A Kind Of Wild Justice

Eight

Twenty years after the murder of Angela Phillips, the whole chain of events still seemed so vivid to Joanna at her desk in Canary Wharf. It had been the most important time of her life, really, in many different ways. And yet it was a part of her past she was not sure she wanted to delve into again.

Hearing Mike Fielding’s voice had somehow not been the surprise it should have been after so long. Maybe it was just that she had always half expected that one day their paths would cross once more.

He hadn’t said his name. He would have known he didn’t need to. Not to her. Not even after almost two decades.

‘Hello, Mike.’

It seemed a long time before he spoke again. Perhaps he was hoping she would continue. But he had phoned her. He could take the lead.

‘How are you?’ he asked eventually.

‘Fine. How are you?’

‘Oh. I’m fine too.’

Awkwardly polite, what a way for them to be after all that had happened between them, she thought. But then, eighteen years or so was a big chunk out of your life.

‘Something’s happened, though, something I thought you might want to know about, maybe help with...’

‘So you phone after all this time because you want my help, do you? Bloody typical!’ She wasn’t sure if she was angry or amused, or maybe just exasperated. He didn’t seem to have changed much, that was for certain.

He didn’t respond to her remark, but continued as if she had not spoken. ‘The Beast of Dartmoor — we’ve got a DNA match,’ he told her flatly. ‘And it’s O’Donnell.’

‘Ah!’ Again she wasn’t surprised. Like Mike she’d always believed in O’Donnell’s guilt and had never been able quite to forget the case, however much she pretended to herself that she had. She had been almost as involved in it as Mike had, perhaps always believed it would one day come back into her life again.

He told her all he knew, about the drink-driving arrest, the routine DNA swab, the computer picking it up.

‘Bang to rights, but I can do bugger all about it,’ he finished. ‘I don’t need to tell you about double jeopardy. The bastard can’t be tried again.’

‘No, but why don’t you guys do what you usually do in these situations?’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked sharply, instinctively on the defensive, even with her, perhaps particularly with her.

She gave a small tut of irritation. ‘Get him for something else, of course. He can’t stand trial for murder again, but what about rape and kidnap? If O’Donnell’s guilty of murder he’s certainly guilty of both of those, and he’s never actually been charged with either.’

‘Doesn’t work, Jo,’ he said. ‘We tried. Put just that to the CPS and they threw it out. Still part of the original circumstances. Abuse of process. Not in the public interest after twenty years. Prospect of a conviction unlikely. Usual crap.

‘You’ve no idea how tough it is to get the Crown Prosecution Service to accept that kind of sidestepping nowadays. And the mess the law’s in over DNA doesn’t help. If they don’t have a precedent to look up in some dusty old book, lawyers don’t have a clue.

‘Apart from double jeopardy the biggest snag with O’Donnell is that you can’t use DNA obtained during one case, a drink-driving offence or anything else, come to that, as evidence in any other unrelated investigation. Section 64 of PACE. Bloody daft, if you ask me and high time it was changed — but there it is.’

Joanna leaned back in her chair. PACE. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act. Of course. She’d kind of known that part of what he had told her. But he was right. It was complex. ‘Presumably you haven’t still got the blood and urine samples taken when he was originally arrested for murder?’ she asked.

‘Destroyed on his lawyers’ instructions right after the case. Acquitted man’s right, as you know. And, God knows, he had the kind of legal team who weren’t going to miss that.’

‘You’ve checked, I suppose? It’s not unknown for those forensic boys to keep samples they should have destroyed, is it?’

‘No, it’s not. It’s a lottery, though. In fact it’s always a lottery whether or not samples from a twenty-year-old case are still in store. But if they had been we would have had a match come up before the drink-driving thing, because we went through every outstanding murder and rape on our books about three years ago and did DNA checks on all the suspects whenever there were samples still available — I think every force in the country has done it now. That’s why O’Donnell’s DNA, taken from Angela Phillips’s body, was already logged.’

‘And you can’t make him give a new DNA sample because the CPS won’t let you charge him with anything?’ She was beginning to remember now. PACE again. The police had the power to take non intimate-samples — like head hair or a buccal swab — without a suspect’s permission only under quite precise conditions, basically if he is charged with a recordable offence or is being held in police custody on the authority of a court.

‘Exactly.’

‘Of course, you could pop round and ask the wanker if he’d like to give a voluntary sample, to clear the matter up once and for all, as it were,’ continued Joanna.

Fielding’s laugh was mirthless.

‘You mean you don’t think there’s much chance of him co-operating?’ she queried ironically.

‘I’ve been round, actually... well, I just happened to be in his neighbourhood.’ Fielding paused. ‘Only it was unofficial, if you see what I mean...’

She saw. And she wasn’t surprised. He’d been told it was over, that there would be no further police action, but he couldn’t resist jumping straight in. ‘Brilliant,’ she said. ‘And how far did it get you?’

‘Not very. I just wanted him to know that I knew. That’s all.’

She could imagine it all too well. ‘Did he say anything?’

‘Smug as ever. Even if we could prove he’d had sex with the dead girl, so what, he said. Maybe she’d been a willing partner, maybe she’d begged him for it. Didn’t mean he’d killed her. I tell you, Jo, I nearly smashed his face in.’

‘You didn’t, though, I hope.’

‘Let’s just say it was a very close thing.’ He chuckled.

‘Mike, not even a jury would swallow that “willing partner” crap, surely. Not with what happened to that poor kid?’

‘I don’t think so either, but it’s irrelevant, like I’ve told you, certainly as far as police action is concerned.’ His voice suddenly became very earnest. ‘Look, Jo, I’ve gone over and over in my mind what we could do to get the bastard. I reckon there’s only one thing left. A private prosecution.’

‘But double jeopardy still applies. And the burden of proof is the same.’

‘Yes. I reckon he could be done for rape and kidnap in a private action, though. The CPS wouldn’t have to be involved and I believe a really good barrister could swing it. I really do. Particularly if we made sure that the committal proceedings were after October.’

‘What happens in October?’

‘The Human Rights Act finally comes into force in the UK,’ he said.

Of course. She should have remembered that. ‘But it won’t change double jeopardy, will it?’ she asked. ‘It’s supposed to be about protecting people’s rights, after all.’

‘Yes. But the rights of victims as well as suspected criminals, Jo. I’ve just been on a course. It’s mandatory for coppers now, it’s got to be, or the whole damned lot of us will end up being locked up instead of the fucking villains. You can start forgetting Westminster and the Law Lords. Think Strasbourg and Brussels. Mostly it’s a nightmare, but hard to believe as it may be, Europe’s actually come up with one thing that might help those of us who are at least supposed to be on the side of the good guys. Look it up. The Seventh Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights, Article Four. Oh — and then go to Section Six of the Human Rights Act.’

‘OK,’ she said casually. ‘I’ll look it up. I don’t quite get where this conversation is leading, though. Why are you telling me all this?’

‘Because I want you to go to that poor kid’s family and persuade them to take out a private prosecution,’ he said.

‘Oh, is that all?’

‘Christ, Jo, you’re a bit heavy on the sarcasm today, aren’t you,’ he countered, the irritation clear in his voice.

‘You really don’t change, Mike,’ she murmured softly.

‘I was thinking just the same thing about you,’ he said.

‘OK, why do you want me to go to her family? Why don’t you go to them yourself? Do they know about the DNA match, has anybody told them?’

‘No, they don’t know and the brass have decided they shouldn’t be told. No point, too painful, some such bollocks. I don’t agree with it, but I don’t dare go against them. I’ve only got two and a half years to do for my thirty and I have enough blots on my record as it is.’

‘Maybe you have changed after all,’ she said, her tone lightly bantering.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Or maybe I’ve just settled for what I’ve got. I’ve risked enough already. There comes a time. The Phillipses wouldn’t want to hear from me anyway; they blamed me, you know, left me in no doubt that they considered me responsible for the whole damn cock-up. I’m the last person to persuade them to get involved in another major court case, to drag it all up again.’

‘I don’t think they were exactly mad about me in the end either,’ she remarked wryly. ‘Not after the buy-up.’

‘Perhaps, but you didn’t have the same personal involvement — and you’ve still got clout.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Well, I’m damn sure they’d still like to see their daughter’s murderer get what’s coming to him, but whether or not they’ll be prepared to take on a case against him by themselves I very much doubt. Apart from the anguish of it, there’s the financial side too. A case like this could cost hundreds of thousands if it went wrong. I know they were wealthy people then, but I’m told their fortunes have changed considerably. I don’t think they’d dare take the risk. Not after all this time. I was hoping you might be able to get the Comet behind this one. Get the paper to finance it.’

‘Mike, for God’s sake. What planet are you on? Papers don’t throw money around like that any more.’

‘C’mon, Jo. They do if a story’s big enough. We both know that. You do a deal with this family and you get everything first. Think about it. It’ll be a huge ground-breaking court case and the Comet will be on the inside. All you have to do is pay the costs and it’s yours.’

‘Just like that,’ she responded.

‘Just like that,’ he repeated expressionlessly.

‘Well, it’s not just like that, Mike, not any more, not if it ever was. What if it all goes pear-shaped again? The CPS have turned you guys down. The risk factor of a private prosecution would be huge. Apart from anything else, there’s a big argument that, right or wrong, this case was buried a long time ago.’

‘I don’t think it ever will be, not for you and me,’ he said quietly.

He was right, of course, and perhaps it was that which made her so angry. ‘Oh, grow up, Mike,’ she snapped. ‘The case, you, me, everything — it was two decades ago, for Christ’s sake. It’s over. Anyway, even if I wanted to get involved again I honestly don’t think I would have a hope in hell of getting the Comet to back it, not in the present climate.’

She knew she must sound patronising. She knew how much he hated being patronised, particularly by her. But she still didn’t expect him to come back to her quite the way he did.

‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d have any problem there, Joanna,’ he shot back at her. ‘After all, you are sleeping with the editor.’

The anger overwhelmed her then. ‘Fuck off, Mike,’ she told him.

Joanna put one hand to her head and glared at the telephone, which she had promptly slammed down on him. Just who did Mike Fielding think he was? How could he be so damned arrogant? How could he think he could just bowl back into her life with all his baggage? The whole O’Donnell business was his problem, not hers. She had just been a young crime reporter covering the case — not the detective who blew it wide open because, as usual, he was in too much of a hurry. For her it was history. She had a new life. She had the column she had always wanted, ‘Sword of Justice’, a weekly eulogy championing the rights of the individual against the restrictions of a government and a legal system which purported to be liberal but actually, in her opinion, encroached upon freedom more than any other in her lifetime. She was proud of ‘Sword of Justice’, even though she knew well enough it was little more than the Comet’s sop to great campaigning days long past.

She also had a family she was proud of, an eleven-year-old daughter who was the apple of her eye — and a husband. A husband who happened to be the editor. Anybody but Mike would have said, ‘After all, you are married to the editor.’ Not Fielding. He had always had a way with words. He could always out-snide the best. He could never resist going just that bit further than other people would.

Her eyes were drawn to the photograph on her desk. She and Paul, taken at their wedding reception. Both beaming at the camera. She was wearing a tailored cream silk suit. It still seemed very beautiful to her, as indeed it should have been. It was Paul Costelloe and had cost nearly £1000 even then. Her bridegroom had wanted the best for her. For them both.

She studied him closely. Even features. Average height. Mousy brown hair, thick and springy, slightly longer then than would be fashionable now. Horn-rimmed glasses. He was never a typical Englishman in any way. She always thought he had looked more like a Harvard preppie in those days, a real American WASP. He was glancing at her sideways, smiling proudly, shyly almost. He did not have the appearance of a remarkable man at all. He had never looked like one or, in his younger days at any rate, appeared to behave like one.

She switched her attention back to her own image in the photograph. The long mid-blond hair framing a thin person’s narrow face, her smile easy and wide, displaying even white teeth. She’d had them professionally scraped and cleaned four times a year then, in order to keep the nicotine stains at bay. That had been her big vanity. She hadn’t been able to stand the thought of yellow teeth, but she never even considered giving up smoking, not until years later. All too often it had felt as if only the cigarettes got her through the day. She looked happy in the picture and she supposed she had been happy, though what she actually remembered more than anything else was her sense of bewilderment.

She looked into her husband’s eyes in the photograph, masked by those thick-lensed glasses. She had often thought they must be very convenient to hide behind and once she had asked him if he really needed such thick lenses. He had laughed lightly and changed the subject. She had never asked again.

Absently she stretched out her right hand and placed the tip of her forefinger very precisely over his smile so that the lower part of his face was covered and you could only see his eyes. Masked by those heavy lenses they were, as ever, merely cool and fathomless.

She sighed. As well as being a bloody great editor he was an attentive, caring husband and a brilliant father who managed to find time for both his wife and daughter in spite of holding down one of the most demanding jobs in the modern world.

Their daughter, Emily, was bright, well adjusted, healthy and self-possessed. Perhaps a little too self-possessed, but certainly she had so far given neither of her parents much anxiety about anything. Of course, Joanna realised that might all change when Emily reached the dreaded teens. However, perversely she knew, she sometimes found herself rather looking forward to having a petulant adolescent to deal with. Occasionally it felt as if life were just too well ordered.

The family lived in a dream home on Richmond Hill. Joanna spent three days a week in the office of the Comet and the rest of her time enjoying herself. House and daughter were undemanding. Both were impeccably organised, almost all according to her husband’s direction, and with the help of a four-times-a-week cleaner and an au pair who picked Emily up from school every day and supervised her until whichever parent returned first.

Joanna had never had reason for one moment to doubt the love of the man she had married, nor his commitment to her. Her friends thought she was immensely lucky and she knew she was. She supposed that she loved him too, but it was not something to which she gave much thought.

She ran her hands through her hair, still more or less the same shade of blonde it had always been although helped along occasionally by streaked highlights, but now cropped short in a fashionable up-to-date style. She had put on some weight but her body was still in good shape — muscles firmish, no dreaded cellulite yet, thank God — maintained these days by regular workouts at the gym. People said she had changed little over the years. She had suddenly reached the grand old age of forty-seven, with another birthday approaching fast, although she really didn’t know how the hell it had happened, but a well-defined bone structure had kept her face from falling — so far, anyway. Her complexion remained clear, her skin lined a little around the eyes and mouth but still relatively smooth and unblemished. She supposed that one of the advantages of never having been a great beauty or even particularly pretty was that you didn’t change so much with the years. She certainly felt much the same as she had always done, but then, that was always the problem of ageing. You did feel the same, inside. She realised that she was tapping the heel of her left foot rhythmically on the ground. She felt disturbed, unsure of herself, for the first time in years. In fact, truth be told, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt anything much for some years.

She had probably been too close to the Beast of Dartmoor case, too aware of the way Fielding and the rest of the team had handled it.

Now, twenty years later, she couldn’t resist being intrigued by what Mike had told her, but one half of her didn’t even want to think about it, really didn’t want to get involved again. For many years she hadn’t allowed herself to think about the case or anything else that it represented to her. She had definitely not allowed herself to think about Mike Fielding — which had made for a considerably easier state of mind.

She had half convinced herself that she really had forgotten him, that both he and the case were completely over for her. She had been wrong on both counts and that had come as something of a shock.

Suddenly it seemed like yesterday. The bloody man could still get under her skin like nobody else. And the case that had brought them together had always been much more than just another story. The poor murdered teenager had got under her skin, too. As had James Martin O’Donnell. The thought of playing a part in at least achieving some kind of justice, after all those years, appealed greatly, albeit against her better judgement. The problem was that all of it was tangled up inside her head with her memories of Fielding and what he had meant to her.

She wasn’t sure that she wanted to risk becoming involved in anything which might affect the life she and Paul had built for themselves. They were, after all, the golden couple of the media world: attractive, rich and privileged. In demand at all the right dinner parties. Rumour had it Paul was up for a knighthood. That would make Jo Lady Potter. Potter. Not the sort of name that went all that well with a title, really, she pondered. But Paul wouldn’t mind. He had worked towards it in the way that he worked towards everything in his life. Quietly. Assiduously. He had been editor for twelve years now, by far the longest of any of the other tabloid editors and something of a miracle in the modern world. The knighthood would not be so much a reward for longevity, however, as for the Comet’s so far more or less unwavering support for the present prime minister — for whom bestowing a knighthood was a small price to pay to ensure the continuing brainwashing of the paper’s ten million or so readers. Paul was also one of the few of the current crop of tabloid editors who had always managed to keep his nose clean.

He had to be the cleverest man she had ever met. There was little doubt about that. He remained deceptive in his manner, which was still quiet and relatively unassuming. Look him in those unfathomable brown eyes, though, and you got a glimpse of how exceptional he was. Theirs had never been a relationship born of great passion — not for her at any rate. They just fitted together, somehow. She always felt that she had found the right man. Certainly all her friends and family thought she had. She and Paul were generally regarded as having the ideal Fleet Street marriage. And she supposed they did. More or less.

She sighed and gazed out of the window. The Comet offices were on the twenty-first floor of the giant shining tower block known as 1 Canada Square. From her desk she could see right along the River Thames to Greenwich. It had been almost as good a day in London as in Devon. The sun had already set behind the distinctive dome of the Royal Observatory and had left a stunning afterglow. Streaks of crimson blazed across a darkening sky. The view was sensational. She looked around her. Her desk was at the far end of a huge open-plan room, as far away as possible from the editor’s office. After all, he was her husband. She preferred her own space.

The whole working area was clean and efficient-looking. There was very little clutter, the furniture new and streamlined, silent computers sitting on pristine desks. The atmosphere was calm and quiet. A bit like the editor, really. Rows of subs and reporters sat staring at flickering screens, barely moving. Certainly not talking. There was no chatter, no noise at all. Just still heads and busy fingers. Even the litter was sanitised. Empty plastic salad boxes had replaced greasy fish and chip papers.

God, she could even remember the smell of the grubby old offices at the top of Fetter Lane. There had been an air-conditioning system, of sorts, which never seemed to work properly. It was always either too hot or too cold, and by about this time in the evening the air would be acrid, the odour of fish and chips and bits of decaying burger mixed with stale cigarette smoke, beery breath and the odd blast of whisky fumes. Why was it that she and all the other dinosaurs yearned for the old days? More than anything, she knew, it was the atmosphere of excitement which had hovered over them continually, like a great big cloud waiting to burst, and which somehow seemed to be lacking from modern newspaper offices. The sheer hubbub of the place had been so much a part of that. The way the whole building shook when the presses started up. The clattering typewriters, journalists who talked to each other, often shouting across the room, instead of sending e-mails. Internal e-mails really irritated her. She had once suggested to Paul that he ban the practice.

His response had been heavily sarcastic. ‘Ban in-house e-mails. A really good progressive idea that. What age are you living in, Joanna?’

Interesting, really, Paul accusing her of living in the past when here she was confronted with it and finding it not welcome at all. Far too disturbing.

Absent-mindedly Jo nibbled at a thumbnail. She had weekly manicures now, of course, but she still couldn’t seem to stop herself biting her nails occasionally. She successfully chewed off a small piece of nail that had been irritating her and it dropped on to the sleeve of her jacket. She brushed it away. She was expensively dressed, as usual, in a sleek grey silk trouser suit, which would take her on to the chattering classes dinner party she and Paul were heading for later. There was no doubt she was in pretty good order for her age and she was probably fitter than she had been twenty years ago thanks to those gym sessions.

She had stopped smoking, of course. Hadn’t everybody? But she still drank just as much, maybe more. The media world might have entered a new puritanical age but she wasn’t giving up the booze even if she did seem to be surrounded by bright young things who thought a bottle of Mexican beer with a bit of lime shoved incongruously into its neck was the height of decadence and sophistication.

She wondered what they would have made of an era when a trolley laden with wine, beer and spirits used to be trundled weekly around the offices of the Comet, and senior executives were invited to choose supplies for their fridges and drinks cabinets. Free of charge, too. Even she, as chief crime correspondent, had had a couch and a fridge in her office. She didn’t qualify for the free booze, but it was common practice for those who did to order a few extra bottles in order to help out those who didn’t. Editorial meetings, particularly on Friday evenings, were inclined to turn into parties. On hot days in the summer the editor and his top men sometimes used to decamp for the afternoon to a swanky Thames-side hotel up near Maidenhead, from which, in the days even before faxes, they would edit the paper long-distance with the aid of a few extra telephone lines and a squad of swarthy despatch riders, laden with page proofs and bundles of subbed copy, running a motorbike shuttle service between the hotel and Fleet Street.

Nowadays, of course, alcohol was banned from the offices of the Comet. Even the editor had a fridge containing only soft drinks with which to entertain visitors.

She smiled nostalgically before reminding herself of the dangers of looking back at the past through rose-coloured spectacles. She made herself remember the appalling antics of Frank Manners and his cohorts. But even most of that merely widened her nostalgic smile. If you told the kids today, of either sex, the way the guys back then had behaved they wouldn’t believe it. After all, if a chap in an office nowadays made the most polite of personally admiring remarks to a woman colleague he was likely to get done for sexual harassment. ‘You’re looking good, Joanna. I bet you had a really great fuck last night,’ as a form of casual greeting would be quite beyond their comprehension.

Strange thing was that while she loathed sexism and certainly sex discrimination as much as the next woman, she did not remember being too discomfited by the things that had happened — until Frank Manners became completely out of control. But at least those guys were human beings, albeit often pathetic ones, and not pre-programmed robots. Joanna was not entirely in favour of political correctness. Apart from anything else, it was so damned dull.

She glanced at her watch. She still had the best part of an hour to kill before Paul would be ready to leave for the dinner party — if he didn’t decide to cancel at the last moment, which was not at all unknown, particularly if there was a big story on the go — and they didn’t get much bigger than the cracking of the DNA code, the day’s huge revelation that would be all over the paper the next morning.

She got up and walked to the coffee machine over by the elevator and helped herself to a decaff. She no longer drank real coffee after lunchtime. She reckoned decaff was probably every bit as harmful, but at least it didn’t keep her awake all night, tossing and turning.

Sipping from her polystyrene cup, she wondered why she bothered with the stuff at all. It tasted pretty much as if all the flavour had been removed along with the caffeine. She tried to clear her mind. Did she really want to get involved with the Beast of Dartmoor case again? Just hearing Fielding’s voice had bothered her much more than she would ever have expected it to. ‘Damn the bloody man,’ she muttered to herself, apparently louder than she had realised. A sea of silent heads turned towards her, then away again. Christ, she could remember a time when you’d hear screaming in the office and wouldn’t bother to look up. Nothing short of an actual physical punch-up caused any kind of stir in those days — and she’d seen a few of those too.

Upon reflection she decided it would be not only unwise but also dangerous to start delving into the case again. It really would be best to leave well alone. Absolutely no doubt about it.

She drained the last of her ghastly decaff, crushed the polystyrene cup in her fist and threw it at the nearest waste-paper bin. She missed and the cup slid untidily across the highly polished floor. A passing twelve-year-old, wearing an overly crisp white shirt, stopped, picked it up and put it neatly in a bin, glancing smilingly towards her as if he expected thanks or something. He didn’t get any. Joanna merely observed him without enthusiasm, her eyes only half focused, her mind twenty years away.

Of course she feared she wasn’t going to leave well alone. There was no real chance of that and had not been since she had taken Fielding’s call. She was going to get embroiled in the case all over again even though she honestly didn’t want to. She knew she was not going to be able to stop herself, so she might just as well get on with it.

Across the newsroom she could see young Tim Jones, upright in his chair, engrossed as usual in his computer screen. Tim, a bright diligent chap for whom Jo had considerable regard, was the Comet’s chief crime correspondent, the job Joanna had just landed when she first met Fielding. Jo’s title was now Assistant Editor, Crime. It didn’t mean a great deal in that she was not one of the three assistant editors allowed, along with the deputy editor, to run the paper at night and in Paul’s absence, which rankled a bit. Paul had apologised and said he didn’t feel able to give his wife that authority. However, she couldn’t grumble as she was primarily only a part-time columnist now.

She hoisted herself upright and walked over to Tim’s corner of the room. When she told him what she wanted he gave her a cheery smile — he always seemed to be cheery, bless him, but then he was still so young and new — and swiftly fished both a copy of the European Convention on Human Rights and Britain’s Human Rights Act out of his desk drawer. Trust Tim to be up to date.

‘Anything else I can help you with?’ he asked, as she turned away from him. Tim had a boyishly open face, very dark curly hair and even darker eyes, and was definitely far too handsome to be let loose in a newspaper office.

Jo thought of all manner of glib answers, muttered a ‘no thank you’ over her shoulder and made herself refrain from turning into the ageing female equivalent of all those tired old male hacks she’d had to deal with when she had been his age.

Back at her desk, she first opened the small purple Human Rights Convention booklet with its four white European stars on the front and turned to Article Four of the Seventh Protocol.

Paragraph One reaffirmed the right of all never to be tried again for an offence of which they had been acquitted.

Paragraph Two gave a proviso hitherto unknown in British law. There could be a retrial ‘if there is evidence of new or newly discovered facts, or if there has been a fundamental defect in the previous proceedings, which could affect the outcome of the case’.

As it happened Joanna thought there had been a number of fundamental defects in O’Donnell’s prosecution for the murder of Angela Phillips. But that was not what was at issue, nor was it ever likely to be. There was, however, certainly new evidence.

She studied the booklet carefully. Tim Jones had helpfully scribbled HRA alongside the articles which had been adopted into Britain’s Human Rights Act due, as Fielding had reminded her, to become law on 2 October 2000. Article Four of Protocol Seven was not among them. She was not surprised. She might not have been on a Human Rights course, and now that she was no longer actually an on-the-road crime reporter she might not be quite as on the ball in certain areas as she would once have been, but she was sure that had such a major change in the law been imminent she would not have missed it.

Nonetheless she turned obediently to the Human Rights Act itself and leafed through until she came to Section Six. ‘It is unlawful for a public authority to act in a way which is incompatible with a Convention Right.’

Courts were public authorities all right. The law was invariably open to interpretation — but put those two clauses together and you had possibly the biggest fundamental change to the whole basis of British law since Magna Carta.

Joanna felt the familiar tingling in her spine that she invariably experienced when she was confronted by something special like this. Something which could be a really great story — which was inclined to overshadow all other considerations with her. She couldn’t help it. Never had been able to. She had been born a natural newspaperwoman.

Nine

She made herself pull back then. Sleep on it. At least not do anything more, including talking to Paul who, apart from anything else, was not exactly likely to be delighted that she was back in contact with Mike, until she had had time to think things through properly. Fielding still seemed to know how to pull her strings in more ways than one. She wasn’t entirely pleased about that. But although she had been angry with him initially she realised suddenly that she was just as angry with herself. Predictably enough Paul had indeed dropped out of the dinner party at the last moment, leaving her to make excuses for both of them. She didn’t blame him, she knew well enough the pressures a daily paper editor was constantly under, and she certainly hadn’t wanted to go without him. She was grateful, actually, for time alone.

In her car on the way to Richmond — a state-of-the-art BMW now, the much-loved MG was long gone — she went over it all in her mind. If she took this any further there would be risks involved, both personally and professionally.

Risks for the Phillipses too. Was it fair for her to dig up the past for them all over again? Would they thank her, even if they did succeed in getting O’Donnell into court again? Would they think it worth it? She sighed. She rather suspected they would, but she also knew they would never be able to think about any of it objectively. That was what she must try to do. And it wasn’t easy for her, not with Fielding involved and not with the old journalistic adrenalin rush, which she hadn’t experienced in a long time, threatening to take over every other consideration.

Yes, there were all kinds of dangers. But on balance she was pretty sure Fielding could well have been right when he’d said a good barrister could swing it. You never knew what could happen once you ventured into a court of law, but the ammunition was all there. There had to be a way to get an admissible DNA sample out of O’Donnell and it really did seem that the Human Rights Act might be that way. Certainly Mike was right that a private prosecution of this nature would be staggering, ground-breaking stuff. The Comet could clean up. The Comet could also end up with egg all over its front pages. But by God, the whole thing was an exciting prospect.

By the following morning she had reached a decision. Perhaps the inevitable one. She would at least contact the Phillipses and sound them out, see if they would consider a private prosecution.

Over breakfast with Emily — well, cereal for her daughter but only tea for Jo, she never could face eating when she had just got out of bed — she planned how she would go about it. Fortuitously it was one of her days at home. Paul had already left in his chauffeur-driven car for a breakfast meeting. She didn’t know how he managed to work the hours he did. Vaguely she was aware that Emily was talking to her.

‘So can I, Mum?’

Oh, God, thought Jo, realising she hadn’t heard a word her daughter had said for some minutes. ‘Can you what?’

‘Oh, Mum! Can I sleep over at Alice’s tonight?’

Jo agreed that she could. Having paid her daughter such scant attention, she had little choice. She reached across the table and took Emily’s hand, trying to make amends. ‘And on Saturday we’ll go shopping, just you and me, maybe look for that new computer game you’ve been going on about.’

Emily beamed at her. Like most kids she was potty about computers. But Jo felt guilty. Why did she always seem to be buying her daughter’s affections? Emily was so bright, so precocious, sometimes it seemed that she didn’t need her parents for much else. That was ridiculous, of course. She was only eleven. And if she was overly self-possessed it was probably that the lifestyles of her high-flying parents had made her so. Which was maybe the main reason for Jo’s lurking feelings of guilt. She loved Emily to bits, but she just wasn’t the naturally maternal type. To make further amends Jo decided to drive Emily to school, instead of leaving it to the au pair as she usually did.

On return to the house she went to the little garden room she used as an office when she was working from home, sat down at her desk, reached into the bottom drawer, rummaged about there for a bit and finally retrieved a battered black-covered book held together with a rubber band so that its many loosened pages would not fall out. It was her old contacts book, 1980 vintage, painstakingly compiled long before the days of palmtop computers and electronic organisers, indeed, long before the days of computers at all in the newspaper world.

She leafed through the smudged, untidy pages until she came to P. P for Phillips. She had to play around with the code, which had changed over the years, but the number was still good as she had somehow expected it would be.

Bill Phillips answered the phone. He sounded like an old man, tired and slow. She realised he must be well into his seventies now, but she also knew how dramatically he’d aged after the loss of his daughter.

They’d all suffered, of course, the whole family and Jeremy Thomas. He’d been in trouble with the police on and off for years after his girlfriend’s murder. His attack on Jimbo O’Donnell outside Okehampton Magistrates’ Court had been merely the first of many outbursts of violence and vandalism, often enhanced by drink. Eventually he had crashed another car one night when he was drunk and that time he had not walked away. Jo knew that Jeremy’s parents had always blamed Angela’s murder, and their son having been at first suspected of it, for the dramatic deterioration in his behaviour and ultimately his death.

Bill Phillips remembered Joanna’s name as she had guessed he would. She thought he would probably remember the names of all the journalists and all the police officers who had been involved in his daughter’s case. The Phillipses had kept the press at arm’s length, but she had phoned often enough and written in the hope of getting close to them.

Not surprisingly, he did not seem pleased to hear from her. She knew he would also remember that she had been the reporter who had written the big series with Jimbo O’Donnell after he had been acquitted. Nonetheless she persevered. She asked Bill if she could drive down to see him.

He was unenthusiastic, to say the least. ‘What for?’ he asked in his dull, tired voice.

‘There’s some new evidence...’ she began. She didn’t have to tell him what the evidence was in connection with. There was only one thing it could be.

‘Then why haven’t the police contacted us?’

‘They don’t think you should be told. I do.’

She could hear him sigh. She knew what he was thinking. Much the same as she had thought earlier, only for him the pain would be so much more acute. Would he want to drag it all up again, relive the horror of it?

She knew that he didn’t have a real choice, though. Maybe, in a way, none of them did. The memories were too powerful.

She arrived at Five Tors Farm just after 1 p.m. The place was very different from the way she remembered it. Then the farm had been beautifully kept, hedgerows immaculate, gardens manicured, the farmhouse itself gleaming with fresh paint, sparkling windows, geraniums in tubs by the front door and all the other signs of tender loving care bestowed on a cherished home. The entrance had been impressive too, with that big white gate hanging from granite pillars, and an access lane which was more of a smart driveway with a smooth tarmac surface.

Now the gate, no longer white, had fallen from rusting hinges and the surface of the lane had broken up and was deeply pitted. It was all for the best that Joanna drove a BMW instead of the precious old MG, because she doubted if she could have manoeuvred the low-slung roadster safely along the lane and into the unkempt farmyard. The adjacent lawns were only roughly mown, the flower and vegetable gardens overgrown and in need of weeding, the farmhouse crying out for a coat of paint. She parked to one side of the yard by the stables, glancing towards them as she climbed out of her car. She thought they looked as if they were empty. Even the top doors to most of the boxes were closed. She could see no horses’ heads at the doors of those remaining open and neither were there any traces of the usual signs of horsy occupation. No hay or straw, no pile of drying dung.

She had heard that the Phillipses had got rid of all their horses after Angela’s death, finding the animals too painful a reminder of the young woman who had been perhaps the most enthusiastic horse lover in the entire family. It surprised her, though, that it seemed they still had not replaced them.

Mind you, she remembered what Fielding had told her, the air of neglect and abandonment which hung over the farm might not all be merely a legacy of their great tragedy. The Phillipses’ financial situation was not what it was, Mike had said. The family had no doubt been badly hit by the slump currently enveloping virtually the whole of Britain’s farming industry.

A young man wearing jeans and a T-shirt, cropped blond hair, fresh-faced, came striding out of the house, presumably having heard her car arrive. For a split second she took him to be Rob Phillips, but realised her mistake at once. Rob would be over forty now, like her. Funny how time stands still in your head sometimes. This must be his son, born prematurely a couple of months or so after Angela’s body was found.

He said ‘Hi’ in a non-committal fashion, adding, ‘I’m Les.’

Now it came back to her. The boy had been named after his dead aunt, Angela Lesley Phillips. A bittersweet reminder always for the entire family. Joanna felt sorry for him. Poor lad. What a burden he must have had to carry throughout his young life. He did not smile as he turned and led the way into the big farmhouse kitchen.

The entire family were sitting around the table. Bill Phillips had shrunk into a little old man. His wife Lillian had a lost look in her eyes. Rob stood up and shook her hand. He too had changed beyond recognition. You would expect a farmer approaching middle age to have leathery skin and a lined face, but you would also perhaps expect a certain glow of health brought about by the outdoor life. Instead, Rob looked tired and wan, almost ill. The strain sat heavily on him. He could easily have been a man in his mid-fifties rather than early forties. His wife, Mary, whom Jo remembered as being strikingly pretty, if just a little on the plump side, had ballooned. She wasn’t very tall and Jo guessed that she probably weighed sixteen or seventeen stone. Her once pretty features had disappeared into folds of fat round her neck.

Jo tried not to show her shock as, although none of the family bade her do so, she sat down and joined them. In a murder case the one who died was never the only victim. Far from it. She remembered having been told that by one of her early police contacts. It remained the grim truth.

Bill Phillips had no time for pleasantries any more, it seemed. ‘Right, you’d best tell us what you’ve come to say and get it over with. I don’t want the missus upset again without a damned good reason.’ He put an arm on Lillian’s shoulder. She barely seemed to notice, just carried on staring straight ahead in that lost and slightly bewildered way.

So Joanna told them straight. About the chance arrest of O’Donnell and about the DNA match. She gave them the probability count. Several million to one, maybe as much as ten million to one. ‘Beyond any reasonable doubt it has to have been O’Donnell,’ she said flatly. ‘A guilty man walked out of that courtroom, which I guess you have all always suspected.’

There was silence when she had finished speaking.

Rob glanced nervously at his mother who did not seem to be reacting at all. It was almost as if she had not heard a word Joanna had said. His father was fiddling with a teaspoon on the table before him, turning it round and round, staring down, intent, as if what he was doing was of vital import.

Mary Phillips spoke first. ‘I don’t see what difference it makes,’ she said, holding out her hands palm upwards, which made the fleshy parts of the tops of her arms wobble alarmingly. ‘It was more than suspecting. We’ve always known that bastard killed Angela.’

‘The difference is that now it can be proved. Beyond reasonable doubt.’

Bill Phillips looked up. ‘Is there going to be another trial, then? Is that it? So why haven’t the police told us?’

Joanna shook her head. ‘O’Donnell can’t be tried again, not for murder. Not an acquitted man.’ She explained about double jeopardy. ‘The police decided not to tell you because they didn’t want to upset you all over again when they are not in a position to do anything constructive about it.’

She could feel Bill Phillips’s tired old eyes boring into her. Red-rimmed. Just as they had so often been all those years ago. ‘That wouldn’t worry you, of course, upsetting people, would it?’ he snapped at her. ‘Your lot don’t care who you hurt, do you, as long as you get a story. So what are you after this time, that’s what I want to know? Last time you paid O’Donnell to talk to you, tell you his lies, make money out of what he did to our poor dead Angela. This time you’ve come to us. What can we possibly tell you that will make a headline in that dreadful rag you work for?’ His voice grew louder and angrier as he spoke. ‘What do you want with us?’ he shouted at her finally. Then he slumped back in his seat, breathing heavily. The exertion of his outburst took it out of him. Joanna saw Rob glance at his father with the same weary concern he had earlier displayed towards his mother.

This poor bloody family, she thought. All their lives in tatters because of this awful thing.

She took Bill Phillips’s comments on the chin. It was what she had expected and what she had tried to warn Fielding about. Bill Phillips had indeed remembered the O’Donnell buy-up and her byline. She doubted he had ever been able to forget anything concerning his daughter’s disappearance and death. Joanna could find little to quarrel with in any of the charges Bill had levelled at her. She had always been quite deeply affected by the family’s plight and by what had happened to Angela, but she could hardly expect the Phillipses to believe that. ‘I want justice,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’ve come to see you. I want justice for Angela, as I know you do. And only through you, through this family, can that be achieved.’ She knew she had attracted their attention. Each set of eyes was riveted on her.

She carried on then, explaining everything. Telling them how the CPS had turned down the police application to try O’Donnell for kidnap and rape and on what grounds. ‘But the CPS is a public service using public money. They rarely knowingly take chances, however slight. Not in the public interest is a euphemism for saying that there are other prosecutions pending with virtually no risk factor at all. I believe the CPS is being overly cautious on this one. I believe this is a situation crying out for a private prosecution. You see, the law is starting to change. Timing could be everything...’

She told them about the Human Rights Act and how it would become law in October, and the implications it would have on cases like O’Donnell’s; how even though the double-jeopardy exemption article in the European Convention was not being adopted, British courts would still be required to take it into consideration. ‘The right barrister could make hay with that,’ she said, unsure whether she had used the farming analogy deliberately or not.

She could see she had excited the family’s interest, won them round a little. She was good at winning people round. That was, after all, what she had done for a living almost all her adult life.

‘Would it really be possible, after all this time?’ asked Rob.

She nodded and was about to speak when Bill Phillips effectively killed the moment.

‘No, it won’t be possible, Rob,’ he said, his previously quavering voice quite firm. ‘Have you any idea how much a court case like that would cost? If we lost, the costs would cripple us. You know better than anyone the financial losses we have suffered over the last few years. All this family has left is this farm — and the boy, of course.’ He glanced fondly towards his grandson. ‘I want him to have Five Tors and a chance to build it up again. The rest is history.’

Again Joanna was about to speak, to explain what it might be possible for the Comet to do for them, when she was prevented from doing so by Les Phillips.

‘No, grandad, it’s not history,’ he cried out suddenly. ‘All my life I’ve been haunted by what happened to Angela. I never even knew her and it’s as if she’s by my side day in and day out. Sometimes I don’t even want the farm. The memories it carries haunt me. Let’s take this bastard to court and maybe we can finally bury Angela at the same time as we bury O’Donnell.’

The rest of family stared at him in shocked silence.

Les flushed and spoke again at once, suddenly realising, it seemed, what he had said and the way it must have sounded. ‘Uh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that...’ he began.

His grandfather touched his hand with his. ‘We know, boy, we know,’ he said gently.

Joanna spoke then. Very quietly, very deliberately. ‘The Comet may be able to help,’ she said. ‘I may be able to persuade the editor to pay for the case. It won’t be easy... I’ll have to deliver. You’ll have to help me...’

‘Yes, and I can imagine only too well the kind of help you want.’ Bill Phillips still didn’t sound very friendly, although Joanna thought he was perhaps more resigned to the way things were than anything else.

Rob shifted in his chair as if he was in physical discomfort and yet again glanced at his father anxiously. Joanna knew that after the trial and the Comet’s publication of O’Donnell’s side of the story the older man had never talked to the press again. And he had always been outraged when money had been offered, making it quite clear that the very thought of making money out of his daughter’s torment was repugnant to him. That was the way the whole family had always seen it.

Would that be the way they would see it now, too, she wondered. It was different. There was something concrete on offer. Something perhaps that could be done in the name of justice. Or was that as much of a joke to him as it all too often was for her? She waited, as did the rest of the family, for Bill to speak. He might be old before his time and frail, but he was still the acknowledged head of this family, there was no doubt about that. They were a traditional lot the Phillipses.

‘I’ll think about it,’ Bill told her eventually. ‘The family needs to talk. Alone,’ he added pointedly.

She took the hint and left.

Two days later Rob Phillips called her on her mobile. ‘OK, we’ll give it a go,’ he said. ‘But I tell you now, if this goes wrong it’ll kill my father.’

‘It won’t go wrong, Rob, not again, I won’t let it,’ she responded instantly.

She began to put the plan into operation then. First she had to convince Paul, who needed quite a lot of persuading to allow the paper to become involved. He had no doubts about the newsworthiness of a reincarnation of the Phillips case, but he needed to be certain that the case would be won. No newspaper ever wanted to back a losing cause. He also wanted to be sure of the family’s commitment and of Joanna’s control over them. ‘If we go ahead with this I don’t want it known that we are funding the prosecution,’ he said. ‘That would put a question mark over the integrity of our coverage of the case and also, if I know your average jury, probably prejudice the likelihood of a successful prosecution. They all love to hate the tabloid press, which you’re every bit as aware of as I am.’

Jo gave him more assurances than she had any right to, as journalists almost always do when trying to sell a dangerous idea to their editors. As a rule the fact that she was his wife made no difference at all to any editorial decisions he might make concerning her. But she did wonder later if he had been influenced by his relationship with her on this one occasion. He knew how much it had always affected her.

‘OK,’ he said eventually. ‘I’ll go for it, but I want a proper legal assessment first. Get yourself an appointment with Nigel Nuffield.’

Joanna’s heart soared. She had never met Nuffield but she knew his reputation, based on a near hundred per cent success record. He was a top bleeding-hearts barrister. He saw himself as a leading human rights campaigner — at least that was the image he liked to cultivate. Joanna doubted his sincerity, as she did that of virtually all the barristers she had ever encountered, but Nuffield was high profile, a great performer and clever. He was also publicity-mad. Defence was his usual game, justice for the wrongly convicted. Attempting to get justice for a victim in such unusual circumstances would be a new departure for him. But then, it was all going to be new. That was the whole point.

Jo didn’t think the man would be able to resist.

Nuffield saw her the very next day. Joanna wasn’t surprised. Any case a paper like the Comet was behind was likely to excite his interest and this one more than most.

It was with considerable satisfaction that she watched his reaction to her story, as she sat in an armchair — several inches lower than Nuffield’s own chair, which she did not doubt for one moment was a deliberate arrangement — in the famous barrister’s Lincoln’s Inn chambers. Gilt-framed English landscapes — Jo was almost sure one was an original Constable — hung from oak-panelled walls lined with unmistakably expensive antique furniture. Whether or not his concern for human rights was genuine, Nigel Nuffield certainly always made sure he got his pound of flesh.

He was tall, handsome and elegant with abundant white hair — the recipient of regular silver rinses, Jo suspected — swept back from a learned forehead and gold-rimmed spectacles perched on an imposing nose. He oozed Old Etonian charm and self-assurance. His personal vanity was legend. Nuffield was special and he knew it. Jo didn’t think she liked him much, but she didn’t care. There surely could not be a better man for the job. Approaching sixty now, Nigel Nuffield had been at the summit of his profession for more than twenty years.

‘It would certainly be a ground-breaking case,’ he remarked languidly, unknowingly echoing Fielding’s earlier comment. ‘Of course, the rights of victims also deserve to be fought for. And I quite agree, if we make sure we go for committal after 2 October there will be a whole new slant to the proceedings. I think we could win. I really do. Tell Paul that’s my considered opinion.’

So Joanna high-tailed it straight back to Canary Wharf, secured the final nod from Paul, and produced a powerful story focusing on the Phillipses’ intention to take out a private kidnap and rape prosecution against the man they believed had killed their Angela. Whatever her husband’s reasons for allowing her to go ahead, he could not be anything but pleased by the result, in the first instance at any rate. Joanna’s story was highly emotive stuff. And it was of course the Comet’s splash the next day.

When Paul Potter made a decision he knew how to follow through, how to have the courage of his convictions. That was one of the many qualities which made him such an impressive editor. A leader article, written by Paul himself, called for Britain’s ancient double-jeopardy laws to be changed, and for Article Four of the Seventh Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights to be adopted into the forthcoming UK Human Rights Act. That was not feasible, of course, the process of Parliament being far too lengthy and involved for such swift action, but it was a nice attention-grabbing ploy. The leader also demanded a realistic, specific and up-to-date review of the laws concerning the use of DNA in Britain’s courtrooms.

Inside was the heart-string-pulling interview with Angela’s mother, which Jo had already persuaded Lillian to give and had put together while still waiting for the final go-ahead. NEVER A MINUTE PASSES WHEN I DO NOT THINK OF MY ANGEL was the headline on the kind of centre spread calculated to leave not a dry eye at any breakfast table in the land. May her killer rot in hell screamed the strapline. ‘All we want is justice,’ was another line.

Potter and the paper’s lawyers had pored over the copy all the previous evening. O’Donnell was an acquitted man and they could lay themselves open to a crippling lawsuit from him. But Joanna knew that her husband had seen his paper to bed very happily — satisfied that the Comet had gone as far as it could in convincing the nation that O’Donnell was guilty as sin without ever actually saying so.

Next day there was uproar. Every other news outlet in the country, print, TV, radio and Internet, picked up the Comet’s story.

Fielding phoned Joanna some time around mid-morning. ‘I knew you’d do it,’ he said, to her immense irritation. Followed by, ‘Fucking great. You’re a genius. This time the bastard’s going down. I can feel it in my water.’

He would never get to be politically correct, would Mike.

Ten

The next four months flew by in a kind of mad whirl for Joanna. Having made the case happen, she was determined to be at the heart of it. She felt that the Phillipses needed her constant support, there were meetings with Nuffield in London and there was her column to write — in which she mercilessly flagged the forthcoming prosecution as much as she could without too blatantly flouting the law. And then there was Emma, seemingly so self-possessed and independent, but whose very lack of reproach made Jo feel all the more neglectful as she spent far more time away from home than usual in the office or in Devon, and half the time when she was at home on the phone or tapping into her computer.

However, this was the kind of campaigning journalism she had always wanted to be involved in. And although it was draining, everything went remarkably smoothly. Until the committal proceedings at any rate, for which a date was eventually set, more or less according to plan, at the end of October at Okehampton Magistrates’ Court. The Phillips family, once they had made their decision, displayed determination and tenacity in bringing about their private prosecution and even began to show signs of looking forward to this first step in the legal proceedings which could ultimately bring O’Donnell to justice. Joanna was with them all the way.

So was Nigel Nuffield, it seemed, who was confident that the case was strong enough, and the new legal gobbledegook such that he would be able to convince the Okehampton magistrates without too much difficulty to commit Jimbo O’Donnell for trial at Exeter Crown Court. ‘Once he’s committed, we’ve got him,’ Nuffield told her. ‘Either on remand or in custody, he’ll be on a charge for rape and kidnap. That means the police will be legally entitled to get a DNA test from him whether he likes it or not. Finally we get PACE on our side.’ The barrister was also confident that once the private prosecution had secured a committal the CPS would step in and take over the case.

‘Between you and me I’ve been tipped the wink, Jo,’ he confided. ‘It is what happens ninety-nine times out of a hundred with a private prosecution after all. Once the likes of us have taken all the risks, done the spadework and demonstrated that there is a case to answer, then the Crown Prosecution boys are more than happy to step in. Doesn’t make sense for them not to.’

It was looking good, Jo thought. The CPS might not have been prepared to take on the case themselves, but to have made this commitment, albeit off the record, indicated that they must have confidence in the prosecution.

Nuffield then duly laid the indictment. He rang to tell her that it had not been necessary to take out a summons against O’Donnell, whose lawyers, almost exactly the same dream team as before, informed the court that their client would be appearing voluntarily.

The barrister seemed delighted that it was all going so well, but Joanna wasn’t entirely sure she liked the sound of it. She had somehow expected Jimbo and his lawyers to try every trick in the book and out of it in order to prevent him even having to defend a prosecution at all.

Nuffield was his usual totally confident, benign, pompously public-school self. ‘When their bowlers give us something to worry about we’ll do so, Jo,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile we’ll just make sure our innings is unassailable. A daunting opening stand, that’s the thing!’

Jo didn’t understand cricket. The most she knew about the game was that when you were in you went out, and when you were out you came in. Nothing about that reassured her at all.

Unlike the Phillips family, who seemed to become increasingly buoyant as the date of the committal proceedings approached, just glad, perhaps, to be doing something to gain justice for their daughter after so many years, Jo became more anxious. Every instinct said something wasn’t right. She desperately wanted to know what the O’Donnells were up to. After a deal of thought she came to the conclusion that she had nothing to lose by at least attempting to see Sam O’Donnell. Her aim was to try to find out what he thought now about his elder son. Sam was still the Man. If he had turned against Jimbo that would have great influence on the outcome of the case, Jo reckoned. Apart from anything else, she would hazard a large bet that the O’Donnell money remained firmly in Sam’s control. She knew that was the way he ran his firm. She also knew that although he was knocking eighty, Sam was still very much in charge.

She called unannounced at Sam’s Dulwich home, aware that she wouldn’t be a welcome visitor. She was sure that if she had phoned first there would have been no invitation forthcoming. Not like the previous time. Information travels fast among police and villains. She had little doubt that the O’Donnells would have a fair idea of the part she was playing in the pending private prosecution. Officially the Comet remained in the closet and the Phillipses had kept their promised silence. But the O’Donnells were streetwise. In common with the Comet’s rival newspapers, they would have little doubt about the true situation as they saw exclusive after exclusive written by Jo for her paper.

The O’Donnell operation was now run almost entirely from Sam’s home, the big Victorian villa in a leafy Dulwich street. Sam had grown older. And he no longer had Combo, who had died five years earlier, to drive him around and pander to his every need. He spent little time at the Duke nowadays. Jo had heard that they’d even put a pool table in the famous back room. Sam’s house was currently a mix of home, office and shrine, where the faithful came to pay homage. Sam O’Donnell really was the nearest thing London had to a godfather. Jo was not surprised when Tommy O’Donnell opened the front door. Tommy had his own home nearby with his family, of course, but he was acknowledged now as Sam’s right-hand man rather than his older brother Jimbo.

Tommy, still in his early forties, was ten years younger than Jimbo. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, like all the O’Donnells, but he looked lean and spare, his light-brown hair, yet to show even a hint of grey, flopped over a protruding forehead, another family trademark. Unlike his elder brother, however, there was nothing remotely thuggish about his appearance. Jo knew his reputation as the brains of the family. An intellectual O’Donnell was actually quite a worrying prospect. Tommy had won a place to grammar school, passed A levels. He was keen on education. Perhaps too keen. Tommy’s fourteen-year-old-daughter, Caroline, had taken an overdose of her mother’s sleeping pills and killed herself six months or so earlier, allegedly in a panic over her end-of-term exams. Jo always found it hard to believe that young people would commit suicide over their school work. But she knew they did. Tommy and his wife had, of course, been devastated by the loss of their daughter in such a way. Like all the O’Donnells, Tommy was a devoted family man, although Jo knew he also had a tough side. He was his father’s son.

Tommy’s eyes narrowed when he saw her standing on the doorstep. There was no visible security around the house. Jo assumed the O’Donnells didn’t think they needed it. Fear was one hell of a deterrent. It was hard to imagine who would take this lot on. Even the police hesitated — which had always been one of the problems.

‘You’re not welcome here,’ Tommy greeted her challengingly.

‘Look, I just wanted to talk. I know how you and Sam stand on crimes like this. Jimbo’s a black sheep, isn’t he? I want to see Sam. I’d like to know how he is dealing with this.’

Tommy stood with a hand on each hip, elbows akimbo, blocking the doorway. As if Joanna would be daft enough to try to barge her way in. That was never what reporters did, as it happened. They wheedled themselves into people’s homes. They were sensitive in their approach, personable, well-dressed, easy of manner, full of wonderful self-deprecating stories. They used charm, not brute force. Their victims thought they were lovely and felt no pain at all — until the next morning’s newspapers plopped through the letter box. The old foot-in-the-door myth was exactly that. And in any case, to try it on an O’Donnell she, or any other hack, whatever their gender or size, would have to be totally and absolutely barking mad. Come to that she was probably pretty damned barking to try any kind of approach on an O’Donnell.

‘You’ve got no chance,’ Tommy told her laconically. ‘You ain’t seeing Sam and as for Jimbo, he’s been acquitted once and you lot have found a way of doing him again for the same crime. Now that can’t be right, can it?’

‘Last time your brother stood trial for murder. This time it’s kidnap and rape. Different crimes. Different evidence. One way and another Jimbo will be brought to justice. The law may have tied itself up in knots, but you can’t argue with DNA, Tommy, and you know that.’

‘Do I? What if, and I’m only saying what if, mind, Jimbo did have sex with that Angela Phillips. Who’s to say he didn’t pick her up on her way home, they get in the back of his truck and she’s as eager as he is, what about that, then?’

‘She was a seventeen-year-old virgin, Tommy.’

‘She’d had a row with her boyfriend. She wanted to get back at him. She went with Jimbo, then he dropped her off. Nobody can prove different.’

‘I know that story, Tommy, that’s what your brother told DS Fielding when he went round after the DNA match was discovered.’

Tommy raised both eyebrows. ‘You two still close then, are you?’ he asked with a knowing leer.

God, she thought, was nothing private in her world? She ignored the inference. ‘It’ll never stand up in court,’ she told him.

‘It won’t have to,’ he said confidently and he winked at her again as he closed the door in her face.

Jo was highly disconcerted. She couldn’t take in that the family still believed Jimbo was innocent, she really couldn’t, but they were continuing to stand by him. Maybe it was just that they felt they couldn’t be seen to turn on one of their own. Certainly appearances would be a big part of it. And what did Tommy mean when he said with such confidence: ‘It won’t have to’?

Jimbo O’Donnell continued to protest his innocence in spite of what everyone concerned considered to be overwhelming evidence. Predictably he was pleading not guilty. Yet he had not waited to be summonsed before agreeing to appear in his own defence against the private prosecution. What was going on?

Jo had not seen Mike Fielding during the four months preceding the committal, although she had spoken to him frequently on the phone. She couldn’t help wondering what the detective would be like twenty years on, but the opportunity to find out did not seem to present itself and her involvement with the case, coupled with her normal workload and family obligations, such as they were, meant that she had little free time. Once or twice, belting up and down the motorway between London and Dartmoor, she did consider arranging to meet up with him. But she never quite got around to it.

Later she also thought that maybe she had been putting off deliberately what was bound to be a strange and disturbing meeting. However, she reckoned Mike was probably keeping his distance from her for other reasons. He had already stepped out of line in the case. He probably felt he could not risk any further direct involvement.

Also, of course, she was totally preoccupied by all that was happening. At night she would lie awake sometimes, her stomach muscles clenched, wondering what the O’Donnells were up to, whether she had done the right thing. There was so much at stake. She knew the case that had been put together was a strong one and that Nigel Nuffield wouldn’t have taken it on were that not so. She also knew it wasn’t watertight. It explored a completely new avenue of law, for a start. There was bound to be an element of a gamble and a lot depended on Nuffield’s apparent invincibility. But what choice had any of them had? There would never be another opportunity to bring O’Donnell to justice for a crime that was already twenty years old, that was for certain.

On the day the committal proceedings began, Jo sat with the Phillips family at the back of Okehampton Magistrates’ Court waiting for O’Donnell to arrive. The place had not changed much, still little more than an extended white bungalow on the north bank of the River Okement, tucked away on the outskirts of town behind the same supermarket, which had now metamorphosed into a Waitrose, the proceedings still held in the unassuming room that also housed the meetings of West Devon District Council. Still the rows of ordinary office chairs giving a vaguely inappropriate air of informality.

Outside there had predictably been a considerable gathering of press photographers and TV news cameramen, but few members of the public. It was certainly a very different scene from the near riot of twenty years ago. In spite of the Comet’s fanfare, in spite of the ground-breaking nature of this hearing, as far as the people of Devon went it seemed that the teenager’s murder was indeed history.

Except for Angela’s family, of course. Jo could feel the tension in each and every one of them. Bill Phillips sat staring straight ahead, his face giving little away except for a periodic nervous twitch of his right eyebrow. Lillian looked likely to burst into tears again at any moment. Rob Phillips kept licking his lips, as if he was thirsty. His wife Mary repeatedly turned her handbag round and round in her lap. Their son Les looked excited, expectant, eager even. But then, he hadn’t been through it all before.

Jo kept glancing towards the door. She had to admit to herself that she was waiting for Fielding’s arrival as much as for that of O’Donnell. Although the detective was officially not actively involved in the new case she knew he wouldn’t miss being there. He turned up just seconds before O’Donnell.

She was expecting to see him. And yet her first sight of him in twenty years made her catch her breath. Some things you never forget, that’s the trouble, she thought. He looked older, of course, his hair greyer and thinning, but he had retained his slim build. He was wearing a very ordinary grey suit, well worn and not particularly well fitting. That was different. He would never have been seen dead in a suit like that when she had first known him. By and large, though, he didn’t seem to have aged badly. He hurried in, checking his watch, and walked right past her, heading for a couple of empty chairs towards the front. That was familiar. Fielding had always been in a hurry, had always arrived everywhere at the last possible moment.

Then he turned to look at her — directly at her, straight away. Maybe he had felt her gaze on him. Certainly he seemed to focus on her immediately and when their eyes met she saw, and it made her feel so sad, just how much disappointment and weariness there was in him. His physical frame might have worn well, but the man himself had changed a great deal. There was somehow no doubt about that. He smiled and raised a hand slightly in greeting as he sat down.

She was still studying the back of his head when a suppressed murmuring in the court indicated that O’Donnell was being ushered in. Lillian Phillips gave a low moaning sound. Out of the corner of her eye Jo noticed Bill Phillips take his wife’s hand in his and squeeze.

Jo had not seen O’Donnell for twenty years either. He too looked older and greyer. Fatter as well. She was struck by the way he had developed facial similarities to his now elderly father. Sam the Man, loyal as ever, keeping up appearances as ever, walked, leaning heavily on a stick, into the courtroom just behind his elder son. It would be important to Sam, to be seen giving family support, showing solidarity. He looked weary, though, every step obviously an effort. Well, the gang boss was eighty and his granddaughter’s death would have taken its toll, as well as the new charges brought against Jimbo. Both father and son had the same folds of skin around the eyes, now, the same jowly features. Jimbo was much less the tough guy, that was for sure. But he’d clearly been groomed for the part again. He wore a dark business suit very similar to the ones he had sported twenty years previously. Just cut a little more generously.

The three magistrates came into the court almost immediately. Two men and a woman chairman. All three looked the part, sombre in manner, soberly dressed, their body language oozing superiority. If they weren’t pillars of the community they certainly believed they were. Jo frowned as she studied the woman chairman. There was something familiar about her but for a while she could not place it.

O’Donnell was represented by more or less the same legal team as all those years ago. Brian Burns was the lead counsel again. At the previous trial Burns had been something of a young blood, the golden boy of the legal profession. Now he was an elder statesman, his brilliance if anything even greater than it had been then. Some things don’t change, she thought wryly.

What became quickly apparent was that O’Donnell’s lawyers had briefed their client on a policy of total denial. It seemed ridiculous that knowing he was faced with such irrefutable forensic evidence the man could just continue to deny everything. But he did. Of course, he would know that the DNA evidence could not be used, not yet anyway.

O’Donnell’s admission to Fielding that he had had sex with Angela was not even on the agenda. It couldn’t be. The detective had been acting unofficially. There was no proper record of the interview. O’Donnell had at no stage made a formal statement. Jo didn’t even know if the confrontation would come out in court. It was certainly not part of the prosecution case and she assumed Fielding was hoping that it did not feature. She knew Nuffield was.

Brian Burns, of course, although a leading top defence lawyer, didn’t really believe in defence at all. He believed in attack. ‘Your Worships, I submit that my client has no case to answer,’ he began. ‘I intend to prove abuse of process. A private prosecution has been brought against Mr O’Donnell only because the Crown Prosecution Service has, quite correctly, turned down a police application to bring charges of kidnap and rape against him. As is a matter of public record, Mr O’Donnell has already, many years ago, been properly tried and acquitted of the murder of the unfortunate young woman in question and therefore by inference of any related offences. I further submit that to proceed at all with this case would be in breach of double jeopardy, hence unlawful.’

The chairman of the magistrates puckered her brows. Suddenly it came to Jo. She was Lady Davinia Slater, a well-known figure in the West of England whom Jo had first encountered in her local paper days when Lady Slater had tirelessly led a long-time campaign to prevent a reservoir being constructed on her beloved Dartmoor. Now a thin, bright-eyed, leathery-skinned woman in her mid-sixties, Lady Slater looked as fit and tireless as ever. She had always been fiercely independent, with her own strongly held beliefs and ways of doing things. Jo knew that Lady Slater could rarely be swayed by others and just hoped she would make up her mind against O’Donnell, because once this particular chairman of magistrates did make up her mind there would be no changing it.

Lady Slater shot a puzzled glance in the direction of the clerk to the court who promptly approached the bench. Magistrates rarely have much more than a lay knowledge of the law and are inclined to rely heavily on their clerks who, Jo reckoned, could become disproportionately important. It seemed this trio were much the same as most of their kind.

The clerk leaned close to all three magistrates and spoke in a low voice but in the relatively small and low-ceilinged courtroom Joanna quite clearly heard him use the dreaded phrase ‘part of the circumstance’. She groaned inwardly.

Nigel Nuffield, however, was swift to respond. ‘I must draw Your Worships’ attention to Article Four of the Seventh Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights which allows for “the reopening of a case in accordance with law and penal procedure of the State concerned, if there is evidence of new or newly discovered facts, or if there has been a fundamental defect in the previous proceedings, which could affect the outcome of the case”. This clearly allows for exceptions to be made to the laws of double jeopardy in circumstances which I submit are applicable in this prosecution. And, in view of Britain’s Human Rights Act which, as I am sure Your Worships are aware, came into force on 2 October...’

Lady Slater might not have been familiar with all aspects of the law but she was certainly familiar with the antics of lawyers. She picked up immediately on Nigel Nuffield’s convoluted phraseology. ‘Are you saying that this article is now law in the United Kingdom?’ she interrupted sharply.

‘No, Your Worship. It has yet to be adopted here. But I would also draw Your Worships’ attention to Section Six of the British Human Rights Act. “It is unlawful for a public authority to act in a way which is incompatible with a Convention Right.”’

All three magistrates looked more bewildered than impressed, Jo feared.

Nuffield, determined, it seemed, to dazzle them both with legalese and his grasp of it, hardly paused. ‘I must also alert Your Worships to Section Two of the Act. “A court or tribunal debating a question which has arisen in connection with a Convention Right must take into account any judgement, decision, declaration, or advisory opinion of the European Court of Human Rights...”’

Lady Slater interrupted again, leaning forward, thin lips pursed in disapproval. ‘Did you say European, Mr Nuffield?’ she enquired.

‘Well, yes, Your Worship, but...’

‘And I think you just told us, did you not, that this Article Four of the Human Rights Convention, to which you referred, is not in fact the law of the United Kingdom?’

‘Well, not exactly, Your Worship, but the Act makes it quite clear that the rights laid down in the European Convention should be deferred to whether or not they are actually United Kingdom law...’

‘Not in my court, Mr Nuffield. I am presiding over an English Magistrates’ Court and until I am actually bound by European law I can assure you I have no intention of deferring to it.’

Christ, she’s a dyed-in-the-wool Euro-sceptic, thought Joanna. That was all they needed. She had to be, of course. A woman who wouldn’t allow her territory to be invaded by what had actually been a very necessary reservoir was highly unlikely to be impressed by the demands of Strasbourg.

Nigel Nuffield had his back to Jo, but she could tell that he was dumbfounded. You didn’t encounter the likes of Davinia Slater at the Old Bailey or the Law Courts on the Strand. The officialdom of London bowed more and more towards Europe, as indeed it had to do. But it wasn’t like that in Okehampton yet. This was factor X. Any idea originating in Europe had to be a bad one. Jo had not given that a thought and neither, she suspected, had Nigel Nuffield. Davinia Slater was a dinosaur in every respect and Jo hadn’t realised that magistrates like her still existed. They did in Okehampton, apparently.

The clerk saved the day, albeit only momentarily. He approached the bench again. Once more Jo was able to catch odd phrases: ‘Should be seen perhaps to take into account’. ‘Must be careful not to be unlawful’.

The furrow in Lady Slater’s brow deepened. However, she seemed to have been persuaded that at least her court should listen. Even if grudgingly.

‘Very well, Mr Nuffield. You may continue. I assume you are going to tell the court that you have new evidence sufficient to warrant the extraordinary measures you are suggesting?’

In reply, Nuffield asked the defence if O’Donnell would come to the stand.

‘Of course,’ responded Brian Burns smoothly. ‘We are all here today in the interest of justice.’ Nuffield ignored him as Jimbo made his way to the dock.

‘Mr O’Donnell, do you know what DNA evidence is?’ he asked.

‘Not really, sir, I just know I never did anything to that girl.’

‘DNA is a genetic blueprint. For example, were your DNA found in relevant samples taken from Angela Phillips, that would give absolute proof that at the very least you must have had sexual contact with her.’

Jo wasn’t quite sure what Nuffield was doing. He was skating on thin ice, that was for certain. She reminded herself that all the barrister had to do was persuade the magistrates to allow the case to go forward for jury trial.

Predictably Brian Burns rose to his feet at once to object. ‘I would remind the court that no attempt at any such DNA match would be either lawful or indeed possible in this case, as there are no admissible DNA samples available,’ he said. ‘Only DNA extracted specifically in regard to the particular charge my client faces could, of course, be admissible.’

Lady Slater’s frown deepened even more. The clerk approached the bench again and there was another conflab, this time in voices so low that Joanna could not catch a word.

‘This is surely not the alleged new evidence to which you earlier referred, is it, Mr Nuffield?’ the chairman of the magistrates asked eventually.

‘Partly, Your Worship,’ admitted Nuffield.

‘But I am advised that all such evidence is indeed inadmissible.’

Nuffield threw back his shoulders and projected his voice in his most theatrical and what he presumably thought his most impressive manner. ‘At this stage and in this court, yes, Your Worship. However, if Your Worship were to commit the defendant for trial this would allow admissible DNA samples to be taken from him. I have reason to believe that such samples would link him inexorably with Angela Phillips. That is the new evidence to which I have referred.’

‘But Mr Nuffield, you know very well that we can only pass judgement based on evidence which is admissible in this court.’

Of course he knew. But Nigel Nuffield also knew exactly where he was leading. ‘Indeed, Your Worship,’ he boomed. ‘I would therefore like formally to ask the defendant if he will voluntarily submit to a new DNA test, a blood test, perhaps, the results of which would of course then be admissible in any court. Surely, if he and my learned friend are to be believed then Mr O’Donnell would be anxious to clear up this matter without question.’

Jo thought that was a highly convincing ploy and Nuffield’s confident authoritative manner was awesome. This was a man with virtually no concept of failure.

However, before she could begin to share his apparent confidence a little more, Brian Burns was quickly on his feet. ‘Your Worships, my client would be more than happy to submit to a blood test, but unfortunately he has a phobia against needles. This is, as I am sure Your Worships knows, a medical condition, from which my client has suffered since he was a child.’

Joanna could barely believe her ears. This was farcical. Yet everyone in the courtroom seemed to be taking the protestation perfectly seriously. She remembered with foreboding the case of a famous Fleet Street columnist who had claimed needle phobia as a defence against a charge of refusing to take a blood test after being arrested on a drink-driving offence. He was acquitted.

Looking at big, burly O’Donnell in the dock, the thing was too absurd for words.

But Lady Slater, bless her, was at least not rolling over. ‘There are other methods of obtaining admissible DNA evidence, are there not, Mr Burns, and would your client not submit to those either?’ she enquired frostily.

Thank Christ, thought Jo. She mightn’t like Europe, but she’s no fool. Maybe Nuffield could still pull it off.

‘Your Worship, we both feel that my client has suffered enough indignities,’ replied Brian Burns. ‘This case has been trumped up against him by people who will not accept the proper verdict of a court of law twenty years ago. My client is an innocent man and as a matter of principle should not be submitted to further tests.’

All three magistrates looked unconvinced. For a fleeting moment Jo began to feel almost optimistic. She should have known better.

It was almost as if Brian Burns were playing a game with the court. Being a barrister, he quite probably was, Jo thought later. He played his trump card then. And it was an ace. ‘In any event, Your Worships, I would submit that even if a new DNA sample were on offer, and whether or not this were volunteered by my client or taken with or without his permission after his committal to trial, such a sample would still be inadmissible.

‘I must draw the court’s attention to the case of Michael Weir whose conviction for murder was overturned by the Court of Appeal in May this year on the grounds that although the prosecution had offered as evidence DNA obtained from a second sample taken when Weir was arrested for murder, without a first ineligible sample from an unrelated crime he would never have been linked to the murder scene.’

The magistrates looked a bit bewildered. The clerk approached the bench yet again. There followed two or three minutes of sotto voce mutterings and head noddings, once more quite inaudible.

The PACE ruling that DNA samples could not be used in any investigation other than the one for which they were acquired was bad enough — when you took it a stage further like this it made a nonsense of science as well as justice, Jo thought. But she had not known about the Michael Weir case and neither, she feared, had Nuffield. She reckoned the barrister had not done his homework as well as he might have. She suspected that Nuffield had long ago reached that stage in his glittering career where he no longer believed he could lose, and it suddenly looked to Jo as if this might be the case where this would finally work against him and all those who had risked so much to put O’Donnell in the dock again. Her heart sank.

The defence wasted no time in pressing home its advantage. ‘My client has waived his rights, appeared here today of his own free will...’ droned Brian Burns, spending several minutes repetitively pushing his point. Then he turned to O’Donnell, who somehow contrived yet again to create the impression of dignified injured innocence which had so irritated Jo all those years before, and asked him to explain to the court why he had pleaded not guilty.

‘Because I never touched that Angela Phillips, let alone harmed her,’ said Jimbo, who had patently expected the question. ‘I’m an innocent man. I’ve been acquitted once. I should never stand trial again, that’s my right. But they bring these Mickey Mouse charges against me, no disrespect, Your Worship, and if they weren’t Mickey Mouse there wouldn’t have to be a private prosecution cos the Crown would have done me, wouldn’t they? Stands to reason, doesn’t it?’

How such a monstrous man could ever come across as endearing was beyond Jo. But he did, no doubt about it.

There followed a brief exchange with Lady Slater about how O’Donnell shouldn’t think for one moment that anything that happened in her court was Mickey Mouse and that he might yet find there was nothing Mickey Mouse about the powers it possessed either. O’Donnell grovelled a bit, but Jo suspected from the expressions on the faces of Lady Slater’s two fellow magistrates that his words had already had the desired effect, on them at least.

She didn’t like the way things were going one little bit. O’Donnell was good, no doubt about it. She dreaded to think about what might be coming next.

And she was right to dread it. Very skilfully Mr Burns led his client into continually stressing what was being presented as unfairness as well as the alleged illegality of the private prosecution.

Suddenly O’Donnell went off on a tack which Joanna had most certainly not been expecting. ‘It’s that DI Fielding, he’s always had it in for me,’ he blurted out. ‘Came to see me, didn’t he, accused me of murder. Twenty years later, mind. And he had no right. No right at all. I’m innocent. I’ve been properly tried and proven innocent. I didn’t murder that Angela Phillips, I didn’t. And I didn’t kidnap her or rape her either. How many times have I got to prove myself against this Mickey Mouse stuff? Begging your pardons again, Your Worships...’

Joanna looked across the court at Fielding, saw him slump in his seat. She didn’t have long, however, to consider his discomfort before she too was targeted by O’Donnell. ‘It’s him and that woman Joanna Bartlett from the Comet,’ O’Donnell continued, actually pointing across the court at her. ‘They set this up. They set me up. It’s bleeding harassment, that’s what it is. The Phillips family didn’t take this case out against me. Not really. They did. She did, anyway. The Comet agreed to pick up the costs and more. It’s nothing to do with new evidence. They’re getting paid for it, that’s why they’re having another punt at me after all this time. For money. That’s why!’

There was, of course, pandemonium. Bill Phillips looked as if he’d been punched. His son lowered his face into his hands. Young Les looked stunned.

Joanna was horrified and shocked rigid. She really hadn’t expected this. Neither had Fielding. Paul had seen the dangers, but she had reassured him. She had been so certain of herself, or at least pretended to be. As for Nuffield — she’d got the impression that the bloody man thought he was invincible. Indeed, he had always seemed to be so. Jo couldn’t bear it. Was the inevitable blow to his invincibility going to come now? She feared it was.

The O’Donnells might have guessed about the Comet’s involvement, but how had they known it was Fielding who had put her up to it, she wondered. Perhaps they guessed that too. But there were many ways — not least that Fielding, so delighted that the case was going to happen, had boasted about his part in it to his colleagues. Particularly if he’d been drinking. Joanna assumed that he still drank. Probably more than ever.

Anyway the damage had been done now. These were bold tactics on behalf of the defence. They were also probably very clever ones. You could never underestimate the sanctimonious hatred the British public profess to have for the tabloid newspapers they read so avidly. And their sanctimony invariably knew no bounds if they found themselves in a position, as magistrates, or sitting on juries, where they felt they had these scurrilous rags and those who produced them at their mercy.

Unwelcome examples flashed through her head. Jo didn’t see how anyone in their right mind could have believed Jeffrey Archer’s ridiculous story that he had arranged for an intermediary to hand a bundle of cash to call girl Monica Coghlan on King’s Cross Station, not in return for her silence but out of the goodness of his heart.

But as far as the jury had been concerned the alternative was that the Daily Star, the most downmarket of all the British tabloids, had been telling the truth. Jeffrey Archer, bold and streetwise as ever, had correctly gambled that no jury would willingly allow that possibility.

By focusing on a tabloid newspaper’s involvement in his prosecution, O’Donnell was in effect playing the role of an innocent man being persecuted by the press — with a little bit of help from a maverick policeman. And the magistrates, Jo feared, were lapping it up. She was still numb with shock and could hardly bear to think about the possible consequences.

It was all over that same day. The magistrates withdrew for just a few minutes shortly before four o’clock. Then Lady Slater delivered the verdict of the bench. In doing so, she predictably strongly criticised the Comet for its role in the débâcle. Mike Fielding also got a roasting for irresponsible behaviour, which Lady Slater decreed could indeed be regarded as harassment. She threw in all the relevant legal jargon — ‘part of the circumstances’ and so on — and concluded: ‘The laws of double jeopardy still stand in this country. In spite of the arguments of prosecuting counsel, it seems to this court unconstitutional that unadopted clauses of the European Convention on Human Rights should have any bearing on our proceedings and it is the magistrates’ inclination to adhere only to what is actually the law of the land until and unless a much higher court than ours rules otherwise.

‘However, in any event, the only new evidence offered by the prosecution is indeed, and will remain, inadmissible. There are no properly obtained DNA samples available in this case, nor can there be, in any circumstances, because of the manner in which the defendant was linked to the crime in question. We have no alternative, therefore, but to uphold the defence’s submission of abuse of process. We find that there is no case to answer and I duly dismiss the case.’

O’Donnell had got away with it. Again.

He and his mob had run rings around the law once more, and she and her newspaper had been made to look foolish. Jo supposed she had been naive to think that the paper’s involvement could be kept quiet. She certainly hadn’t expected anything like this, though. She was furious, but not nearly as furious as she knew her husband would be.

She sat for just a few seconds in a kind of stunned daze, only vaguely aware of Bill Phillips, his face like thunder, pushing past her and rushing out of the courtroom. The rest of his family followed at once. They did not try to speak to her, which was all for the best, because for just a few seconds she was not sure that she was able to speak. Slowly she stood up and began to make her way outside.

It was quite a cool, breezy late October day, but Joanna was sweating. She was wearing a woollen trouser suit and beneath the jacket her cotton shirt was sticking to her. Her face felt as if it were burning. She had previously not really given much thought to the consequences of this case collapsing. She had not allowed herself to think about it.

On the steps of the court she was confronted with the nauseating sight of O’Donnell giving one of his impromptu press conferences. His father was by his side as ever. Frail in body Sam might be, but his toughness and strength of character had not left him — as much of his earlier weariness seemed now to have done. Still leaning heavily on his walking stick, he used his free arm to clap his son on his back, beaming, openly triumphant. Extraordinary. Joanna continued to find it hard to accept that he could really believe in his elder son’s innocence, because she genuinely thought that Sam the Man would find this kind of crime as repugnant as would almost everyone else. Surely the only explanation could be that Jimbo really was the old man’s blind spot and that when it came to his favourite son he truly couldn’t see what everyone else could so clearly. She knew that was what Fielding thought. Fielding. All she wanted to do was get away as quickly as possible, but the crush of bodies on the steps impeded her progress. She looked around for the detective. He was right behind her, as desperate to escape as she was, she suspected. Their eyes met briefly again. There was a blankness in his. His mouth was set in a firm, hard line. Come to think of it, he looked pretty much the way she felt.

Apart from anything else, O’Donnell had made certain that the link between them was public knowledge. And under privilege in open court too — which meant that the papers could print what they liked free from the restriction of the laws of libel.

With half an ear she was aware of O’Donnell’s slightly whining voice. She could catch only snatched phrases above the hubbub of the crowd but it was enough to know he was repeating yet again the now familiar story: ‘...I’m an innocent man. I’ve been persecuted... harassed... set up...’

Suddenly the pitch of his voice changed. ‘There they are, there they are now,’ he shouted, and this time neither she nor anyone else within a half-mile radius could have any difficulty in hearing him. ‘There they are!’

To her horror, she realised Jimbo was pointing at her and Fielding, his face screwed up in hatred as he spat out the words.

The gathered hacks and snappers turned as one and surged forward towards them. Jo was about to learn the hard way what it felt like to be on the receiving end of this level of press attention. Suddenly a flash exploded in her face and she was dazzled, momentarily blinded. At almost the same moment someone lurched into her side. She stumbled, almost fell. A strong hand grasped her elbow, supporting her. She looked round. It was Fielding. He was half smiling, a wry, resigned sort of smile. She smiled her gratitude back. More cameras flashed.

Joanna Bartlett and Mike Fielding were no longer just a journalist and a policeman who had worked on the case. They had become an important ingredient in the whole Beast of Dartmoor saga.

Eleven

All Joanna wanted to do was go home and hide. And for perhaps the first time in her marriage she quite desperately wished that she did not share her home with her editor. The large, impeccably furnished and decorated house on Richmond Hill was going to be no hiding place at all.

She had no idea where Nigel Nuffield had disappeared to so swiftly after the devastating verdict or, indeed, exactly how, but in any event she did not really want to see him. Not yet. She was too angry. Too defeated.

On autopilot she filed what story she could. The Comet’s news editor was a woman now, virtually unheard of twenty years earlier. And Pam Smythe’s measured approach was a far cry from that of the bombastic McKane and Foley, who had been traditional Fleet Street newsmen of a very different mould, but Pam was razor sharp and could be quite cutting enough when it was called for. On this occasion she actually sounded embarrassed. Banter was not what it was any more, but even the old guys would probably have held back in this situation. Joanna had screwed up big time and back in Canary Wharf they damn well knew it.

When she had finished her call to the office there was something else she felt she had to do before she could head home to the dubious reception which inevitably awaited her. She set off across the moor to Blackstone to visit the Phillips family. They too had managed to make a quick getaway, somehow getting past the press pack and presumably driving off back to Five Tors. Jo didn’t really want to see them but she felt she could not just walk away from them on this dreadful day. The pack were gathered, just as they had so long ago, at the end of the farm lane, having no doubt already knocked several times on the farmhouse door and been sent away.

Joanna drove straight past them, swung her BMW into the yard and parked right outside the kitchen door, which was opened almost immediately when she knocked on it. They would have heard her arriving, of course, and recognised her car.

Rob Phillips beckoned her into the big kitchen where the entire family were, yet again, gathered round the kitchen table. Without being asked she pulled back a chair and sat down. Just as before. Nobody spoke to her. But at least they had allowed her in.

She glanced around her. Bill Phillips sat head down with his hands clasped round a mug of tea as if drawing comfort from the warmth of it. She could see that his fingers were shaking. He did not look up and for that she was quite grateful. She did not want to see how much more pain there was in his eyes.

Lillian Phillips was sobbing quietly. Joanna thought she had probably been in tears ever since the verdict was announced. Her daughter-in-law had her arm round her but had obviously given up trying to comfort her. What comfort could anyone give this woman, Joanna wondered. Lillian stared at her through her tears, a stare which was a mix of accusation and pleading.

Mary was tight-lipped. Eyes bright in their folds of flesh. She was deceptive. The fat made her look like a West Country version of jolly Ma Larkin. Her voice was a gentle Devonshire burr, but it had a hard edge when she broke the silence. She was, of course, as damaged as the rest of the family by the legacy of the terrible twenty-year-old murder and in reality her personality could not have been further removed from that of the carefree Ma Larkin.

But how could it have been any other way? How could anybody in this family ever be carefree again? As his mother began to speak she glanced at Les, the youngest of them, Angela’s nephew. The lad looked as if he was carrying the cares of the world on his shoulders. Unlike the others, he had not gone through anything like this before. This was his first taste of it. She thought the look of panic in his eyes came from the grim realisation that this had been the family’s one chance to put an end to it all, finally to bury Angela, as he had put it. Now he must know that there would be no end, that Angela’s ghost would probably haunt him for the rest of his life. Joanna couldn’t imagine the bleakness he must be feeling.

Mary Phillips’s words washed over her: harsh, deserved, expected. ‘What was the point of it all? What was the point of dragging it all up again? There is no justice in this country. We should not have listened to you, Joanna Bartlett. Look at the state mother is in, look at her. You did this to her, you and your precious policeman boyfriend. We trusted him before and he let us down. Now we’ve been let down again. By you. By everyone.’

Joanna did not reply. What was there to say? She wondered a little at even Mary referring to Fielding in this way.

Young Les spoke up then. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said. ‘You promised us we’d get him this time. You promised us it would be all right...’ There was a catch in his voice.

Joanna sighed. ‘Les, I’m not the chairman of the bench. I’m as sorry as you are, as sorry as any of you.’ Even as she said the words she knew they were a mistake.

From Bill Phillips there came a kind of strangled sound; it was actually a sort of dry, mirthless laugh. He looked up for the first time. She tried to avoid his eyes but could not. If there had been pain before, now there was agony in them. ‘No you’re not,’ he told her in a quiet, even voice without much expression. ‘No you’re not and please don’t ever again say that you are. You don’t know what sorrow is. You have to lose what we have lost to know. We’ve lost our daughter and our own lives too. Look at that boy there...’ He gestured at Les. ‘What’s he known in his life but our misery?’

She didn’t dare speak.

‘Why have you come here tonight?’ he asked sharply.

Her reply was honest. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘After another story for that so-called newspaper of yours, are you?’ he persisted.

‘No, this is off the record, I promise. I just wanted to see you...’ Her voice tailed off.

‘We’ve had enough of your promises,’ he told her. There was another silence before he spoke again, his voice even sharper, his look challenging. ‘You are going to honour our contract, you are going to pay up, I assume. Or will that be another broken promise?’

‘You won’t be out of pocket, Bill, I suppose that was the only promise I could make and have some control over. Of course the Comet will pay you, as agreed.’

She spoke with a confidence she did not feel. So far the paper had only paid a nominal £5000 to the family for interviews given once it had been decided to put a private prosecution into motion and before the court case. As ever, and apart from any other considerations, what further material they could publish, if any, would be severely limited by the man’s acquittal.

Costs had been awarded against the Phillipses. That meant they had to pay O’Donnell’s legal fees as well as their own and he, as ever, had fielded the dream team. The total bill, even though the case had not got beyond the committal proceedings, could well end up approaching £100,000 or so. Brian Burns was famous for quite extortionate fees, which had become a part of his mystique and which his clients always seemed to pay without a murmur because of his extraordinary record of success. And Nigel Nuffield did not come cheap, in spite of his bleeding-heart pretensions.

Joanna’s heart sank to her boots as she made herself consider it all. She dreaded Paul’s reaction. He had agreed to the deal being struck. She was not just a senior columnist on his paper but also his wife. This was the kind of mess that could bring editors down.

She had a feeling he might refuse to pay. And sitting at that kitchen table looking around at those sad, broken people, she wished the quarry-tiled floor would split in two and swallow her up.

They didn’t hate her, really. They just wanted someone to blame. After a bit Mary offered her a cup of tea. Jo didn’t actually want it, but gratefully accepted the olive branch. In the end she stayed for just over half an hour and when she left to begin her drive back to London Lillian was still weeping. Her sobs grew drier and drier as if she had no tears left, but she carried on going through the motions.

Jo had at one point quietly asked Mary if she thought maybe she should call a doctor for her mother-in-law.

‘No,’ the other woman had replied with forceful certainty. ‘She’ll be better just left alone.’ Then, pointedly she had added, making Jo feel smaller than ever: ‘We’ll all be better left alone now...’

That seemed to be her cue to go. And once she was safely in the cocoon of the BMW, Joanna found she had to take deep breaths in order to prevent herself breaking down. She rattled the powerful motor down the lane, not bothering even to attempt to avoid the potholes, and, much faster than she knew she should have done, hurtled past the assembled pack who were shouting out at her, desperate for a few crumbs from her table. As she pressed her foot a little further down on the accelerator, she wondered why on earth they should think she had any crumbs left after what she had been put through in the courtroom that day.

A photographer she knew vaguely and had never liked stepped out into the road in front of her, brandishing his camera. She accelerated even more and was mildly gratified by the surprised and frightened expression on his face as he was forced to leap into the hedge in order to avoid being run over.

She did remind herself, as she carried on in the direction of the A30, that there was nothing worse than poacher turned gamekeeper, and she lifted her foot, just slightly, off the accelerator slowing to an almost sensible speed. Her hands were shaking on the wheel. Her bottom lip was trembling and she had to fight like mad to prevent herself from bursting into tears. Apart from anything else, she was afraid that if she started, like poor Lillian Phillips, she would not be able to stop.

The A30 blended with the M5 just before Exeter and within half an hour or so of leaving Five Tors Farm the Exeter Services loomed ahead of her and she pulled off the road, telling herself that she might as well fill up with petrol straight away. There was, of course, another reason.

This time she intended to give in to her impulse. She didn’t have anything much more to lose anyway. She really did want to see Fielding. She used her mobile to call him. She guessed he would be in his office at Heavitree Road just as he had been on that other occasion all those years ago. For all sorts of reasons she did not dare turn up unannounced as she had then. Their relationship, whatever it was, and God knew she had no idea what it was, particularly as they had yet even to talk in person this time round, was now too public. They had somehow become almost as much a part of the story as O’Donnell and poor Angela Phillips.

But there was something else, too. Suddenly the memory of what had happened between them after that other trial, that long-ago acquittal of O’Donnell in Exeter Crown Court, had become overwhelmingly vivid. Once more, and after so long, she felt very strongly that only she and Fielding could help each other.

He answered his direct line at once. ‘I was hoping it might be you,’ he said quietly.

She was very slightly taken aback. Was he too thinking of that night twenty years ago? ‘Can you get out?’ she asked. ‘I thought we might have a drink.’

‘I’ve got a report to write. I’m in the shit over this, deeply in the shit.’

She interrupted him. ‘Me too.’

‘Yep,’ he murmured. ‘Story of my life, though, isn’t it?’

There was a slightly awkward pause.

‘Look, if I don’t have this report in the chief constable’s office by tomorrow morning I’m dead.’

‘It’s OK, you’re right, it was probably a lousy idea anyway.’

‘To hell with it,’ he interrupted suddenly. ‘Where are you?’

She told him.

‘Right. Not any of the pubs here.’

She understood his reasons well enough as he gave her directions to a pub she had never heard of. ‘See you there in twenty.’

She phoned Emily on the way, trying not to give any indication of how upset she was, but telling her daughter and the au pair that she would be late home and Emily shouldn’t even think about waiting up as she had school the next day.

Fielding was at the pub before her, sitting at a corner table nursing a pint. He’d taken his tie off and his jacket looked rumpled. She was reminded again of what a snappy dresser he had once been, always particularly noticeable in a member of a profession not known for sartorial elegance. He looked worn out and fed up. She was aware again of the disappointment and weariness in his eyes.

He got up and kissed her lightly on the cheek. Strange how natural that seemed. She accepted his offer of a drink and ordered a Diet Coke. She had a long drive ahead of her.

He bought the drink for her and sat down opposite. Neither of them spoke for what seemed a long time but was probably just a few seconds.

‘You look tired,’ she said eventually.

‘Thanks a bunch,’ he responded. ‘I’ve seen you look better too.’

‘I’ve just come from the Phillipses,’ she said.

‘Oh, fuck.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And now you’re off home. Something else to look forward to.’

‘Yup.’

‘I keep trying to figure out what went wrong.’

‘Yup,’ she said again.

‘I was sure the bastard would go down. Instead it’s all the rest of us who are down, right down the pan in my case.’

He looked so miserable. A completely different man from the one she had first encountered all those years ago. Like a small boy, really, but a very old small boy. She felt a sudden urge to give him a cuddle. But those days were long gone and this was certainly not the moment to rekindle anything. ‘We did the right thing,’ she said, as much to reassure herself as him.

‘Did we? And since when did the likes of you and me even try to do the right thing?’

She sighed. ‘We do sometimes.’

‘And sometimes not.’ He looked down at his hands, holding his pint glass on the table in front of him. ‘I was remembering when we met after O’Donnell walked the last time...’

He didn’t need to explain further. She had known that would be as much in his mind as it was in hers. It had to be. ‘So was I,’ she said softy.

He looked up at her. Suddenly there was just a spark of the old Mike Fielding. ‘God, we were good,’ he said. And his eyes twinkled.

‘We damn well were, weren’t we?’ she responded, and for what seemed the first time in for ever she managed a big broad grin.

But that was the only reference they made to their old relationship. One thing was obvious — and that was how much they both remembered it, how easy it was for them to relive their time together. Nonetheless, although they continued to talk about the old days they spoke more about other people than themselves.

‘You used to drive that old bastard Frank Manners crazy, you know,’ he said.

‘Didn’t I, though,’ she replied with some satisfaction. And they had almost managed a bit of a giggle at that. It was as if by silent consent they did not want to talk about anything that might be contentious in any way. They stayed in the pub together for more than an hour and also, perhaps surprisingly, talked very little about that day’s courtroom disaster. There was, after all, little point. Neither of them could see any way of taking the matter forward. Or their relationship, come to that. This stolen hour had been a great comfort to her somehow and also, she suspected, to him. But it could not be more than that.

‘I’ve really got to get back to that report,’ he said eventually. ‘If I want to keep the small chance I have of hanging on to my pension.’

She found it sad to hear him talk in that fashion. The Mike Fielding she had known before had been convinced that he was going straight to the top. That Mike Fielding would not have believed that twenty years down the line he would have progressed just one rung up the promotional ladder and be grimly hanging on to the remains of his career, desperate not to lose his bloody pension.

Was that really all his lifetime’s work amounted to? She was lucky in that respect, she reflected. She already had total financial security, albeit thanks largely to her marriage to Paul.

Paul. Seeing him that night promised to be a perfect end to a perfect day. ‘I have to go too,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.’

‘Good luck,’ he murmured. He still seemed to know what she was thinking. Did he also know that thanks to him, and for reasons she could not quite explain to herself, she now felt more able to deal with what lay ahead? Certainly both stronger and calmer than she had done when she arrived at the pub.

Outside the pub they kissed goodbye on the cheek, like the old friends she told herself they could only ever be again, particularly after this latest débâcle. How come they always seemed to cause each other trouble? How come she had not been able to stop herself feeling some of the old longing for him? And how come she was so convinced that he still felt it too?

He looked different. He was different. He was weary and disappointed, a failure, more or less, hanging on in there. And yet as she watched him walk away from her to his own car she did not see that at all. No. She saw the same bold, high-flying young maverick, with his to-die-for grin and winning ways, that she had fallen in love with twenty years earlier.

Whatever succour she had gained from her meeting with Fielding rapidly disappeared on the way back to London when she finally made herself call Nigel Nuffield on his mobile phone.

The barrister answered at once. She wanted, irrationally or not, to scream abuse at him, but there was no point. ‘I just need to know if you think there is anything else we can do, Nigel?’ she asked. ‘Is there any kind of appeal procedure at this stage? And if so, is there still any reasonable chance of success?’

‘My dear Joanna, I only wish there were,’ he told her, sounding as languid as ever. ‘We could appeal to the Queen’s Bench on a point of law over the Human Rights Convention issue, and we would be in with a chance on that. Somebody will have to get a ruling on it sooner or later. But I’m afraid we’ve been bowled a googly on the DNA admissibility issue and that is our only new evidence, as that infuriating woman magistrate pointed out.’

Bloody cricket again. She wished he wouldn’t do that. Her irritation got the better of her. ‘Nigel, you quite obviously didn’t know about the ruling on the Weir case...’

The barrister interrupted her. ‘Jo, you know as well as I do the confusion over interpretation of the law regarding DNA,’ he asserted. ‘If we’d had a different umpire we might have won the day regardless, worried about the next step then. As it is I played all the shots but the decision went against us. Badly, I’m afraid.’

A different umpire? Played all the shots? The man was infuriating. She really wasn’t going to let him get away with it. ‘Nigel, I’m sorry, I think our case was ill-prepared and I’m going to tell Paul so, and if I have my way the Comet will damn well sue you.’ She very nearly shouted the last few words into the phone.

Nuffield replied in a slow, slightly amused drawl, his public-school vowels even more extended than usual, ‘Joanna, Joanna, calm down. This is litigation, not life.’

She completely lost it then. ‘That may be how it is for you, prancing about in your damned silly wig, but for real people it is their lives, you overpaid, over-hyped patronising fucking bastard,’ she yelled at him. Then she switched her phone off.

Unprofessional. Unhelpful. Yes. But oh, it was also the only fleetingly satisfying moment in a truly nightmare day. A day which had yet to end.

Paul was sitting on the big black leather sofa in their spacious living room surrounded by the next day’s papers when she finally arrived home just after midnight. The walls and the floor were cream. The only colour came from Paul’s collection of vibrant abstract paintings. The scattered newspapers were the only clutter in the room. Probably in the house. Paul was like that. So too was their daughter, hopefully sound asleep upstairs by now. Emily took after her father in personality. She was self-contained, capable, organised, meticulously tidy. Unnaturally so, Joanna sometimes thought. All Emily’s contemporaries seemed to be congenitally lazy and specialised in leaving a trail of debris behind them. They were, well, sort of normal really. Jo shrugged away her vague disloyalty and forced herself to concentrate on the unwelcome confrontation she knew was about to begin.

She sat in the armchair opposite her husband. Dinah Washington was playing loudly on the music system. Paul liked to listen to classical music quietly in the background when he was working in the office and loud jazz when he was relaxing at home. He didn’t look very relaxed. Dinah was singing ‘What a Difference a Day Makes’, which, Joanna thought, was certainly appropriate.

She felt drained. She kicked off her shoes and closed her eyes. After a moment or two the music stopped abruptly and she guessed that Paul had turned it off with the remote control.

‘You took your time getting back,’ he remarked eventually.

She opened her eyes just a little. ‘I went to see the Phillipses.’ She carefully omitted mentioning her meeting with Fielding.

He didn’t reply.

‘They’re devastated by what’s happened.’

He regarded her coolly. ‘So am I,’ he said.

‘Look, I reckon Nuffield really let us down...’

‘Don’t search for scapegoats, Jo. It was you who convinced me this case could be won and I gave you the absolute top man in the country.’

That was true.

‘He does say we could take it to the Queen’s Bench...’

He interrupted her again. ‘Don’t even think about it, Joanna. There is no “we”. As far as you and the Comet are concerned, it’s over.’

She didn’t have the energy to argue. And in any event, even Nuffield, never one to pass up the opportunity of a further fee, had warned against attempting to take the case any further. There was one subject she could not stop herself broaching. ‘Look, Paul, you know costs were awarded against the Phillipses...’ She regretted the words as soon as she said them.

‘My heart bleeds for them.’

‘You are going to honour the contract...’ She regretted those words too. She knew she should have waited until at least the next working day, picked her moment. But she had been worrying about the financial side of it all the way home.

‘There is no contract, Jo.’

Her heart sank. It was all too true. There had not been any contract because she had convinced the family it would be prejudicial for the Comet to be seen to be financing the case. She had been right enough about that at any rate. She had also convinced them that her word was as good as a contract. ‘National newspapers don’t renege on deals,’ she had told them. ‘We don’t dare. We need our contacts and the people we do business with to trust us. If we make a deal we keep it.’ Once upon a time that really had been the truth. Nowadays, by and large, it was bullshit. But this time she had really willed it to be true. ‘Paul, if the Phillipses go public on this it will be even worse,’ she said. ‘They’ll deny it to the wall as long as we pay up.’

‘Joanna, think about it.’ He spoke with exaggerated patience as if to a small child. Obliquely she wondered why all the men in her life seemed to do this to her. It had been understandable, perhaps, with her primary schoolteacher first husband. From Paul it was especially infuriating.

‘It’s already public,’ Paul continued. ‘We have been accused in court of masterminding this whole farcical trial, of leading a campaign of persecution against an already acquitted man — which is more or less the truth, isn’t it?’ He picked up a couple of newspapers at random and threw them at her. ‘Look at this lot, for Christ’s sake. We’re being crucified.’

She had already seen the headlines as the papers were all lying around him on the sofa, open at the appropriate spot.

CRETINOUS COMET LEADS MURDER VICTIM FAMILY IN SUICIDE COURT CASE was an average offering. The strap on that one was good too: And they’re paying for it.

She knew what Paul was going to say before he said it. ‘We can’t pay the Phillipses, Jo, and you may as well accept it now. I should never have given you the go-ahead on this one. I should have known better.’

She suspected that he had known better. She suspected that, maybe for the first time during their marriage and his editorship, he had let the fact that she was his wife sway his judgement. He had known how important this story was to her. She was grateful to him for that but now she could feel the chill of his anger. He obviously felt she had let him down and maybe she had.

She could only continue with what she had begun. ‘Paul, if we don’t pay the Phillipses I think they could even lose their home,’ she said. She didn’t know if that was true but they had told her they had already been forced by the farming recession to remortgage their property to the hilt.

He was unimpressed. It wasn’t that he was an unfeeling man but, apart from any other considerations, it was a very long time since he had been on the road. She had noticed from her first days in Fleet Street the differences between front-line troops and the back-room boys, as she still in her mind divided up the staffs of newspapers. To the back-room boys a story was simply that — words on paper to be manipulated in whatever fashion would give greatest effect. The people behind the stories only existed to the front-line troops who, all too often, were out there on their own.

She tried again, a different approach. ‘Look, together with the Phillipses we tried to get a monster locked up where he belongs. That’s in the glorious old campaigning style of the Comet and I think we should do more of it.’

‘Some glorious campaign,’ he snapped at her and threw another newspaper across the room, front page towards her. I’VE BEEN PERSECUTED, CLAIMS INNOCENT O’DONNELL screamed a banner headline.

‘Innocent O’Donnell,’ she muttered irritably. ‘That’s a contradiction in terms. What about the poor bloody innocent Phillips family, that’s what I want to know.’

‘Do you, Joanna?’ He was as angry now as she could ever remember seeing him. ‘I’m not entirely convinced of that. I’m beginning to wonder if the reason for your blind obsession with this case isn’t exactly the same as it was twenty years ago. One Mike Fielding.’

She was startled. She had tried to mention Fielding’s involvement with the case as little as possible.

‘Take a look at page five of the Mail. It’s inside most of the others too.’

With growing apprehension she did as she was bid. There, staring her in the face, was the photograph which, if she had allowed herself to think about it, had been bound to appear. She and Mike were standing close together on the courtroom steps, smiling slightly at each other, his arm protectively round her shoulders. ‘Damn,’ she thought. ‘Damn and blast.’

Sometimes she forgot just how astute her husband was. He missed nothing. She suddenly felt sure he had guessed that she had been with Fielding that evening.

His next words convinced her that she was probably right. ‘Don’t take me for a fool, Joanna,’ he told her icily.