just see the rocky summits of five tors — on the edge of the moors not far from the lovely old granite-built village of Blackstone. Their home was a beautiful rambling Devon longhouse, one end of it converted to provide a more or less separate unit for Rob and Mary.

A smart new stable block had recently been built on to the rear wall of the main milking shed, and from it could be enjoyed as fine a view over the moors as from anywhere on the Phillipses’ land. But during the late afternoon of that particular day, seventeen-year-old Angela noticed little of her surroundings as she fed her three horses, two hunters and a showjumper, and prepared to turn them out for the night in the adjoining paddock.

Angela was going to the village dance with, for the very first time, a boyfriend. Her casual friendship with Jeremy Thomas, her brother’s best friend, had begun to turn into something else at the hunt ball the previous winter when he had unexpectedly kissed her during the last dance.

Feelings Angela did not know she possessed had overwhelmed her. And since then Jeremy, and their occasional heavy petting sessions, had become a major absorption for a young woman who had previously shown little interest in anything other than her beloved horses.

The sun was just beginning to drop in the sky and Dartmoor glowed gloriously before her as she shut the paddock gate and turned to walk back to the farmhouse. Angela remained totally preoccupied with the evening ahead. After all, she had made rather momentous plans for it.

In that very focused way teenage girls sometimes have, she had decided that the time had come to rid herself of the burden of her virginity, that she was going to do so in a proper bed and that tonight, as she knew Jeremy’s parents were away, was the ideal opportunity.

So far Angela and Jeremy had conducted the physical side of their relationship almost entirely in the back of his car. Neither had parents of the modern liberated kind who would allow their young offspring to sleep with their girlfriend or boyfriend under their roof. An unfortunate attempt at a passionate encounter in one of Five Tors’ more remote copses, which had ended abruptly with a number of ants finding their way into her underwear, had put Angela off the idea of outdoor venues. Jeremy had been unusually grumpy when she had stopped him from going any further that day. She didn’t really blame him, though, because she had already learned enough about sex to know that she had led him on shockingly.

Tonight she was not planning to stop him at all.

She glanced at her watch as she made her way across the farmyard. She’d better hurry. It was well gone five, Jeremy was picking her up at seven, she had yet to wash her hair, and as she intended this to be such a memorable night it would probably take her much longer than usual to get ready. She had some new make-up to experiment with, too, which would take her ages to put on because she hardly ever wore the stuff.

She also had a new outfit, the most grown-up she had ever owned. Normally Angela was not particularly interested in clothes, favouring jeans and baggy shirts on the rare occasions she was not wearing either her school uniform or jodhpurs. But she had persuaded her mother to take her shopping in Exeter to buy something special for the dance, traditionally held after the fête on the final day of Blackstone’s annual festival, which this year had fallen on the last Saturday in July and for which the weather had so mercifully cleared.

Angela broke into a trot, ran through the farmhouse kitchen, ignoring her mother’s shouted protest when she failed to close the yard door behind her, and bounded up the stairs to her bedroom. She felt the excitement mount when she saw the black mini-skirted shift dress spread on the bed waiting for her. A pair of very high-heeled black patent leather shoes stood on the carpet alongside. Angela had shiny dark-brown hair and smooth, creamy skin, but she thought her hair was too curly and judged, quite correctly, that she was fairly average-looking, facially anyway. She also knew she had a truly great figure, honed to super-fitness by her riding activities, and that her legs were her best feature. Although only five feet four inches, most of her height was in her legs which, because they were so slim and well-proportioned, succeeded in looking much longer than they really were — and the extravagantly expensive sheer black tights she had bought out of her own pocket money would be the final touch.

She bathed, and washed and dried her hair quickly, having decided not to attempt an elaborate new style and just to go for the clean, glossy look, but easing on the unfamiliarly sheer tights without ruining them took some time and she was as clumsy as she had expected to be with her make-up. However, after several attempts she eventually got it more or less right and regarded her appearance critically in the full-length mirror inside her wardrobe door.

She thought she looked pretty darned good, but so different that she hardly recognised herself. She just hoped Jeremy appreciated the transformation. She had done it for him, after all. She didn’t know which she was looking forward to most, showing herself and Jeremy off to the village, or — whatever might happen afterwards. She gazed dreamily out of the window, again hardly seeing the view, and thought about her big, blond, handsome boyfriend, just two years her senior. She imagined them dancing the night away together, glowing warmly under the admiring glances of their friends and peers. Then she started to imagine what it would be like to ‘go all the way’ with him...

A familiar throaty engine roar interrupted her reverie and she watched the souped-up red Ford Escort, which was Jeremy’s pride and joy, coast to a halt outside the kitchen door. He was clever with mechanical things and she knew that he had almost entirely rebuilt the car himself, painting a sporty gold flash down each side and adding oversized wheels.

Angela glanced at her watch. He was actually five minutes early — as keen as she was, apparently. She turned away from the window, hurried out of her room and, in spite of her high heels, ran down the stairs almost as quickly as she had earlier run up them.

Rushing through the kitchen, she called goodbye to her mother over her shoulder and was outside in the yard before Jeremy even had a chance to knock on the farmhouse door. Well aware that she was wearing rather more make-up than her mother would approve of, she didn’t want anything to spoil the moment when her boyfriend was confronted with her new look for the first time.

Jeremy didn’t disappoint her. As she emerged, his face broke into a big, crooked grin and he took an exaggerated step backwards. ‘Wow!’ he said, then followed that with a loudly approving wolf whistle.

Angela felt smug. So far everything was going according to plan. Jeremy knew nothing of his girlfriend’s ulterior motive in choosing an outfit far sexier than anything he had ever seen her in before. Nonetheless he beamed at her in that rather proprietorial way she found so disarming and escorted her to the car. Then, just as he started the engine, a waving figure emerged from the other end of the house.

‘Hey, wait for me,’ shouted her brother Rob.

Angela adored Rob and was normally delighted to have his company anywhere — but not on this particular night. ‘I thought you were staying home with Mary,’ she muttered in a not too friendly manner as Rob jogged across the yard towards them.

‘Nope, she said I should go out and have some fun, bless her,’ responded Rob with a big grin.

Angela didn’t reply.

‘Great, mate,’ said Jeremy enthusiastically. He and her brother had been close friends before Rob’s marriage. Since then, Rob had been completely preoccupied with his new bride and his achievement of making her pregnant almost certainly during their honeymoon. Indeed, it was this pregnancy which had kept both Mary and Rob more or less housebound, because Mary was not having an easy time of it and felt slightly sick almost non-stop — as she complained volubly.

No wonder Rob was excited about a night out, Angela thought, feeling selfish for a moment.

‘C’mon, Ange, get in the back, I’ll never fit in there.’

Instantly feeling irritable again Angela, in spite of her high heels and short, tight skirt, did as she was bid, somehow managing to manoeuvre her way through the gap between the two front seats. Her brother was exceptionally tall and gangly for a Phillips, a build inherited from their mother’s side of the family.

‘First night out with the lads since I got wed, no point in me driving as well,’ chattered Rob as he settled into the front seat alongside Jeremy.

‘I am not a lad,’ muttered Angela tetchily from the back.

‘I know that, you’re my baby sister,’ pronounced Rob mischievously, knowing full well how much it would annoy her.

Angela bristled in silence. Then Jeremy made it even worse by laughing loudly. Angela was used to being the centre of attention — with both her family and her boyfriend. She didn’t like this at all. By the time they got to the village she was already in a thoroughly bad mood.

‘How about one in the Blackstone Arms?’ suggested Rob and, to her annoyance, Jeremy readily agreed. The boys were first out of the vehicle and headed straight for the bar, not even bothering to look over their shoulders to see if Angela was following them. As she climbed out of the car, hurrying in order not to be left behind, Angela caught the top of her right leg in the seat mechanism, snagging her tights. She cursed.

The scene at the Blackstone Arms was very old-fashioned. But then the village of Blackstone was an old-fashioned place. The men were all propping up the bar, some already in distinct disarray, and the women, of all ages, were sitting at the tables and chairs which lined the walls, giggling into glasses of gin and tonic, and white wine.

A group of local lads, apparently already well oiled, welcomed the newcomers noisily. Jeremy ordered himself and Rob a pint each, then finally seemed to remember Angela and offered her a drink too. She asked for a shandy. She occasionally drank wine or beer but, being only seventeen, the most she could get away with in her village pub was shandy — the low-alcohol kind, which was largely lemonade and came ready-mixed in a bottle.

‘I’m going to have a bloody good night,’ said Rob as he passed her the drink, which left Angela thinking gloomily that she doubted she would.

She was pleased when two friends called her over and asked her to join them. That would show Jeremy. But he appeared not even to notice as she sat down at their table, tugging at her skirt in an attempt to keep the snag in her tights covered. It was then she noticed there was a smear of blood on her leg as well. That depressed her even further. She had made such an effort with her appearance.

Morosely she stared at Rob and Jeremy over the too-fizzy weak shandy. Her two favourite men in all the world, apart, of course, from her father, and at that moment she thoroughly disliked both of them. They grew louder and louder, and the only attention they paid her was to offer periodically to replenish her drink and occasionally shout ‘All right, Ange?’ across the bar. She knew they hadn’t had an opportunity for a drink together in a long while. But she was still angry. She made an effort to talk to her friends, mostly about horses, until, almost two hours and several pints later, she finally persuaded Rob and Jeremy to move on to the dance.

If she could just get Jeremy away from his cohorts, on to the dance floor and into her arms, her original plans for the evening might be resurrected. She was no longer so sure about ending up in his parents’ bed, but perhaps a little romance could yet be injected into the evening.

However, at the village hall Rob and Jeremy again headed straight for the bar.

Angela sighed with frustration. ‘Shouldn’t you be careful? You are driving,’ she said quietly to Jeremy. For a moment her boyfriend, who was usually a very sensible young man, looked uncertain.

But Rob had overheard her remark. ‘Christ, henpecking him already,’ her brother jeered. ‘Stop being such a spoilsport, Ange.’

Jeremy squeezed her arm. ‘I’ll be all right, honest,’ he said. ‘Just one more pint. And it’s only the back lanes home, isn’t it?’

Encouraged, she whispered, ‘Can we have a dance, then?’

‘Any minute,’ said Jeremy.

But ‘any minute’ stretched on and on. The one pint became another and then another. Her two favourite young men were starting to look quite unsavoury. Stuck in the corner of the bar with them, she could only glance with envy at the couples gyrating on the floor. The village hall was packed and the air was heavy with cigarette smoke. The music was so loud she could hardly hear a word anybody was saying, which didn’t actually matter much as there was nobody she wanted to have a conversation with. Certainly Rob and Jeremy were well past that, she reckoned. After a bit she even began to think that the band, allegedly the best in the area, sounded pretty lousy and started to wonder why she had been so excited about the village dance in the first place. Suddenly everything seemed second-rate, particularly her two companions.

She glanced at her watch. It was almost 11.30 and so far her romantic night out had been a complete disaster.

She made one last attempt to rectify matters, although she knew it was too late. ‘Come on, Jeremy, come and dance,’ she coaxed, tugging on the sleeve of his jacket.

Again Rob interfered. ‘Don’t let her nag you, mate, she takes after her mother,’ he said.

This time Angela felt the anger rise inside her. Her cheeks flushed. She was not used to being treated like this. She was accustomed to getting her own way, indeed to being spoiled rotten, by her father, her brother and, usually, her boyfriend.

Again Jeremy laughed loudly. Too loudly. It was probably rather a nervous laugh, but Angela was too angry by then to notice.

‘Fuck you both,’ she shouted at them, using the kind of language she hardly ever used. ‘I’m going home. And Jeremy, I hope you crash your bloody silly car and get breathalysed...’

‘Oh, go away,’ murmured Rob conversationally.

‘I’m going, don’t worry, and I hate you,’ she said, pushing aggressively past them and bumping into Jeremy so that beer spilled from his glass over his trousers and shoes.

Rob smiled and took a swig of his pint. ‘Always did have a temper on her,’ he announced, slurring his words and swaying slightly as he spoke.

Jeremy giggled. This time he definitely sounded nervous. ‘I’d better go after her,’ he said, reaching to put his now almost empty glass on the bar.

‘I’d let her cool off, if I were you, mate,’ advised Rob.

‘I suppose you’re right, Rob, but it’s a good two miles back to your place.’ Jeremy was watching Angela’s retreating back as, shoulders set in anger, she fought her way through the throng on her way to the door.

‘Walk’ll do her good,’ said Rob resolutely. ‘C’mon, Jer, it’s your round.’

It was almost two in the morning before Lillian and Bill Phillips heard the unmistakable sound of Jeremy Thomas’s customised Escort roaring into their farmyard, followed by the slamming of a car door and some loud laughter.

They even heard their son’s voice: ‘Some night, mate, aye, some bloody good night,’ followed by more laughter.

‘They’re back,’ whispered Lillian Phillips unnecessarily. She knew it was silly, both their children were grown-up now and Rob was a married man, an expectant father even, but she could never sleep properly until they were home. And she was well aware that neither could her husband, though he denied it.

Bill Phillips grunted. ‘Boy’s drunk,’ he stated.

‘First time he’s let his hair down since he was wed, bless him,’ said his wife, her voice indulgent.

Bill Phillips grunted again. ‘How come you’re never that understanding when I’ve had a few?’

‘Because you’re my husband, of course,’ replied his wife, offering no further explanation.

‘And don’t I know it,’ he muttered, softening his words by reaching for her hand.

She sighed in the darkness. ‘We’re so lucky, aren’t we? Two wonderful children, this place. And now we’re going to be grandparents. Do you know, I just can’t make up my mind whether I want it to be a little boy or a little girl. What about you, Bill? I suppose you want a boy, do you, make sure of the farm. Aye? Bill? Bill?’

This time the only reply was gentle snoring.

Carefully Lillian Phillips withdrew her hand from his and snuggled contentedly into the deep warmth of the bed. Within seconds she had fallen into an untroubled sleep.

In the morning, Bill Phillips was first up as usual. He didn’t do the milking any more, hadn’t for years, the Phillipses employed a dairyman for that, but old habits died hard. He liked to be up soon after five and settled by the Aga with his first cup of tea, listening to the farming programme on the radio.

Rob was usually up not long after him and would come down to his parents’ part of the house for his first morning cuppa knowing that the tea would already be brewed. Bill didn’t expect him very early that morning, though, not after the kind of night he’d apparently just enjoyed.

The farmer smiled to himself. Secretly he was as tolerant of his son’s rare excess as was his wife. Rob was a good, hard-working boy. They could not have wished for a better son and, although Bill had always said that he wanted both his children to have choices and that no son of his would ever be forced into farming the way he had been, he was, of course, delighted when it became clear that all his only son wanted in life was to run Five Tors Farm one day. Rob would be the fourth generation of Phillipses’ to do so.

Sometimes, particularly if the day were bright and sunny, Bill would go for an early inspection tour of his land. But the morning had dawned dull and drizzly, the previous day’s sunshine already proven to have been just a brief respite in a terrible stretch of weather, and it was also Sunday. He poured a second cup of tea, settled himself more comfortably in his armchair and decided to stay where he was, enjoying the warmth and the radio for at least another hour or so.

Lillian was also an early riser and was up soon after six as usual. Normally, she took Angela a cup of tea in bed to soften the blow of having to get up. Angela liked her bed. The early-rising habit of her farming ancestors seemed somehow to be missing from her genes. On weekday mornings Lillian would wake her daughter at 6.30 in order for her to see to her horses before getting off to school. On Sundays Angela was still expected to be up at 7.30 for her stable chores. But remembering the late night and how much her daughter had been looking forward to the dance and to wearing her new dress, and being escorted there, for the first time, by her very own boyfriend, Lillian Phillips decided to let her have a rare lie-in. And an even rarer rest from her morning routine.

Lillian pulled on her boots and set off to bring in the horses herself. During the summer they were put out to grass only at night. They got too fat otherwise and the daytime flies bothered them.

The job did not take long. As soon as Lillian opened the paddock gate the animals came towards her, expecting their usual morning corn feed. Back in the house just a few minutes later, she made fresh tea and carried a mug of it up the stairs.

It was just before 8.30 a.m. when she paused and listened outside the door to her daughter’s bedroom. Not a sound came from within. Smiling, she pushed the door open. ‘C’mon, lazybones, I just hope you weren’t in the same state as that brother...’ Lillian stopped in mid-sentence. Her daughter’s bed had not been slept in. There was no sign that she had been in the room at all since the previous evening when she had been getting ready for the dance.

Startled, Lillian quickly put the mug of tea down on the landing floor and hurried into her son’s and daughter-in-law’s part of the house. Passing their bedroom, she knocked on the door and, receiving no reply, ran down the far staircase and into their kitchen.

Rob was sitting at his kitchen table with Mary. He looked more than a little dishevelled and bleary-eyed, but he managed a wan smile as his mother entered the room.

‘Hi, Mum,’ he began. ‘No point in asking you if you heard me come home, cos I know darned well you would have done...’ Seeing the expression on his mother’s face, he too stopped in mid-sentence. ‘W-what’s wrong?’ he asked uncertainly.

‘Rob, where is your sister?’ his mother asked.

‘I dunno. In bed, I suppose. Late night, wasn’t it? Why?’

‘She did come home with you? Surely you brought your sister home with you, Rob?’

Rob was momentarily bewildered. After all, his head was not very clear. ‘What? No. She’d had enough of Jer and me. Got in one of her tempers and stomped off; said she’d walk home. She should have been back more than an hour before us...’

He realised his mother was just staring at him, the shock in her eyes all too clear.

‘Oh, my God, Mum, she’s not here, is she?’ he blurted out.

His mother just shook her head.

Two

The desk clerk on front-office duty at Okehampton police station took the first call at 8.45a.m.

The Phillips family had not waited to make any enquiries of their own. Instead, Rob Phillips looked up the number for their closest police station in the phone book. And when he made the call, although the panic was already rising inside him, not to mention the guilt at his own behaviour the previous evening, Rob spoke quietly and as calmly as he could. Nonetheless he had difficulty getting the words out in a lucid fashion.

In Okehampton, George Jarvis listened carefully. He was that kind of man, a civilian clerk but with a lifetime of policing behind him. And missing seventeen-year-old girls were every policeman’s nightmare. They had minds of their own, did teenage girls. And bodies that were going through all kinds of metamorphoses their parents didn’t usually want to know about. ‘Our Doreen’s not like that.’ How often had George heard that one. He knew better. They were all like that, he had discovered over the years, even the most unlikely ones. Sometimes he was almost glad that he and his missus had never managed to produce any children. George knew more about the pain children caused their parents than he did about the pleasure, of course. That was a policeman’s lot, really.

George had been the solid, old-fashioned sort of copper. He even looked a bit like the actor who’d played George Dixon, Britain’s first famous TV bobby, and he’d been teased a lot about that in his younger days: same Christian name, same looks, same build. He wished he had a quid for every time he’d walked into a pub to be greeted with ‘evenin’ all’. ’Course, it didn’t happen very often nowadays. Nobody remembered George Dixon any more. Like Dixon, George Jarvis had been a uniformed sergeant when he’d retired four years earlier after completing his thirty years, always working a country beat. He’d signed on again immediately as a clerk. George liked being in police stations. His work had always been more of a way of life to him than just a job.

‘Are you sure she didn’t go home with her boyfriend for the night, Mr Phillips?’ he asked, then, remembering himself and the offence such remarks could give, even at times like this when you’d think they had something more to worry about than appearances, ‘I mean, to his family...’

‘No,’ said Rob. ‘I told you. Jeremy gave me a lift back and went home on his own. We both thought Angela was already here at the farm.’

George wasn’t at all sure he had told him that, but he didn’t push the point. ‘Is there any chance that she could have walked to his home and waited for him there, instead of going back to your place?’

‘Well, I suppose she could’ve done. But no, she wouldn’t have. I’m sure of it.’

‘Is the Thomas place also within walking distance of the village?’

‘About the same distance away as our farm, in the other direction,’ said Rob. ‘But I’m quite sure she didn’t go there. She was angry with Jeremy and, anyway, she wouldn’t have done...’

George Jarvis sighed. ‘Have you phoned the Thomases to check, sir?’

‘No.’

More often than not the relatives of a missing kid would have done that before they called the police, thought George. This lot hadn’t even thought about it, apparently, quite convinced their Angela must have come to harm not to have got home. He’d come across that sort of certainty in the past, only to find that it was misplaced.

He knew the Phillips family, of course, had seen Bill Phillips in Okehampton on market day only two or three weeks before. George had once been the village bobby at Blackstone in the days when villages had their own policemen instead of some anonymous car patrol passing through once a month — if you were lucky. George had known Rob Phillips when he was a nipper at the village primary school — Blackstone had had one of those too, once — but he didn’t expect the lad to remember him. And the policeman had never known Angela at all. He was well enough aware, though, that parents also almost always thought their daughters were sensible. And all too often they were anything but.

‘Right,’ George began patiently. ‘Then may I suggest you do so right away, sir. And try to think of any other friends she might have gone to and get in touch with them. Also, could she perhaps have fallen and hurt herself on the way home, and not been able to continue her journey?’

‘W-w-ell, I don’t know, I suppose she could have done, but Angela knows the lane home from the village like the back of her hand...’

‘You haven’t checked her route?’

‘No, but Jeremy and I came back that way last night...’ The young man sounded uncertain.

‘It was dark, sir, wasn’t it? You could have missed her easily enough. Did your sister have a torch?’

‘N-n-no.’

George thought he detected something in Rob Phillips’s voice. Was it guilt, perhaps? Nothing unusual about that in the case of a missing person. The family and those closest often felt guilty, and sometimes had good reason to. First thing any copper worth his salt checks out is the alleged nearest and dearest. George collected his thoughts. He was getting ahead of himself. There wasn’t even a crime, not yet, anyway. Just a seventeen-year-old girl who hadn’t come home from a dance.

‘Right, sir, you may like to have a bit of a look around. And make those calls. If you find anything, get back to me at once. Meanwhile we’ll start making some enquiries and I’ll get a man over to you soon as I can.’

George Jarvis hung up the phone and sat staring at it for a moment or two. He wasn’t sure how seriously he should take the call yet. But he knew what to do. Stick to procedure. Go by the book.

He entered the call meticulously in the message log. Then he used the radio to contact a constable he knew was not too far from the Phillips farm because he’d recently been despatched in his panda car across the moors to investigate a break-in at a garage near Moretonhampstead. George Jarvis was used to making decisions and issuing instructions. He might be just a civilian desk clerk now, but he was still inclined to behave like the station sergeant he had once been. ‘We’ve got a missing person, Pete,’ he began, as he redirected the constable to Five Tors Farm.

Then he made himself a cup of tea. No point in notifying the top brass yet; see how it pans out, he told himself. But George had an uneasy feeling about this one, even this early on. The Phillips family weren’t ones to panic. They were a pretty solid bunch. More than likely, the girl was of the same stock. And even if she were the daft, irresponsible sort, at seventeen she was highly vulnerable. Best to share the burden, George thought.

He checked his watch. Still not quite nine o’clock. He knew the recently promoted Detective Sergeant Todd Mallett was on duty in CID that day, but being a Sunday with nothing much on so far, he wouldn’t expect Todd in before 9.30 or so. George liked Todd, one of the best of the younger chaps, he thought. He took a couple of sips of tea and considered his options for a moment or two more. Then he called Todd Mallett at his home in Sticklepath, just a few miles out of Okehampton on the Exeter road.

Todd listened just as carefully as George himself had done when Rob Phillips had called in. ‘I think I’ll take a run out there, then, George,’ he said eventually. ‘Not much point in coming in to the station first; it’s quiet enough otherwise, isn’t it? Young Pete Trescothwick could do with some moral support I reckon, if nothing else.’

Typical Mallett, thought George. Taking it calmly, step by step, but finger on the pulse already. There were those who regarded Todd as a bit old-fashioned and overly thorough. But George approved of qualities like that in a policeman.

At the farm, the whole family gathered in Rob’s end of the big old house. They were unimpressed when Rob told them what George Jarvis had asked him to do.

‘But she wouldn’t...’ began his mother.

‘I know, I know. But look, let’s just do it, shall we?’ Rob replied. His voice came out higher-pitched than usual with just a hint of hysteria in it now.

‘I’ll call Jeremy,’ said his mother, still sounding tearful but also as if she were glad to have something to do.

‘And didn’t you say she was chatting to those riding chums of hers last night?’ Mary enquired. ‘I’ll call them, and anyone else I can think of.’

‘Good. And I’m going looking for her.’ Rob’s face was set.

‘Where, where will you begin?’ asked his father, the strain clear in his voice too.

‘I’ll walk the way she should have come home. I ought to have thought of that already. Maybe the policeman is right. Maybe she did fall and hurt herself, maybe she was taken ill, maybe she’s lying in a hedge somewhere...’

Rob tried to sound optimistic. Any of those possibilities was infinitely preferable to the one they were all dreading. But his voice tailed off almost plaintively. He didn’t believe what he was suggesting and the rest of the family knew it. However, it was action of a sort, something to do. Anything was better than sitting around the house waiting. The guilt was like a dull pain nagging away in the pit of his stomach. He had got drunk, played the fool, not bothered to see that his sister got home safely. And now the potential consequences of his completely out-of-character bout of irresponsibility were too dire even to think about.

‘I’ll come with you, boy,’ said his father. ‘Let’s take the Land Rover and walk it in stretches. Then we’ll have a vehicle to bring her back in.’

But Rob didn’t think his father sounded as if he believed he would be bringing Angela back. Nobody had criticised Rob. Not yet. But he knew that would come. He could hardly bear to think about what this would do to his family.

As soon as the men had departed, Lillian Phillips and her daughter-in-law started to telephone people: Jeremy Thomas and any other friends of Angela’s whose homes she could possibly have reached on foot.

Jeremy answered the phone sleepily, as if he had been woken by it, even though it was mid-morning. No, Angela had not been to his house last night, he said. And then, as if the significance of what he was being asked had suddenly dawned on him he exclaimed abruptly, ‘Oh, my God! I’ll be right over.’

‘No, Jeremy,’ said Lillian at once. ‘We couldn’t cope with anybody else here right now. We’ll call you as soon as we have any news.’ Then she hung up before she had to explain or discuss the situation any further.

Her daughter-in-law had given up and Lillian was speaking to the final friend of Angela’s she could think of when Constable Pete Trescothwick’s panda car pulled into the yard. Mary, even more pale and drawn-looking than she had been throughout her troubled pregnancy, opened the door and ushered the constable in.

Pete Trescothwick was young and green. He was bright enough, though, and it didn’t take him long with the two women to begin to fear, as they obviously did, that something very serious had happened to Angela. His instinct was to believe that he was being told the truth and that Angela had indeed never returned home from the dance. Nonetheless there were procedures to go through. ‘Do you mind if I have a look around?’ he asked.

Lillian Phillips appeared slightly bemused. ‘She’s not here, Constable, I told you. Do you think I wouldn’t know if she were here?’

Trescothwick coughed to hide his embarrassment. A search of the home of a missing person or victim of a violent crime was standard procedure. So many crimes were committed within the family set-up. Where there should be the greatest safety there was so often the greatest danger. Everybody in the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary knew about the major hunt for a missing woman over in Plymouth that had gone on for several days and all the time she was in the garage wrapped up in a carpet. There were certain police officers involved in that one whose careers had come to a sudden dramatic halt. Pete Trescothwick had no intention of allowing that to happen to him, despite his gut reaction that the distress of the Phillips family was one hundred per cent genuine. But he did try to be as tactful as he could. ‘Just routine,’ he said in a casual voice.

Not casual enough to fool Lillian Phillips, it seemed. ‘You’re not suggesting that we’ve got her here somewhere, are you?’ she asked sharply. ‘You’re surely not suggesting anyone in this house has hurt our Angela?’

‘Of course not, Mrs Phillips, just routine, like I said. There’s a way we have to go about things.’

But the distraught woman interrupted him and now she sounded close to breaking point. ‘Just go and find her, find my Angela, please,’ she screamed at him, her voice high-pitched, desperate, her tears suddenly flowing freely. ‘Don’t waste your time here. Go and find her. Something terrible has happened to her, I just know it...’

Pete Trescothwick shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.

Mary Phillips came to his rescue. ‘C’mon, Mum,’ she said soothingly. ‘Let me make you a cup of tea and we’ll let the constable get on. He’s only doing his job...’

‘I don’t want any tea...’ the older woman began, but she fell silent and let Mary lead her over to a chair.

Trescothwick slipped out of the room and began his search. First he went through the bedrooms, looking in the wardrobes and under all the beds. Then he checked all the downstairs rooms before starting on the yard. He did his best to search the big cowshed, the stables and the barn where they kept the feed, all with no result as he had more or less expected. It was now gone 10 a.m. The girl had been missing for almost eleven hours. She was wearing party clothes, a skimpy black dress if Trescothwick had ascertained it correctly. The only money she had was a few pounds in a small handbag. She had no coat. All right, it was the end of July, but nonetheless she was hardly equipped to do a runner. Trescothwick had extremely bad vibes about this and decided he wanted to shift responsibility for it on to broader shoulders as soon as possible.

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.

She drove straight to the scene of the crime at Blackstone. There was plenty of activity and it wasn’t difficult to find the spot where Angela Phillips was believed to have been abducted, but the area was cordoned off and there was little to see, so Jo drove on to the missing girl’s farmhouse home. It was almost seven o’clock by the time she arrived, but the earlier rain had cleared, and it was a warm and pleasant evening. There was a single uniformed police officer standing at the end of the lane which led to Five Tors Farm. The pack were staked out all around him. With some difficulty Jo found enough of a grassy verge to park her car just about off the road. As she climbed out she narrowly avoided a rather large cowpat and wrinkled her nose with distaste. Sidestepping smartly, she was vaguely aware of admiring glances from one or two of the waiting journalists, not directed at her, she was quite sure, but at her car, which was an absolute beauty: British racing green with gleaming wire wheels.

Joanna was tall and slim, with mid-blond hair that hung straight and sleek halfway down her back — a legacy from her teenage years during the hippy-influenced sixties and early seventies. However, she thought her hair was lank and boring, and was all too aware that her slim figure owed more to cigarettes and nervous tension than healthy diet and exercise. Although she wasn’t pretty, she had a good strong face, high cheekbones, clear skin and nice eyes. And she certainly didn’t have an inferiority complex, not about anything. But it simply did not occur to Joanna that her appearance was particularly attractive. And certainly the behaviour towards her of most of the men she had dealings with did nothing to alter that.

She picked her way carefully across the narrow road to the assembled group. The countryside was great when you were driving through it in a nice warm car or looking out of the picture window of a luxury hotel, Jo thought, as she glanced around her. However, though she might not be mad about it, unlike many city folk she did at least understand that the countryside did not look after itself. The big Devon hedges all around her had been freshly manicured, the farm lane was no rough track but a tarmac driveway flanked by imposing granite pillars, the gate, standing open, was painted immaculate white. The Phillipses obviously kept their land beautifully, and had the money and workforce to do so. Their farmhouse was hidden from the road, but Jo imagined that the family lived in some style. Through the gateway opposite she could see a sweeping view of Dartmoor, hazy and purple in the evening light, its unique tors, those piles of granite boulders at the summit of sharply pointed hillocks, piercing the skyline a bit like falling-down church spires. It was a lovely spot, Jo admitted grudgingly to herself.

There were about a dozen men standing around, talking and smoking, at the lane junction. Some were obviously camera crews and radio reporters; others, she guessed, were local reporters and regional men for the nationals, and there were already a couple of Scotland Yard press corps lads who had rather irritatingly got there before her. But then, she had wasted time trying to smooth things over with her husband before leaving. Chris had not been best pleased to have one of their rare Sundays together interrupted. Male hacks rarely seemed to have those kinds of problems with their wives.

Harry Fowler, the Comet area man, who she knew had covered the earlier press conference, was also already there, as she had expected him to be. She was the only woman, as she had also expected.

Harry looked across and gave her a slightly uncertain wave. Fortyish, a little on the plump side, pleasant-faced, you could tell almost by looking at him that here was a man who had found his niche in life in a part of the world he loved. She had met him before, of course, and he was a nice enough guy without any of the chips on his shoulder of the London crime lads she had to work most closely with. But he would be well aware of the furore her appointment had caused in Fleet Street.

The Scotland Yard reporters already at the scene, Nick Hewitt and Kenny Dewar, were two of the most contemptuous of her after her own alleged colleagues. They were watching her arrival with expressions of amusement and disdain. Patronising bastards, she thought. And, from the expression on his face, it was clear Harry Fowler didn’t know quite how to deal with any of it. She decided to take the bull by the horns and strode towards him, trying hard to display a kind of confidence she was not really feeling.

She had to walk straight past Hewitt and Dewar, and she made sure her steps did not falter as she wished them a curt good evening.

‘My God, the Comet’s sent in the heavy brigade,’ announced Hewitt with a derisive laugh.

And both quickly and loud enough to be sure she was still well within earshot, there followed Dewar’s clear stage whisper: ‘You know something, Nick, I’d like to give ’er one really hard and bite ’er lip till it bleeds.’

Joanna ignored both comments. Women who couldn’t stand the jolts were not expected to join the Street of Shame. She knew the rules and how to live by them.

Harry Fowler, however, began to look even more ill at ease.

Joanna pretended nothing had happened. ‘All right, Harry? Anything new?’

Harry smiled uncertainly. ‘Hi, Joanna. Not a lot. I expect you know they’ve got the boyfriend in Okehampton nick.’

Joanna shook her head. That information was obviously too fresh to have made any of the radio news bulletins she had listened to on the way down. Harry would already have passed it on to the news desk, of course, but although the MG did have one of the new car phones, linked by radio to a Post Office operator, it was unreliable. The reception had proved to be almost non-existent outside the London area and she hadn’t talked to her office since setting off.

‘They say it’s just routine,’ said Harry. ‘But he’s been in there since three this afternoon apparently. The word is that they found the boy’s motor near where the girl disappeared. I’ve got a stringer over there on a watching brief.’

Joanna felt her excitement wane a little. If the boyfriend was guilty this might not turn out to be quite as big a story as she had anticipated. It was certainly likely to be cleared up quickly.

‘We might get something else soon,’ Harry continued. ‘Fielding’s supposed to be coming out to speak to us any minute.’

Joanna nodded. She knew who Fielding was. She had already been given the names of the principal investigating officers when the news desk had called her at home. She took a packet of Marlboro from her jacket pocket and offered Harry one.

‘No thanks, given it up.’ He tapped his abundant torso in the vague region of the heart.

Then she remembered. He’d been off work for six months following a bypass operation. Now back on the job on a story like this, something nice and stress-free, she thought wryly, lighting a cigarette as she leaned against the nearest parked car and settled in for a wait.

She hadn’t even finished her smoke when a squad car approached from the direction of the farm and pulled to a halt at the end of the lane. Two large men climbed out of the back seat. Both were well over six feet tall, but while the first to emerge was thickset and fleshy with dark hair and a swarthy complexion, the second was long and lanky with light sandy hair, which flopped over his face as he moved. The dark swarthy one, who was wearing a particularly ill-fitting brown suit, looked as if there were a million other things he would rather be doing. The fair lanky one, snappily dressed in a trendy navy-blue linen jacket and immaculate dark-cream trousers with what looked terribly like Gucci loafers on his feet, gave the impression that he was thoroughly enjoying himself.

He strode straight into the gathering of hacks. ‘For those who don’t know me, I’m Detective Sergeant Mike Fielding and this is DS Todd Mallett,’ he announced, waving his hand at his colleague, whose discomfiture seemed to increase. Then he made a brief statement. It was standard stuff, all about growing concern, no further development, a renewed appeal for anyone who might have witnessed anything suspicious to come forward. ‘Also, I would like to ask on behalf of the Phillips family that you respect their privacy at this difficult time,’ he finished predictably. ‘There’s no point in hanging around here, lads, really there isn’t. Nothing’s going to happen at the farm. We’re in the process of setting up an incident room in Blackstone village hall and I or one of the team will give a press briefing there tomorrow at 4 p.m. — and every day until we find Angela.’

As soon as he stopped talking the pack surged forward, surrounding him and Mallett, bombarding them with questions, almost all about Jeremy Thomas.

‘We do have a man helping us with our inquiries, but it really is just routine at this stage,’ said Fielding predictably. ‘There is no more I can tell you today, lads, I’ll see you tomorrow.’ As he spoke he was trying to force a way through the throng back to the squad car, the completely silent Todd Mallett at his shoulder. But the pack continued to harangue the two policemen, pushing and shouting.

Joanna was in the thick of it. That was what she was paid for, after all. ‘What about the car you found near the scene, Detective Sergeant?’ she called and felt she could hear her own voice clearly above the chorus, perhaps because her pitch was higher.

Maybe she was right, because Fielding swivelled round to face her, his surprisingly soft grey eyes seeking her out in the crowd. ‘And who are you?’ he asked.

‘Joanna Bartlett, the Comet.’

He flashed a lopsided grin at her. ‘Thought so. The first woman in the Scotland Yard corps, eh? Frank Manners has told me all about you.’

The bastard, thought Joanna. He’s even warned off his contacts. ‘I’ll bet he has,’ she said, half to herself.

Fielding heard her, though. ‘Don’t worry about it, darling, you can tell me all about Manners any time you like. And any place.’ He looked her up and down appreciatively.

There was loud laughter from the throng, particularly, not at all to Jo’s surprise, from Dewar and Hewitt. Another patronising sod, just like all the rest, thought Joanna, staring levelly back at the detective. She did not rise to him, choosing instead to remain silent.

‘Honestly, lads, that’s all for today,’ he said then.

He did not attempt to answer her question, although she didn’t blame him for that, but his eyes were fixed on hers. Suddenly his face broke into that lopsided grin again. It was actually quite an endearing grin, thought Joanna, and was instantly annoyed with herself.

Then the man winked.

Joanna felt an almost irresistible urge to slap his face. She was quite glad to be clutching a notebook and pencil in her hands. How could a policeman investigating a murder behave like that, she wondered.

Three

Jeremy Thomas was detained at Okehampton police station all night. He claimed he had crashed his car driving home from Five Tors Farm after giving Rob Phillips a lift. He also claimed that the last time he saw Angela was when she had left the dance in a huff.

The previous afternoon Fielding, along with Todd Mallett, had conducted the first formal interview with Jeremy. There had been no solicitor present. The young man had turned down the offer of one. Fielding hoped that wasn’t going to cause problems in the future in view of Jeremy’s youth. But no policeman would turn down the chance of interviewing a suspect without the interference of lawyers.

The SOCOs had found strands of dark-brown hair, some attached to follicles of skin, in the Ford Escort and a small amount of fresh blood on the frame of the passenger seat.

Fair, crew-cut Jeremy had admitted at once that the dark hair could well have been Angela’s. ‘She’s always in my car and well, you know, she’s my girl and, well, we’ve only got the car...’

Fielding understood what the boy was trying to say clearly enough. If they’d been using the car for a kiss and a cuddle, and maybe more, you would expect some signs of that to remain. Hair, yes. But blood?

‘I don’t know,’ said Jeremy. ‘Maybe she knocked herself. Maybe somebody else did...’ Maybe, thought Fielding. Maybe not. ‘Lead you on, did she?’ he asked. ‘Was that the problem? Things got out of hand...’

‘No,’ insisted Jeremy Thomas tearfully. ‘Nothing like that happened, honestly. I’d never hurt Ange.’

The boy didn’t seem all that bright and he was scared rigid. But his story never changed. Fielding’s attention span was short. When it became apparent that there was going to be no quick confession from Jeremy Thomas he began to lose interest. He was always the same. He needed to be on the move, dealing with fresh information. Parsons understood his sergeant’s strengths and weaknesses. That was why they were such a good team. Parsons pulled him off after the first hour-long interview. Todd Mallett carried on, along with a hard-case DS up from Plymouth, a man who specialised in losing his temper, or at least appearing to.

Mallett was right for the job, Fielding had conceded reluctantly. He didn’t like Mallett, never had done, thought he was too slow and ponderous. A real plod. In many ways Fielding couldn’t understand why Mallett didn’t still have a pointy hat on. But the man was meticulous, no doubt about that. And he had a way of wearing witnesses down. Fielding liked to joke that people talked to Mallett in order to get him to go away. Actually, he was only half joking.

Nonetheless, Mallett’s attention to detail was well known — it was what was said to have secured his promotion — and it was often detail that caught people out. Fielding believed that if Jeremy Thomas was the man they were looking for, Todd Mallett and his bad-tempered partner would break him sooner or later — after all, Thomas was no hardened villain, just a nineteen-year-old kid who might have lost it for a fatal few moments. Fielding had been happy enough to leave the interviewing team to get on with the job. He didn’t like to get bogged down in any one area of a major investigation. He was better at the overview, the big picture.

While Charlie Parsons ran the show, directing the troops, controlling the policy, managing, Fielding would be his eyes and ears on the spot. That was the way they always worked.

And it suited Mike totally. He liked to be at the heart of a case. And the heart of this one was at Five Tors Farm. The press knew that, which is why they were staking out the place damn near twenty-four hours a day. Mike Fielding was one of the few policemen around who had a lot of time for newspapermen. They knew what they wanted and stuck at it till they got it. And most of them had an uncanny knack of being in the right place at the right time. They thought fast and knew how to follow their noses. Fielding only wished some of his fellow coppers were as quick on their feet.

He and Charlie Parsons, however, were very quick on their feet. They were already an acknowledged partnership and so far their results had been exceptional — so much so that Fielding reckoned he’d be an inspector even quicker than might be expected, certainly within weeks rather than months.

Eager as ever to get on with it, he had returned to Five Tors Farm immediately following his abandoned interview with Jeremy Thomas and from then on he shadowed the family. If the key wasn’t with Thomas, then it would be with them. It almost always was. He was, as ever, confident that he had the knack of seeing through the cotton wool that always seemed to clog up a major investigation. So he stayed at Five Tors Farm, watching, waiting, prodding and probing.

He hadn’t slept all that night. When there was a major investigation on the go and his adrenalin was flowing, he rarely seemed to need sleep. Indeed, the only person at Five Tors Farm who had actually been persuaded to go to bed had been Mary, weak and sick from her pregnancy on top of everything else.

Fielding had just sat at the big old table in the Phillipses’ kitchen along, most of the time, with the rest of the family. He had been acutely aware of their pain as he drank copious amounts of coffee and went over and over the case in his mind. It wasn’t that he really reckoned any of the Phillipses was responsible for Angela’s disappearance, although you never knew for certain, even with an apparently close and decent family like them. It was more that if anybody knew anything which would give a clue to Angela’s disappearance it was likely to be one of her immediate family, even if they didn’t realise it. As for the boyfriend, he didn’t really think so — the boy hadn’t broken for a start and he had looked a pretty soft touch.

Mike felt in his gut that the case had a long way to go. There were two possibilities: either that, dead or alive, Angela had been left in the immediate vicinity, or that she had been taken away from the vicinity, almost certainly in a vehicle.

But by mid-Monday morning the search team, including specially trained officers with dogs, had thoroughly combed a circle of more than a mile in diameter with the scene of the crime at its centre. There had been no further results. It became increasingly likely that Angela had been taken from the scene in a vehicle. But was it Jeremy Thomas’s vehicle? Mike somehow thought it unlikely.

By two in the afternoon, lack of action had more or less brought his adrenalin flow to an end and he was starting to feel the effect of his sleepless night. Wearily, he was also beginning to wonder if he would, in fact, learn anything more from the family after all.

Then the telephone rang.

Lillian Phillips ran to answer it eagerly, as she had done each time it had rung since Angela’s disappearance. Even though all the calls to date had either been from concerned friends and relatives or the press, it was quite apparent that she kept hoping to hear her missing daughter’s voice on the other end of the phone.

This time, after putting the receiver to her ear, she seemed to freeze. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said. ‘Yes, yes. How? Yes.’

Then, ‘Wait, please don’t go, is my daughter all right? Can I speak to her...’

Fielding’s weariness left him at once. He launched himself across the kitchen where the entire family had been gathered round the old pine table and snatched the receiver from Lillian’s hand. All he could hear was the dialling tone. He turned to Lillian Phillips, who looked absolutely stricken. ‘Talk me through it,’ he said. And he knew more or less what he was going to hear.

A muffled voice had told Angela’s mother that if she wanted to see her daughter alive the family must pay a ransom of £50,000. ‘And you can tell the filth they may as well call off the search. They’ll never find her.’

The caller had said that he would ring back the following morning, when he expected confirmation that they had the money in cash to give him. He would then give instructions for its delivery.

Fielding cursed under his breath. A kidnap and a ransom demand were the last things he and the team had expected. If they had they would never have called for media involvement. Kidnaps were a staggeringly rare crime. From the kidnapper’s point of view the success rate was minuscule. He knew that professional criminals would stage a kidnap only in exceptional circumstances and amateurs were highly unlikely to have the organisational skills required. They had had absolutely no reason to suspect that Angela’s abduction would result in a ransom demand. Fielding felt the muscles in the back of his neck tighten into a knot of tension. The nature of her disappearance had led him, and Parsons and Mallett, to suspect, almost exclusively, a sex crime. Phone calls to Five Tors Farm had not been monitored. All the probabilities had been against a kidnap for ransom. Christ!

He made himself concentrate hard. Was that really what they had on their hands? They couldn’t be sure yet, of course. There were all kinds of nutters out there who would get some sort of sick kick out of making a malicious phone call to the family of a missing girl. There was no proof so far that the call was genuine.

Lillian Phillips’s stunned silence had turned into hysterical weeping. The sound cut through Fielding’s thought process. ‘There, there, love, don’t carry on so,’ he heard Bill Phillips soothe his wife. ‘At least we know she’s alive, think on that. She’s alive, Lil, and we’ll get her back, I promise.’

Abruptly Lillian stopped crying. ‘Oh, Bill, you’re right. Of course. She’s alive. Thank God. She’s alive.’

I wouldn’t bank on it, thought Fielding. But he kept the thought to himself.

Within an hour Parsons arrived at the farm with Todd Mallett. Jeremy Thomas had already been released. The boy wasn’t totally out of the frame yet. Particularly not while the ransom call could still be a hoax. But Jeremy continued to stick resolutely to his story and had, in any case, already been detained for almost twenty-four hours without any progress being made.

‘Thought we could do with Todd’s local knowledge,’ said Parsons.

Fielding grunted unenthusiastically. But he had to admit that Todd was a hell of a lot better than him at coping with the family. Better than Parsons, too. Everybody knew that Parsons’s biggest strength was planning, not dealing with people. He was, however, an ace delegator, which was another of his great strengths.

There was, of course, something reassuringly solid about Mallett. Fielding hoped he himself was solid enough in his way, but uttering reassurance was not one of his finer qualities. Mallett had a calming effect on the family, whose first reaction had been to rush to their bank. ‘First thing is to make sure this joker really does have your Angela,’ he told them. ‘The call may not be genuine, you know.’

They hadn’t thought of that. It stopped them in their tracks.

Parsons, who had been largely silent till that point, allowing Todd to smooth the way for him, took over then, issuing instructions in his clipped, businesslike tones. ‘Right, when this man calls again you ask him for proof that he’s got your girl. OK? He’ll be expecting that. Bound to be. If he can prove it, then you say yes, you’ll pay up. But when he’s given you your delivery instructions you play for time, say it’ll take you a day or two to raise the cash, that kind of thing...’

‘I don’t want to stall,’ interrupted Bill Phillips. ‘I’m not playing games with my daughter’s life. If the price of getting her back is £50,000 then I’m paying it. Right away.’

‘I’m not asking you to play games, Mr Phillips.’ Parsons was firm and authoritative, as sure of himself as ever. ‘I’m asking you to accept that we have learned a bit about this sort of thing over the years. If we are dealing with a kidnapper, he won’t expect you to move too fast; he might even be suspicious if you do. It’s important for us to take the initiative, not to let him make all the running. We need to know where he wants you to make the drop and consider all the implications. We have to think of a way to make sure that he doesn’t get the cash without your daughter being returned. If we move hastily and let him get the money without ensuring that he returns Angela — well, anything could happen...’

There was a silence while his words sank in. Lillian Phillips moaned. Her husband grasped her hand tightly. It was several seconds before he spoke. ‘OK. Just tell us what we have to do,’ he said eventually.

The call came as promised the next morning. This time fully monitored.

Bill Phillips had decided he would be the one to take it. His wife was more than happy to let him do so. Mike Fielding listened in on a specially installed extension.

At first Bill adhered strictly to his instructions. ‘You have to give me proof that you’ve got my daughter,’ he told the caller.

There was a brief silence, then a girl’s voice, weak and frightened: ‘Dad, Mum, it’s me, Angela, please give him what he wants. Please. I want to come home. I can’t stand...’ The voice ended abruptly. The listening police noticed the click of a tape recorder.

Bill Phillips, predictably enough, did not. ‘Ange, Ange,’ he called plaintively. ‘Are you all right, darling?’ Then, getting only silence in response, ‘Of course I’ll give him what he wants, darling. I’ll do anything to get you home. Anything.’

The muffled voice came on the line again: ‘At midnight tonight you will put £50,000 in used ten-pound notes into a rucksack and leave it at the foot of a pine tree in Fernworthy Forest. I want your son to do it. On his own. No filth. Nobody else. You want to see your son again, don’t you? Mess with me and he’ll go missing too. Tell him to take the road around the reservoir. It comes to a dead end. Park there and walk approximately 150 yards due west into the forest. Ordnance survey map OL 28, reference 8390.6574. The tree will be marked with a red cross. The kid will be nearby. You’ll find her.’

‘I haven’t got the cash, I can’t get it till tomorrow morning.’

‘Tell the filth to keep their snotty noses out. I know they’re with you and I know their tricks. Tonight — or your precious Angela dies. Oh, and it won’t be a pretty death...’

The caller hung up. So did Bill Phillips. His complexion seemed to be growing greyer by the minute.

His wife looked at him questioningly.

He shook his head numbly. ‘So much about wanting to take control away from him,’ he said. ‘It’s got to be tonight and I don’t want any interference. I want it the way he’s said. I’m not taking chances with my children’s lives.’

Parsons and Fielding exchanged glances. ‘Can you raise the money that quickly, Mr Phillips?’ asked Fielding.

The other man smiled weakly. ‘One call to my bank manager,’ he said. ‘And I won’t have to explain why.’

Fielding glanced around the big farmhouse kitchen. It reeked of affluent well-being. The house must have a minimum of eight bedrooms, he thought. He glanced out of the window over Dartmoor, taking in the five tors that gave the farm its name. He had learned that the Phillipses were mixed farmers, big on beef, some dairy, and several thousand sheep on their higher ground and moorland. Their more lush land, on which they raised their beef including one of the country’s finest herds of pedigree Devon cattle, was to the rear of the farmhouse stretching back towards and beyond Okehampton. Fielding also knew the size of the farm, approaching 2000 acres, pretty big anywhere and huge in the West Country. He felt a bit silly having even asked the question that he did.

Parsons stepped in brusquely. ‘You’d better do it in that case, Mr Phillips,’ he said. ‘And then we’ll discuss the next step.’

Phillips turned away and picked up the phone again.

Fielding spoke in the DCI’s ear. ‘A word, boss,’ he said.

Silently the older man turned on his heel and walked out of the room. Fielding followed him. ‘Boss, we can’t let Rob Phillips make the drop. Let me go in his place.’

Parsons looked thoughtful. ‘I’m not sure, Matey obviously knows this family. Or all about them anyway. We don’t know how well he might know Rob Phillips, do we? It’s not at all unlikely that he’s local, don’t forget. At the very least he’s done his homework. Almost certainly he knows what Rob looks like. That’s the problem.’

‘I’m about the same height and build. It’ll be pitch-black out there. I’ll keep my head down. The bastard’ll never know the difference.’

Parsons considered for a moment. Then he nodded abruptly.

Rob Phillips, however, who had already been notified by his father of the kidnapper’s instructions, needed a little more convincing. ‘We mustn’t take any chances,’ he said, echoing his father’s earlier remark. ‘I don’t want anyone standing in for me. I want to go get my sister. It’s my fault she was taken in the first place.’

Fielding wondered if the young man was waiting for somebody to say that it wasn’t his fault. But nobody did.

Parsons did have something to say, though. ‘Mr Phillips, at the very least your sister is in very grave danger. I cannot allow you to put yourself in danger too.’

‘What do you mean, you can’t allow...’ Rob was bristling, quick to find a target for the anger inside him, which was really directed at himself.

His father interrupted. ‘No, boy, the inspector’s right. Your mother and I can’t risk losing you too. Let the sergeant take the money. He knows what he’s doing.’

Fielding just hoped Bill Phillips was right.

It took about half an hour to drive from Blackstone to Fernworthy Forest, mostly along dark deserted roads skirting the moor. Apart from Fielding himself, alone in Rob Phillips’s Land Rover, there did not seem to be a soul about. There are few roads over Dartmoor and the heart of the moor remains remote and inaccessible, but the last couple of miles or so, from Chagford to the reservoir, cut right across the stretch of rugged moorland known as Chagford Common. At one point, as the Land Rover reached the brow of a hill, a pony loomed abruptly in its headlights and Fielding had to swerve violently to avoid it. As he swung the wheel, his nerves jangled far more than they would normally do.

The thing about surveillance was that it was so much easier in urban areas. People are the best camouflage. Want to lose yourself, go to a city. Policemen and villains both knew that.

The number one priority was to retrieve Angela Phillips safely — if that were even still possible, Fielding thought wryly. There were plenty of police officers waiting nearby for the call everyone hoped Fielding would be able to make, the call to say that he had Angela Phillips safe. But no attempt had been made to plant police officers at the delivery point. There was something about the kidnapper’s approach, the use of precise map readings, which tagged him as a military man. Indeed, kidnappers often were. They were the kind who enjoyed plotting complex operations. Parsons had reckoned that close surveillance would not be possible. ‘Not without Matey sussing it out pretty damned quickly,’ he had said. And he hadn’t been prepared to take that risk. So Fielding was pretty much on his own. His mouth felt dry, the palms of his hands were clammy.

On the car seat next to him was a freshly purchased Millet’s rucksack containing £50,000 in used tenners. As instructed. It also contained a signalling device, concealed in the padding in the bottom. It might be discovered at once. Or Angela’s kidnapper might just empty the cash into another container or straight into a vehicle. On the other hand it might just give out a signal for long enough for the police to close in on him. After Angela Phillips was freed, of course. Nothing was to happen until then. That was the priority.

It was all a matter of survival, really. And not just the survival of Angela Phillips, but also that of the senior police officers on the case. Fielding knew the way Parsons’s mind worked. He was unlikely to catch much criticism, if any at all, over loss of the Phillipses’ £50,000 as long as Angela was safely recovered. Indeed, he would be a hero again. So would Fielding himself, he considered with some satisfaction. As Todd Mallett had worked out long ago, he liked being a hero. But if Angela were lost, he and Parsons, already involved in an unorthodox operation, would both be deeply in the mire, whether or not the money was ever recovered. In fact, probably particularly if it were — if it looked as though any priority had been given to anything other than the safety of the missing girl.

He was also about to wander into a forest at the dead of night in the presence of an undoubtedly dangerous man who could well be a raving lunatic. Fielding licked his dry lips. He drove as instructed to the parking area at the end of the road, which ran round about half the circumference of Fernworthy reservoir. When he switched off the engine the silence was deafening. Fielding didn’t think he had ever really appreciated that expression before. He switched off the Land Rover’s lights too and was instantly swallowed up in pitch-blackness. Nowhere, but nowhere, is darker than a forest at dead of night, he thought.

A map-reading expert had pinpointed the appropriate reference for him. Fielding hoped his own skills were up to it. It should take only a few minutes to walk to the tree, but at night, making your way through a forest was far from simple, he could easily get lost and he would have to be careful not to trip over the undergrowth. He decided to try to find the appropriate tree straight away and then just wait.

With the help of a powerful torch, its beam cutting reassuringly through the darkness, Fielding, taking care to keep the light directed away from his face at all times, picked his way gingerly through brambles and nettles, weaving around the tree trunks. He found the tall conifer marked with the red cross more easily than he expected. It stood alone in a small clearing. He checked his watch. He was tempted to put the rucksack alongside it there and then, but decided against. The instructions were to make the drop at midnight. He would do it by the book. He switched off his torch, leaned against a nearby tree trunk and wondered if he were being watched. Almost certainly he was. He pulled the peak of his black baseball cap a little further down over his forehead. He was dying for a cigarette, but he didn’t dare light up. As Parsons had pointed out, they had no idea how well the kidnapper knew Rob Phillips, whether personally or just by sight. Either way, it was far too great a risk to allow the flame from his lighter to illuminate his face.

He was standing quite still when he heard the crack of a twig nearby. His eyes were adjusted as well as possible to the darkness now and through the gloom he could just make out an approaching figure. Early, he thought. What should he do now? Should he have made the drop already after all? He was confused. The figure was coming closer. He hadn’t expected the bastard to show himself like this. He passed Fielding within about three or four yards. He was wearing some kind of military-style camouflage jacket — but then, so did almost everybody nowadays, it seemed. The policeman could not see his face. He could see the shape of a gun clearly enough, though: a .22 rifle, by the look of it, fitted with some kind of night sight and a silencer.

The man moved almost soundlessly towards the tree with the red cross on it. Casually he propped his gun against the trunk. Then he undid his flies and had a pee.

Fielding could barely believe his eyes. What was going on? He tried desperately not to move a muscle. But something alerted the other man’s attention. He could feel eyes boring into him across the clearing, peering through the darkness. Suddenly the man picked up his gun and took off at a run.

Instinctively Fielding called out, ‘Hey, wait.’

The man kept running. Fielding was bewildered. He did not know what to do or think. He glanced at his watch. It was still only ten to twelve. Should he follow? He’d never catch the bastard anyway. The man obviously knew these woods. He’d taken off at a pace. Even with the help of his torch, if Fielding tried to chase him he would be sure to fall over or at the very least run into something.

For a few seconds he could make no sense at all of what he had seen. Then gradually his jumbled thoughts cleared. It only made no sense if the man who had run away was the kidnapper. But what if he wasn’t the kidnapper at all? Of course! The most likely scenario was that sonny was a poacher out hunting, his appearance at the drop spot just a ridiculous coincidence. Poachers didn’t like bright lights or big bangs drawing attention to their presence — hence the rifle with a night sight and silencer. Fernworthy’s three square miles or so of dense forest land would be home to more than one herd of deer, Fielding reckoned. While Dartmoor hosted nothing like the herds of big red deer which roamed Exmoor, there were other breeds in its woodland areas, as there were throughout the West Country, come to that. And although the managed forest of Fernworthy was open to the public, unauthorised shooting was strictly forbidden. That had to be it: a poacher. But Fielding had no idea where that left him — or Angela Phillips, come to that.

He decided that the best he could do was to continue as if nothing had happened. It couldn’t do any harm, surely. On the dot of midnight he strode across to the tree and dropped the rucksack at its base in a rather theatrical manner. Then he walked back to his original vantage point and waited. He waited and waited, heart thumping in his chest, for what felt like an endless period of time. Now and then he glanced at the luminous hands of his watch. Nobody came to pick up the cash and, if Angela Phillips was nearby, he could neither see nor hear any sign of her. After forty-five minutes he could stand it no longer. He had to try to find out what was going on. He turned and began to make his way back to the Land Rover.

When he got there he switched on the police radio, which had been hastily installed in the vehicle earlier that evening. Straight away a call came through from Parsons. ‘It’s off. Matey’s called the farm already. Says there were armed police in the woods with rifles. Bill Phillips assured him there weren’t. I even talked to him myself. He’d already made it clear he knew I was here. He’s been watching our every move, no doubt about it.’

‘Shit,’ said Fielding. ‘There was a man with a rifle. Night sights and silencer, too. I think he was a poacher. Matey must have seen him as well. I don’t damn well believe it.’

He heard Parsons draw in a deep breath. ‘Right, then, go get the money and come on back,’ instructed the DCI abruptly and only someone as close to him as Fielding would have detected the strain in his voice.

At 8 a.m. the next day, after another sleepless night of recriminations and distress at Five Tors Farm, the kidnapper made a further phone call: ‘You’ve got a second chance. Same place, same time. But I’m fining you. The price has gone up to £70,000. This will be the last chance. Any hint of police presence this time and the girl dies.’

Fielding, mightily relieved, could see hope flickering over the faces of Angela’s family. They too, he suspected, had begun to believe that Angela was probably already dead. Last night must have been unbearable for them. It had been bad enough for him.

‘But you have to let me go this time, Inspector,’ said Rob Phillips. ‘Maybe he saw the sergeant’s face. We can’t take the risk.’

Parsons dodged the issue. ‘Are you absolutely sure there is nobody you know who you think could be doing this?’ the DCI asked for the umpteenth time.

The younger man shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it’s anyone the family knows, I really can’t.’

Ultimately it was agreed that Rob should make the second drop and secretly Fielding was glad not to have been given the task again. He couldn’t quite stifle the nagging doubt that he might somehow have been responsible for the failure of the first exchange, although he did not really see how that could have been so.

However, Parsons had a plan to keep control. ‘We tried to play it straight,’ he told Fielding. ‘You can’t legislate for something like your damned poacher and that was probably our mistake. This time we take no chances. We get the armed-response boys in. Make ’em look like soldiers on exercise. There’s enough of ’em up at Okehampton camp.’

‘He’ll know, he’ll not fall for it,’ intervened Todd Mallett. ‘He’s been spooked once by a man with a gun in the wood.’

‘If we get ’em in position quickly enough he shouldn’t even see ’em.’

The Phillips family, of course, were not told of the new plan. But at 10.30 p.m., half an hour or so before Rob Phillips was due to leave the farm to follow in Mike Fielding’s footsteps of the night before, the kidnapper called again. ‘Change of plan,’ he said. ‘Make the drop at Hay Tor. Leave the rucksack at the top of the tor itself. The very top.’

‘Shit,’ said Fielding. ‘He’s giving us the run-round. And Hay Tor, too — no cover for him, or the girl, come to that.’

‘Or, indeed, us,’ commented the DCI. Hay Tor was Dartmoor’s highest point, bleak, exposed and at the other side of the moor from Blackstone.

‘Maybe that’s the point. I just don’t know. I wonder what he’s up to...’

He and Fielding were conferring in the main hallway of the farmhouse, out of hearing of the distraught family gathered, as usual, in the kitchen.

‘I’m going to call off the armed-response boys from Fernworthy and see if they’ve got any bright ideas on how they can give some sort of cover at Hay Tor without being seen,’ Parsons said quietly.

Fielding listened uneasily as his boss got on the radio and began to issue fresh instructions. He had no sensible alternative suggestion, but was this really such a good move? he wondered. Within minutes it became clear that it wasn’t.

Just as Rob was about to leave for the new assignation point, the kidnapper called once more. Bill Phillips answered the phone.

‘Tell the pigs I didn’t see the gun boys go into the forest, but I sure as hell saw ’em come out. Oh, and tell ’em — when your daughter dies I won’t have killed her. That’ll be down to them.’

He hung up at once, leaving a stunned Bill Phillips looking at a buzzing receiver. He turned to Fielding and Parsons. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing,’ he shouted at them. ‘He’s right. The bastard’s right. If my daughter dies it will be down to you lot. All I ever wanted to do was to give him the money and get my girl back. But you couldn’t settle for that, could you, not any of you.’

DCI Parsons looked him coolly in the eye, still the manager, still the chief executive. If he was as shaken by the turn of events as Fielding, he certainly didn’t show it. ‘Mr Phillips, I had to take responsibility for your son’s safety as well as your daughter’s. I’m afraid the kidnapper double-bluffed us on this one. We couldn’t have guessed that.’

‘Then you should have left well alone,’ stormed Phillips. ‘Let me do it my way. He’s been scared off, now, and if we’ve lost him then we’ve lost Angela too. God knows what he’ll do to her.’

If he hasn’t done it already, thought Fielding. Aloud he said, with a confidence he did not feel, ‘Try not to worry, Mr Phillips. He’ll be in touch again very soon, I’m sure of it. He wants your money not your daughter.’

The kidnapper did not call again. Not that night. Not the next morning. Kidnaps were such a rare crime in the UK that there were few precedents. Those that did exist encouraged little optimism among the police team. And in the case of Angela Phillips some of the most important lessons learned in the past did not fully apply. The débâcle surrounding the abduction and murder of Lesley Whittle by the infamous Black Panther taught the importance of taking the press into police confidence and insuring a media clamp-down over kidnaps for as long as there was a chance of safely retrieving the victim. Parsons and his team had not had the luxury of choosing that option, because following the discovery of Angela’s shoe, they had promptly announced her missing and called for public help. Fielding suspected they would all be criticised for that sooner or later, but it was easy to be wise after the event.

By noon that day — it was already Thursday and five days after Angela had been taken — a kind of restrained panic was setting in. Still no further calls. Still no further clues. Parsons decided to throw caution to the wind and step up the hunt. Territorial Army soldiers on their annual training at Okehampton camp were called in to continue the systematic searching of Dartmoor and the surrounding farmland. After the first ransom demand was received, Parsons had decided to keep the search fairly low-key, in order not to alarm the kidnapper. Now he changed tack and threw everything at it. Angela Phillips could have been taken miles away from where she had been abducted, of course, but nobody had come up with a better game plan than to stick to standard police procedure and to continue to search outwards from the crime scene, gradually taking in a wider and wider expanse of the moor and the surrounding farmland. The vast majority of victims of violent crimes were ultimately found in their own backyard.

But Dartmoor was notoriously difficult to search. Bodies, even after quite a short time, were unlikely to be discovered. Everyone remembered the nightmare faced by the parents of the children murdered by Brady and Hindley, and buried on the Yorkshire Moors. Without the help of the murderers, their graves could not be found. Even taking the optimistic view that Angela Phillips was still alive and hidden on the moor, the team knew she could be anywhere. There were cairns and old quarries, disused mines with a whole network of shafts, old sheds and storm drains. George Jarvis, who had policed the moor longer than anyone, was fond of saying that he reckoned the results of half the unsolved murders in England could be lying rotting somewhere on Dartmoor and nobody would ever know.

By Thursday evening, a number of locals had joined the police and the Territorial soldiers and upwards of 150 people were involved in the search. They combed the moors, sifting through the bracken, checking out all the military lookout posts and hideaways, poring over the remains of crofters’ huts and old deserted tin mines, prising open boarded-up entrances, peering into long-abandoned shafts.

At ancient Knack Mine, in Steeperton Gorge, a remote granite-strewn classically rugged Dartmoor valley sandwiched between Okement Hill and Steeperton Tor, there were no visible shaft entrances left and the casual passer-by would probably be unaware that there had ever been a mine there at all. Little more than the foundations, covered with grass and fern, remained of the ruined buildings. But some years previously a group of Territorials from the camp had discovered a narrow overgrown entrance to a shaft, which they had used as a hideaway during exercises. They had contrived to roll a granite boulder in front of the shaft, which in any case had, at a glance, looked to be just a hole in the rocky hillside and had been already more or less concealed by an overhang. The searchers did not notice the old shaft entrance, nor could they have been expected to, so well was it hidden from view. And the part-time soldiers who had known it well were long gone and had never had call to return there. All except one, that was.

He lay in the bracken half a mile or so away on the brow of Okement Hill, home to the source of the River Okement, studying the scene below through powerful binoculars. He was wearing army-style camouflage fatigues and made sure he kept very still, hopefully hidden from sight. He shifted position slightly in order to get a better view. Suddenly one of the antlike figures down in the valley put a hand above his eyes and seemed to be peering directly at him. Then the figure began to raise a pair of binoculars.

The man in the bracken immediately slipped his own into the pocket of his jacket and started to wriggle backwards on his belly until he had manoeuvred himself over the brow of the hill and a little way down the other side where he knew he would be out of the view of the searchers. Then he rose to his feet and ran.

At Knack Mine the soldier who had raised his binoculars scanned the distant hillside. Something had caught his eye, a flash of reflected light. More than likely the glint of the evening sun reflected on binoculars, or perhaps even a gun. He studied the bracken-covered hill carefully. In the sky above, a buzzard drifted gracefully, soaring up and up on a current of warm air. There were some sheep near the spot where he thought he had seen the reflection and they continued to graze undisturbed. Nothing else moved. After a few minutes the soldier lowered his binoculars. But he was an experienced hand for a Territorial. He was quite sure he had seen something up there. He called out to the police sergeant in charge, and explained it to him.

‘Let’s take a look, then,’ said the policeman and promptly led his team away from Knack Mine and off in the direction of the suspicious sighting.

Police dog handler Brad Davis tugged impatiently at the long leash of the young Alsatian he was still training. Prince was going to be a credit to him one of these days, Brad was quite sure, but the young dog was still inclined to be wayward and had a yet to be controlled passion for chasing rabbits. He had been driving Brad mad all day.

Prince suddenly lurched away from his handler, nearly pulling Brad over, and began to bark in a frenzied fashion, the focus of his attention apparently a rather large granite boulder. Almost at once a pair of startled rabbits emerged from behind the boulder and took off in a frantic dash. Brad swore, pulled with all his might on Prince’s leash and half dragged the dog away, breaking into a trot to catch up with his colleagues who had already moved on up the hill.

The old mine shaft that lay behind that boulder, the one-time Territorial hideaway so well concealed, remained undisturbed. But the man who had lain in the bracken up on the hill half a mile away had not stayed long enough to know that.

The days passed, then a week, two weeks, three. The Phillips family had made it quite clear by then that they no longer had any confidence in the police. Everyone seemed to be blaming everyone else. Todd Mallett reckoned they were in just the kind of mess fancy tricks always got you into. The word was that Parsons was about to be replaced as senior investigating officer. Fielding was keeping as low a profile as possible. Lillian Philips had indeed turned against her only son, as the young man had feared she would, and Rob didn’t have much time for himself either.

Then, just two days short of a full month after Angela Phillips’ disappearance, a body was discovered by a hunting spaniel dog, taking its owner for a walk in the area of Knack Mine.

It was still high summer, or what passed for it on Dartmoor. The spaniel began to howl and bark, and scratched furiously at a large granite boulder nestling beneath a rocky overhang, eventually managing to stick its nose into the small hole produced by its scratching. It began to whimper pitifully then, and neither threats nor gentle coaxing could persuade the creature to continue with its walk.

Eventually the spaniel’s owner was obliged to investigate. He could not see anything amiss and had yet to be alerted by a sense of smell, which was, of course, far less acute than that of his dog, but when he leaned against the boulder as he tried to look behind it, he found to his surprise that it rocked very easily. And once he had discovered the correct leverage, the big hunk of granite rolled freely to one side. Behind the boulder was a foliage-framed hole in the earth, just big enough for a man to crawl through. The spaniel continued to whimper, but cowered back, leaving its owner to lean into the hole and peer within. The smell that had alerted his dog overwhelmed him then. The man gagged but carried on peering into the hole, as if compelled by a kind of morbid fascination. It took a moment or two for his eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. Then suddenly he threw himself backwards, almost as if he had been attacked, out of what was of course the opening to the old mine shaft the Territorials had used as a hideout, and was promptly sick on the grass.

Later he said he feared he would remember for the rest of his life the dreadful sight that had confronted him. Which was something he and Mike Fielding, the first police officer on the scene, had in common.

Mike was in his car on his way into Okehampton police station when Parsons radioed him with the news. The detective sergeant carried straight on to the call box on the edge of town where he was told the distraught dog owner was waiting, having used the phone to dial 999. He got there even before the team he knew Parsons was despatching. Fielding picked the man up and asked him to take him to the spot where he and his dog had found the body. The army-built loop road which cuts into the heart of the moor just above Okehampton leads almost to Knack Mine. Then a rough track runs most of the way down into Steeperton Gorge before finally disintegrating. Mike hurtled his car over the uneven ground, showing a complete disregard for its well-being, then, when finally forced to pull to a halt, he continued on foot, grabbing the torch he kept in the glove compartment, and half ran the remaining hundred yards to the old mine shaft the dog owner had pointed out to him.

The other man hung back. He said he had no wish for a second look. A few minutes later Mike did not blame him at all.

The smell, as he peered in through the narrow opening, was horribly unmistakable. The bile rose in Mike’s throat. For a moment he thought he also was going to be sick. But he had a job to do and he did not allow himself even to hesitate.

He lowered himself into the shaft, getting mud and grass stains all over his nearly new suit, for once neither caring nor even realising, and scratching his hands and face on brambles. He knew he should wait for the SOCOs, that he should not barge in. But he had to look at her properly. Mike had studied photographs of Angela Phillips so often he felt sure there was no question that he would recognise her, even allowing for the inevitable deterioration of her body. He could see quite enough from above to be as horrified as the dog walker had been. But he wanted more. He wanted to be sure this was Angela Phillips, lying like a dead animal in a hole. And he wanted to see for himself exactly the state she was in.

Mike Fielding was a hard cop, but the sight which greeted him when he shone his flashlight fully on the murdered girl really would haunt him always. And the stench, of course, even more overpowering once he was in the shaft alongside her.

It was her all right, he was quite certain — even though her face was discoloured and distorted. It was not just death and decay that had caused that. Her nose was badly swollen and he thought it had probably been broken. There was dried blood and bruising around her mouth. She had been viciously gagged with a nylon stocking or tights, which may well have been her own, but her lower jaw hung loose beneath the gag, displaying several smashed teeth. She was completely naked, lying in her own filth and blood. Her hands and feet were tied with electric flex so tightly that it had cut deeply into her flesh. It looked as if wild animals of some kind had begun to eat her. Probably rats. Foxes would have done more substantial damage by now, he thought, regarding her quite clinically for just a moment or two. There were small lumps of flesh missing from her body — and she had no nipples.

Fielding gagged again. But he forced himself to lean forward for a closer look. There didn’t appear to be any teeth marks or signs of tearing around the breast area.

He didn’t need a pathologist to tell him that Angela Phillips’s nipples had almost certainly been sliced off with a knife.

Four

It was Joanna, in the Comet, who originally dubbed Angela’s killer the Beast of Dartmoor. It came to her as she filed her first piece after her recall to the West Country when Angela’s body was found.

Joanna had trained on local papers in Plymouth and Torquay. As a cub reporter she had frequently worked on Beast of Dartmoor stories. There had also been a Beast of Bodmin and a Beast of Exmoor. Several of each, in fact, if truth be told. But previously these had always concerned sightings of big cats, possibly zoo runaways, or wild wolf-like dogs. This was something different. Very different. Yet the name could not have been more appropriate.

Like all really big stories, the Angela Phillips story damn near wrote itself. Her kidnap and killing had indeed turned out to be tragically reminiscent of the Black Panther and Lesley Whittle case. In common with Lesley, she had apparently been left to die horrifically in a dreadful hideout. Joanna knew that the general view was that this time the media side of things had probably been handled by the police as well as possible, in difficult circumstances. Although Angela’s disappearance had been announced before it was known that a kidnapper was involved, Parsons had kept news of the ransom demands successfully under wraps and, when it became apparent that the case was not likely to be quickly resolved, he requested the Scotland Yard press office to contact relevant editors and news chiefs and ask for press silence on the kidnap angle. This was observed until after Angela’s body was found. Even Fleet Street editors would not wish to be blamed for the death of a teenage girl.

However, when further details of their operation began to emerge, Joanna was not surprised that police action in several areas was called to account, and Parsons and his team accused of making a number of potentially catastrophic mistakes.

It was Joanna herself who found out about the armed-response unit fiasco through an old local paper contact and her story predictably made the front page yet again. The decision to call for the unit at all was widely condemned as a grave misjudgement. The leader writer in one newspaper went as far as to suggest that if more resources had been piled into stepping up the moorland search for Angela earlier, and less wasted on playing soldiers, the young woman might well have been found in time and her life saved.

Indeed, the post-mortem examination — the results of which would not be officially revealed until the inquest on Angela, but almost all hospitals leak information like sieves — showed that the girl had only died around two weeks before her body was discovered. Jo could hardly bear to think about that. It meant that Angela had lived for twelve days after her abduction, almost certainly imprisoned the whole time in the old mine shaft that became her tomb. She had been raped, beaten and abused, but had ultimately died of dehydration.

All the papers painted a suitably lurid picture of this. The Comet carried a leader questioning the scale of the original search operation and criticised Charlie Parsons for concentrating on a maverick plan to do business with the kidnapper at the expense of fundamental police procedure.

One way and another the story broke with a vengeance. The Beast tag caught the imagination of the nation, with every other paper following Joanna’s lead and using the name in all future reports.

Frank Manners, also on the case in Devon and smarting at Joanna’s success, did his best to take the credit for it, apparently telling the pack he’d mentioned the Beast idea to his senior colleague and she’d promptly pinched it when she filed the first story. Shortly afterwards, though, Manners — who was a total pro, Joanna had to admit, even if she did consider him a thoroughly unpleasant human being — came back with a corker. He got the splash in every edition with his story of how Mike Fielding had impersonated Rob Phillips when the first ransom drop was attempted in Fernworthy Forest. This brought both Fielding and Parsons further criticism, of course. ‘Family fears kidnapper knew he was being tricked by cop,’ stormed the Comet alongside an unfortunate and no doubt hand-picked picture of Fielding looking inordinately smug and grinning broadly.

Joanna’s first instinct was delight that her newspaper’s coverage was so far ahead of the rest of the field — this was, after all, by far the biggest crime story there had been since her appointment to the top crime job and she was far too secure to worry about it being Manners’s yarn. Her attitude was that whenever the Comet looked good on crime, as head of department at least some of the credit would always be hers. But she couldn’t help feeling just a little sorry for both Fielding and Parsons. If their ploy had worked they would be heroes now instead of scapegoats. Particularly Fielding. She shrugged such thoughts aside. She had a job to do and, as ever, what she really cared about was doing it better than anyone else.

All the tabloids, as usual, were competing over who could supply the most gruesome details of the murder. And Joanna got a lucky break in that direction too. Out of the blue, Fielding called her in her Okehampton hotel room early one morning and asked her if she would like to have a quick drink with him. She wondered briefly if he was still playing sexist games, but he didn’t seem to be in the mood. He sounded far more sombre and less cocksure than the man she had last seen almost four weeks earlier. Well, he had taken a bit of a hammering, she thought. And when he suggested they both drive separately to the Drewe Arms at Drewsteignton she knew that whatever he was up to it was something different. Any approaches he had made to her before had always involved giving himself maximum opportunity for showing off and he had only been interested in talking to her where he knew the other hacks would be gathered. So it seemed the policeman might genuinely want to have a quiet word with her.

She arrived in the pretty thatched village at the agreed time and found a parking place in the square.

Fielding had got there before her and was already in the tap room nursing a pint of bitter, sitting on the wooden bench next to the hatch through which drinks were served. In the traditional style of old Devon pubs there was no actual bar at the Drewe Arms. ‘What’ll you have?’ he asked.

‘No, let me.’ Joanna might not have been around as long as Manners and Co., but she knew the form right enough. If there was even the slightest chance that a cop was going to give you an exclusive lead you did the buying. She ordered herself a gin and tonic, a small one as she was driving, and raised an enquiring eyebrow at Fielding. ‘’Nother pint?’

Fielding shook his head. ‘Large Scotch,’ he said.

Joanna had heard he was a drinker, but it was only six o’clock and he had his car parked outside. He was as snappily dressed as ever, smartly casual in lightweight jacket and polo shirt, and he was not a man who gave a lot away. But she suddenly noticed how grim he looked. Perhaps he reckoned he needed a large Scotch.

He downed the whisky in one go, then turned to her. ‘In case you’re wondering, Frank Manners will never get another line out of me,’ he said suddenly. ‘He got me at a weak moment and I told him about making the drop. It was off the record, though, and he damned well knew it. I’d begun to think of him as a mate, I suppose, more fool me. The bastard’s landed me right in it, but he may live to regret it yet. That’s why you’re here.’

She inclined her head in mock graciousness. It was beginning to make sense now. Frank would have been so eager to get back at her after the success of her ‘Beast’ story that he would have broken the confidence of the Pope himself. And the old crime hack was an allegedly devout Catholic too.

‘There’s something I thought you’d like to know,’ Fielding continued. He obviously had no wish to waste time or make small talk. ‘This joker is some piece of work. He damn near tortured that girl to death. She may have died of dehydration ultimately, but my God she was a mess. Something specific. He sliced both her nipples off.’

‘Good God, why?’ Joanna could not imagine how even the most perverted killer could get a kick out of such a thing, but as she spoke she wondered if Fielding would think her naive to ask such a question.

If he did, he gave no sign. Instead, he smiled grimly. ‘A knife fetish? Who knows what turns these sickos on?’

Joanna was astonished. Not only by the dreadful deed but by Fielding’s eagerness to tell her about it. She wondered if his superiors knew he was planning to give her this line. Probably not, she thought. The detective might be a little chastened, but he was still a maverick. She glanced at him. Why was he telling her this? she wondered. What was his motive?

He carried on speaking, then, almost as if he had read her mind. ‘I want him, Joanna, and I want him fast. The more public outcry we can whip up, the more help we are likely to get. Anyway, that’s the way I see it.’

But not your bosses, more than likely, she thought. ‘Any more detail? How did he do it, and before or after she was dead?’

Fielding told her that a large sharp knife, possibly a carving knife or a hunting knife, was believed to have been used to mutilate Angela’s breasts. ‘And done while she was still alive, poor kid, definitely,’ he continued bluntly. ‘In fact, the SOCOs reckon Matey hadn’t been near the place since soon after he took Angela there. Seems like he may have been scared off and just abandoned her.’ He paused. ‘Two theories: one that he raped her and sliced her breasts right at the very beginning, maybe after the first drop went wrong, and that when the second drop went pear-shaped he was totally scared off and just legged it and left her there. Two, that he went back to the mine and had a bit more fun with her and sliced her breasts after the second drop. Just for the hell of it, or for revenge or some such twisted thing. Don’t know which scenario I like best, really. Do you?’

He made an attempt at his disarming grin but it didn’t quite work. He picked up the remains of his pint and drained the glass. ‘Oh, and she was buggered, of course, but that’s no surprise.’

It wasn’t, but Jo still hated to hear it. Rapists were very fond of buggery. It was all about degradation.

‘Curious MO,’ he went on. ‘On the one hand Matey’s a criminal out for gain. Organised. Done his homework. Knows the territory. He’s hand-picked his victim, studied her family. On the other hand he’s a psychopathic sex fiend. Those sorts usually perform opportunist crimes and gain doesn’t come into it.’ He stood up. ‘But you know that as well as I do, don’t you?’ he said, looking down, his face serious.

Good God. He really was treating her like a grown-up suddenly, as if he had finally accepted that she was indeed chief crime correspondent of the Comet and not just a bit of a joke. But she had no illusions about him. He was an instinctive wheeler-dealer, you could sense that in Fielding. She didn’t doubt he handled police politics very smoothly indeed. He seemed to have a pretty good grasp of the office politics of newspapers too. And Fielding was shrewd enough to know that if he wanted to stuff Manners, make him really mad, the best way to do it was not to feed a major exclusive to the opposition, but to tip off the woman who had been promoted over his head. That would hurt Frank Manners much more. In addition, Manners would be sure to guess that Fielding had fed her the line. He knew Fielding’s style so well. And that would make him even madder, which was no doubt Fielding’s intention.

As she left the pub, just minutes behind the detective sergeant, Joanna could not resist a chuckle. She didn’t doubt, however, that Fielding believed what he said about stirring up a public outcry, nor for a second that he had been genuinely horrified by Angela’s death and the manner of it. But there was this other side of him. He was a high-flyer, a man determined to reach the top in his career. While the bulk of the criticism of the police operation had so far been directed at the man in charge, DCI Parsons, Fielding was widely regarded as Parsons’s right-hand man, so it reflected badly on him too. The ransom drop which went wrong was especially damaging for him, of course.

Angela’s family, the boyfriend she knew had been rigorously questioned after her disappearance, and all who had been close to the teenager, were now fully aware that if she had only been found earlier she could probably have been saved.

A shiver ran down Joanna’s spine. She had been up to the remote spot on the moor where the body had been found, taken a look at Knack Mine. It was a stunningly beautiful place, actually, when you were out in the fresh air walking around, fit, well and free to leave when you wished. She could only imagine what it must have been like for a seventeen-year-old girl to be bound and trussed and held underground there. And raped. And buggered.

Word was that the girl had been a virgin, too. And on top of everything she’d been beaten and systematically tortured. Joanna found she had an all too clear picture in her mind, of Angela lying in that hole in the ground in her own blood and faeces, desperate for water, dying finally of dehydration. It was a wonder she didn’t just die of fear. All that the bastard had done to her and in the end it was simply lack of water that had got her. The whole thing was almost too dreadful to think about.

But Joanna had not actually seen the poor girl’s body. She had not had to look at those mutilated young breasts. Fielding had. Something else she could only imagine was the effect that would have on him. She knew he was a tough career cop. But she could not believe that he would not have been deeply affected. Certainly he seemed very different from the man she had first met.

She thought vaguely that maybe she could even get to like him.

Joanna’s story caused quite a stir. It was just the sort of tale the tabloids loved. All the other news desks wanted to know why their crime teams didn’t have the nipple-slicing line. She was pleased with herself. She was just as ambitious as Fielding in her way, and just as wrapped up in herself and her own world — aware as she was that it was a world many people considered to be more than a little distasteful.

Joanna was as disturbed by the horrors faced by Angela Phillips as any halfway decent person. But that didn’t stop her giving the gruesome story, in the words of her first news editor, ‘plenty of top spin’. Her report dwelt on every horrific detail. If she considered the effect of its being splashed luridly all over the Comet would have on those who were mourning Angela, it certainly didn’t make her pull her punches in any way. She became even more popular with her editor than she had been before. Picking up sensational exclusives was beginning to become a habit with her.

Her popularity with her peers, however, sank correspondingly. The opposition were getting roastings from their news desks and Frank Manners, allegedly working alongside her down in Devon but as often as not quite clearly working against her, kept having his thunder stolen. And he didn’t like it.

The pack picked up on her new connection with Fielding, as, she supposed, had been inevitable. Their attitude to her became increasingly more offensive and her relationship with Manners in particular struck a whole new low.

‘Good morning, Joanna,’ he said, meeting her outside the incident room at Blackstone on the morning that her latest big story had appeared. Joanna, waiting with a small group of reporters for a promised briefing, was standing by her car, idly studying the modern, rather ugly village hall, which seemed to her to be quite out of place in picturesque Blackstone, and thinking how ironic it was that the building in which Angela Phillips spent the last evening of her life now housed the police team investigating her murder.

Reluctantly she turned her attention to Manners, greeting him without enthusiasm.

‘You look quite radiant, darlin’,’ he told her. ‘Had a good fuck last night, did you?’

Manners spoke loudly and with a big smirk on his face. Nick Hewitt and Kenny Dewar chuckled appreciatively. Joanna suppressed a desire to slap all their faces. Then she remembered that Hewitt and Dewar would both have received the old midnight phone call after that day’s issue of the Comet had arrived at their night desks. She knew how pissed off that would have made them, particularly as it was her story, and immediately felt better.

‘Which is more than you’ve ever managed, I should imagine, Frank,’ she replied, and was rewarded with an appreciative chuckle from the Daily Express crime man. There were some good guys and Jo had a soft spot for Jimmy Nicholson, known as the Prince of Darkness because he invariably wore a Dracula-like black cape whatever the weather or occasion. He certainly liked women too. Jo had first encountered Jimmy Nic on the Spaghetti House siege, when Fleet Street’s finest were staking out the Knightsbridge restaurant in which a number of hostages were being held. Jim had walked up to a group of young women chatting with some fellow hacks in a nearby pub, introduced himself by name and added ‘I’m the big noise from the Daily Express.’ The extraordinary thing was they seemed to fall for it, too. On that job Jo reckoned she’d encountered Fleet Street’s first and only groupies.

She smiled to herself at the memory, then returned her full attention to the case in hand. ‘Right, Frank, if you can tear yourself away from your chums I’d like a word in private,’ she said. ‘I have a game plan that should keep us as far ahead on this one as we are already,’ she continued, smiling sweetly as she turned and headed towards the door.

Her remarks didn’t shut the others up, of course. She overheard, as no doubt she was meant to, Hewitt asking pointedly, ‘Anybody seen Fielding yet this morning?’

‘Having a lie-in, I understand,’ responded Dewar. ‘Exhausted, poor chap. ’Course, everybody knows the woman’s a raving nympho...’

This time Joanna held her tongue. Not only did women journalists only get their jobs through sleeping with the editor, they only got their stories through sleeping with their contacts. Wonderfully simplistic. Ability was never mentioned.

In a certain kind of mood Joanna even wished it could be like that. It would be a lot easier than working so bloody hard, she thought to herself wryly. Forcing herself to be businesslike and matter-of-fact, she started to discuss with Frank Manners how they could take the story forward.

The day turned out to be uneventful, however, and she was at her hotel early that evening when Fielding called her again and suggested a pint and a bite to eat, once more at the Drewe Arms. She agreed readily enough, but again there was something in his manner that left her unsure whether he wanted to give her a story or chat her up.

And as the evening progressed this was never really clarified.

‘I like you, you’re bright and I think you’re straight as well,’ he told her abruptly at one point.

‘Thanks very much,’ she said ironically. ‘How about you, are you straight?’

‘As a die,’ he said, flashing her the disarming grin.

She smiled back. ‘What am I doing here, Mike?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘This case has really got to me. You’re someone I can talk to,’ he said.

‘Spare me the clichés. I do know your reputation, you know.’

‘What reputation?’

‘Don’t be a prat. That reputation you have for being unable to stop yourself jumping on anything in skirts.’

‘You flatter yourself.’

‘Smug bastard!’

‘Anyway,’ he began, running an eye appraisingly over her trouser-suited figure, ‘I’ve never seen you in a skirt.’

He grinned again. He was good company. And when by the end of the evening he had still not made a pass at her, she didn’t really know whether she was disappointed or not. She’d had every intention of turning him down, of course. But that wasn’t quite the point.

Joanna stayed in Devon for the best part of a week, returning to London only when it became obvious that there was no chance of an early arrest. She asked Manners to stay on for a little longer just to keep an eye on things. At least, then, she wouldn’t have to look at the bloody man every day, she thought.

She left Dartmoor right after lunch, having filed an early story and manoeuvred herself into a situation where she would not be expected either at the office or the Yard. This meant that with a bit of luck she could be home in Chiswick soon after four o’clock. She wanted to get there early and make a special effort for her husband, something she knew she didn’t do nearly often enough.

As she drove, Jo reflected on her marriage to her childhood sweetheart. She and Chris had been an item since, aged seventeen, she had surrendered her virginity to him in the back of a Mini Cooper. Now that had been a feat of some agility. The thought of it still made her smile in spite of everything. And, as so often happens with young people discovering sex together for the first time, Chris and Joanna fell head over heels in love. They married when she was nineteen and he was twenty-one. So they had already been married for eight years, and they were no longer a match made in heaven.

Joanna felt that she had moved on in life, that she had moved into worlds Chris had never got close to. She didn’t believe that made her superior or even that her world was superior. In fact, on a bad day she would often concede that Chris’s life and career were a damn sight more useful than her own. It was just that he seemed to have stood still. Chris taught at a primary school near their home in Chiswick. She had little doubt that he would remain a teacher throughout his working life. That was the kind of man he was: content with his lot; dedicated in his way, but unambitious. She had no illusions about him. She didn’t even expect him to make deputy headmaster. Ever. And it might have been his chosen career, dealing with small children day in and day out, which gave him the kind of stick-in-the-mud naivety that was beginning to irritate her. He was always infuriatingly sure that his ideas, mostly formed in extreme youth, and his ways of going about things were the only right ones. Sometimes she felt that not only had he no concept of what her life was all about, but that he actually worked at keeping it so. Certainly he made it quite clear that he didn’t like journalists. They distorted the truth, misled their readers, ruined people’s lives. There was no talking about it with Chris. There was no middle ground.

She sighed. Since she had become a crime reporter he had increased his circle of most loathsome people to include policemen. She didn’t think she’d ever even heard him voice an opinion on the police until working with them became a daily part of her job. Then he decided they were crooks and villains equal to the criminals they were supposed to be catching. His only problem was making up his mind which was the lower form of life, hacks or cops.

Her problem was that she still loved him. She couldn’t help it. They went back a long way. And, in spite of everything, she was pretty sure he loved her too. After a week away she was determined at least that their first night together would be a good one.

The traffic was mercifully light. She was in Chiswick High Street at 4.15, parked the MG on a double yellow and nipped into Porsche’s fish shop where she bought two large Dover sole, Chris’s favourite. There would be potatoes and vegetables at home, Chris always kept the house well stocked with those, so all she needed to make the night special was a bottle of champagne, swiftly acquired from a nearby off-licence, and some flowers. One of the few things she bought regularly for their small but attractive cottage just off Turnham Green was flowers. Chris said it was because they hid her clutter. He was more than half right. She knew she was a lousy housekeeper. She left almost all of that sort of stuff to him, in fact, but she did like her flowers and she bought a big bunch of white roses, his favourite again, from a street seller.

She was at home soon after 4.30. Brilliant, she thought. Loads of time. She knew Chris was teaching games and wouldn’t be home until six. She found vases and arranged the roses in the dining room, the living room and, feeling optimistic, the bedroom. Then she peeled potatoes. She was going to make a really creamy mash. Chris loved mashed potato. She inspected the vegetable cupboard and, deciding on a simple green salad, easy and good for them, selected a crisp-looking lettuce, some cucumber and a green pepper. When she had finished chopping she made a dressing, then went to have a bath and change her clothes.

She felt relaxed and refreshed when Chris arrived. ‘Hi, darling, miss me?’ she called as she heard his key in the lock.

His response was a barely audible grunt.

Joanna’s smile of greeting faltered, but she carried on anyway. She walked towards him and wrapped her arms round his neck. ‘Dover sole on the grill, mash with full cream ready to go, champagne in the fridge. Do you love me or what?’ she challenged him.

He grasped her wrists with both his hands, flinging her arms away from him. ‘You’d better invite one of your lovers round, then, hadn’t you, ’ he told her.

‘What?’

‘Well, there’s not much point in wasting champagne on me, is there? I can’t get you a job or a story.’

‘What the fuck are you going on about?’ she demanded, instantly regretting her use of the four-letter word. It just slipped out. But she knew how much it annoyed him.

‘Keep that language for the scum you work with, will you? I’ve told you before it’s got no place in my home.’

‘Will you please stop being so dammed sanctimonious and tell me what has happened, because it’s obvious something has.’ Joanna’s heart was pounding. What was going on?

He smiled. It was completely mirthless. ‘Some of your chums have being filling me in on your extramarital activities — all in the name of duty, of course,’ he told her, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

‘In English, please,’ she responded.

‘Please don’t try to be superior all the time, Joanna, it doesn’t suit you, really it doesn’t.’

She hated it when he talked to her as if she were one of his six-year-old pupils. But she made herself not respond. Instead, she waited.

‘I’ve had some phone calls from someone explaining to me exactly how you get your stories,’ he said eventually.

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ exploded Joanna. ‘Come on. Tell me about it, please.’

She reached for his hand and this time he did not shy away from her touch, which at least was something. He allowed her to lead him to the kitchen table.

‘There’ve been a series of calls while you’ve been away,’ he said in a flat, expressionless voice. ‘The theme’s been the same each time. That you’re a slut who’ll do anything to get a story — particularly sleeping with policemen. Any policemen at all.’

She was staggered. ‘Who made these calls to you?’ she asked quietly.

He shrugged, not looking at her. ‘I don’t know, do I? The caller didn’t leave his name, surprisingly enough!’

‘Chris, for God’s sake!’ she said again. ‘Have we come to this? You’ve let some nutter making anonymous phone calls get to you?’

‘How would you like it?’ he countered. ‘Joanna, what am I supposed to believe? I don’t see you for days on end, you’re away on some story or other and then, when you are at home, you’re out till all hours drinking with your alleged police contacts. How do I know what’s going on?’

‘It’s my job, Chris,’ she said mildly.

‘Some job,’ he responded. ‘And who’s making these calls? Some of your so-called colleagues, I suppose. You work with such charming people, Joanna, don’t you?’

Now that she was inclined to agree with and she opened her mouth to tell him that she had a damned good idea who was making those calls. In fact, there was only one person she could think of who really hated her that much: Frank Manners. But she changed her mind. Things were getting to the stage where the less Chris knew about her work and the people she worked with the more chance she had of at least a tolerable home life. ‘I don’t have a clue who could be making these calls,’ she lied. ‘And I would sincerely hope it isn’t someone I work with. Look, there’s a guy I know at the Yard who specialises in sorting out moody phone calls. I’ll have a word with him. Maybe he can get a tap put on the line or something.’

‘I don’t want a tap on my bloody phone line, Joanna,’ her husband shouted at her.

‘Oh, stop being so damned unreasonable, Chris. What the hell do you want, then? You want this sorted, don’t you? It’s obviously upset you.’

‘Yes, it bloody well has upset me. What I want is for my wife to stop behaving like some kind of tart. Then I wouldn’t have to put up with stuff like this, would I?’

All Joanna’s good intentions disappeared in a wave of righteous indignation. ‘You pious prig,’ she shouted at him. ‘Cook your own fucking supper. I should be in the office anyway.’

She was nearly through the front door when he called after her, ‘There’s one copper in particular, isn’t there? A bit of a favourite of yours.’

‘What the hell are you going on about now?’ demanded Joanna.

‘Detective Sergeant Mike Fielding. He’s your latest, isn’t he? I’ve seen him on the news. A real smooth operator. Just your sort. Going places, no doubt. Bit different from a poor bloody schoolteacher.’

‘Believe what you want to believe, you bloody fool.’

Joanna slammed the door behind her and headed for her car. If there was anything more infuriating than getting that kind of treatment from your husband when you really had done absolutely nothing to deserve it, she didn’t know what it was. She had lapsed a couple of times since she and Chris had been married, but considering how young they had both been when they had tied the knot she didn’t think that was too bad. There had never been anything consequential with anyone else and she was pretty sure that Chris had lapsed once or twice, too. But she was also pretty sure that he had never had anything amounting to an affair either.

Funnily enough, she had believed for years that she and Chris had rather a good marriage. Better than a lot she saw, anyway. But recently they seemed barely able to be civil to each other and she really didn’t think it was her fault most of the time. Sometimes she wondered if Chris was jealous of her success in her career, but she supposed that was a touch arrogant of her.

She left the house at 5.45 p. m. and pulled into the Comet car park around 6.20. She had actually been in the same room as her husband for little more than five minutes, she thought wryly. World War Three had broken out in about as many seconds. So she had left Chiswick early enough to beat the bulk of the theatre traffic and her journey was a reasonably easy one.

In the newsroom the day was just building towards its climax. Daily-paper offices in 1980 were noisy, smoky places where nobody cleared their desks and everyone tried to talk to each other at once, always at full volume, often while simultaneously conducting a phone call and frequently while also typing — still on clattering manual typewriters, of course.

So why was it she always felt as if she had been given an intravenous shot of adrenalin every time she entered the building — particularly in the evenings? It was her favourite time there. Indeed, it was every true newspaperman and — woman’s favourite time because that was when the deadline was tightest, the fever pitch ran hottest and the presses were getting ready to roll. The news desk and the back bench were the hub of the paper at night. Passing the desk, she heard Andy McKane, the night news editor, on a call to a reporter apparently making a check call. Andy was one of the old-fashioned sort, a tough-talking Scotsman, convinced that any journalist who hadn’t done a stint north of the border had not completed his apprenticeship and should always be treated with grave suspicion. As should most women journalists, of course, whatever their pedigree. ‘When I want ye to know how I am, old boy, I’ll tell ye, all right,’ she heard him say in his thick Glasgow accent.

He must be talking to one of those new kids, she thought. Only a reporter who was very new and green would ever begin a check call to McKane with the social nicety of asking him how he was. She chuckled to herself. It was McKane who was famously responsible for a 1 a.m. call to a former showbusiness editor of the Comet, the only point of which appeared to be to slag off one of her staff. The woman had apparently listened more or less silently for some minutes, no doubt just hoping McKane would go way. Eventually she decided she should show some sort of support for her man and had told the night news editor, ‘Oh, come on, Andy, Ron’s done some bloody good stuff lately.’

McKane hadn’t argued with that. Instead, he replied in his guttural Glaswegian, ‘Huh, only because you sit on his fucking lap and squeeze his fucking balls.’

The next day the showbusiness editor had approached McKane just as the editor was walking past. ‘Andy, when you said that Ron had only done some good stuff lately because I sat on his fucking lap and squeezed his fucking balls, did you mean by way of punishment or encouragement?’ she had asked in a loud, clear voice. Her timing had been impeccable. The newsroom had erupted in laughter. McKane had had the grace to flush slightly. The showbusiness editor’s response had been spot on, of course.

The same woman, who was almost six feet tall, had once effectively dealt with a diminutive reporter who, upon returning from a heavy lunchtime session in the pub, had beerily informed her that he wouldn’t half like to give her one, as he so charmingly put it. She had drawn herself up to her full height and replied, ‘Well, if you ever do and I find out, I shall be very angry.’

Jo grinned at the memory. Let the bastards think they’d got to you and you were dead. Banter and lack of concern. Looking as if you couldn’t care less — even when you did. Those were your only weapons. And they weren’t much when you were one of a handful of women among several hundred men.

Paul Potter, a talented young feature writer, was still at his desk as Joanna had rather hoped he might be, working on a spread featuring unsolved murders of young women — the peg, of course, being the Angela Phillips case. Joanna knew that he was looking into what had happened in the investigations into each case, some of them going back many years. He was talking to the families and the police officers involved, and sometimes to suspects. In the UK, no unsolved murder investigation was ever closed. The only exceptions were when the police were damn sure they had found the murderer but either could not gather enough evidence to go to court, or their prime suspect was acquitted. Then inquiries were often quietly folded.

There was plenty for Paul to work with. He was nice-looking in an unassuming sort of way, quiet, clever, thoughtful and a good listener. Sometimes she wondered what he was doing in Fleet Street. It didn’t seem his sort of place. He was excellent at his job; it was just that he was so different from the others. It certainly never occurred to her, or indeed anyone else in those days, that he was particularly ambitious.

She paused to speak to him as she passed. ‘How’s it going?’ she enquired.

He looked up in mild surprise. ‘Hi, Jo, didn’t expect to see you until tomorrow.’

‘No, well, it was one of those times at home when I reckoned I’d actually rather be here. Anyway, maybe I can get a quiet hour or so to catch up with the backlog of stuff that is no doubt waiting on my desk.’

There was no one else in the Street of Shame to whom she would have confided even that much about her troubled home life. She knew all too well that another rule of survival in a newspaper office was not to bring your troubles to work with you. Not ever. The guys could do that occasionally, but never the women.

Paul accepted her small confidence without comment, as he almost always did. He never asked questions. ‘Quiet hour or so? In this place? You have to be joking,’ he told her with his familiar tight smile.

‘Oh, well, quiet ten minutes, maybe?’

‘No chance.’ He smiled again. ‘I’ll have wrapped this up in the next hour, I reckon. It’s been a tough one. Not very cheery material, either. Then I’m going to the Stab for a pint. Care to join me?’

The Stab in the Back was the name by which the Comet pub, the White Hart, was invariably known. ‘Sure, that’d be good,’ Jo replied casually. So much for working! But the truth was that the possibility of a quiet pint with Paul had been in the back of her mind since she had decided to go into the office. He was perfect company for her. Sometimes he seemed to be the only person in her life with whom she could spend time without some kind of stress. He did not indulge in the constant, often lewd, banter of so many of her colleagues. He made absolutely no demands on her. She could talk shop with him with more freedom than with anyone else and drown her sorrows without fear. Even if she later felt she had made a bit of a fool of herself, he had never let her down.

He was not only sensitive but also safe. To her those were his finest attributes. And it did not occur to her that he might regard her as anything more than a casual drinking mate.

Five

Joanna was halfway along Knightsbridge on her way home from the Comet office just five days later when she was called on her car phone and told that a man had been arrested in connection with the abduction and murder of Angela Phillips. He had yet to be charged. ‘I’m on my way back,’ she said as, with a screech of tyre rubber, she instantly swung her car into an illegal U-turn just past the Beauchamp Place traffic lights.

The black cab behind her had to brake and swerve to avoid hitting her and the driver shouted a mouthful of abuse at her through his open window. Joanna barely heard him. She belted back along Knightsbridge, racing two red lights, and roared the MG around Hyde Park Corner without even attempting to wait for a gap in the traffic. The other vehicles could dodge her. And thankfully, unlike in America where they kept driving at you because they were so unused to motorists breaking rules, in London they almost always did dodge you — even if accompanied by much horn-blowing and colourfully vocal road rage.

On Constitution Hill, Jo switched her headlights on to full beam and drove down the middle of the road, hoping to God she didn’t encounter a policeman. It was nearly nine on an early September evening, most workers had gone home or were ensconced in a central London pub or restaurant for the night, the theatre crowd were safely locked in for at least another hour. The roads were mercifully clear, for once. She belted past Buckingham Palace, sped down Birdcage Walk and turned left at Westminster along the Embankment. Big Ben was striking nine as she passed the Houses of Parliament.

There was only an hour to go until first-edition time, an hour in which to produce what would be regarded as an early story, to be expanded and updated for later editions. She knew Tom Mitchell himself was editing that night and was glad of it. Sometimes, when his deputy or one of the two assistant editors allowed to edit at night were on duty, they erred on the side of caution a little too much for her liking.

The night desk would already be on the case and almost every reporter on late duty would have been assigned a task which would form just a part of the night’s coverage. When a big story like the arrest of the Beast of Dartmoor broke, every conceivable angle was covered as quickly as possible, somebody would be hammering out a recap of Angela’s disappearance, a number of reporters would be trying to contact Angela’s friends and family, and others would be trying to find out exactly who had been arrested. Frank Manners and Freddie Taylor would also have been alerted and put on the job. Manners had quite a track record of prising information out of police contacts. Joanna wanted to beat them to it.

She pulled off the Embankment by the Howard Hotel and hurtled up the tiny side street which led up to the Strand and the Aldwych, where she drove straight over the cobbles past St Clement’s Church and turned right along Fleet Street. Jo swung a left into Fetter Lane, then a right into the office car park, manned twenty-four hours a day. She pulled noisily to a halt alongside the all-night attendant, jumped out of the car leaving the engine running, begged the man to park it for her and, within seconds, was belting up the back stairs to the newsroom. She was in far too much of a hurry to wait for the lift.

The newsroom was buzzing. You could feel it as soon as you stepped on to the murky brown carpet-tiled floor. Joanna felt the familiar rush of adrenalin. It was like getting a shot of something. On occasions it could be as good as sex. She had felt it many times before. The excitement rising inside her, the desire to get on with doing what she knew she could do so well. It was at times like this that she remembered why she had fallen in love with the job in the first place.

She went straight to the night news editor. McKane, shirtsleeves rolled up above brawny forearms, sat at the head of a clamorous news desk cluttered with piles of paper, grimy tea mugs and overflowing ashtrays. The phones didn’t ring on the desk, that really would have been bedlam. Instead, lights flashed relentlessly on mini switchboards. There were only two desk men on duty, the normal night staffing, and each seemed to be taking at least three calls simultaneously. McKane, holding a phone to an ear with one hand, passed Joanna a narrow sheaf of Press Association copy with the other. ‘Hold on a minute,’ he commanded into the receiver, then turning to her, he said, ‘This is about all we’ve got and it’s bugger all, Jo. Where did this joker come from? We didn’t even know they were close, did we?’

She shook her head. She had expected this approach. She knew exactly what McKane was getting at. The Comet was completely out in the cold on the arrest. She just hoped that none of the competition had been more on the ball. Had she let go her grip on the story a bit? She didn’t think so. Either the suspect had come into the frame extremely suddenly or the boys in blue had really kept their drum tight for once.

‘Any help you can give us, Jo. We badly need a line,’ continued McKane before returning to his phone call while at the same time studying a piece of copy handed him by one of the regular night duty casuals. There was no sexist nonsense with him tonight nor would there be. He was doing what he did best. McKane was always at his most impressive when he was up against it, handling a major late-breaking story or chasing up a belter of an exclusive when the foreigns, the first editions of rival newspapers, dropped around midnight.

The only time he played games was when he was bored. And McKane got bored easily. So did most of them. It was one of things that made being married to a civilian difficult. The chaps seemed to manage it all right. Men had a way of moulding their women, or was it more that women had a way of turning themselves into the right kind of person for the man they married? Certainly women were inclined to try harder, Jo was damned sure of that.

Frank Manners was at his desk. He had left the office long before her, but she guessed that he had probably been having a few pints in the Stab or Vagabonds around the corner. Frank was just finishing a phone call and, if he was under the influence at all, he didn’t show any signs of it. But then, much as she disliked the man she knew him to be a professional, both as a reporter and a drinker.

He also was too busy to play sexist games.

He put the phone down with a flourish as she approached. ‘James Martin O’Donnell,’ he said and he was apparently too caught up in the story to sound as triumphalist as she might have expected. ‘The Devon and Cornwall boys picked him up in London and took him straight back to Exeter. He’s not been charged yet, but they must be confident to bowl into Met territory like that.’

Jo stared at Manners in amazement. ‘Not the James Martin O’Donnell?’ she asked.

‘The same,’ he responded, this time sounding just a little triumphant. And she didn’t blame him.

Manners buzzed through to the news desk to give them the line, at the same time threading a sheet of copy paper into his typewriter and one-handedly typing a catchline in the top right hand corner — O’DONNELL.

Although she was standing a good four or five feet away and the veteran crime reporter was using a standard telephone held to his ear, Joanna could clearly hear McKane’s roar. ‘Fucking great, Frank me boy! Right. I want every spit and fart. Got it?’

As Manners began to write, Jo took a moment to consider the information he had obtained. There wasn’t a crime correspondent in the country who didn’t know who James Martin O’Donnell was — and not many members of the public, either, not if they ever read newspapers or watched TV. The O’Donnells were a criminal family of some stature. In the fifties and sixties the Krays had ruled the London underworld. By 1980 the O’Donnells were almost as big and had created around them the same kind of legendary personae. James Martin, known as Jimbo, was the eldest of old Sam O’Donnell’s brood. He was the natural successor to Sam’s dubious throne, although somewhere at the back of Joanna’s mind lurked the vague impression that there had always been something suspect about him. She couldn’t remember quite what.

Sam was one of the last of the old breed. You didn’t more or less run the London crime scene for years on end unless you were quite an operator. And whatever you thought about Sam you had to have a grudging admiration for the man. He and his family were also the last people Joanna would have suspected of being involved in the Beast of Dartmoor case. The O’Donnells ran their rackets and pulled their strokes. They didn’t harm civilians. Journalists, coppers, villains, they all talked about civilians. Poor Angela Phillips was a civilian. She’d been hurt. And how!

‘Christ, Frank, raping and torturing an innocent kid, leaving her to die like that, that’s not an O’Donnell sort of crime,’ she said eventually.

The older man was already typing steadily. He did not stop as he glanced up at her. He had that smug look on his face, which he always got when he was going to show off. That was all right. She had no objection whatsoever to Frank Manners in show-off mood. The man had a memory to die for, and his knowledge of criminals and often long-forgotten crimes was encyclopaedic.

He was justifiably pleased with himself because he had got there first, but even though Jo would have liked, as ever, to be the one breaking the news, she was the head of department and preferred that any of her team should score, rather than the opposition.

‘Jimbo’s different,’ Manners told her. ‘He’s always had a reputation for being nasty with woman; word is he likes to knock ’em about. That’s how he gets his kicks. Back in sixty-nine he was jailed for rape. Served eighteen months. It was a big story at the time.’ He typed another sentence. Like almost all daily-paper journalists, Manners had perfected the art of performing several tasks at once.

That was it! A rape conviction. Joanna remembered it now, but not the details. She waited for Manners to continue as she was sure he would. He was invariably unable to resist displaying his superior knowledge of what he regarded as his patch. After just a minute or so he began to speak again. ‘It was what they call date rape nowadays, or Jimbo would have got longer. He’d picked up this girl at a club somewhere and she’d invited him back to her place. She claimed he’d taken it for granted she would have sex with him and when she resisted he pulled a knife on her — that fits too, doesn’t it, the bastard always liked knives — knocked her to the floor and forced himself on her. Big strong boy, our Jimbo. But she didn’t report it for almost a year after it allegedly happened. She claimed that when she realised who Jimbo was she didn’t dare because she was too scared of the O’Donnells. He said she’d had sex willingly and there’d been no knife. But then, he would, wouldn’t he?

‘The jury convicted him on a majority verdict but it was never cut and dried. Hence the judge only gave him a fraction of the time he could have done. The girl was a right slag, too, and that influenced the judge as well, no doubt.’

No doubt, thought Joanna wryly. It drove her mad when judges pointed out that the victim of a sex crime had been dressed in a provocative way, or worse still, that she wasn’t a virgin. The inference being that once a woman had surrendered her virginity that gave the rest of the male sex the right to do as they wished with her. The very idea made Joanna angry.

‘The conviction alone was enough to get him drummed out of the Territorials,’ Manners went on.

Joanna started involuntarily. ‘Say again!’

‘Thought you’d pick up on that. Yep, he was in the Territorials and yep, he did annual training up at Okehampton camp several times. Jimbo’s always been a military freak. Crazy about the army. Wanted to join the regulars, apparently, only the old man wouldn’t have it. From when he was a kid James Martin was the apple of Sam’s eye. And he never accepted that the boy had done a rape, of course. Never. You know Sam the Man. Like some fucking Mafia godfather. Built everything on respect, has Sam. Has his own strict moral code. Doesn’t prevent him fitting the old concrete boots on his so-called chums every so often, but that’s just business in his book.’

Joanna was silent for a few seconds, thinking. ‘So it really looks like Jimbo’s going to be charged, then, does it?’ she asked.

‘I reckon so. But what do I know? You’re the one with the special police contacts now, aren’t you?’ Frank’s voice turned into a sneer and he put heavily sarcastic emphasis on ‘special’, making his inference abundantly clear.

It had to come, of course. Manners could never behave like a reasonable human being towards her for more than five minutes or so on the trot. ‘Fuck off, Frank,’ she remarked conversationally, turned her back on him and headed for her office where she slammed the door behind her.

Soon after she had arrived in Fleet Street, young, eager, and terrified, Joanna had been introduced to the Daily Mirror’s legendary agony aunt Marje Proops, not a woman to be trifled with, who had given her advice on dealing with the chauvinists of Fleet Street, which she had never forgotten. ‘Smile at them sweetly, dear, and if that fails just use the “F” word.’

Jo found she was smiling at the memory as she tried to put a call in to Fielding. Predictably, he was not contactable. She spoke to a constable at the incident room who assured her he would pass on her message for the detective to call her as soon as possible. She did not, however, have high expectations. And she was genuinely surprised when he called back little more than half an hour later. ‘Can you tell me how sure you are?’ she asked.

‘We don’t make a habit of arresting people without good reason, Joanna,’ he replied rather prissily. He sounded cocksure again, more the way he had been when she first met him.

She knew all too well that getting a result did that to policemen. Even when they had a dead body on their hands. ‘For God’s sake, Mike...’ she began irritably.

‘Fucking sure,’ he interrupted her suddenly. ‘Look, it fits like a glove. O’Donnell likes playing soldiers, always has done. Likes knives, too — we found a nice collection at his house. Also we know he’s been a regular visitor up on the moor. Oh, and he was seen on the Phillipses’ land the day Angela disappeared.’

‘You’ve got more than that though, surely?’

‘Fucking right.’

‘Well?’

‘Can’t tell you.’

‘OK, can you tell me what led you to him?’

‘Seems the shock tactics paid off. We had a call from a minor Dartmoor villain. He’d seen Jimbo hanging around Five Tors Farm on the day Angela was taken and recognised him at once. Apparently he’s done a bit of wheeling and dealing with the O’Donnells in the past, although he doesn’t like admitting it. Jimbo was tucked in behind a hedge and looked as if he was watching the farmhouse through binoculars. It all made sense because, unless he was a local, whoever abducted Angela had definitely learned a bit about her and her family, almost certainly been watching them. Our man was up to no good himself, as usual — sheep rustling is one of his favourite tricks and there’s been quite an operation going on around Dartmoor lately — that’s why he didn’t speak out before. And he certainly didn’t want to interfere with Jimbo O’Donnell. Said he backed off smartish when he spotted the bastard. Scared shitless of the O’Donnells, of course. All rogues are and with good reason. You don’t shop an O’Donnell lightly and in any case when Angela disappeared he couldn’t really see it as the kind of thing the O’Donnells would be involved in. Anyway, he was in two minds when the girl’s body was found and the kidnapping angle broke. Then, when you printed the story about how her breasts had been mutilated, he finally came forward. Got a kid that age himself. Said he couldn’t stomach it. Seems he told his missus then and she pushed him to speak out.

‘So there you are. As I said. Fits like a glove.’

‘It’s an unusual profile, though, isn’t it?’ queried Joanna. ‘An organised premeditated kidnapper who is also a vicious sex offender.’

Fielding grunted. ‘O’Donnell’s always been a sicko,’ he said. ‘Abuse is what turns him on. And young girls are his weakness. The Met say he’s damned lucky to have only the one conviction for a sex offence. There was a particularly nasty rape of a teenage girl in his manor just last year, which they were sure was down to him. But neither the kid nor her family would point the finger, too damned scared of the O’Donnell mythology, they reckon.

‘The kidnap of Angela Phillips was planned and premeditated all right. O’Donnell may even have convinced himself that it was no different from the kind of job the rest of his family might take on. Sam rules with a rod of iron, you know, and keeps a tight hold on the purse strings. Jimbo would have loved to have proved to his old man that he was a major league operator in his own right — and make a few bob, too. But no doubt the bastard always planned to have his fun with Angela as well. And once he’d got hold of her, his true nature ran away with itself.’

‘Were you on the arrest team?’

‘Yup. Bowled up to the Smoke at dawn this morning. In and out. No need to get the Met involved, the boss said. I enjoyed that. Enjoyed the swoop on Jimbo too. Thought he was on his heels, didn’t he? He’s always been a piece of work, Jo. You know that, I’m sure.’

‘I do now, yeah,’ said Joanna. ‘You’ll be charging him, then?’

‘Fucking right.’

‘When?’ That was the million-dollar question. If O’Donnell was going to be charged that night the paper’s whole coverage would become sub judice and be severely limited. If not, they could run at least some of Manners’s juicy background. Although they would be unable to spell out the criminality of Jimbo’s family, because that would be highly prejudicial, a little innuendo can go a long way in a well-written tabloid splash and most readers would in any case know at least something of the O’Donnells’ dubious reputation, and be able to put two and two together. Even the Comet’s readers, thought Jo wryly. The paper would also be able to carry much of the additional information she had gleaned from Fielding.

Fielding knew all that. He was a media man. Jo was already beginning to think he knew as much about media coverage of crime as he did about catching criminals. ‘You’re all right, it’ll be tomorrow morning,’ he said.

‘Thanks, Mike, you’re a diamond.’

She could just hear his voice in the distance as she hung up. ‘Aren’t I, though?’ he murmured.

O’Donnell was formally charged the following morning with the murder of Angela Phillips, as Fielding had told Joanna he would be. He appeared briefly at Okehampton Magistrates’ Court and was remanded in custody. After that there was little coverage that the paper could give until the committal proceedings, which were expected to be a formality.

Nonetheless, Joanna drove down to Devon to be present at the committal six weeks later. She had been on the case from the start and she planned to see it through to the end, every step of the way.

Okehampton Magistrates’ Court was an unlikely grubby white bungalow of a building tucked away on the northern edge of the town behind the Co-op supermarket just where the Rivers West and East Okement merged. O’Donnell was brought from the Devon County Prison at Exeter in a black van with barred windows. He climbed out by the entrance to the court, a big, rugged, broad-shouldered man in his early thirties, wearing combat trousers and a tight black T-shirt which emphasised the impressive muscle definition of his upper body. The sleeves were short enough to display upon the biceps of his left arm a large and particularly unpleasant tattoo of the upper torso of a buxom young woman one of whose obscenely oversized breasts bore the word ‘love’ and the other ‘hate’. Yuck, thought Jo.

Apparently unbowed by what was happening to him, O’Donnell held his head high as the gathered crowd roared their loathing at him. His peroxide-blond crew-cut gleamed in the autumn sunshine. His eyes blazed beneath their heavy dark brows. There was no being covered up in blankets for this guy.

The car park outside the court, the road behind, and even the supermarket car park beyond that were teeming, and the mood of the crowd was not sweet. It was a fairly predictable reception for someone accused of a crime as horrific as this one. The crowd bayed for blood. The majority in government and, thank God, in Joanna’s opinion, within the police force were against the reintroduction of capital punishment. This lot would no doubt rip O’Donnell apart limb from limb, were they able to get to him.

She thought there could be four or five hundred people gathered into the area around the court. A lot of them looked like farming folk, who would have been more at home on horseback or leaning on a farm gate somewhere. Instead, they were screaming blue murder at James Martin O’Donnell, who was securely handcuffed to two policemen and surrounded by half a dozen or so more as he began the brief journey into the courtroom.

If he’d lowered his head or kept his eyes downcast it might not have been quite so provocative, Joanna thought. But, as the Nikon choir formed by dozens of cameramen burst into flashing, whirring action, O’Donnell glared coolly around him, belligerent, arrogant, contemptuous.

There was a yell of outrage, which she somehow heard above the collective noise of the chanting throng. A figure managed to force his way through the police guards and hurl himself at O’Donnell. The accused man’s big shoulders wrenched against the restraint of the cuffs round his wrists as he tried to defend himself. She could see the hands of the assailant raking O’Donnell’s face, reaching for his eyes as if the intention was to gouge them out, and then it was all over. Standing on the courtroom steps with her back to the wall, Jo had a grandstand view as three hefty policemen pounced on the attacker and he was led away. She got a clear glimpse of his face, then, and was almost sure it was Jeremy Thomas, Angela Phillips’ boyfriend. Silly boy, Jo thought to herself, but of course, not only had Jeremy had to deal with the loss of his girlfriend in such a terrible way, he had also had to put up with the anguish of having been suspected of the crime himself.

With the added excitement of the attack, the roar of the crowd reached a crescendo. O’Donnell tossed his head at them as he was finally hurried into the courtroom, almost as if he were a film star acknowledging the acclaim of his fans instead of a man standing accused of one of the most horrible murders Joanna had ever had knowledge of. She saw that there was a trickle of red running down his face. The attacker had drawn blood and the crowd loved it. Even execution would probably not satisfy this lot, the mood they were in, thought Jo. Certainly not if it was conducted humanely and in private. A public hanging might do, but better still, something like that lovely old Chinese way of doing things, death by slicing. Any government having trouble with its popularity should really consider that, she thought wryly.

With some difficulty she made her way into the court — there wasn’t time to file the story of the attack on O’Donnell without missing the start of the proceedings and, in any case, there was no need to do so yet; her deadlines were still hours away. Once inside, she instantly spotted Mike Fielding. He was wearing a beige linen suit — he was fond of linen, obviously — a maroon silk shirt, a tie which carefully blended both colours in varying shades and a smug smile. She had never known a policeman who dressed like him. As for his smugness, she hoped he was not overconfident. This was no ordinary crime and Jimbo O’Donnell was no ordinary prisoner. Certainly he was no ordinary sex offender nutter. He was different. His back-up was different too. She already knew that he had a top legal team defending him.

The attack on O’Donnell provided an early diversion inside the court as well as outside. O’Donnell’s lawyers made a big thing about their man getting first-aid attention. O’Donnell shrugged his big shoulders, asked for a handkerchief with which he wiped his face, said he’d be fine and grinned broadly at the magistrates. He was going to play to the gallery, no doubt about it.

After that the proceedings went according to plan. O’Donnell was committed for trial at Exeter Crown Court and was remanded in custody, of course. His lawyers knew better than to ask for bail; they’d never get it on a case like this.

As Jo left the court, Fielding was waiting in the foyer. For her? She didn’t know, but certainly he stepped forward smartly to her side and put a hand on her arm. ‘How’s my favourite hackette, then?’ he asked lightly.

His manner was flirtatious, as it almost invariably was with her, but again she was not really sure whether he was chatting her up or not. His body language and his words did not always match. On this occasion he stood much closer to her than necessary and he kept his hand on her arm in an almost proprietorial fashion as they walked together towards the door.

She decided to play it dead straight. ‘I’m fine, how are you?’ she asked him in a crisp businesslike way.

‘All the better for seeing you, as ever, Joanna,’ he said. And he grinned that grin, which would have been even more disarming if he were not so obviously aware of it. He was one of those men who appeared to think he was irresistible to women. There was a lot of that about, usually misguided. In Fielding’s case probably not so misguided, she thought, but she was beginning to find that irritating too. Her brief period of getting to like him seemed to have come to an end. But she didn’t want to antagonise him. He had already proved to be a most useful contact and it pleased her greatly to think that she appeared to have effectively stolen him from Frank Manners.

She was about to ask him if he would like a drink later when his radio pager bleeped. He studied it briefly. ‘Have to leave you, darling,’ he said. ‘Much as it breaks my heart.’

God he was an annoying man. She could only follow him out into the street where mob rule still reigned. Anyway, Fielding wasn’t the key to it today and she didn’t really have time for buttering him up.

Pushing her way through the crowds, she hurried to her car, which she had sensibly parked in a car park on the other side of the town, just a few minutes’ walk away, so that she was able to make a relatively quick departure from Okehampton and head out to Five Tors Farm. A load of hacks and snappers were already gathered at the end of the farm lane, as before, and although Joanna did not actually expect to get very far on this day of the committal with so many press around, she knew the importance of trying to get close to the Phillips family.

She planned to stay down in Devon for a couple of days to make yet another attempt to obtain proper talks with the family who had so far turned down all interview requests. The Comet was after what they called background, the bulk of which would not be usable until after the trial had concluded or else it would break the sub judice laws, and some of it would not be usable even then unless Jimbo was found guilty. She couldn’t imagine that there was much doubt in this case, but regardless of the likely outcome, newspapers always spent a great deal of time and money on background. It was considered vital. The paper with the best background after a big case ended was always the envy of the rest of the Street.

Jo waited, chatting to the others, quite enjoying being out in the fresh air. It was a sunny day and unseasonably warm. Jo hated doorsteps, they all did, but at least it wasn’t raining and you invariably gleaned a few nuggets of additional information when you were with the pack. She learned from the Press Association man that she had been right about the attack on O’Donnell. The police had announced that the assailant had been Jeremy Thomas and he had been arrested for assault which, harsh as it might seem, was only what she would have expected.

After about an hour, just as Joanna was wondering if she could be better employed and whether to ask the desk if Harry Fowler was free for the watching brief, a Land Rover came down the lane. Somewhat to the surprise of the pack, who had more or less given up on the family while still, of course, having to go through the motions, out stepped Bill and Rob Phillips. Neither had been in court that day. They both looked wan and drawn. Bill Phillips in particular seemed to have aged ten years since Jo had last seen him, a couple of days after his daughter had disappeared, making one of several public appeals for her safe return.

The old Nikon choir burst into action again. Cameras flashed. Motor drives whirred. The reporters also pressed forward, some clutching notebooks and pens, some brandishing tape recorders.

Rob Phillips barely seemed to notice the chaos going on around him as he spoke. ‘We have nothing to say about today’s court proceedings except that we hope justice will be done and that the dreadful death of m-my sister...’ He stumbled over the words and looked for a moment as if he was going to break down, then with what appeared to be a great effort of will he gathered himself together and continued. ‘...the death of my sister A-Angela will be avenged.

‘But nothing can bring our A-Ange back and we are horrified at what happened in Okehampton today. We know that...’ He glanced at his father as if confirming that he should go ahead with whatever they had agreed. ‘...we know that there has been an arrest following an attack on the accused man. And, of course, we know who has been arrested. We don’t want anybody else to suffer because of what has happened to Angela. Sh-she...’ He stumbled again. It seemed that whenever he said her name, no doubt thinking about her and what had happened to her, he faltered. ‘She wouldn’t want that either,’ he continued. ‘Thank you very much.’

Reporters and cameramen ran towards their cars in order to get to phones and wire points so that they could file their copy and wire their pictures. Joanna stood for just a few seconds, watching the two dejected men, father and son, climb into their vehicle, swing it round and return to their home. The home that would never be the same again.

There were good people around. Unless she had got things very wrong indeed she had just encountered two of them. It was almost impossible to grasp what that family were going through. And yet they were still trying to behave like civilised human beings, to do what they felt was right.

She found that she was quite moved. And that didn’t happen very often.

During the long wait for the trial, which was scheduled to begin in April the following year, Harry Fowler took over the background down in Devon while Joanna and Manners concentrated on the London end.

The Phillips family continued to refuse to give interviews to anyone. Their brief statement at the end of their lane on the day of Jimbo O’Donnell’s committal was just about the sum total of their relations with the press.

There was little to justify a chief crime correspondent spending her time in Devon on the story and Jo wasn’t sure if she was sorry or glad about that. If there were to be any chance of saving her floundering marriage, then the longer she spent at home the better. Her trips away did not help anything, particularly since the anonymous phone calls, which seemed, mercifully, to have stopped.

Joanna was going through one of those torn-apart periods. She loved working for a daily newspaper and specifically covering crime. It was the sharp end all right — as tough as it got, but totally exhilarating. And, secretly, she revelled in being the first woman Scotland Yard hack. It was ground-breaking and she was damn proud of herself. But she was getting heartily sick of all the nonsense surrounding her job. Every time she saw Frank Manners she wanted to throw something at him.

She had not told a soul at the Comet about the moody phone calls. And neither, in the end, had she told any of her police contacts, in spite of suggesting to her husband that she would. This had been a deliberate policy. As ever, she was not going to give the bastards the satisfaction. She didn’t want anyone, particularly Manners, to know that she had serious problems within her marriage. And in particular she didn’t want to give Manners the satisfaction of thinking that he might be responsible for it. Nothing would please the toe-rag more, she was quite sure of that.

Instead, she concentrated on the job in hand, which involved getting alongside the O’Donnells. Joanna had met Sam the Man before, of course. So had any crime reporter worth tuppence. Like the Krays before him, Sam saw himself as a bit of a star, loved to make showbusiness friends and prided himself on having a good relationship with the press. He enjoyed appearing in newspapers. He sent journalists thank you notes for coverage, even when it had been far from complimentary, Christmas cards and, if he could find out when your birthday was you got cards for those too. Joanna had received a birthday card from him every year since, as a very young general news reporter, she had first written a story about the O’Donnells. Against her better judgement Joanna had never quite been able to stop herself liking Sam the Man — on a superficial level, at any rate. However, she had no illusions about how evil he could be.

Sam’s right-hand man, Combo, a big burly minder whose build and blind loyalty to Sam made him a bit of a gangster cliché, took her call when she phoned Sam’s Dulwich home. ‘I’ll get back to yer,’ he said in his ponderous way. Not a man you wanted to quarrel with. Joanna had been told that he was given his rather peculiar name because in a fight he was famous for employing a devastating combination of fist, feet and head. In spite of this she was pleased to hear from him when he returned her call only ten minutes or so later to say that Sam would see her at the Duke the following day.

She knew where Combo meant, the Duke of Denmark, a big, noisy pub not far from Sam’s home. They all knew the Duke. Sam held court there in a small back room behind the public bar. That’s where he liked to do business. His home was for family and Sam was a great family man. Jo was not surprised by his ready agreement to see her and, again, neither was she under any illusions. Sam would no doubt have agreed to talk to all the nationals; that was his way.

Sam appeared to be his usual avuncular self when she arrived at the Duke at the appointed time — although she felt sure he must be shocked by the horrific charges levelled at his eldest son. If Jimbo had been arrested on a straightforward blagging or, more likely in his case, a hit job, Sam O’Donnell would have regarded it as part of the cut and thrust of business. His business. But the rape and murder of a civilian was totally against his personal code. She knew that Sam considered himself to be a good, honest villain. Nonetheless, if he was anxious or in any way distressed, he certainly wasn’t showing it. Not to her, anyway. Arms outstretched in greeting, he rose from his big upright armchair to welcome her as the bartender showed her into the dark, wood-panelled room, its ceiling yellowed by decades of tobacco smoke. She noticed as he sat down again on the throne-like chair that a single spotlight on the wall behind cast the old gang boss slightly into silhouette, giving an edge of mystery and menace to his appearance. Always good at theatre, was Sam.

‘A pleasure to see you, as ever, Joanna,’ he told her. His voice was deep and throaty from smoking, his smile displayed expensive dentistry, his abundant figure was immaculately encased in a beautifully cut pale-grey suit, fingers and wrists dripped gold, his nails had obviously been professionally manicured. She knew he must be almost sixty, but he still had thick, wavy hair although the colour was too dark to be natural. However, the stylish cut flattered his big, jowly features. His eyes, small for his face and peering at her through folds of flesh, were astute and intelligent. Anyone who underestimated Sam did so at their peril. Combo stood at his right arm, just fractionally behind his boss. Combo’s son, Little John, a teenaged clone of his father although already even taller and bigger, hence his ironic name, stood just a step or two back again. On the surface, at least, it was business as usual for Sam the Man.

Jo was untroubled by the beautifully presented Godfather tableau. All she was after was good copy. She enjoyed the challenge, that was the truth of it. And although she had no desire to fall out with the O’Donnells, she wasn’t scared of them. As a reporter she had no reason to be, she was the last kind of person the clan would want to harm.

Sam lit a large cigar and offered her coffee from a silver pot on the table by his side. He poured some for her into a dainty bone china teacup, the sort of cup which positively invited you to crook your little finger as you drank from it. It was well known that Sam didn’t drink alcohol and neither did anyone else while they were in the back room. If you wanted a proper drink you were expected to go to the bar for it — but only when Sam told you that you could. Jo knew the rules.

‘What I want is for you to put the record straight about my boy, Joanna,’ Sam told her, puffing on his cigar and sending a cloud of dense smoke wafting towards the already discoloured ceiling.

‘That’s what I’m here for,’ she replied, although they both knew it wasn’t.

She would, however, appear to go along with anything Sam said. She needed him. She couldn’t afford to let the Comet be out in the cold on this one as far as the O’Donnells were concerned. So she was quite prepared to appear to display a sympathy she did not feel for both the family and Jimbo’s predicament.

‘My boy’s told me he’s innocent and I believe him absolutely,’ Sam went on. ‘We O’Donnells don’t harm innocent people and we never hurt women. None of us would hurt a young girl like that and the filth should damn well know it. My boy’s been fitted up. And we’re going to damn well prove it.’

Joanna studied the tough old gangster appraisingly. He was dealing with his son’s arrest in exactly the way Joanna would have expected. And he was giving nothing away. Down, but most definitely not out. Typical Sam the Man. She had already seen the names of the sharp legal team which had been hired for Jimbo. The O’Donnells had money, know-how, and influence — a lot more influence in all kinds of areas than they should have.

Jo just hoped the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary and the prosecution lawyers knew what they were up against. She didn’t think they had villains quite like the O’Donnells in the West of England. Perhaps the family’s biggest strength was the way they saw themselves. They had no real perception of themselves as crooks at all — rather as tough but fair businessmen working in a certain area and operating under a different set of rules from the rest of society. They dealt out their own rough justice and if ever challenged would insist that their integrity was as great as anyone else’s.

Sam was still talking: ‘Jimbo’s never been able to keep his hands off the ladies, but that’s not rape. He was just a boy when he let things get out of hand before and I never believed he raped anyone then either. He was led on. He doesn’t need to force women against their will, he’s too good for that, my boy. And this Angela Phillips thing. It doesn’t make sense. Rape and torture of an innocent girl? No way, I’m telling you. And kidnap? Why in God’s name would he stage a kidnap? It’s the hardest scam of all. Everybody knows that. And he’s got no need, my boy, has he?’

Joanna didn’t doubt that Sam had convinced himself he was telling the truth.

She also didn’t doubt that he would move heaven and earth to get his son cleared of all the charges against him. And she knew he would be a formidable adversary.

Six

The trial of Jimbo O’Donnell took place at Exeter Crown Court in April 1981, seven months after his arrest. Joanna returned once more to Devon to cover it.

She had not seen Fielding since the committal proceedings. Once the Comet’s background was in place there was little else that could be done until the trial began. Certainly very little that could be written. As far as Joanna was concerned there had been plenty of other stories to deal with. Plus Frank Manners. Plus all the other bastards. And plus, most important of all, her husband.

As she was driving down the M4 she considered again the grim reality concerning Chris. Their marriage was effectively over. They didn’t have sex any more and could barely be civil to each other. She felt she had tried as hard as she could. For the first time she began seriously to wonder if there was someone else in Chris’s life. He appeared to have come actively to dislike her, which she could hardly believe after all the time they had been together. Sometimes it seemed to her that he was almost inventing problems between the two of them and she couldn’t help wondering if he was doing it deliberately.

Paul Potter was invariably around when she wanted a drink and a chat, but she continued to think of him only as a friendly face in the office and nothing more — someone who provided very welcome solace in an environment that in her eyes was becoming more and more hostile.

One way and another she found herself relieved by the prospect of being out of London for a bit.

As expected, O’Donnell, who continued to profess his innocence, pleaded not guilty. The historic Crown Court at Exeter lies within the great walls of Exeter Castle, which dates back to Roman times. A forbidding iron portcullis forms the only entrance and Joanna could never pass through it, into a courtyard where a gallows once stood and the old hanging judges ran riot, without a bit of a shiver running down her spine. James Martin O’Donnell, however, seemed totally undaunted. The grim ghosts of other crueller ages clearly did not trouble Jimbo. Imagination was probably not his strong suit, Jo suspected. And the influence of his legal dream team was apparent from the start. Jo was afraid yet again that Jimbo’s lawyers, provided by his doting dad and led by a clever and already highly acclaimed young barrister called Brian Burns, might run rings round the police prosecutors.

Jimbo’s appearance no longer bore any resemblance to the way he had looked at the committal proceeding and his behaviour was also completely different. The thuggish-looking peroxide-blond crew cut had gone. His hair, which was now mid-brown, presumably its natural colour, had been allowed to grow longer while he was on remand and had been neatly cut in conventional fashion with a parting to one side. The offensive tattoo on his arm was concealed. He wore dark suits, crisp white shirts and sober ties to court, and when he spoke he did so politely and with apparent respect for the proceedings. He no longer seemed to have an arrogant bone in his body. Jimbo had been given a complete make-over and had quite obviously been groomed in every way by people who knew exactly what they were doing.

Most of the evidence against O’Donnell was circumstantial, although some of it was quite strong, including that given by an ex-Territorial the police had called as a witness. He stated with absolute certainty that O’Donnell was among a group of them who had used Knack Mine as a hideout during military exercises. But the prosecution did not get off to a good start.

Jimbo admitted readily enough that he had been on the Phillipses’ land on the day that Angela Phillips disappeared, but claimed this was just coincidence. He had been camping, not for the first time, on a part of Dartmoor not far from Five Tors Farm, and had unwittingly strayed on to Phillips land. When the prosecution claimed that O’Donnell had been keeping the farm under surveillance, checking on the movements of Angela and her family, Jimbo denied it hotly. ‘I was birdwatching, that’s why I had the bins, wasn’t it,’ he said ingenuously. ‘I’m a twitcher, me!’

The very idea was so incongruous that Joanna had to fight against an almost irresistible urge to laugh out loud. However, when she glanced at the jury they seemed to be lapping it up. The concept of judgement by your peers, twelve good men and true and all that, left a great deal to be desired, she thought, not for the first time.

The prosecution barrister, Malcolm Bowman, a slightly plump, earnest young man with a disconcerting squint, did not give up.

‘You meticulously checked out the Phillips family,’ he persisted. ‘You appraised their property, you knew that they were a wealthy family well able to raise £50,000 in exchange for Angela’s life. You have been obsessed with the military from an early age, have you not, Mr O’Donnell, and you used your Territorial training when you planned this terrible crime, didn’t you?’

Jimbo stared straight ahead. ‘I don’t know what you mean, sir,’ he said.

‘You believed, because of your training, that you could deal with the logistical complexities of abducting and detaining a young woman against her will, did you not?’ said Malcolm Bowman. ‘And you had considerable local knowledge gained during your training at Okehampton camp.

‘We have heard from a reliable witness, Mr O’Donnell, that you had personal knowledge of the mine shaft where Angela Phillips’s body was found. You knew what an excellent hideout Knack Mine was, and I put it to you that when you abducted Angela Phillips it was already your intention to conceal her there.’

‘No, that’s not true, sir,’ responded Jimbo mildly but firmly. ‘In any case, if I ever did go to that mine when I was up at the camp, I just don’t remember it at all.’ He was so well briefed it hurt. Obviously acting under instructions, he just kept on calmly denying everything.

‘You tortured, raped and mutilated Angela there to satisfy your own perverted desires,’ continued Bowman doggedly. ‘And then, when your attempts to obtain a ransom for her failed, you callously left her in the mine shaft to die.’

‘No, that’s not true, sir,’ said Jimbo again, equally mildly.

Joanna knew that he had not left fingerprints on the little that had been found in Angela’s dreadful tomb and the best forensic had been able to come up with, in the days before DNA, was that the semen found in Angela’s body was from someone with the same blood group as O’Donnell. It was O Positive — the most common of the lot.

Malcolm Bowman was beginning to look frustrated and became even more so when he brought up the collection of knives found in O’Donnell’s apartment, none of which, Joanna already knew, forensic had been able to prove had been the weapon used to maim Angela.

‘They’re military memorabilia, sir,’ said Jimbo.

Bowman looked incredulous. ‘Memorabilia, Mr O’Donnell? You are talking about a selection of potentially lethal weapons, including one almost new army knife of a particularly vicious design.’

‘Well, they’re all memorabilia to me, sir. I’m very interested in the military, you see.’

‘And what exactly do you claim that you have used these knives for, Mr O’Donnell, if not to maim and kill?’

‘I’ve never used them for anything, sir. I just like looking at them.’

It was ludicrous, but once again the jury did not seem to think so.

There did appear, however, to be one irrefutable piece of evidence — and Joanna realised it was this to which Fielding must have been referring when he had refused to give her the details during their conversation after Jimbo’s arrest.

The prosecution claimed that a gold locket Angela Phillips was wearing when she disappeared had been found in O’Donnell’s London flat. This was not circumstantial. This was hard evidence. This could swing it. Joanna felt her hopes rise. She was aware of a kind of collective gasp from the public gallery behind her, where she knew Angela’s family were sitting, and even the jury looked impressed.

However, Jo’s hopes were quickly dashed again. The defence had an answer — and Mike Fielding was at the crux of it. The locket bore O’Donnell’s fingerprints clearly enough, and that was not in dispute, but it seemed that after claiming to have found it in a drawer in O’Donnell’s bedroom, Fielding had triumphantly brandished his trophy at the accused man and allowed him to take it from him. Jo could see Fielding almost visibly squirming when, having been asked to take the stand, he was confronted with this.

He tried unsuccessfully to fudge the issue. ‘Well, we found the locket, sir, no doubt about that, and whether or not Mr O’Donnell actually handled it...’

‘DS Fielding, you know perfectly well that Mr O’Donnell did handle the locket,’ persisted Brian Burns. He was tall, slim, handsome and authoritative, in brutal contrast to the unprepossessing Malcolm Bowman. ‘I suggest you tell the truth, Detective Sergeant,’ Burns continued. ‘There were other officers with you, were there not, who may not be as evasive as you are trying to be.’

Ultimately Fielding had no choice but to admit that he had allowed O’Donnell to handle the key piece of evidence. ‘I was excited by the discovery,’ he said.

‘You were excited, DS Fielding? So you allowed a suspect to handle a key piece of evidence and put his fingerprints all over it? Do you really expect this court to believe that?’

There was no answer. Burns did not push the point any further but continued by asking: ‘And what did my client say to you when you handed him the locket, Detective Sergeant?’

‘I didn’t hand it to him, he took it.’

Joanna felt almost sorry for Fielding. Didn’t he realise that everything he said seemed to be making the whole thing appear worse?

‘I see,’ responded Burns casually. ‘So, what did my client say when you allowed him to take the locket from you?’

Fielding looked defeated. ‘He said he’d never seen it before in his life.’

Joanna groaned to herself. This was going seriously pear-shaped. She, too, found it hard to believe that Fielding would have made such a silly mistake. The alternative was that he had planted the locket. He had been the first officer at the scene of the crime. If the locket had been with Angela in the shaft at Knack Mine, Fielding would have had ample opportunity to secrete it away — to have the locket up his sleeve, as it were, just in case a little extra evidence was needed later on. She had known it happen before.

And that was just what Burns went on to suggest. Indeed, he finished his cross-examination by going way beyond suggestion: ‘I put it to you, DS Fielding, that you did not find this locket in my client’s home but that you calculatedly planted it on him. You needed a conviction, didn’t you? You’re a high flyer aren’t you? You don’t like unsolved crimes, do you?’

Burns was a slick operator and this was devastating stuff. There seemed to be holes in the prosecution case you could drive a bus through — or anyway there did when the dream team were at work.

The trial lasted six and a half working days including the day and a half it took for the jury to agree its verdict. They found James Martin O’Donnell not guilty — which, after the way the proceedings had gone, came as no great surprise to anybody. But it was a dreadful disappointment — to police, prosecution, the family and friends of Angela Phillips, and indeed to Joanna, whom Fielding had quite convinced of O’Donnell’s guilt. She had not realised, in fact, just how much she had wanted to see him brought to justice for his appalling crime until he was cleared.

The jury could not be told, of course, of O’Donnell’s previous conviction for rape, nor of his and his family’s criminal reputations, although most of them must surely at least have heard of the O’Donnells, Jo thought. It was a majority decision, so maybe if the law were different and that kind of information had been made available to them — as many people thought, certainly in the case of sex crimes, it should be — the balance could have been tipped. As it stood, a majority of ten to two was all that was necessary for Jimbo O’Donnell to walk from the court a free man. And walk he did.

Joanna wondered if the clenched-fist salute Jimbo gave when their foreman read out the verdict made any of the jurors question their judgement. Certainly, once he realised the case was won he cast aside his demeanour of quiet respectfulness with alacrity.

She joined the crush to follow him outside the court. His father had been at the trial every day and now Sam the Man stood alongside Jimbo in the middle of the ancient courtyard, smiling for a cacophony of flashing snappers. ‘Justice has been done — for once,’ Sam announced with a big grin. ‘My boy could never have done what they said he did. He’s an O’Donnell. We don’t hurt women or children. I never doubted him for a minute. Never. He’s straight down the middle, my boy, look at him I ask you, look at him...’ Sam the Man reached up and ruffled his son’s new haircut.

The younger O’Donnell did his best to look innocent, endearing and wronged — but he succeeded only in looking smug and pleased with himself. However, inside the court during the trial his performance had been convincing, certainly good enough to convince the jury, and that was all that mattered.

In stark contrast, the Phillips family, accompanied by Jeremy Thomas and escorted by a grim-faced Todd Mallett, tried to slip away quietly into a waiting car. They had no chance at all. The press swarmed on them. Joanna joined in, calling out ‘Mr Phillips, Rob, Jeremy, just tell us how you feel’ — to no avail. They all looked devastated. Reporters needed words to make copy, but snappers always insisted a picture could be worth several thousand of them. Certainly in this instance they were probably right, Joanna thought. Nothing any of the family might say would ever convey their feelings as effectively as their shattered appearance. Bill Phillips glanced towards her at one point, but all she could see in his eyes was the emptiness of a broken man confronting yet another tormentor.

Fielding and DCI Parsons were right behind the family and hurried them through the throng. They also refused to comment to the horde of press who surrounded them, making their passage difficult. Both men looked grave, but Joanna was riveted by Fielding. The normally suave, cocksure detective seemed stricken. His face was ashen.

She supposed he would bounce back eventually, he was that sort. But his career had suffered a potentially fatal blow. Apart from any other consideration it must be a policeman’s nightmare to be accused in open court of having planted evidence. She felt almost sorry for him. His rosy future did not look quite so rosy any more, that was for certain.

She filed an early story and, with Manners under instructions to look after the police angle although nobody was expected to put their head up over the bunker for a bit, set out across Dartmoor and spent most of the rest of the afternoon and evening doorstepping the Phillipses. They continued to refuse to speak to the press, but nonetheless she had to wait until the desk sent Harry Fowler down to take over her watching brief outside the farm before she was allowed to leave at about 10 p.m. She was thoroughly exhausted and there appeared to be little more she could do. All she really wanted was to go back to her Exeter hotel room, order herself a large malt whisky and maybe some sandwiches, and take to her bed.

But on a whim she found herself making a detour to Heavitree Road police station. She swung the car into the car park, fairly empty at that time of night. There were still a couple of reporters and one photographer outside. Manners had been there earlier, she knew, but he was no longer about. Jo wasn’t surprised. Not one to hang around on a doorstep, that man, but he never seemed to get caught out. He did have a way of covering his back, she had to admit that.

She walked straight past the reporters, both of whom she knew only by sight, and into the front office where she asked the clerk if she could speak to DS Fielding. She was never quite sure what made her do it. Did she really think he would give her an exclusive on a night like this or even talk to her about the case? Or did she, in the depths of her subconscious, have another reason even then for trying to contact the detective sergeant?

The clerk studied her without enthusiasm. ‘He’s not talking to the press and neither’s anybody else. You may as well join your friends out the front.’

‘Look, will you just ask him?’ She treated the man to what she hoped was her winning smile.

He looked uncertain.

‘Please. Just ask him. That’s all.’ Jo smiled again. She might draw the line at sleeping with guys for stories, in spite of what her husband thought, but would resort to feminine wiles at the drop of a hat. And she had the honesty to admit to herself that while Manners and the rest of the heavy mob wouldn’t have a hope of getting anywhere with Fielding, she at least was in with a chance.

Quite deliberately, she bit her bottom lip and did her best to look as if she might be about to burst into tears. That did it. The clerk picked up the phone on his desk. Strange how she had somehow not doubted that Fielding would still be in his office at almost 11 p.m.

‘...Joanna Bartlett, the Comet, yes, Mike, I told her you wouldn’t...’

There was a pause while the man listened. He looked mildly surprised. Then he turned away from Joanna and lowered his voice. She could still hear him clearly enough, though: ‘...Look, are you sure, mate? You don’t need any more bother, do you... OK, OK, whatever you say.’ With a sigh he replaced the receiver. ‘You can go up,’ he told her. ‘Second floor. He’ll meet you at the stairs.’

Fielding was waiting for her by the time she had climbed the two flights. If anything, he looked even worse than he had outside the court. He did not smile, just gave her a quick hello and escorted her to his office. She thought he had probably been drinking and it turned out she wasn’t wrong. There was a three-parts empty bottle of whisky on his desk. He offered her a drink, which she accepted. He found a paper cup and poured her a large measure, waved her into a chair, sat down himself behind the desk, put his feet up on it, and took a deep swig straight from the bottle. Then he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. She could feel the blackness of his mood. She felt pretty down herself. She had believed in O’Donnell’s guilt and had wanted to see him go down. And she had lost the bulk of her background. All that hard work for nothing. A huge chunk of it could not be printed now that he’d been acquitted, legally far too dodgy.

‘I’m sorry it went so wrong for you,’ she said eventually.

Mike opened his eyes, which she noticed then were bloodshot, and regarded her steadily. His skin still looked ashen. There was certainly none of his usual God’s-gift-to-women smugness about him. His wits hadn’t completely deserted him, though. ‘Are we off the record?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ she replied quickly. It was probably unprofessional not to have attempted, at least, to get something from him on the record, but her response had been quite automatic. The man must have got to her in some way for her to behave in such an out of character way. Joanna was usually just as hard-nosed in her approach to work as the normally tough policeman she was talking to.

He took her at her word, as she expected him to. And she sensed him relax a little.

He tipped the whisky to his lips once more. ‘What a fuck-up,’ he said. ‘What a bloody fuck-up.’

‘Yours wasn’t the only mistake,’ she told him, sensing that he was blaming himself. ‘You were a bit overeager, that’s all.’

‘Story of my life. The locket was the only really hard evidence. And I gave Jimbo a lifeline on it. Did that bloody jury really believe I planted it?’

She shrugged. They did, of course. They had to have believed that in order to acquit O’Donnell. She too had some doubts. Not about O’Donnell. Not really. But about Fielding, definitely. And so, presumably, did his superiors. Fielding was deeply in the mire and he knew it. She changed tack. ‘You still don’t have any doubts about O’Donnell, do you?’

‘For Christ’s sake, none at all. Bastard’s as guilty as sin. Just that the might of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary combined with the Crown Prosecution Service didn’t have the wit to get him convicted, that’s all. A major fuck-up to which I contributed...’ He paused as if seeking a word. ‘Majestically,’ he concluded with a bit of dramatic flourish.

‘What’ll happen to you?’ she asked.

‘Probably fuck all. Which is what I deserve. I won’t make DI for years, now, that’s for certain. Maybe not ever. There’ll be an inquiry, of course. If it goes against me I could get chucked out. I doubt it, though. Whatever they believe privately, the bastards will prefer to sweep it under the carpet. At best I behaved like a bloody fool, at worst I tried to plant evidence. Sod’s choice, isn’t it?’

She didn’t say anything. She could think of nothing to say.

He took another slug of whisky, got up from his chair and walked over to the window. He continued to talk as he stood with his back to her, looking down on the street below. ‘I wake up at night and I see Angela, you know, lying there, mutilated, in all that filth.’ There was a catch in his voice.

She was momentarily surprised. All she had really expected from him was self-pity. He was a professional detective. As hard-nosed as any of the villains he pursued. It took one to catch one. That’s what they always said about the CID, wasn’t it?

‘I can’t get it out of my head,’ he went on. ‘I’ve never been on a case that’s got to me like this one. I thought, if we can send the bastard down, then that would finish it. But we’ve failed. And there’s no second chances in this game.’ She saw his elbow rise as he took yet another drink from the bottle. ‘So that’s it. I’ve let myself down and I’ve let Angela down.’

There was no doubt about it. There was definitely a catch in his voice now. Perhaps, after all, there really was more to this man than just another ambitious cop, she thought. She got up from her chair and walked over to join him at the window, gazing in silence for a moment at a lone car travelling along the road outside, its headlights picking up for a moment the two reporters still standing together, chatting, on the pavement. It was a beautiful night, the sky clear and star-studded. That didn’t seem right, somehow. It should have been raining or, better still, there should have been a storm raging, something dark and moody to mark what had happened that day. ‘You are not single-handedly responsible for it all, you know,’ she told him. ‘You did your best.’

He turned towards her then. She saw to her amazement that his cheeks were wet. ‘Don’t they say that’s actually the worst epitaph you can give anybody?’ he asked, attempting a smile, which didn’t really work. It stretched his lips but failed to reach his eyes.

‘No epitaph — you’re not dead yet, Mike Fielding,’ she said quietly and surprised herself somewhat by reaching out a hand to touch a tear-stained cheek. She knew it was probably the whisky as much as anything that was doing this to him. Nonetheless...

He took her hand and kissed it gently. Suddenly, awkwardly, she was in his arms and their lips had met. He tasted of whisky and tobacco but the sensation was wonderful from the beginning. He felt so good. Rough round the edges. Soft in the centre. Afterwards she was never quite sure how it happened, the two of them in the middle of a police station embroiled in a clinch. His tongue pushed her lips apart. She gave him hers. His grip tightened round her. She felt him hard against her. He pushed her back against the wall, his hands sought her breasts and she heard his little gasp when he touched a hard nipple. His hands pushed her legs open and simultaneously somehow pulled her skirt up round her waist. The fingers of one of his hands sought for her. She knew that she had become ready, couldn’t believe it. She also knew that with his other hand he was starting to unzip his flies.

Then a moment of sanity gripped her. She managed to prise his mouth from hers and, pushing his hand away from her, said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Mike. No.’

He stopped at once, pulling back from her, breathing heavily. ‘God, I’m sorry, Joanna,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what came over me. I’m really sorry. It was just that...’ He paused, as if not knowing quite how to go on.

She shook her head. ‘It’s all right, I know what you’re trying to say, I feel exactly the same.’

He had one hand on his trousers. He was trying to cover the bulge in his crotch, she realised suddenly with some amusement. He glanced at her in surprise. ‘You do?’ he enquired.

‘Yes. I must be barking, but I want you like crazy. Only not here, you daft bugger. This is your office, remember. It’s in Heavitree Road police station and the place is crawling with cops. Didn’t you know?’

He grinned the disarming grin and started to laugh. His face was still tear-stained and his hand was still covering the bulge in his trousers.

In spite of the absurdity of it she wanted him more than ever. She reached out, pulled his hand away and replaced it with her own. She felt his whole body tense. He was very hard. She realised she could hardly wait. It was madness but she felt as if she had no choice. ‘I do have a hotel room,’ she began.

‘So what are we waiting for?’ he asked in a very low, husky voice.

On the way out Jo noticed a photograph on his desk of a pretty, red-haired young woman holding a baby in her arms. She assumed that was Mike Fielding’s wife with one of their children. She didn’t really want to think about his wife, any more than she wanted to think about her husband.

She left the station first, having arranged that he would follow her a few minutes later and make his way separately to her hotel. There was, after all, no need to advertise their intentions. Once they were in her room it was as if suddenly they had both made time to do the thing properly.

Without any of the desperate urgency he had displayed earlier Fielding sat beside her on the edge of the bed and kissed her face, her eyes, her cheeks, her neck before their lips met again. And that too was more gentle, more lingering. ‘Will you undress for me?’ he asked.

She nodded, stood up and took her clothes off. Just like that. She had no sense of embarrassment, she didn’t play around, turn it into a striptease, simply took off her clothes and stood before him naked.

‘You have a beautiful body,’ he said in that same low voice.

‘It’s a miracle,’ she said. And it was, too, the way she lived.

‘My miracle,’ he told her.

She hadn’t expected him to be soppy at all about sex.

‘Lie down, now,’ he instructed.

Again she did as she was told, the excitement rising in her.

She lay down beside him and immediately he pushed her legs apart and buried his face in her. He didn’t touch her with his hands at all. It was immensely exciting. And he carried on and on, until she began desperately to want him inside her and told him so. She needed that in order to reach a climax. She nearly always did the first time.

After what seemed like for ever he pulled his face away from her. She braced herself for what she expected to come next. Instead he wriggled up the bed and lay beside her. His lips brushed hers lightly. She could smell and taste her own sex.

She reached for him. He pulled slightly away.

‘I’m afraid I’ve lost it,’ he said. He was still wearing his trousers, which was fairly ridiculous. She realised there was no hardness there at all now.

‘Do I put you off that much?’ she asked lightly.

‘The opposite,’ he said. ‘Maybe it was the whisky. I can’t understand it. I’m like a fucking machine usually.’

She giggled.

So did he. ‘That’s not what I meant,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘Can I stay with you? In the morning it will be different, I promise.’

‘Shouldn’t you go home? What about your wife?’

He shook his head. ‘She’s used to me,’ he said.

I’ll bet she is, poor cow, thought Joanna. But she wasn’t really in a position to be moralistic. And she certainly didn’t want him to leave.

He undressed and she saw that he had a good body too, long and rangy, and covered with a down of sandy hair just a little darker than the hair on his head. He kept his underpants on, which made her smile, crawled into the bed beside her and wrapped his arms round her. Within minutes she could hear his breathing slow and become more shallow and even. He was asleep. It took her longer. She was too excited to fall asleep easily. She needed sexual release quite badly, but it appeared that she was going to have to be patient.

Ultimately, though, she did not have to wait until morning after all. Having fallen eventually into a fitful sleep lying on her back, some time during the night she was woken by the weight of him on top of her. She opened her eyes. His face was inches away from hers and he was smiling at her. They had left the curtains open and there was a full moon. She could see him quite clearly.

He looked very happy, suddenly, and very intent on what he was doing. ‘God, you’re wet down there,’ he muttered appreciatively. In the next second he was inside her.

She came almost at once and he muttered encouragement to her. She managed another orgasm before he reached his own climax and she had never felt quite so fulfilled. He did things to her that were entirely new to her. He had no inhibitions and neither did she. Not with him. In the past there had always been something holding her back from complete sexual abandon. Not with him, there wasn’t. With him she just felt so at ease. They lay together afterwards, limbs entangled, at peace. They barely spoke. They did not need to.

It was the best sex she’d ever had. By far. It was in fact so superior to anything she had experienced before that it was almost like the first sex she’d had in her life. At the age of twenty-eight for God’s sake. She really could not explain why — but the fact remained that it was so wonderfully, stunningly, amazingly good that it frightened the living daylights out of her.

Fielding felt much the same way. He left her shortly after dawn. And he didn’t want to. He wanted to fuck her all day. And then all night. And then all the next day. Actually, he didn’t think he was capable of even one more time. But, he liked the idea of trying.

He felt elated and bewildered. How many women had he had? He’d long ago lost count. All shapes and sizes and ages. Even a couple of professionals. Most of them willing and eager to play any kind of sex game he fancied. Getting laid had, after all, always been just about his number one aim in life. That and the job, of course. Work as hard at seduction as he did and you were bound to get your share of success. So how was it that he had never felt like this before? How come sex had never been as good as this before? Come to that, he thought, smiling to himself, how come he had never been as good as that before?

He couldn’t understand it. He shook his head to clear his brain. He really had to be sensible about this. Best not to see her again, probably. He had enough problems, after all. The last thing he needed was an affair with a Fleet Street journalist. He’d cool it, that was the only thing to do, he reckoned.

Meanwhile Joanna lay in bed reliving the night she had just enjoyed. She was not in the mood to be sensible at all. Her whole body glowed and she wanted more of it. She wondered how long she could string out her trip to Devon, and began to torture herself thinking of the kind of sex she and Fielding might have the next time — which she sincerely hoped would be very soon.

Then the phone rang. It was the news editor, Reg Foley, calling from his home at just after 7 a.m. to tell her that the editor wanted to buy up James Martin O’Donnell.

Joanna was not enthusiastic. She still thought Jimbo was a guilty man, didn’t like the idea of her paper throwing money at him.

‘He’s been acquitted, Jo,’ said Foley. ‘That makes him innocent, OK? Anyway, it’s what the editor wants, so let’s give him what he wants, shall we?’

Taylor was already on the case but naturally Tom Mitchell wanted his chief crime correspondent to mastermind the buy-up attempt — which meant Jo was needed back in London pretty damn smartish. So that was one question answered. Her trip to Devon was over already. She would certainly not be seeing Fielding again that day and she had no idea how long it might be before she did.

Obediently she packed her small bag. Before leaving the room she called Fielding at Heavitree Road. He hadn’t arrived yet. Well, it was still not quite eight o’clock. She left a message, in what she hoped was a businesslike manner, saying that she had been called back to her office in London and would he please phone her there later that day.

He didn’t phone. Not that day. Not the next day. Not all week.

Joanna was offended. She left a second message at Heavitree Road. Then she phoned twice more without leaving a message at all. She supposed she would have to accept that for him she had just been another quick lay. After all, she knew his reputation well enough. She had even told him that. Why should she think for a moment that their one night in the sack would have been any different for him than all the other times. She had thought so, though. And that was the problem. For her, certainly.

Apart from any other considerations, his silence made her feel cheap. Fortunately she had little time to dwell on it. The Jimbo O’Donnell buy-up took all her time and energies. First she was involved in the negotiations and then, when the Comet succeeded in outbidding its rivals, Mitchell assigned her to do the interviews.

In spite of her feelings about O’Donnell it was always exciting to be at the sharp end of a big story and Jimbo was the sharp end all right. They took him to a remote hotel on the outskirts of Epping Forest in order to keep him away from the opposition until the series the Comet planned to run had been published. Joanna was booked into the room next to Jimbo and found that she was quite grateful that a Comet photographer was also booked into the hotel, plus another reporter whose job was primarily to act as a kind of extra minder.

There was something about the way the man looked at her which she found deeply disturbing. His attitude to her as a woman bordered on contempt. He had reverted to what seemed to be a penchant for wearing tight T-shirts to show off a torso which seemed to have become even more muscular during his stay in prison. Not to mention his horrible tattoo. He also wore overly tight black jeans and had an unpleasant habit of periodically and quite blatantly adjusting his crotch while staring at her challengingly. More than ever Joanna was convinced that he was guilty as hell, a sex monster who had got away with a truly dreadful crime — but in order to do her job she tried not to think about that.

Jimbo treated her to a predictable diatribe about his innocence and the police persecution that continually dogged him and his family. But among it there was some very good stuff, some pearls, in fact.

I AM NOT THE BEAST OF DARTMOOR, MY WRONGFUL ARREST NIGHTMARE, screamed banner headlines in the Comet when the paper ran the first instalment of a three-part serialisation of the Jimbo O’Donnell story just six days after his acquittal. ‘I’d never hurt an innocent girl. I’m no sex monster. Just because some of my family have records, we’re always persecuted. They said I raped before but she led me on. If it was rape it was only date rape. And I was just a kid. I could never kill etc., etc.’ It was the story everybody wanted and Joanna was a good interviewer. She had coaxed Jimbo into talking about the earlier rape conviction, thus allowing the paper to print material it might otherwise have considered legally unwise.

She returned to the office on the day that the third and final instalment ran. Her job was over, the story written and published. The Comet no longer needed to mind Jimbo. The paper had successfully completed its scoop. Tom Mitchell was well pleased. Public demand had been such that the print run had been substantially increased. In the evening she went to the Stab to celebrate. It was always immensely satisfying to have a few drinks in Fleet Street pubs when you knew you had pulled off the big one — even if it was a buy-up, which invariably lessened the thrill a little for Jo.

It was nine days, now, since she had spent that one night with Fielding. Still no word. She didn’t let herself think about it. She was on a roll, after all.

Paul Potter was in the bar and he bought a bottle of champagne, which they shared. But Jo left alone, the only way ever for a slightly drunk woman reporter to leave a Fleet Street pub, if she had any sense.

There was a car parked on the double yellow right outside and as she stepped on to the pavement its passenger door swung open, blocking her way. An arm reached out and a hand fastened round her wrist.

Alarmed, she almost cried out, then she realised who was in the car. It was Fielding. ‘Christ,’ she said. ‘Are you stalking me or something?’

‘You should be so lucky, darling, get in the car.’

He sounded angry. She hesitated. He half pulled her into the vehicle. ‘I’ve been reading that shit of yours, I just wanted to tell you to your face what I think of you.’

She stiffened. This was the man she had been aching to see for over a week, but she had never imagined meeting him in this mood. Suddenly she felt very sober indeed. She made herself respond in an even voice, as if she were not at all concerned. ‘And you’ve driven all the way to London specially, have you?’ she asked casually.

‘Don’t flatter yourself. I wouldn’t drive across fuckin’ Exeter to see you.’

‘I see.’ She struggled to keep calm.

‘You’re just scum like all the rest of the hacks,’ he hissed at her. ‘How could you pay money to that perverted bastard? How could you give him a platform for his twisted bloody lies? How could you?’

She felt as if he had hit her. ‘It’s my job,’ she said.

‘Yes, and your job stinks.’

‘Really,’ she said. ‘Unlike yours, then. At least I don’t go around planting evidence on people.’ She got out of the car as she spoke and started to walk swiftly away from him.

He was too quick for her. He was alongside before she had even thought about breaking into a run. He grabbed her by one shoulder and pushed her against the pub wall. He looked absolutely furious. His eyes were blazing. He half shook her. ‘You bitch,’ he hissed at her through clenched teeth.

For a moment she really thought he was going to hit her.

Then the expression in his eyes softened, and the change in him was so fast that she was completely taken by surprise. He leaned forward and began to kiss her.

She responded at once, kissing him back with all her might, her body out of control. His hands found their way inside her jacket, she felt his fingers tighten round her breasts, his hardness shoving into her just as it had done the first time.

Almost as abruptly as he had begun, he stopped, pulling away from her. They stood on the pavement both breathing hard, looking at each other.

‘I really didn’t intend to let this happen again,’ he said quietly.

She didn’t reply, but reached for him, putting one arm round his neck, and drew his face to hers.

All too soon he pulled away again. ‘We’re standing outside your office pub, that’s even worse than Heavitree Road police station, isn’t it?’ he enquired, his voice lighter now, his tone mischievous.

‘You’re dead right it is,’ she replied. It was too. The extraordinary thing was she would probably have let him fuck her right there against the wall before she had even considered the implications.

‘This time I’m the one with the hotel room,’ he said, very serious again.

She just nodded and followed him to his car.

Unlike Fielding, she did make some effort to remember she was still married. She left his hotel at 4 a.m. and got a taxi home, creeping into the spare room where she spent most of her nights now anyway.

Alone in the small single bed, she put her hand between her legs and remembered the pleasure she had so recently experienced. God, why was it so good? She really had no idea, but it had been even better than the first time. And it wasn’t over. Fielding had told her that he had to spend two more weeks in London. He had been sent to town to work on the London end of a long-running fraud case. It mostly involved endless boring days poring over records in Company House and he assumed he had been assigned to the operation so quickly after the O’Donnell trial principally in order to get him out of the firing line back in Exeter. He had also told her that he was already the subject of an internal inquiry following the allegations made against him in court.

The hotel wasn’t much, just about the cheapest available, but she supposed they were lucky he wasn’t in a section house. Apparently there had been no room. The sex had not been affected by the insalubrious surroundings. It had been, if anything, even better than before. Fielding had asked Joanna if she could join him for the rest of his time there.

She didn’t hesitate. In the morning she told her husband that she would be out of town for two weeks on a story. He didn’t even bother to ask any questions. She knew he didn’t really care what she did any more and wondered why she had gone through the motions of returning home the previous night. Habit, she supposed. She packed a small bag and at the end of the working day high-tailed it to Fielding’s hotel room as soon as she could.

They had planned to go out for a meal. They didn’t make it. Just went to bed instantly and stayed there. She marvelled at his sexual energy and invention, and, indeed, at her own. She couldn’t believe how excited he made her. Fortunately it seemed to be the same for him.

‘I can’t get enough of you,’ he told her. He admitted then that he had planned to walk away from her, that from the start his feelings for her had been so strong that he had considered it too dangerous to continue seeing her.

‘That’s why I didn’t phone you, I never intended to contact you again after that first night,’ he explained. ‘Really I didn’t. And when I confronted you outside that pub I had utterly convinced myself that I was just there to give you a piece of my mind about that fucking awful story.’

He smiled, softening his next words. ‘I still think the O’Donnell buy-up was a fucking disgrace, by the way.’

She had not bothered to reply. They both knew that everything in their lives, even including, for once, their respective careers, paled into insignificance compared with the desperate urgency of their love affair.

‘Then, when I saw you, legs up to your armpits, hair down to your waist, knowing how sexy you are, knowing what you’re like there...’ He placed his hand over her crotch. Quite lightly. But just the heat of his touch was enough to send her wild again. ‘I just couldn’t keep my hands off you,’ he continued, moving his fingers as if to prove the point.

‘Thank God,’ she breathed huskily, reaching out for him.

Each time the sex seemed to get better and better. Joanna wondered how long that could go on for. She had never experienced orgasms like this before and yet somehow the more she had of Fielding the more she wanted him. She never seemed to be satisfied. And even when neither of them was capable of any more sexual activity she needed to be close to him, to be touching him all the time, almost as if continually to make sure he was still there.

Her feelings for him grew day by day during that stolen fortnight. But she was confused by them. In many ways he was just the sort of man she didn’t like, yet her desire for him knew no bounds. And, in any case, there were so many different sides to him.

One night he confounded her. After making love to her he rolled off her on to his back, then reached out again with one hand and touched her mouth lightly. ‘I think I’ve fallen in love with you,’ he told her quietly.

Stupidly, perhaps, she thought at first he was just teasing her. Fielding did not fall in love with the women in his life. He bedded them and, when he tired of them, left them and went home to his wife. She knew that well enough and she had always believed that it was madness to get involved with him. She felt vulnerable with him and she didn’t like that.

She decided to play him at him own game. ‘That’s what you say to all the girls, I know your reputation, after all,’ she said lightly.

He wrapped his arms around her. ‘Sleeping around and being with you are two different things, you silly cow,’ he told her affectionately and kissed her on the end of her nose. God, he was a patronising, arrogant, sexist sod, she thought. Why did he have this extraordinary hold over her? ‘That was then. This is now. I want to be with you all the time,’ he continued.

‘You have a wife and children, Mike. I know your kind. I write about them every day. You always go back to your families.’ She didn’t like be taken for a fool and she still had a suspicion that was what he was doing.

His voice hardened. ‘What do you mean, you know my kind? You quite obviously don’t know anything about me. Do you really think I’m just fooling around with you? Do you think what we have is commonplace? Do you honestly think it could be like this between us if that were true? Do you?’

She shook her head lamely. She supposed he was right. How could it?

‘Of course it couldn’t be,’ he continued more gently, not waiting for her to think of anything to say. ‘I’ve never known anything like this before, never. Look, I’ve been thinking — I’m going to try for a transfer to the Met.’

‘What?’ She had really never expected anything like this from him.

‘I mean it, Jo. I can’t stay with Ruth any more. I’d be living a lie now I’ve found this with you. I’m going to tell her when I get home. And that’ll be the end of it.’

Seven

He didn’t leave his wife, of course. Although for a time Joanna really believed that he meant to. Their affair very quickly came to mean everything to her. And she had no reason to doubt that it was the same for him. The frequency with which he managed to manoeuvre time to be with her in London astonished her.

‘When all you think about in life is one thing and how you can achieve it, it’s surprising how much you succeed,’ he told her, grinning. And she knew he was speaking the truth, because that was how it was for her, too.

It was as if every minute that she was not with him was a waste of time. She knew her mind was not on her job in the way that it had always been before, and wondered just how much that was being noticed in the office and at the Yard. She and Chris were living more or less separate lives and had discussed divorce. But for almost three months after the trial and the start of her affair with Fielding they continued to share a home, at least most of the time, and she still went through the motions of giving plausible work-related reasons for her prolonged absences. Habit again. But also she was trying to keep it as civilised as possible. And she successfully kept the affair from her husband — until the anonymous caller decided to start a new campaign.

It was towards the end of July when Chris received a call, telling him, in graphic detail, all about it. Joanna was allegedly away on a story. Again. Actually she was with Fielding. The timing of the phone call was impeccable. The detailed knowledge impressive. But then it would be. You can never keep anything secret from a load of hacks. She had no doubt it was one of her colleagues who was being so malicious and still believed it to be almost certainly Manners.

‘They’re with each other right now, did you know that? They can’t keep their hands off each other. He’s even fucked her in his office...’

Not true but near enough.

Chris repeated the entire conversation to her on her return home. He appeared to be more upset than she would have expected. After all their marriage had deteriorated to the point of being virtually non-existent.

‘Just tell me the truth, Joanna,’ he said. At first he didn’t show his anger, really. He didn’t yell at her and he just looked sad.

She had no intention of lying to him. Not any more. Chris deserved better, she thought, and in any case her affair with Fielding was too important to lie about. ‘It’s all true, more or less,’ she told him quietly. ‘Not some of the details, thank God, but we are having an affair. I’m in love with him and he with me.’

Once she had made the admission her husband’s attitude changed completely. Maybe it was just wounded pride, maybe he really was deeply hurt. She didn’t know. But he totally lost his temper. ‘Please, spare me the sentimental self-delusion,’ he shouted at her. ‘For God’s sake, the man treats you like a slag. He’s fucked you in his office, in the middle of a police station. Did the other pigs join in, or did they just watch? Over his desk was it, or on the floor doggie fashion? Give him blow jobs in taxi cabs, do you?...’

‘Don’t do this, please, Chris,’ she interrupted him, resisting the urge to tell him that sex in the office was one of the details the bastard caller had got wrong — even if only just.

She reached a hand out to him. He knocked it away. It hadn’t really occurred to her that her husband would be this angry, or, indeed, as wounded as he patently was. Not any more. She thought they had gone beyond that. And she cursed herself for not telling him about the affair before he had to learn of it in the dreadful way that he had. She had meant to. It was just that she’d always had a way of putting off unpleasantness and she had hoped eventually to extricate herself from her marriage in as dignified a manner as possible before Chris needed to know.

The next day she moved into a hotel and by the end of the week she had found herself a flat to rent in the Barbican. She’d always thought that the sixties development on the edge of the City was a bit of a concrete jungle, but the one-bedroomed flat had a beautifully spacious open-plan living area with a splendid wood-block floor and looked out over an ornamental lake to the old Roman wall and the church beyond. It was also very central, of course.

‘Good,’ said Fielding when she phoned him in Exeter to tell him the news. ‘I’ve just got the job to sort out, then I’ll tell Ruth. I’ll be moving in with you before you know it.’

However, the months passed and nothing changed. They talked constantly on the phone. Most weeks Fielding seemed to manage to get to London for at least one night, sometimes more. Joanna had no idea how he managed it, but he did. It was nowhere near enough, though. The physical attraction between them did not diminish. The sexual chemistry seemed to grow more intense rather than less. Joanna was quite sure they were both deeply in love. But still Fielding did not leave his wife.

Christmas came and went, and Joanna found out just how hard it was at holiday times to be embroiled in an affair with a married man. He spent the festive season with his family, of course, and she volunteered to work on Christmas Day. The demands of a daily paper did have certain uses.

Early in the new year Mike claimed that he had finally told Ruth and his children that he was leaving them for Joanna. Later, Joanna was not even sure of that.

‘I’m not going to be able to rush it, Jo,’ he had said. ‘It’s my daughter who’s the problem. She’s ten now. I don’t think I realised how much they take in at that age. She just cries all the time and begs me not to leave her. Every time I go out of the house she makes me promise I’ll be coming back. I just have to give it some time, Jo.’

She agreed with him, sympathised with him even. Eventually he said he thought his daughter was getting used to the idea, that maybe she was beginning to understand at last that it wasn’t her he was leaving. That he would never leave her. Maybe he would bring her to meet Jo.

He didn’t, of course, but Jo was hopeful. For a while she thought he really was going to do the deed now. But no. Instead, he told her that his wife’s mother was dying. She had cancer. ‘She’s been more of a mother to me than my own, Jo. We don’t expect her to live more than a few weeks. I really feel I have to stay with Ruth to see her through this.’

She went along with that too. What choice did she have? She felt guilty enough about breaking up his family — though God knew why she should with her knowledge of his track record. If she had not become a threat to his marriage, then it would surely eventually have been something or someone else.

Then, when he told her that his mother-in-law had died, Jo’s hopes were renewed again. ‘It won’t be long now,’ he said. ‘But Ruth is in a right state, so I may not be able to get away quite so much for a bit while I settle her down. I owe her that much, don’t I? But it’ll be over soon and we’ll be together for good. In a month or two max — I promise.’

It never seemed to be over, though, and they were not together. Not in a month, or two months, or even three. And she was indeed seeing less of him than ever.

He explained one day that he thought Ruth was having a breakdown. She needed treatment. She was behaving in a totally neurotic fashion and that wasn’t like her. ‘She’s threatening to take me to the cleaners if I do leave her, Jo,’ he told her on the phone, which seemed fast to be becoming their greatest point of contact. ‘I’ve always said I’d provide for her and the kids, but she wants to wipe me out. I’ve got to sort it, somehow. She doesn’t just want the house, she’s after my pension, the lot. I can’t let her have everything, can I? I mean, we have to be practical as well, don’t we?’

Joanna agreed, in a distant kind of way, that yes, of course they must be practical.

When she hung up she made herself think clearly about the situation. Fielding had come up with every possible story in the family package — distraught child, neurotic wife, dying elderly parent, financial problems. It was beginning to dawn on her that she had probably been right in the first place. Mike Fielding was not going to leave home, for her, or for anyone else.

Somehow she didn’t doubt that he had genuinely intended to. She believed that he had fallen head over heels in love with her. Indeed, she believed that he remained head over heels in love with her. But in the end that didn’t seem to help much. He was tearing her apart. As far as her own feelings were concerned, sometimes she was no longer sure whether she hated him or loved him. What she was sure of was that she could not let it go on this way. She was drinking too much and smoking too much. She had lost weight, and she felt tired and listless all the time. She lived for her meetings with Mike, yet she knew she was being destroyed by a relationship she had started to realise was going nowhere.

Displaying a strength she did not know she still had, she eventually issued Fielding with an ultimatum. It was the oldest one in the book. ‘Leave your wife or stay away from me,’ she told him. ‘And I’m not going to let you touch me again unless you do leave home.’

He had just arrived for yet another stolen night. He had caught the train from Exeter that evening and had to leave again early in the morning. ‘Oh, come on, Jo, I’m doing my best,’ he told her. ‘It won’t be like this for ever.’ He didn’t sound too shocked or upset.

She realised he probably didn’t believe her. This was what women usually said to married men, wasn’t it? And they almost never meant it, just kept on putting up with the three-card trick. But Joanna had never said this to him before. He had brought it on himself with more than a year of broken promises. And she meant every word of it.

‘Well you’re not chucking me out right now, surely,’ he said, trying to sound jokey. ‘I’ve just come on a two-and-a-half-hour train journey.’

‘You can sleep on the sofa,’ she told him and she meant that, too. But he cheated, something at which he excelled, she considered wryly. He got up in the night and slid into her bed and damn near into her before she awakened. The excitement rose in her as it always did. They made love, and all the while he told her how much he loved her and promised they would be together. They really would.

In the morning she felt angry again, with him and herself. And as he left she said, ‘I still mean what I said, Mike. This really will be the last time unless you keep your promises, unless you do leave home. I’ve never pushed you, the decision has always been yours and that’s still the case. But you can’t have it both ways any more.’

He smiled in that rather patronising way he had and left.

He didn’t leave home and Jo kept her word to him and to herself. She told him it was over. Then she refused even to talk to him on the phone. Once he turned up at the office and another time at her flat. She didn’t open the door, but for several minutes she heard him outside in the corridor, ringing the bell and calling through the letter box. ‘I know you’re in there, Jo. Please open the door. You don’t understand...’

But I do, she thought. Oh, but I do understand so very well. And so, I imagine, does your wife. With a great effort of will she sat quietly in her living room until he finally left. And so, in August 1982, just over a year after she had left her husband, Joanna brought the most exciting, most mesmerising relationship of her life to an end. It nearly broke her heart. But ultimately she preferred losing him to sharing him.

Paul Potter remained a good friend to Joanna throughout the whole thing. Although her affair with Fielding had, with the usual alacrity, become common knowledge in the office, Paul was the only person she ever confided anything in.

After she left her husband, on the countless evenings when Fielding was not around, the end-of-day drinks in the Stab had frequently stretched into supper at Jo Allen’s or the Bleeding Awful. It was called the Bleeding Heart, really, and was actually rather a good restaurant and wine bar, and certainly not awful at all. But juggling with names was a permanent fixture of Fleet Street life.

During that period she began to tell Paul more and more, even about the anonymous phone calls, and how the last one had brought things to a head with her husband and led to her finally leaving him, and also about how unsure she was of Fielding and what he really intended, in spite of his promises.

‘Well, at least now your own marriage is over you’ll find out soon enough what he’s prepared to do about his,’ Paul had said sensibly. ‘And I don’t have to tell you how rarely men with families leave them for somebody else, do I?’

She had shaken her head. Potter was just what she needed in a friend. His feet were so firmly on the ground it might help her keep hers there. Paul was such easy company, clever, funny, unthreatening. She began to enjoy her times with him more and more, and to seek him out with greater frequency. It didn’t ever occur to her to wonder at how readily he always made himself available for her. She knew he was single and lived alone, but she had no idea what commitments or relationships there were in his life. Certainly he always made time for her and she was grateful for it. But she continued to think of him as just a friend.

‘The pillocks in the office probably think we’re having an affair too,’ she told him after several drinks one night and laughed as if at the absurdity of it.

‘More than likely,’ Paul had said, with a shrug and a brief smile.

Looking back later, she wondered whether she would have had the strength to finish with Mike in the way that she had without Paul’s support. Somehow she rather doubted it. Paul had played an important part just by being there and being someone to talk to. Someone trustworthy, someone who never seemed to tire of listening.

It was not until a month or so after she split with Mike that he made any kind of move on her.

He suggested they go to dinner at the Ivy to celebrate his recent appointment to assistant editor. She had agreed readily enough. She loved the Ivy and she had been very pleased for Paul about his promotion. It had become apparent to her that the career of this quiet yet very talented man was beginning to take off, and Joanna found that she was delighted. The more senior a position he managed to achieve the better, she thought. She reckoned it would make a pleasant change from the old-fashioned bulldozer sort to have a man who was cleverly thoughtful and imaginative at the helm.

They had an excellent dinner and yet again she thought how much she enjoyed his company and how entertaining he was. Indeed, she barely remembered Fielding all evening.

Outside the Ivy he asked her if she could manage one more drink.

She was beginning to get the taste and said she was sure she could.

He hailed a taxi and gave an address in Kennington, which she assumed was his home. ‘I have a rather good bottle in the fridge,’ he said.

He lived in a beautifully restored four-storey house in one of those lovely Kennington squares. Not all the houses were renovated to the standard of Paul’s home, though.

‘It was falling down when I bought it and I got it for a song,’ he told her. ‘I think it’s quite nice now, don’t you?’

She told him that was an understatement. The house was drop-dead gorgeous. Paul’s taste was impeccable. It was simply decorated and furnished, and some very striking abstract originals by Clive Gunnell, one of the few artists whose work she recognised immediately, hung on the plain cream walls.

The more you got to know this man the better he seemed, she thought. But he was something of a dark horse.

He produced a bottle of vintage Bollinger and only when they had almost finished it did he make a very gentle pass at her, kissing her lightly on the lips. It was in stark contrast to the impassioned first clinch with Mike, Joanna thought, but perhaps this was just what she needed in life. Certainly she could do with a sexual encounter again, that was for sure. Even a month seemed like a long period of abstinence, coming after the intense eroticism of her relationship with Mike.

As she had expected, sex with Paul Potter did not live up to that. Not straight away, at any rate. But Paul was a man who worked at what he did, whatever it was. The more she was with him, the better the sex became as he grew more aware of what she wanted, what she needed.

After that first night together their relationship moved very fast. Perhaps because she was unused to living alone and to being single, before she realised quite what was going on they were spending just about every night together either in his house or her apartment.

And suddenly, and she had little idea how that happened either, they began to talk about marriage. She found herself agreeing that it would be a rather nice idea. One evening he turned up at the Barbican with a beautiful diamond ring, which she allowed him to slide on to the third finger of her left hand. He helped her rush through her divorce and arranged for them to be married in the City with just a handful of friends present.

It was only later that she realised how much work he’d put into all the plans and all the arrangements, for the divorce, the forthcoming wedding and a honeymoon in New York. There was little doubt that for Joanna her marriage was something that happened on the rebound.

But Paul made absolutely no secret of the fact that it was something he had longed for and always hoped might happen one day if he were patient.

She had yet to learn how determined and focused her husband-to-be was, beneath his quiet and unassuming exterior. But as their wedding day loomed — December 1982, two weeks before Christmas and just three months after they first slept together, Paul said there was no point in hanging around at their age, after all he was quite sure of his own mind and she hoped she was of hers too now — she began to realise that she felt happy and content for the first time in almost as long as she could remember. There were no longer these huge tensions and uncertainties hanging over her. She didn’t have to sit around waiting for the phone to ring, wondering if the man she loved could get away to be with her and how long he could stay. Her life was suddenly completely stress-free. Paul made absolutely sure of that and it was a very pleasant change to be looked after in this way.

However, the knives remained out for her in the office. The small but powerful coterie of male journalists who disliked and resented her so much, led as ever by Manners, were apparently out to get her with a vengeance still, their resentment no doubt fuelled by her projected marriage to a man now fairly obviously destined for big things in the newspaper world. Their continual comments in the office, to each other but clearly meant to be overheard by her, were getting extremely tedious. Particularly as they were using that familiar old trick. She could not really defend herself because she could never be absolutely sure that the snatches of barbed comment, more often than not obscene, were indeed directed at her. She was pretty damned sure, though. And it infuriated her.

‘He’s hung like a donkey, of course, that’s what she likes...’

‘...lets him give it her up the arse...’

‘No wonder there’s a fucking queue for her.’

Jo had no choice except to pretend she did not hear. But boy, did it make her mad. She did not repeat any of this to Paul. There was no point. She did not want to stir things up any more and she feared any intervention by him would just make matters worse. She just tried not to think about it.

But three days before their wedding she returned to the Kennington house they now shared, unusually a couple of hours later than her fiancé, to find Paul oddly angry. ‘I’ve just had a phone call from your old friend,’ he told her at once.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked, taken completely unaware.

‘The same perverted creep who plagued you and Chris, I assume,’ he said. Paul’s lips curled in distaste. ‘You can guess the sort of thing, “Do you know how your girlfriend gets her stories? She just takes her knickers off.” More and worse. I don’t even intend to repeat it. It’s just sick.’

She was horrified. ‘Oh, my God, now the bastard’s starting on you,’ she blurted out. ‘I am so sorry. I promise you, Paul, I’ve not even seen Mike since you and I have been together.’

‘Don’t worry, I know that, darling,’ said Paul. He glanced at her with concern. ‘Jo, you didn’t think I was angry at you, did you? Absolutely not, I can assure you. If you think for one moment that I would let some twisted creep harm our relationship then you don’t know me very well.’

Jo thought he might still be right about that, but the more she did get to know him the more she was coming to like and respect him. And love, too, she supposed. He was some man, that was for certain. Paul was treating the kind of incident that could rock long-term marriages with cool disdain. He was angry. Yes. But he was also calm and thoughtful. She studied him with open admiration.

‘I have the advantage over poor Chris,’ he said. ‘In the first place I believe in you and trust you absolutely. In the second place I know that bastard Manners and, in spite of his somewhat pathetic attempts to muffle his voice, talking into a handkerchief or whatever, I am absolutely sure it was him on the phone. In the third place, I am in a unique position to deal with him.’ He smiled his enigmatic smile. ‘Now come here and have a cuddle,’ he commanded. Gratefully she went into his arms. Paul’s strength was such a comfort. His certainty such a relief. With him there seemed to be no problems that couldn’t be overcome with extraordinary ease. She felt the worries that had been beginning to settle on her shoulders again lift once more. With Paul she never seemed to have anything to worry about. To her annoyance she started to cry into his shoulder. But her tears came from relief and happiness.

‘That’s it, my darling. Cry as much as you want. You’re safe now. I’ll sort it out.’

Joanna was in the press room at the Yard the next day when a call came through on the Comet phone — a direct link with the news desk — summoning Manners back to the office for a sudden meeting with the editor. Later Tom Mitchell phoned Jo personally, as head of the crime department, to tell her that the older man had been offered, and had accepted, a redundancy package. He had been asked to clear his desk at once. Joanna knew perfectly well that early retirement would never have entered Manners’s head. He was the kind of old hack who would try to hang on by his fingertips long after his sell-by date because — one of the reasons Joanna’s appointment as chief crime correspondent had so incensed him — his job had always been his life. Actually, she wouldn’t knock him for that. It was true of some of the best. ‘What happened?’

‘I’m afraid that’s between me and Frank,’ said the editor.

‘There must have been a reason...’ her voice tailed off.

‘Private reasons, isn’t that what they say?’ said Tom and she realised she was getting nowhere.

For once the office gossip network got nothing either. She confronted Paul, of course, but as usual, he gave little away. ‘Now what could I possibly have had to do with it?’ he remarked. But the wide smile he treated her to was not as enigmatic as usual. In fact, it was decidedly self-satisfied. And the next time he made love to her he held her very tightly and told her that there was something she must always remember. ‘For as long as you and I are together nobody will ever harm you, Jo,’ he said. ‘I will always make sure of that, I promise you.’

She was beginning to realise that she was marrying a quite exceptional man.

Fielding only found out that Joanna had married again when he rang her office, for the umpteenth time, in yet another fruitless attempt to speak to her. Until that fateful moment he had been quite unable to believe that he would not be able to persuade her to see him again eventually. The secretary who answered the phone told him casually that she was on her honeymoon. Very carefully he replaced the telephone receiver. He was in love with Joanna Bartlett. He had really meant to leave his wife for her and still did not quite know why he had been unable to.

Joanna had been right about him. His feelings for her had been, still were, entirely genuine. And he had always intended to fulfil his promises to her. It was simply that somehow, when push came to shove, he just couldn’t. Joanna had been right in another way too. He had indeed never even told his wife about her. He didn’t know why he had not managed to do that either. He had meant to. And, more important, he did not know why he had lied to Joanna continually. The excuses — the distraught daughter, the dying mother-in-law — had been the easy way, of course, a method of smoothing his path, keeping Jo sweet. He had been unable to bring himself to face the upheaval required in order to commit himself properly to her and he had been terrified of losing her. So he had lied. Maybe if he had been honest with her he might have been able to keep her.

She had known he had lied, he was sure of it, known he had continually deceived her. And in the end she wouldn’t stand for it. He had respected her for that — more than he respected himself, that was for sure.

His life was becoming a complete mess. The internal investigation into Jimbo O’Donnell’s evidence-planting allegation against him had petered out, as Fielding had predicted it would, and he’d never even been suspended from duty. But he was quite sure that his high-flying career had been dealt an almost fatal blow. The word was always going to be that at best he was flawed and couldn’t be trusted, at worst he was bent. Certainly there had been no sign of his previously expected promotion coming through. Nor, he felt, was there likely to be for a very long time.

Now, with Joanna irrevocably out of his life, he could not imagine that he’d ever again be half the man he had once been. Not in any way.

Jo was married again. He was so stunned he had not even asked to whom. It was extraordinary. They had only been apart for four months and she was married already, and he didn’t even know who her new husband was.

All he knew was that he’d lost her. Really lost her. For ever.

Fielding did what he usually did. He reached for the whisky bottle.