A Kind Of Wild Justice

Twelve

Two months later James Martin O’Donnell disappeared.

The Daily Mail broke the story, to Joanna’s intense irritation and her husband’s fury.

‘Where’s my boy?’ asked Sam O’Donnell in a lengthy centre-spread feature, which focused on what he claimed was a campaign of persecution against his eldest son. ‘The police and a major national newspaper have colluded in hounding my Jimbo. And now he’s disappeared. I fear I’ll never see my boy again.’

It was nauseating stuff, once more making O’Donnell sound like some innocent caught up in a whirlwind of events none of which were of his own making. Sam O’Donnell had apparently gone to the Mail in preference to reporting his son missing to the police. That made a kind of twisted sense. It was hard to imagine the O’Donnells calling on police help for anything. This way they brought the case into the public domain and ensured that police inquiries would be made without actually directly calling on plod for help.

No doubt the O’Donnells had already scoured their own dubious contacts nationwide before taking this step. They must have drawn a blank. That in itself was intriguing. In fact, the whole thing was fascinating. However, Joanna could not sit back and enjoy any kind of objective assessment. She was too involved. And the Daily Mail story was yet another kick in the teeth for the Comet.

At one point Sam O’Donnell damn near accused the police of having played a part in Jimbo’s disappearance. Fielding got a specific mention:

Joanna groaned. Here we go again, she thought.

The Mail had tried to get to Fielding, of course, doorstepping him, no doubt. The paper reported that he had refused to speak to them and the only other police comment was from a Met spokesman pledging that of course inquiries would be made in the normal way into Mr O’Donnell’s disappearance, but pointing out that he had not even been officially reported missing yet. There was a small picture of Fielding hurrying out of Heavitree Road police station looking extremely fed up and harassed.

On its leader page the Mail made it clear that it was not in any way supporting Sam the Man, many of whose business activities had frequently been the subject of police investigations, but the events leading up to O’Donnell’s disappearance must undoubtedly have some significance. If he were guilty of any involvement in the abduction, rape, or murder of Angela Phillips then police mishandling must surely be evident. If he were not guilty, and he had after all now been found innocent of all three charges in courts of law, then his father was probably quite correct in alleging harassment. Certainly Jimbo O’Donnell’s disappearance and the varied events leading up to it should be thoroughly investigated by independent officers.

It was all good stuff. But not for the Comet.

‘This whole story is turning into a fiasco, Joanna,’ Paul stormed at the end of morning conference, giving her a roasting in front of the entire senior editorial team, which she was quite sure they all thoroughly enjoyed witnessing. The days when female staff were fair game for any kind of nonsense and sexual harassment in a newspaper office might be over — but an assistant editor and high-profile columnist who was also the editor’s wife fell into a unique category, and to see her lampooned in this way was bound to be regarded as excellent sport.

‘First we get publicly humiliated. Now the opposition is running rings round us. Again. I let you have a free hand with this one, Jo, because I believed you were on top of it. Let’s see if we can’t retrieve something out of this mess, shall we?’

It was fair comment. Joanna could not argue with him and did not.

Instead, she went to work. She had already called the O’Donnell house, in fact, had done so when the first edition of the Mail had dropped the previous night. A Daily Mail reporter had answered the phone. She had not been surprised. The Mail had obviously done a deal. And in the circumstances the O’Donnells would hardly have come to her and the Comet.

She phoned Fielding. She had called him before, leaving messages at Heavitree Road and on his mobile message service that morning. He had not replied. This time she got lucky.

He answered his mobile at once.

‘Another fine mess,’ she began.

‘I don’t know what you’re worried about, the rubber heel boys are over me like flies again,’ he said. He meant Complaints and Discipline investigators.

And she wasn’t surprised to hear it. Or all that interested. She had her own troubles. ‘Christ, Mike, you could have called me yesterday when the Mail got on to you.’

‘For God’s sake, Joanna. Don’t you think maybe I had something else to think about?’

There was none of the unspoken warmth between them that there had been that evening at the Exeter pub. They were both under too much stress. The mess was getting worse rather than better. In normal circumstances Jo could imagine nothing she would like better than to think that O’Donnell might have come to a sticky end at the hands of some of his particularly venomous cohorts. But these were not normal circumstances.

It seemed that she and Fielding were getting blame thrown at them at every step.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly.

He mellowed a little. ‘Look, if I hear anything and if I possibly can, I’ll call you,’ he told her before saying an abrupt goodbye.

She pondered for a moment. She dared not call the Phillipses. That relationship was over for good. Paul was still refusing to pay the family and she had to realise that by his own standards he had good reason not to.

She had even been forbidden by Paul from explaining the situation to them. ‘Joanna, there was no contract between this newspaper and the Phillipses,’ he had reminded her repeatedly. ‘That is the legal truth and we’re sticking to it. Classic denial. It worked for Jimbo O’Donnell and it’ll work for us.’

That had made her feel even more of a rat, of course, but what could she do?

‘It would be madness for you even to try to contact them, Jo,’ he had continued. ‘You must see that. If they’ve got any sense they’ll have a lawyer in on the act now. They’ve probably been told to tape any conversations they have with you or anybody representing this newspaper. You really mustn’t even discuss it with them.’

She had known he was right, which made it harder.

He’d put a hand on her arm, continuing more gently, ‘Look, Jo, I know you feel bad about this and so do I.’

She hadn’t been convinced of that, but she let it pass.

‘There’s just no alternative. At least we tried to help them, tried to bring O’Donnell to justice. Nobody could have predicted that it would all go pear-shaped again.’

She hadn’t been convinced of that either. Her own and Fielding’s judgements had so far proved to be faulty in every aspect of this case. And Nuffield had turned out to be a huge disappointment.

For once she did as she was told. She dodged all phone calls from the Phillips family and never called them back. Eventually they got the message.

Both she and Paul had since received letters from a firm of Exeter solicitors saying that they represented Bill and Rob Phillips who were planning to take them to the Press Complaints Commission and sue them for breach of contract if they did not pay the costs of the court case as agreed.

Paul said they didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of winning such a case and, anyway, he’d have a large bet that when it came to it they wouldn’t take the risk. ‘Let’s face it, they can’t afford to, can they?’ he remarked.

Joanna squirmed inside.

As for the Press Complaints Commission, Paul went on to say that he would be more afraid of them if he paid the Phillipses than if he didn’t. Inasmuch as any editor was afraid of the Commission, he concluded.

Again she had been forced to agree with him, even though she didn’t like it. Everything about this whole case continued to leave a nasty taste in her mouth.

Paul was proved right. There had so far been no follow-up to the letter from the Exeter solicitors. It seemed likely that the Phillipses were indeed not going to proceed with their threat to sue the Comet. But Joanna had got one prediction right. When they finally realised they were not going to get any more money out of the Comet without one hell of a fight, the family decided to go as public as possible, giving an interview to a local news agency, which put out their story to all the nationals.

Unfortunately, the family’s bad fortune continued and their timing was atrocious. They had embarked on this course of action only yesterday, thus having to do battle for space with the story of O’Donnell’s disappearance. The Mail, glorying in its exclusive, did not even give the Phillipses’ allegations a line. The other papers ran stories in their first editions — although not as big as might have been hoped because more or less the same claims had already been made in open court — but the ‘O’Donnell missing’ revelation virtually wiped them out of later editions altogether. Rather guiltily, Joanna had to acknowledge that while unlucky for the Phillipses, it was quite fortunate for her that the two stories had broken on the same day. Jimbo’s disappearance had so overshadowed the Phillipses’ story that Paul seemed barely to have even noticed it.

Joanna tried to put out of her mind everything about which she could do nothing, and concentrated on attempting to find a really sensational follow-up to the Mail exclusive. She did not succeed but, fortunately for her, neither did anyone else.

The Mail, predictably, remained ahead. After all, they had the O’Donnells tied up and they were famously good at this kind of story. The Comet’s involvement with the private prosecution, however misguided it now seemed to have been, had until this latest development at least meant that the paper had been continuously ahead of the game. The Mail did not like to be beaten. Ever. Now it was firmly in front. The day after its initial exclusive the Mail carried a picture story of an old and frail-looking Sam O’Donnell, his walking stick to the forefront, outside the police station at which he had finally officially reported his son missing.

It was a brilliant image. However, the word was, in spite of official police protestation to the contrary, that Sam had been greeted with no great enthusiasm and there were few signs of any major police activity in looking for his son.

Joanna called Fielding again.

He had calmed down somewhat and seemed to be taking some pleasure at last from the prospect, however remote, that Jimbo O’Donnell might have come to harm. ‘You’re right, nobody’s rushing around on this one up at the Met,’ he told Jo. ‘But why should they? It’s not just that we all know the bugger’s a villain and of a particularly nasty kind, too. He’s also a grown man and, unfortunately, a free one. He’s not considered vulnerable — that would be a laugh. He could have gone anywhere off his own bat. There’s no evidence to show that he may have been taken against his will or harmed in any way — not like poor Angela.’ She had heard him sigh at the other end of the phone. ‘There’s no reason why there should be a major search on for him. He’ll go on the missing persons register, now that it’s been reported that he’s disappeared, and that will be about it. For a while, at any rate. Nobody could expect otherwise,’ he paused. ‘Except Sam the Man, of course,’ he reflected wryly.

Joanna’s discomfiture continued. Three days later Private Eye dropped with an uncannily accurate summary of Paul Potter’s public rollicking of his wife. In the notorious ‘Street of Shame’ section they referred to Potter as Smile in the Back and predictably dubbed Joanna his ‘pouting hackette spouse’.

Joanna groaned inside when she, alone at her desk thankfully, encountered the barbed item in her early copy of the magazine. There was no telling how Paul would react. He too, of course, received the earliest possible edition of Private Eye, as did virtually everyone in newspapers. It was a bit like a house magazine, really. Paul would have scanned the rag already and read the piece. If he hadn’t, some kind soul would be sure to point it out to him.

She saw her husband several times during the day, including at morning and afternoon conference, but he made no mention of the Private Eye piece. She didn’t either, in spite of being well aware of occasional little giggling groups of staff falling into unnatural silence as soon as she approached. But she kept her own counsel, pretended not to notice, said nothing. Give nobody the satisfaction of seeing that you were hurt or in any way affected. That was one thing that had remained the same throughout all the changes she had witnessed within newspapers. If there was one thing worse than being the subject of a typically snide Private Eye piece, it would be to let the buggers know they had got to you — in particular the buggers who had been responsible for supplying the relevant information.

Though Paul did not mention the item to her that day, or even give any indication that he had read it, she knew him well enough to be quite sure that he had, and that this was the reason for him looking unusually tight-lipped. She dreaded the confrontation that was surely coming.

At home that evening, over a nowadays increasingly rare late supper together, Paul at last brought up the subject. ‘I’m absolutely fucking furious about that Private Eye piece, Jo,’ he told her, and she knew he really must be, because he so rarely swore.

‘I know. It is bollocks, though; I hope you realise that.’

‘What?’ He glanced at her with his eyebrows raised as if not quite following her train of thought. ‘Oh, you mean the Fielding stuff?’ Paul’s tone was very reasonable. ‘I don’t enjoy reading that sort of thing about my wife, but I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later after the court case. That damned picture everybody carried didn’t help. And you do insist on still remaining in contact with the man.’

‘He’s the best contact we’ve got on this; in fact, he’s about the only one left, Paul,’ she said.

‘Yes, I know,’ he countered. ‘You still have a fixation for him, though, I’m aware of that even if you’re not yourself. But I don’t really think there’s anything between you any more. And anyway, it’s not that which has made me so mad. It’s all that stuff from morning conference. If I knew which one of our guys had sold us down the river like that I’d sack whoever it was at once. Jesus!’

She couldn’t help a small smile. Paul’s reactions were rarely predictable. He never failed to surprise her and often to impress her.

The following day the law lords ruled that the appeal court which had overturned the murder conviction of Michael Weir had been wrong. This was the case which had been used as a precedent by the defence in the ill-fated private prosecution of Jimbo O’Donnell.

The appeal court’s judgement that DNA samples obtained during the investigation of one offence could not be used in an unrelated case had been crucial to the failure of the committal proceedings.

The law lords, however, were damning. ‘The austere interpretation which the court of appeal adopted is not only in conflict with the plain words of the statute but also produces results which are contrary to good sense,’ they said.

Too late, thought Joanna glumly. If only O’Donnell was in court now, that ruling could have made all the difference. But Jimbo had now faced every possible charge concerning the abduction and death of Angela Phillips. Double jeopardy was still the law. He couldn’t be tried again.

Four days later it all became academic. James Martin O’Donnell’s body was discovered on Dartmoor, not far from the disused tin mine which had become the tomb of the raped and murdered Angela Phillips twenty-one years earlier. He had been found early one morning by a group of ramblers and it was as if his killer had planned for him to be discovered. Jimbo had been buried in the shallowest of graves which, although in a remote part of the moor, had been only roughly filled in and was almost on the edge of the kind of track that was bound to be popular with walkers. The grave was so shallow that the heavy rains of the previous evening had washed away enough of the loose soil covering Jimbo for the fingers of his right hand to be left actually sticking out of the ground. It was this grisly sight that had alerted the ramblers.

O’Donnell was naked, his body caked with his own blood. And his cut-off penis had been stuffed into his mouth. Medical examination was later to prove both that his penis had been removed with a none too sharp knife shortly before his death and also that he had been buried alive.

Thirteen

Joanna learned of the discovery of O’Donnell’s body from Fielding. He might be out of favour with his bosses but Dartmoor remained his patch. The seasoned detective didn’t miss much.

She was stunned. It was something else she hadn’t expected. Was this story never going to roll over? In her mind she had half dismissed the whole business of Jimbo’s disappearance as yet another O’Donnell stunt. But he had been murdered, and in such a dramatic and significant way. Buried alive. His cock in his mouth. Found near where Angela Phillips had died. The first constructive thought that crossed her mind was that it had to be a revenge killing.

‘It’s going to be announced at a press conference later today, after he’s been formally identified,’ Fielding told her in a telephone call just after morning conference. He was at Heavitree Road police station. He spoke very quietly. She could understand that he did not want to be overheard. It was good of him to call her. She supposed it was for old times’ sake. Mind you, she had stuck her neck out on his instigation and, thanks to him, her head was almost as much on the block in a different sort of way as his. She deserved his help. That did not mean he would necessarily always give it. On this occasion, though, Fielding had come up trumps. ‘Tommy O’Donnell’s on his way to the mortuary in Exeter as we speak,’ he went on. ‘It’s a formality, though. We all know what O’Donnell looks like well enough. He hasn’t decomposed that much yet, and there’s that tattoo on his arm. I thought you’d like a lead on it.’

‘Thanks, Mike, I appreciate it,’ she told him. She did too. The Mail would already be working on it for certain. They would be keeping their grip tight on the O’Donnells. If Tommy O’Donnell was on his way to Exeter the chances were that a Mail team was hard on his heels — maybe even with him. She didn’t have the O’Donnells and she sure as hell didn’t have the Phillipses any more. All she had was one Mike Fielding.

She pumped him for any extra information he could give her. ‘Have you seen the body yourself?’ she asked.

‘Nope. C’mon, Jo, I’m off the case, aren’t I? If I survive this lot at all I’m not likely to be doing much more than shuffling papers till I can pick up my pension and get out.’

Not that again, she thought. But she passed no comment. After all, she did realise that her own financial situation was a very fortunate one.

There appeared to be little more that he could or would tell her. When she ended the call she realised that neither of them had expressed their feelings on O’Donnell’s death or the manner of it. Nor the significance of it. That was perhaps strange. For herself, she had been too shocked. She leaned back in her chair, stretching out her legs, and allowed herself the luxury of a minute or two to think over what she had just learned. She could not avoid a sense of satisfaction that Jimbo O’Donnell had met both an early and undoubtedly agonising death, but not nearly as much satisfaction as she would have obtained from seeing him found guilty of the murder or at least the kidnap of Angela Phillips and properly revealed as the monster he had undoubtedly been. As far as the law was concerned he had died an innocent man and she was almost surprised to find that still mattered to her.

However, she had no time for further philosophising if she wanted to make the most of the advantage she and the Comet had been given by Fielding. She reached for her phone and called through to Paul’s office.

‘Come in now, get news and pix and Tim Jones,’ he instructed. He meant bring in the news and picture editors along with Jones as chief crime man. Together they worked on the story all day, Pam Smythe directing her news team, Tim and his number two working through the Yard and their own contacts on either side of the law, and Joanna mercilessly exploiting whatever contacts she had left who might be able to help her on the story.

She spoke to Mike again a few hours later, to check on developments, homing in on every possible angle he might be able to give her that could put her and her newspaper ahead of the pack. ‘So it is a revenge killing, then?’ she asked. ‘For Angela? Is that what your lads think?’

‘’Course they do. Where he was found, the way he died, his cock in his mouth. Unless we’re just being made to think that.’

‘You’re getting complicated.’

‘Yeah. Well. I try to think round things, don’t I? Which is maybe why I was never going to make it big in the job...’

His bitterness and disappointment were never far from the surface, she thought. She stayed silent.

He continued after a brief pause ‘No. You’re right, Jo. Revenge for Angela is the number one theory. The Phillipses will be questioned, of course.’

‘You don’t think any of them would be capable of what was done to Jimbo, do you?’

‘As it happens, no, I don’t. And Jimbo O’Donnell was never short of enemies. But they’re obviously going to be on the list, aren’t they?’

Jo supposed so. She felt a sharp stab of pity for the family, together with a pang of guilt. If she and Fielding hadn’t opened the whole can of worms again the Phillipses would not be in this situation.

She had no time to dwell on it, though. She had work to do. And fast. The material was dynamite and she knew they had put together a really good package by early evening conference at 5.15 p.m. The official Yard announcement did not come until about half an hour before that. Fielding’s tip had given them a lead of the best part of a day. The Comet had been handed a huge advantage over its rivals, with the exception, she had little doubt, of the Mail. For about the first time since the whole thing had started again she allowed herself to feel a little bit pleased with herself. Just a little. And O’Donnell was dead, brutally murdered, which really was beginning to give her a nice warm feeling. Whoever had done the deed.

After the conference Paul gestured for her to stay behind. She knew he would consider the story the Comet would be putting to bed that night to be at least something of a recovery. And, indeed, he seemed to be in the best mood he had been in for some time. ‘I had lunch with Cromer-Wrong today,’ he told her cheerily. Ronald Cromer-Wright was the Comet’s senior lawyer. Naturally he was invariably known as Cromer-Wrong. Nicknames like that were traditionally every bit as much a part of Fleet Street life as of the gangland world. It was instantly reassuring to Jo that Paul had referred to the lawyer in the familiar vernacular. Had he not been quite so cheery she might have wondered a little uneasily, in view of her recent exploits, where this opening remark was leading.

‘Apparently Cromer-Wrong bumped into a rather well-oiled Nigel Nuffield at some chambers do who informed him that he would never be doing business with him or anybody else at the Comet for as long as you remained employed here, but refused to elaborate,’ Paul continued, sounding highly amused now. ‘Actually, I’m beginning to come round to your way of thinking, that maybe that’s no great loss. But Nuffield’s been paid by the Phillipses, apparently, so that’s not his problem. I just want to know what you did to him, Jo.’ Paul was grinning as if in anticipation.

This was almost like the old days, thought Joanna. ‘I told him he was an overpaid, over-hyped, patronising fucking bastard,’ she explained casually. ‘Oh, and I think I may have mentioned something about prancing about in a damned silly wig...’

‘I’ve told you before, Jo, about being afraid to say what you mean,’ remarked her husband solemnly. Then he started to chuckle. She could still hear him chuckling as she left his office, closing the door behind her.

Paul had always had a wicked sense of humour, buried as it all too often was beneath that cool, rather distant exterior, and it pained her that she, at least, seemed to be seeing less and less of it nowadays. He also had a liking for journalists who stood their corner and showed spirit. Even the one who was his wife, it seemed. By the time she reached her desk she was remembering all the reasons why she had married him in the first place.

Then, just before first edition time, he phoned down and asked her to come along to his office. She was still feeling buoyant — until he told her he was taking her byline off the main story.

‘Sorry, Jo, you’re too much at the heart of it all. The Phillipses might still sue. I can’t take unnecessary risks. And God only knows what the O’Donnells might yet come up with. I want to distance you from it all. Having your name all over the splash every time something new breaks on this one just won’t do.’

‘Fine, whatever you say,’ she told him crisply. She made no further comment, but she did slam the door to his office on the way out.

As she walked back to her desk she couldn’t help but think back to the days when in an unhappy situation like this the first person she would have chosen to drown her sorrows with would have been one Paul Potter.

She told herself not to be so dammed stupid. If she hadn’t been his wife she doubted Paul would even have bothered to tell her about the byline, and she would have known nothing about it until the first edition dropped. It was utterly ridiculous that a byline should matter so much to her at her age and after all she had been through in newspapers, after all she had achieved. But it did matter, of course. Particularly when she was the one who had got the lead on the story. It was actually even more than that. This was her story, through and through, and had been from the very germ of the beginning of it to whatever decaying bones of it there were now. She had taken the flak when it had gone so badly wrong. She should also get any credit that was going. Even after all these years it was still important to her to be seen to be achieving, to be seen to be at the top of her particular game.

It mattered all right. And the day that it didn’t would be the day when she might as well not bother to continue even pretending to be a journalist.

The red-top Sundays had a field day. The News of the World homed in on Rob Phillips who gave a near-hysterical interview in which he said that O’Donnell had finally got what he deserved and that he only wished he had had the nerve to do the job himself. ‘What happened to O’Donnell is poetic justice,’ he said. ‘I just hope he died in agony and in terror, like my poor sister did. But no end, however dreadful, could ever be quite bad enough for that evil bastard.’

It was hard-hitting stuff. The fact that O’Donnell was officially an innocent man twice acquitted for crimes against Angela, including her rape and murder, in two different courts of law, received little attention. Because O’Donnell was dead, the Screws had a clear run at the story. You can’t libel the dead.

The People featured an almost equally hysterical outburst from Tommy O’Donnell. He more or less accused the entire Phillips family, Rob Phillips in particular, of involvement in the murder and even suggested that Mike Fielding probably had a part in it too. Joanna was only surprised that she didn’t merit a mention somewhere along the line.

She thought the People was on by far the most dodgy legal ground, but who was going to sue? Certainly not Mike Fielding who in any case appeared just to want the whole thing to go away so that he could ensure the safety of his pension. And certainly not the Phillipses. They would not have the bottle for yet another court case, she was sure of it, nor the cash, come to that. And in any event, with Rob Phillips’s rantings coincidentally appearing in the Screws on the same day as the Tommy O’Donnell stuff was in the People, what sort of case would they have? If, indeed, it was a coincidence. She thought it probably more likely that they had known over at the People what the Screws was running. After all, from about Friday morning onwards every week half the aim of the news teams of the two big red-tops was to find out what the other was splashing on. And if they’d had early knowledge at the People of the Screw’s exclusive, that would have greatly influenced the advice of the paper’s lawyers and the decision of its editor.

She called Fielding the next day. ‘Just wanted to see how you were doing.’

‘I’m not quite sure,’ he said. ‘O’Donnell’s death has taken the heat off a bit.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Somewhat takes the attention away from all those claims about me pushing you guys and the Phillipses to get the private prosecution case against O’Donnell set up, doesn’t it?’ he said.

Typical, she thought. He always saw everything in terms of how it affected him and his career, always had done. Jimbo O’Donnell being found dead with his cock in his mouth was no exception.

And what did he mean ‘claims’? That was the trouble with Fielding, sometimes he seemed to bend the truth so much inside his head that he got to believe his own fabrication. Which was, of course, exactly what journalists were so frequently accused of. ‘Did you see all the stuff in the Sundays?’

‘Yup. Predictable, I suppose.’

‘I wondered if you knew how the investigation is going. Any progress?’

‘Don’t believe so. Not that I’m allowed to get a look-in, of course. One thing’s for sure, there’s a longish list of folk who wouldn’t have minded topping Jimbo.’

‘Yeah. And you are on it, according to his brother Tommy.’

He chuckled drily. ‘The O’Donnells think everybody’s idea of justice is the same as theirs,’ he said mildly.

‘Well, I must admit I’m glad the twisted bastard’s dead,’ she replied. ‘I’m beginning to get quite a warm feeling about it, in fact.’

‘Yeah.’ There was a silence.

Surely he had more to say than that? She waited.

‘Yeah,’ he said again, a little more life in his voice at last. ‘Come to think of it, so am I.’

Fielding told himself that for him it was good news not to be involved in the case any more. Things seemed to be straightening out quite nicely. With Jimbo dead the Complaints and Discipline guys did indeed seem to be losing interest in him and the part he had played in the private prosecution. He knew he would be sure to be interviewed by the team investigating O’Donnell’s murder, and he determined that he would be respectful and to the point, and not let any of his personal feelings get in the way.

Unfortunately he was called in by the senior investigating officer on an afternoon when he was least expecting it. He had spent far longer than he ought to have done that lunchtime in the pub and had also drunk far more than he should. Confident of spending the rest of the day doing nothing more challenging than the ‘paper shuffling’ of which he was so scornful, he had downed four or five pints of bitter, he couldn’t quite remember which, each after the first one accompanied by a large whisky chaser.

To make matters worse, the senior investigating officer was Todd Mallett. Detective Superintendent Todd Mallett. Mike had known that, of course, but he had tried not to think about it. Apart from anything else, it really rankled that the other man, whom Fielding had always considered to be thoroughly inferior to himself as a police officer, had ultimately achieved a rank far senior to his own.

Fielding had never doubted that he had both greater ability and greater intelligence, not only than Todd Mallett but than most of the officers he had worked with over the years. That made his failure to progress beyond the rank of DI all the more infuriating. Particularly as even he had to accept that the stagnation of his career was at least partly down to his own behaviour.

Mallett interviewed Fielding himself, rather than delegating the task to one of the lower-rank officers on his team and Fielding knew that was a gesture of respect. But he still couldn’t help the way he felt. Particularly after that ill-fated lunchtime session. From the moment he opened the door to the second-floor office which Mallett, who was actually based at HQ at Middlemoor, had been allocated, Mike seemed unable to stop himself appearing uncooperative and belligerent.

Mallett greeted him in his usual courteous, affable fashion.

Fielding, in the sort of mood which ensured that even the other man’s affability irritated him, responded abruptly; ‘Right, what do you want with me, then?’

He was aware of Mallett studying him appraisingly. Apart from anything else he supposed it would be highly optimistic to think that the detective superintendent would not notice that he had been drinking.

Certainly when Mallett spoke again he was no longer affable. He had greeted Fielding pleasantly and informally, and addressed him as Mike. The interview suddenly turned very formal and not a little hostile. His own fault again, Mike knew.

‘I suggest, Detective Inspector, that you watch your attitude. There is no doubt at all in my mind that you have already gone against the instructions of your senior officers in passing on certain information, albeit through a third party, to the Phillips family, and that by then encouraging them in every way you could to take out that ill-fated civil prosecution you opened the whole can of worms which has led to James Martin O’Donnell’s death...’

‘Look,’ interrupted Fielding, ‘I’ve been through all that with the rubber heel squad. None of you can prove a thing.’

‘Really,’ said Mallett, leaning towards Fielding across the small table which separated them. ‘Well, that’s down to Complaints and Discipline, although I wouldn’t be quite so sure of yourself if I were you, Inspector. As it happens, all I am interested in is any leads you may have acquired during your extremely dubious and meddlesome “enquiries” which could help us find Jimbo O’Donnell’s killer.’

The drink really got the better of Fielding then. Or maybe it was not just that. Whatever the reason, one of those flashes of the old devil-may-care stick-it-up-your-jumper Fielding, which he tried so hard to suppress nowadays, came roaring to the forefront. ‘For fuck’s sake!’ he yelled, jumping to his feet.

Todd involuntarily swung away from him as if half expecting to be punched in the face. Fielding wanted to punch him, too, and only just held back. Pompous, patronising, sanctimonious bugger, he fumed. But fortunately he had just enough restraint and sense of preservation left not to say so. He couldn’t stop himself launching into the rest of his diatribe, though. ‘Jimbo O’Donnell was one of the most twisted, evil, perverted bastards ever to walk free from a courtroom. Now he’s got his. And you think I’m supposed to give a fuck who topped him? Well, I fucking don’t! The world is a better place this week because somebody somewhere had the balls to do to the fucker what the whole of the justice system of this country couldn’t do — put him somewhere where he can never harm some other poor bloody kid. There is such a thing as natural justice, you know, Detective Superintendent.’ He did his best to make Todd’s rank sound like an insult and succeeded fairly well.

The other man eyed him impassively. ‘I think we’d better continue this interview when you’re not so emotional, Mike, don’t you?’ he enquired eventually, informal again, but very cool. He returned to studying the papers spread out on his desk in a gesture which clearly dismissed Fielding who made gratefully for the door without another word.

Outside in the corridor, Mike closed the door quite gently behind him and leaned against it for a moment or two. He had been surprised at how articulate he had been in the circumstances and was actually, on one level, quite pleased with himself.

But then the full implications of his outburst struck him. ‘Oh, God,’ he murmured to himself. ‘If that fucker reports me on top of everything else that really will be the end of my fucking pension.’ And, weaving very slightly from side to side, he set off down the corridor, heading for the back door out of the station. The only further decision he intended to make that afternoon was which pub he was going to go to. He certainly had no intention of returning to his desk. He might as well compound his own felony, he thought.

Anyway, he was just beginning to feel no pain, which more and more often was the only state he really liked to be in nowadays.

A week later a professional London heavy called Shifter Brown was arrested on suspicion of the murder of Jimbo O’Donnell. There was no formal announcement because ultimately Shifter was released without any charges being brought against him. But the news leaked around the Yard like flood water seeping through a wall of sandbags. Only quicker.

Joanna knew of Shifter Brown, although she had never met him. He was the kind of thug others hired to do their dirty work for them. Shifter would give a man a good going over for a hundred quid or so and throw in a broken leg or two for not much more. That was well known. Shifter looked the part. He was a big, muscle-bound guy in his early forties with thinning red hair and a broken nose. As a kid he had been a budding professional heavyweight boxer until a particularly vicious blow to the head dislodged the retina of his right eye and he had been banned on medical grounds from ever fighting again. After that it was back to the streets for Shifter. Officially he was a nightclub bouncer, standing patiently, trussed up in a dinner jacket outside some of London’s hottest nightspots, his thick neck threatening to burst open the collars of his shirts, which invariably seemed to be a size too small. But the word had always been that Shifter was up for extras. He had twice served time for GBH over the years. Nobody had ever been able to pin a murder rap on him, although he had been the primary suspect in at least two gangland killings, but there seemed little doubt that killing, too, was just a job for Shifter. All part of his business. The only difference was probably the price.

After all, that was more or less how he had got his name. He had been christened Arthur Richard Brown. They called him Shifter because he shifted people.

Reminiscent of the original prosecution of O’Donnell for murder, it seemed that just about all the police had against Shifter was circumstantial evidence. He had been seen at night by a witness bundling an obviously unwilling passenger, hands bound, the witness had thought, into the back of his white Ford Transit. The same van had been seen in Devon, parked, apparently empty, just off the army’s Dartmoor loop road by a range warden from Okehampton camp in charge of clearing the area for a night-fighting exercise. As a matter of record he had obligingly jotted down the van’s number before going on a quick recce of the area to ensure that the vehicle’s driver had not strayed into danger territory. On a further check visit to the spot where the Transit had been parked, the warden found that the vehicle had been removed and thought no more about it until after O’Donnell’s body was discovered, when he passed his invaluable information on to the police.

If Shifter Brown really had bundled O’Donnell into the back of a van that way, then the vehicle could well hold forensic evidence which would convict him. However, when he was arrested Shifter simply claimed that his van had been stolen. And certainly nobody could find it.

Intensive police interrogation failed to make much impression on Shifter. He was a pro. He said nothing. Even if he had believed that the police had enough to charge him and that fingering whoever might have hired him could help his case, Shifter was firmly of the ‘I don’t grass, governor’ breed. Ultimately the arresting officers had to admit they had insufficient evidence with which to charge Shifter and he was released after the maximum thirty-six hours in custody.

A couple of weeks after that the inquest into James Martin O’Donnell’s death was held in Okehampton — once again in the familiar room in the grubby white extended bungalow which was the moorland town’s unprepossessing Magistrates’ Court. The verdict, of course, was death by unlawful killing.

Joanna travelled down to Devon for the hearing, carefully avoiding telling Paul that she planned to be there. She somehow could not resist witnessing this final chapter in O’Donnell’s life and she knew her husband would not approve. He appreciated her contributions to the story and the additional information she was sometimes able to provide, but he still seemed to want her to back off from any public involvement.

The Phillipses were not at the inquest. Joanna reckoned they’d had quite enough of courts — and of the police. She had not expected them to be there and would indeed have been horrified had she had to confront them.

Tommy O’Donnell was there. He glowered at her across the courtroom but made no attempt to speak to her. His father Sam didn’t make an appearance and neither did Mike Fielding.

Joanna knew that Mike, too, was being forced to take a back seat and thought that maybe he had in any case reached the stage where that was all he wanted to do.

She called him on her mobile afterwards and they agreed to meet again at the same pub as before. She didn’t like to think about what was continually drawing her to him, but she had to admit it was something more than just what he could give her professionally.

He looked even wearier and as if he had been drinking already, which was probably par for the course, she suspected. He arrived in a taxi. Gone were the days when policemen dared to take liberties others might not with drink-driving laws. In the present climate a drink-driving offence almost invariably meant instant dismissal. And the end of the pension, the prospect of which, as Mike had so frequently indicated to her, seemed to be about all he was looking forward to in life.

In response to her query about his welfare he told her the story of his interview with Todd Mallett.

She couldn’t help smiling. ‘How to win friends and influence people, the Fielding edition,’ she said.

‘Tell me about it,’ he responded. ‘Too much to bloody drink again, I suppose. Mind you, I always drink more when I’m bored and I’m bored rigid. It’s not just this case the bastards won’t let me near, you know. It every damn thing. They’re giving the impression they’re doing me a favour just by letting me work out the next twelve months or so for my thirty years.’

Here we go again, she thought.

He drank deeply from his pint, his second since they had arrived there ten minutes earlier.

‘So Mallett didn’t take any official action against you, then, or you wouldn’t have that to worry about maybe.’

‘No maybe about it. I suppose Mallett did me a favour really.’ He sounded very grudging, but then Jo knew enough about the relationship between the two men to understand how difficult Fielding must find it to accept their respective positions. ‘He didn’t report me. Just called me in the next day and suggested we do the interview all over again. Told me to consider that I was being given a final warning, though. Step out of line once more and he’d make sure I was out. And stuff my pension.’ Mike smiled wryly. ‘Anyway you don’t want to hear all that; all you want from me is information, isn’t it?’

Was it her imagination or did he sound bitter yet again? She played it straight and spoke lightly. ‘If you say so.’

‘It’s OK, I know I owe you.’

He’d told her that before, too. But, rather stupidly perhaps, she hoped that wasn’t the only reason he was helping her. And in any case, he might be a bit down and out by his standards, but Fielding was not at all beyond using her to pass on information he wanted to see in print. His reasons were invariably his own. He was the kind of man who had always had a private agenda, always found it hard to toe the official line. The difference was that when you were young and flying high, and cracking cases others couldn’t get to grips with, it was all right to be a bit of a maverick. When you were pushing fifty and drinking too much and you had lost that early flair, albeit because it had been knocked out of you rotten, then it wasn’t all right any more.

She knew that and was honest enough with herself to wonder how she would be faring in her world were it not for her marriage to her editor. All too many of her peers had been either unceremoniously cast on the scrap heap when they were in their forties or early fifties, or else so badly humiliated they had felt forced to resign in order to save their sanity. And, all too often nowadays, without the buffer of the huge payoffs that had been pretty well standard right up to the early nineties.

She studied Fielding sympathetically. She had to pity him, although she knew how much he would hate to know that. ‘You don’t owe me anything,’ she said flatly. If it was a lie, what did it matter?

He grinned at her. In spite of everything the grin had barely changed. Extraordinary. Still to die for, still cheeky and challenging and warm and inviting all at the same time. It was just that she reckoned it was a pretty rare sight nowadays.

‘Whatever you say,’ he told her, and there was even that old hint of laughter in his voice. But he continued in matter-of-fact more serious tones, ‘Mallett’s convinced Brown did it, Jo. Don’t waste your energies on any other theories. I haven’t got a lot of time for Todd Mallett, but there’s little doubt he’s right.’

She studied his face and his voice as he spoke. He had always been different when he talked about policing in this way. It was what he did, what he had once done so well. He sounded almost authoritative and sure of himself, the way he used to, even though this was not his case any more and any further unofficial involvement in it could only damage, if not destroy, the remains of his career.

But it appeared that he had been keeping his ear to the ground as much as he invariably did. She wondered fleetingly why she had thought he would ever really change.

‘They’ll get him eventually, Jo, no doubt about it. But the big question will remain, won’t it? Who paid him to do it? Guys like Brown only do it for dough.’

Back in London, Joanna got Tim Jones to sort out a phone number for Shifter Brown. Then she called him and asked if he would like to meet her for lunch. And, unlike perhaps most members of the public who had never had dealings with a villain like Brown or his kind, plus perhaps the bulk of the current crop of rookie reporters, she was not at all surprised when he accepted.

Her predecessors in crime reporting had all been on the Christmas lists of the Kray bothers, and Reggie Kray continued to write and send cards from Parkhurst jail to his ‘friends in the press’ right up to his death. Jo herself had got used to the same kind of treatment from Sam O’Donnell. Although she would never get another card from Sam, that was for certain.

She knew that Brown had always seen himself as a kind of folk hero, a modern-day gunslinger who would maim and maybe even kill, but, in common with Sam the Man O’Donnell, whatever he did was strictly according to his own moral code. Like the good-guy gunfighters of the Old Wild West who would only kill in a fair duel and never shoot a man in the back, or so legend had it anyway, Brown would only administer what he saw as rough justice within the criminal world in which he moved. It was all business to him. He considered himself to be one of the last of a dying breed, the sort who looked after his own and harmed no one outside his own circle. And like the Krays and the O’Donnells, certainly Sam the Man, he saw himself as a kind of celebrity and could rarely resist an opportunity to talk to the press. He was certainly not afraid of media people. But Shifter Brown was the sort who would not admit to being afraid of anything.

Jo arranged to meet him at a good but unfashionable Soho restaurant. She did not particularly want to be seen in his presence. He arrived looking immaculate in an expensive dark suit, snowy white shirt and flamboyant multicoloured silk tie. Gold and diamonds flashed on his fingers and at his wrists. Shifter doubtless reckoned that he looked the business and in a way he did, even though there was more than a touch of the Del Boys about his appearance. He did not notice the way the other diners paused in their conversations as he passed them by, but then he wouldn’t.

It wasn’t just his great size, the broken nose, the weathered features, and the overly flash clothes and jewellery which marked Shifter as one apart. It was everything about him from the set of his jaw to the way he squared his broad shoulders and how his big, beefy hands hung at his sides almost like a shotgun carried loosely but cocked ready for use.

He beamed a greeting at her when he was ushered to her table and proceeded to be charm itself. ‘I’m delighted to meet you, darling,’ he told her. ‘I’ve always had you down for one of the good ’uns.’

Joanna smiled back as if flattered, but she wasn’t. She had met his sort before often enough. She knew perfectly well that he was another evil bastard, albeit with, like Sam O’Donnell, his own twisted morality.

He did have rough charm, though. And, by God, he was funny. Particularly if you were into seriously black humour. Which of course, as an old crime hack, Joanna was. He told her some wicked gangland stories, playing to the gallery. First there was the tale of legendary London gang boss, Charlie Richardson, hard as they come but famous for his devotion to his mum and love of animals, who had an adored but wayward pet monkey which his newly acquired mistress insisted he get rid of after it effectively destroyed her collection of Capo di Monte porcelain. “It’s that creature or me,” she said. Now Charlie wasn’t too sure which to choose at first but eventually he gets on to Mad Frankie — Frankie would always do anything for him, loved Charlie, did Frankie — and asks him if he’ll look after this bleeding monkey for a bit, and Frankie says OK boss and takes it home with him. Well, the monkey’s shaking and shivering all the time, and it’s just the way its nervous system is, but Mad Frankie doesn’t know that. He thinks, poor little bleeder, come all the way from Africa, it’s cold, innit? So he wraps it up in an electric blanket. Then the monkey goes and pees itself in fright and gets electrocuted.’

Shifter paused for effect. Jo began to giggle helplessly.

‘Well, Frankie gets together with the rest of the boys and they think up some yarn to tell Charlie about the sad demise of this blessed monkey, cos God knows what Charlie would’ve done if he’d thought Mad Frankie was to blame. Anyway, somehow or other they get Charlie to accept that it died of natural causes, but he’s gutted. Right gutted. He goes and fetches this monkey home to his house in Peckham and then he arranges a burial service for it in his back garden.

‘Well, he’s a man who commanded a lot of respect, Charlie. So you end up with about two dozen of the hardest nuts in the business all done up in their best whistles, black ties, the lot, standing in Charlie’s backyard doffing their hats at a funeral for a bleeding monkey.’ Shifter threw back his big head and roared with laughter. Jo laughed with him. Everybody in the restaurant stopped eating and drinking, turned and stared.

He really was a showman. And it was annoyingly difficult not to find him likeable. Joanna hated it when she liked villains. She had gone to Brazil once to interview Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs and she had felt much the same about him. The man had been a serial thief, widely believed to have been the unfeeling bastard who had casually smashed the innocent train driver viciously on the head, ruining and cruelly shortening his life. She had arrived in Rio de Janeiro determined to dislike Biggs intensely. But Ronnie had played the role of lovable rogue so well that she hadn’t been able to stop herself falling for it, at least up to a point, even though she knew only too well that a large part of it was just a carefully cultivated act. And it was much the same with Shifter Brown.

‘’Ere, I’ve got another funeral story,’ Shifter continued. ‘Well, it’s a wedding story, really, about Charlie and Mad Frankie again. When Charlie’s daughter got married they had this posh do down in Kent and the invitations said “Morning dress”. Well, poor old Frankie, he didn’t know any different, he thought it meant mourning dress, so he gets this undertaker suit, everything black, black tie, shiny black shoes, and when he turns up Charlie says: “Fuck me, Frankie, I thought you were a bleeding gangster kissogram.”’

Shifter grinned broadly, then his expression turned suddenly serious. ‘Whoops, sorry, Joey doll, I didn’t mean to use that language to you, girl, honest,’ he said.

Joey doll? That was a new one. Joanna wondered what Shifter would have made of the vernacular of an old-fashioned newspaper office. Not a lot, she didn’t think. He might be a gangland hit man but he still considered himself a gentleman.

Indeed. She made herself concentrate on what he did for a living. How he got his name. He shifted people. And, most particularly, what he might have done to Jimbo O’Donnell. Joanna was glad O’Donnell was dead. She was even glad that he had suffered such an appalling death. But it was bizarre to think that she was sitting in a smart restaurant with an engaging, immaculately dressed companion who had probably removed another man’s sexual organs and buried him while he was still alive.

‘You did him, didn’t you, Shifter?’ she asked eventually. ‘The cops know. It was a pro job. It had your mark all over it.’

Arthur Richard Brown held both his hands out towards her, palms upwards in a gesture of supplication. ‘Now would I? Would I do a horrible thing like that?’ He grinned. Gold fillings gleamed among large yellowing teeth. ‘I’m innocent, darling, upon my baby’s life, I am,’ he told her.

And then, just like Mike Fielding the very first time she ever met him, he winked broadly.

Fourteen

A month later Shifter Brown was rearrested. It was simple. The police found his Transit van which, although it had been washed and vacuumed and even given a new coat of paint of sorts, contained enough forensic evidence to prove that Jimbo O’Donnell had been transported in its rear compartment. Almost certainly under duress. The amateurish coat of paint had, in fact, contributed to Shifter’s downfall.

Tim Jones got the full story from the Yard. It seemed that a sharp-eyed young constable had spotted the signs of a cheap, hasty respray on the now red Transit. A thin film of red paint had strayed on to both rear and front bumpers, along the bottom of one of the side windows and even into a corner of the windscreen. The constable had fed the registration number into the PNC and found that it did not match the vehicle he had spotted. At the time there was a major car theft scam operating in the capital and the young officer had been told to watch out for vehicles that might have been stolen and, if he had the slightest suspicion, to do a check. With the diligence of a newcomer to the job, he had done so even though the battered Transit, which had obviously seen better days, was not the kind of vehicle professional car thieves would normally target. And certainly he had no idea whatsoever that he might have stumbled across something far more serious.

The van’s driver had been taken in for questioning. It turned out that he was a minor villain called Colin Ferris who ran a scrapyard in the aptly named Gravesend and had been suspected in the past of dealing with hot vehicles.

Meanwhile further checks were run on the Transit. It turned out to have been registered to Shifter Brown. Under intense pressure, including threats to have his business closed down straight away, Ferris admitted that Shifter had brought him the vehicle and had paid him to destroy it. He was supposed to have crushed it in his crusher. But he hadn’t done so. ‘It was a good set of wheels and I needed a van, you see,’ he explained. ‘Shifter’d put a nearly new engine in it, hadn’t he? But it didn’t look much and Transits like that one are all over this manor. So I figured if I changed the colour and the reg I’d get away with it.’

Ferris was not the brightest of characters, evidently. And if he had ever known or suspected what Shifter had used the van for and why he needed it destroyed he denied it hotly.

Shifter Brown was rearrested at once. This time there was hard evidence against him. By the time the van was discovered in the dubious care of Colin Ferris there had been very little forensic evidence left — but just enough in an age when the science has become so exact that DNA can be extracted from the moisture left behind by breath on glass. Small spots of dried blood found on the floor and sides of the vehicle’s rear compartment matched O’Donnell’s.

Shifter capitulated. He was an old-fashioned villain. He didn’t think he stood a hope in hell of bucking that evidence. He didn’t have a legal dream team behind him, either, as the man he had killed had always done. And he believed a court would go easier on him if he confessed and pleaded guilty. So Shifter was co-operative. He knew when he was beaten. Shifter was into damage limitation, only he didn’t call it that.

Todd Mallett did the interrogation himself. The detective superintendent went back a long way on this case and still he didn’t reckon the investigations had got anywhere near to the bottom of it. He wanted to be hands-on.

Although Shifter would not say who had hired him to kill Jimbo, he was quite happy to reveal that it was indeed someone who wanted revenge for the death and degradation of Angela Phillips. Shifter always liked to appear justified in his actions. However, there were a number of points which continued to puzzle Mallett. ‘Why did you use your own van, Shifter?’ the detective asked.

‘Well, you never know quite what’s best to do in a situation like this, you see, Mr Mallett,’ Shifter began to explain, frowning in concentration. He sounded as if he were giving the policeman a lesson in criminology. ‘I had to take Jimbo right back to Dartmoor where Angela Phillips was found, that was part of the deal. And I had to take him alive and do him there. On the spot like, buried, more or less the same way the girl was. Now — if I’d nicked a motor I could easily have got stopped on the way, couldn’t I? So I figured that it would be safer to use my own wheels. The Transit had seen better days anyway. I reckoned if I wrecked it I was being paid well enough to buy myself something better. That toe-rag Ferris, though, he landed me right in it, didn’t he? He gets paid to make a motor disappear and then he gets greedy. Thinks he’ll take his bung and keep the van. I’d like five minutes with him, I’ll tell you that for nothing, Mr Mallett...’

‘I’m sure you would, Shifter, but I think you may have a long wait,’ said Todd wryly.

‘I know that, Mr Mallett,’ replied Shifter.

Todd had one final try at extracting the information he really wanted. ‘And you also know how much it would help if you told us who hired you, don’t you, Shifter? You could get a lot less time.’

Shifter nodded. He knew all right. But he wasn’t budging. And frankly, neither had the detective superintendent expected him to. ‘I don’t grass, Mr Mallett,’ said Shifter flatly.

Joanna phoned Fielding on his mobile to talk again about who might have been behind the contract. That was her excuse, anyway. She didn’t like admitting to herself how much she liked to hear his voice. Even when he sounded old and tired, and whined about his pension, it was as if someone else were speaking. Every time she saw him, every time she spoke to him, she could only remember the way he had been before. That was how she thought of him and that was how she still saw him.

He told her he would be in London for a couple of days later that week. ‘Fancy a spot of lunch?’ he asked.

Joanna took a moment or two to answer. She did fancy lunching with him. There was no doubt about that. However, it was against her better judgement that she finally heard herself agreeing to meet him in the same Italian restaurant, tucked away just off the Strand, where they had eaten together many times twenty years previously.

She was surprised he even knew it was still there. She did, of course, and invariably felt a twinge of nostalgia every time she walked past it.

‘Well, we both know where it is, don’t we,’ he remarked casually.

And she agreed with that too, as if she believed it really was his only reason for choosing the place.

He was already there, sitting at a table for two in the far corner, when she arrived. She noticed that he no longer looked crumpled as he had done on the occasions she had seen him in Devon. Obliquely, she wondered if he kept his best clothes for London nowadays. Or maybe for her. No, she was flattering herself. But certainly he was every bit as smart as she remembered him from the old days, dressed in a fashionable dark-beige linen jacket, cream shirt and a brown and cream striped silk tie. His eyes still held that disappointed look she had become so aware of, but he no longer seemed tired and world-weary. He stood up to greet her. He was a funny mix. He could be so well mannered and charming, and he could be such a pig.

There was a bottle of white wine on the table before him and she saw that he had already drunk about a third of it.

Without asking first, he poured a glass for her as soon as she sat down.

The mineral water culture would never be for Mike Fielding. She hardly knew anybody any more who bought wine by the bottle at lunchtime, she realised.

They made small talk for a few minutes.

‘How’s it going with the rubber heel brigade?’ she asked.

‘Looks like I’ll be exonerated. They can’t prove a thing and they know it,’ he said. ‘The muck’s stuck, of course, like it always does.’

She nodded and took a deep draught of the wine. She must have become as brainwashed as all the others by the new puritanical age, she realised suddenly. She had almost forgotten how good a chilled glass of wine tasted in the middle of the day. And this was very nice wine indeed, at the perfect temperature. She didn’t know much about Italian wine, but she did know that Mike always had bought better wine than he could afford. Mind you, the rate at which he was drinking it you wondered if it made much difference, she thought, noticing that he had drained his glass again already.

‘They’ve put me out to grass, Jo,’ he told her abruptly. ‘I’ve been appointed the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary’s Best Value Manager.’

‘What the hell’s that?’

‘Well may you ask! Officially I’m in charge of ensuring all our resources are managed properly; it’s a legal requirement now for every force in the country. Unofficially I’m being kept out of trouble, aren’t I? No more proper policing for me. Instead, the backwater of admin. I’m not even allowed to remain in a proper police station. I’ve been transferred to HQ at Middlemoor. My life is to be a merry round of seminars, working parties, and God knows what else. I’m in town for meetings at the Yard of the Met National Committee and, to tell the truth, I don’t even really understand what we’re supposed to be doing. I told you I’d be a paper shuffler from now on, didn’t I?’

‘I’m sorry, Mike,’ she said. He had been a hands-on detective all his life. She knew how unhappy he must be about his new job.

He grunted, refilled both their glasses to the brim and ordered another bottle.

What the hell, she thought, taking another good long swig. She couldn’t remember when she had last had a real boozy lunch. And to think that she had been brought up in the days when a Fleet Street lunch wasn’t really considered lunch unless it ended after dark. In the summer. Any amateur can make lunch go on until after dark in the winter, the lads used to say.

‘So what about Shifter, then?’ she asked, eventually focusing on the subject she most wanted to talk about. ‘Are there any theories about who hired him?’

‘Oh, yeah. Theories by the hundredweight. But the same old suspects, none of which really hang together. Any one of the Phillipses, Jeremy Thomas’s family, they always reckoned Angela’s murder did for their boy. Even Sam the Man himself, secretly disgusted by Jimbo and afraid of what he still might do. I don’t reckon that myself, though, family’s family to Sam regardless. Anyway, he always was blind about Jimbo.’

‘So what do you think?’

‘I don’t have a clue, Jo, to be honest. Even if I thought it was, say, Rob Phillips, he’s a Dartmoor farmer, for Christ’s sake, who’s never been in trouble with the police in his life. How would he know how to set about hiring Shifter Brown or his like? Of course, Shifter’s done jobs before for the O’Donnells, but topping one of their own, however nasty a piece of work he is — I just don’t see it. There’s another possibility. Jimbo’s made enough enemies in his time. It could still be somebody completely unconnected with the Angela Phillips case.’

‘But even Shifter believes he was hired for a revenge killing; he’s admitted that much, hasn’t he? Why else would he have taken Jimbo to Dartmoor and killed him the way he did? Shifter was told what to do, presumably. For Christ’s sake, he cut Jimbo’s dick off — the inference is obvious. If it wasn’t revenge for Angela, then it’s one hell of a coincidence.’

‘Unless all that was a smokescreen designed to deflect attention away from those really responsible. But as there’s nobody remotely in the frame apart from people involved in the old Beast of Dartmoor case, what would be the point of that? The more you think about it the more you keep going round in circles.’

‘Maybe Shifter will come clean eventually. He must know it’ll go easier for him.’

Mike shrugged his shoulders. ‘Of course. But you know his sort. Do their bird and keep stumm. It’s a way of life.’

They ate grilled sardines and fresh pasta, and began to reminisce about old times again.

‘Do you remember the day we came here and left before the main course?’ he asked her mischievously. She did, of course. They had eaten a starter of some sort and had suddenly become so desperate to be in bed together that they couldn’t spare the time for the rest of the meal.

She didn’t know whether she wished he hadn’t mentioned it or not. They were on the third bottle of wine now. He had drunk considerably more of it than she had. She was, however, mellow enough to accept that the attraction was still there. For both of them. But she was admitting nothing. Not to him. ‘Vaguely,’ she said, as if in any case it were not very important.

Suddenly he became very serious. He leaned across and touched her hand. ‘I still regret that I didn’t leave home for you,’ he told her abruptly.

She studied him carefully, his eyes a little bloodshot now, his voice just very slightly blurred around the edges. The truth was, she suddenly realised, that she knew she still regretted it too, but she was dammed if she was going to admit it.

She did not respond to his comment. Instead, after a few seconds she said in an even voice, ‘I think we could both do with some coffee, don’t you?’

‘Nope,’ he said. ‘The only thing I could do with is you. Nothing’s changed there.’ He closed the fingers of his hand around hers.

She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear that kind of comment from him, not after all this time, it was a little too glib. She tried to withdraw her hand.

He tightened his grip.

‘Let go, Mike, please,’ she said, her voice calm.

If anything, his grip tightened even more. He leaned forward so that his face was very close to hers. She could smell the alcohol on his breath and the old attraction did not seem quite so strong after all.

‘How about we skip the coffee, for old times’ sake. My hotel’s ten minutes from here in a cab...’

Underneath the table she felt his other hand grasp her knee.

Suddenly she became very angry. It was as if she was overwhelmed by all the unhappiness he had caused her. She could not believe that he could be quite so crass as to grab her and make a comment like that in the middle of a restaurant, particularly this restaurant. It really was the clumsiest pass she had ever been on the receiving end of and his excessive alcohol consumption was no excuse. A few minutes ago Joanna had felt warm and mellow, even a little elated, in his company. Now she was angry and humiliated. And she wondered if his choice of restaurant had been more than nostalgia, a deliberate ploy in some plan he had hatched to seduce her. Part of her fury, of course, stemmed from the knowledge deep inside that, had he handled it better, he might have succeeded. ‘Take your hands off me, you bastard,’ she told him very quietly. Her voice was very cold and so were her eyes.

He obeyed at once, holding the offending hands out towards her, palms up in a gesture of supplication, but still grinning the grin that she had so often found disarming and now, perhaps because he was half drunk and perhaps just because of her anger, simply thought made him look really stupid.

‘All I ever was to you was a cheap lay, wasn’t it?’ she enquired conversationally.

He began to protest.

She stopped him at once. ‘Save it and fuck off,’ she said. ‘I really don’t know why I had anything to do with you again.’ Then she stood up and walked out of the restaurant, leaving him sitting there, aware of his eyes boring into her back.

He didn’t try to stop her. Perhaps he knew that he really had gone too far. It gave her some small satisfaction to think that she had left him to pay a bill he could doubtless ill afford and that, taking into account the amount and quality of wine that had been consumed, it would undoubtedly be quite substantial.

Fielding had one more day to spend in London before returning to his Exeter base. He knew what an idiot he had been in the restaurant. He’d downed a swift pint and a couple of large Scotches before even going there to meet Jo, and then he’d probably drunk the equivalent of two of the three bottles of wine he had ordered. It was getting to be disconcerting just how much he could drink nowadays without feeling much different from the way he felt when he hadn’t had a drink at all. But that kind of quantity was excessive even for him. He’d been deeply distressed by his dreary new appointment, which he’d been well aware he had absolutely no choice but to accept if he wished to survive at all, but that was no excuse.

At his desk on his first day back at HQ in Exeter he found it difficult to concentrate on anything much. Par for the course nowadays. There was always so much on his mind. His thoughts kept turning to Joanna. He made himself work through the morning at the various dull routine tasks which were now his lot, reminding himself that the way things had been going he was lucky still to have a desk. Even if it was at Middlemoor, and even if that was about all he had.

With a great effort of will he kept himself out of the pub at lunchtime, reasoning that it was time he kept his head clear for a while. Several times during the day he very nearly picked up the phone to call Joanna in London. Each time he stopped at the last moment. He didn’t think she’d want to hear from him. He bet she was going into the office every day. He knew that she was supposed only to work a three-day week, but he also knew that Jo was desperate to come out on top in the Shifter Brown case. He had been intrigued to realise over the past few months that she was just as ambitious as she had ever been. She hadn’t changed a bit. She had so much in life, wealth, a family, an impressive professional track record, a column, which he suspected most of the other hacks envied, and day-to-day crime coverage was no longer her responsibility, officially at any rate. Yet she couldn’t bear to be beaten by the rest of the pack. She had to be number one. That was Jo. And she’d be pulling out all the stops right now to make sure she stayed number one. Mike managed a wry chuckle. He bet she was working seven days a week on this one, whether or not she was actually in the office. She wouldn’t stop trying. Not Jo. He knew her.

And he had surprised himself by the growing realisation that he would like to get to know her much better again. But he was afraid he had effectively scuttled his own chances. He hadn’t planned to make a move on Jo. Certainly not in the way he had. He couldn’t believe he had made such a damn stupid, clumsy pass at her. Throughout his life he had almost always got those things right. He had invariably been able to sense the moment. Know when to do and say what. And Joanna had been right up to a point — most of those women had never been anything other than cheap lays to him. But not her. Not Jo. She was wrong about that. Joanna remained the one woman ever really to have got under his skin. It was only now he had seen her again that he realised how little that had changed.

He had been speaking the absolute truth when he told her he wished he had left home for her. But he’d had the opportunity and he’d baulked at it. He’d messed up Jo’s life then, he knew that, and it seemed pretty reasonable that she wouldn’t want to give him the opportunity to do so again. In any case, she was the woman with everything. Jesus, it was amazing she had any time for him at all any more. What was he, after all? Just a broken-down middle-aged cop working out his time for his pension.

And then he’d made that dumb pass at her.

Around five in the afternoon he decided to send her an e-mail apologising. He couldn’t bring himself to phone and doubted she’d take his call. But he was desperate to have some contact with her. He had never quite got used to the way e-mails disappeared into cyberspace — but it was better than nothing.

He really did want to see her again. Even if it could never be anything more than just lunch or a drink.

Joanna was at her desk trying to write her column, which should have been completed at least two hours earlier. This wasn’t like her, or she would never have lasted as long as she had at the top, even with a husband as editor.

Her mind, too, had been wandering that day and even though she was over her deadline she found it hard to concentrate on her writing. She was, as Fielding had thought she would be, preoccupied with landing a really big exclusive on the Shifter Brown case, but she was also thinking about him.

When her anger had subsided she had found herself dreadfully disappointed that the lunch had ended so badly. It had been his fault but, even though she knew it was silly, she was nevertheless upset by his crass behaviour. Trouble was, Fielding could still get to her. No doubt about that.

And when an e-mail arrived from him she couldn’t help being pleased.

She had to smile. There was something schoolboyish about the message. She sat at her desk thinking for a moment or two when Tim Jones came over to tell her he had a call for her from someone who wouldn’t give his name saying he had information on the Shifter Brown case. ‘Deep throat will only speak to the “Sword of Justice” lady, he insists, and I’m afraid to transfer because I’ve lost two calls that way already today — I think the system’s playing up again,’ Tim went on.

She agreed to take the call on his line, got up from her chair and hurried across the editorial floor to Tim’s desk, with the young crime reporter ambling along just behind her. ‘More than likely a nutter but you never know,’ she muttered.

Shortly after Jo left her desk Paul came looking for her.

It had not taken her long to deal with the call. Within four or five minutes she was quite certain that the caller was indeed a nutter with nothing constructive to tell her or anyone else. The majority of such calls were. But she’d learned early on that a journalist with any sense always took time to listen. The one you ignored was certain to be the big one. News desk assistants spent half their day listening to calls from readers, ninety-nine per cent of which were a complete waste of time. But a result once in a hundred times made it imperative that they all got heard.

When she returned to her desk Paul was standing behind her computer screen, staring at it, his face grim.

The Fielding e-mail was still on the screen.

This, she thought, is all I need. She opened her mouth to explain. A mistake in more ways than one.

Paul raised a hand to silence her. He would never have any kind of personal conversation with her in the public arena of the newsroom. ‘I need to talk to you about this week’s column. Would you come into my office when you have a minute, please, Jo?’ he requested mildly enough.

She nodded silently and, as he walked away, sat down at her desk, read the offending e-mail one more time and deleted it — as she should, of course, have done in the first place. Then, resigned to a difficult exchange, she made her way to Paul’s office at the other end of the newsroom.

By the time she got there Paul was already sitting in the big antique leather armchair behind his desk and he did not get up when she walked in. Neither did he ask her to sit down. She did so anyway. She was damned if she was going to stand before him like a schoolgirl being given a telling-off by the headmaster.

‘I want you to explain to me exactly what that e-mail meant, Joanna,’ Paul demanded. His tone was chilly and precise.

She was suddenly very irritated by him. She decided to go on the attack. ‘And I want to know what you were doing reading my bloody private e-mail?’ she countered.

He sighed. ‘I came to see you to ask you where your column was; it is, as you know, very late and I looked at your screen in the vain hope that you might be working on it.’ He spoke with exaggerated patience. ‘Silly of me,’ he finished.

She relented a little. She didn’t feel guilty about Fielding, but old habits died hard and she always felt guilty when she was late for a deadline. Deadlines were sacrosanct. On a daily newspaper it didn’t matter how brilliant your copy was if it was too damned late. ‘Look, Paul, it was nothing,’ she began. ‘We had lunch, he had too much to drink, he made a silly pass. Mike was apologising. For God’s sake, you read the damned thing.’

Paul stared at her steadily. ‘You didn’t tell me you were having lunch with him,’ he said flatly.

‘Do I usually tell you everyone I’m having lunch with?’ she responded, trying not to react.

‘Mike Fielding is not everyone, not as far as you are concerned, Joanna,’ he said.

‘Paul, you’re making something out of nothing...’

‘Am I?’ he interrupted her. ‘When Private Eye ran their piece I gave you the benefit of the doubt. Absolutely. You know I did. Embarrassing though it was, I dismissed it out of hand. But now we have this...’

She interrupted him then. ‘You gave me the benefit of the doubt? Honestly, Paul, I sometimes wonder who the hell you think you are.’

‘I think I am your husband, Joanna,’ he said. His voice was louder than normal and he didn’t sound quite as cool and controlled as usual. ‘And I think you’ve been forgetting that lately...’

‘I turned him down, Paul. I said no. No! OK?’ She spat the words at him. They had never indulged in anything remotely resembling a personal row anywhere in the Comet building before. She wondered vaguely if his secretary or anybody else could hear what was going on.

‘Yes, and why did you have to turn him down? That’s what I want to know,’ he stormed at her. ‘How exactly did you find yourself in that situation?’

‘For God’s sake, Paul,’ she said. ‘If we have to continue this can we at least do so at home and not in the bloody office?’

He muttered something indecipherable. She’d had enough. She got up and left.

If she had been angry with Fielding in the restaurant it was nothing compared with the anger she felt against Paul now. She had never been unfaithful to her husband. Not once during their eighteen-year marriage. In fact, there had never been anybody else since the first time she had slept with Paul. She had turned Fielding down, for God’s sake, and she told herself that she had never had any intention of doing anything else.

Until now. She wasn’t sure quite what she intended now. Not after the ridiculous interrogation Paul had submitted her to.

Several heads turned towards her as she walked back to her desk. She realised she was doing what they told her she always did when she was angry — the Bartlett Stomp, positively thumping her way across the newsroom. She slowed down and eased up — just a little. But her anger did not subside.

To hell with it, she thought. She sat down at her desk, picked up her phone and dialled Fielding’s mobile number.

He was in his car on his way home when he took the call, unusually having stuck to his plan to have a sober day. He was delighted to hear from her and told her so.

‘It’s OK about the restaurant,’ she said. ‘We’d both had too much to drink. You must have done to behave the way you did. No style at all, Mike, I have to tell you. Not like you!’

Alone in his car, he smiled. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I’m losing my touch.’

‘What a relief for the women of the West of England.’

‘You flatter me.’

‘Indeed I do. Anyway, you’re on. Lunch next time you’re in town. How could I deny you the chance to make amends.’

He took his left hand off the wheel and punched the air. ‘Yes,’ he shouted to himself silently.

Aloud he said, ‘Great. I’ve got to come up again next week. Any chance?’

They agreed on the following Tuesday and when their call was over he promptly called the inexpensive hotel he had so disastrously attempted to take her to after their previous lunch and booked it for that day.

He had lied to Joanna. He had no call to be in London the following week. But he could take a day off and go up by train. Even though the hotel was reasonable by London standards it would be a pricey trip without any expenses to claim back. He didn’t care. There was no way he was not going to have a room booked. If the opportunity arose he wanted to be prepared. Maybe he was pushing his luck, but he had a gut feeling that might not be so. He couldn’t stop smiling as he continued his journey. Perhaps his pass had not been so clumsy after all.

Fifteen

Yet again they met in the same Italian restaurant. This time she was there before him and she wondered if that was significant. When he arrived the first thing she was somehow instantly aware of was that he had not been drinking. He had maybe decided that had been a mistake previously. He moved quickly and deftly across the restaurant towards her. He had always moved well for such a tall, rangy man. The second thing she noticed was his clothes. He was wearing a mid-blue jacket and darker-blue trousers. So was she. His face broke into a crooked smile the moment he saw her and he was still smiling when he sat down opposite her.

‘We match,’ she remarked in greeting, smiling back.

‘So we do,’ he responded lightly, looking as if he had almost said something else in answer to that.

Like we always have matched, Jo thought to herself.

Afterwards she could not remember the details of their conversation through the meal. They talked about O’Donnell, of course, and Shifter Brown, because that was always there between them, but they both knew that was not what their meeting was about. Not this time.

Joanna had no plan, she had made no decisions before the lunch. What happened at the end took her half by surprise even though she was the instigator.

They both turned down dessert. Then he asked her if she would like more wine or coffee. They had drunk much less this time, just one bottle between them. Still enough at lunchtime to shock the new puritans rigid, she thought obliquely.

She suddenly heard herself say: ‘No, thank you. Life’s too short, don’t you think, and for all too many people turns out to be a lot shorter than they might reasonably expect.’

She sensed the change in him at once.

He became very still, his gaze steady and serious. She knew he would be determined not to make a fool of himself again. Not twice. Not Mike Fielding. He was a picture of restraint. ‘That’s true enough,’ he murmured eventually in a non-committal way. But she knew he was already on her wavelength.

‘Well, you said it yourself last time, we never used to waste too much time over lunch.’

His eyes widened. He had been fiddling with his wineglass, turning it round and round on the white linen tablecloth. He took his hand away and sat back in his chair. ‘Are you suggesting what I think you may be suggesting or are you playing games with me?’ he asked. This time he sounded almost stern.

Typical Fielding, she thought, he would never let someone else be in charge for long. ‘Now would I play games with you?’ she enquired, in a bantering sort of way.

His eyes narrowed.

She’d make him angry if she carried on like this. Maybe neither of them was quite as good as they thought they were. Not any more, anyway. ‘No games,’ she said, absolutely serious now. ‘Have you got a hotel or do we need to find one?’

His eyes softened at once. For a second or two she thought she could see tears welling in them. She had seen that before, in the days when most people would have said Fielding did not have an emotional cell in his body. God, the man was a curious mix all right.

But that moment was over almost as it began. He said nothing. Just stood up, reached into his pocket, half threw a handful of notes on to the table, gestured for her to rise too, put a hand on her arm and steered her quite firmly out of the restaurant, almost as if he feared she might change her mind.

She had intended to pay the bill this time. But it somehow did not seem an appropriate moment to start fishing out her credit cards. Instead, she let him be masterful.

It was not the best of hotels. One of those slightly sleazy ones in Southampton Row. Joanna could have afforded something much better, but he would have hated that. She had no idea, however, that he had paid for the room himself, just assuming that it was on expenses, as in the past. Fielding had always been good at fixing things to fit in with his personal life. If you were married and had also been embroiled in as many affairs as she knew he had, then it wasn’t surprising. But she really did not want to think about that. Not now.

They had taken a black cab to the hotel, even though it was really quite close, each sitting at opposite ends of the bench seat, as if they were afraid their bodies might touch by accident. They barely spoke. The room had only a single bed, she noticed, which was a nuisance, but at least it indicated that he had not been taking her for granted. She was unaware, of course, that he had quite deliberately decided to book a single, not to save money — although God knew he could not afford to pay out for too many London hotel rooms — but to create exactly the impression she had indeed gained.

She felt awkward in that bare, impersonal room with its cheap furniture and nasty net curtains. It was hardly romantic. But then, afternoon sex in downmarket hotel rooms was not about romance and she’d known that well enough before re-embarking on it after so many years, she told herself.

He seemed awkward, too. He took off his jacket and tie, and stood looking at her. She had not even removed her jacket. The only furniture in the room apart from the narrow bed and a small fitted wardrobe was a single hard wooden chair. She too was standing, over by the window, half pretending to be looking out at the street below through its grubby metal-framed panes.

He crossed the room to her, turned her towards him, wrapped his arms round her and kissed her. A proper kiss. Full on the lips. She felt their bodies melt together, just as they had always done — without either of them appearing to move, really. He was a good kisser. One of the few men she had known who actually enjoyed kissing and for protracted periods of time. The years seemed to disappear. The magic had not gone. It was as if it were only yesterday that they had last been together like this.

He drew away from her. ‘Undress for me,’ he said, smiling.

The same words he had used the very first time so long ago, the same command. The same husky voice. She knew he had done it quite deliberately, but she was moved nonetheless. At least he had remembered. But then, would either of them ever forget? She supposed that was what this was all about.

So she did what she was told, just as before. Slipping her clothes off, no game playing, no stripper antics, just slowly removing her jacket, her trousers, her silk T-shirt and her underwear, until she stood naked before him. She wasn’t self-conscious any more. Strange, that. But from the moment he had come to her and kissed her it had all felt so natural again.

He gazed at her appreciatively. ‘God, but you’re still beautiful,’ he whispered.

She knew that her body looked good, thanks to those workouts at the gym, but she loved hearing the words from him.

He took her hand in his and drew her to the bed, made her sit down and kneeled before her. Still fully clothed, he buried his head in her. Something else she began to remember was how good this had been with him, just how good it had all been. And how much it had always made her want more, and more.

Eventually he stood up and began to take off his shirt and trousers. Standing right above her looking down at her, there was great longing in his eyes.

‘I’m not sure how able I am going to be,’ he began. She liked to think of him being just a little uncertain. He had always been so sure of himself before.

As he was climbing out of his trousers she reached out and touched him. ‘I don’t think we’ll have any problems,’ she said.

And they didn’t. He wasn’t the super stud he had been twenty years earlier. However, she hadn’t expected him to be. They were both slower and more lingering in their approach to their lovemaking. She had wondered, even as they rode in the taxi from the restaurant, whether it might be a let-down after so many years. Perhaps even half wished that it would be — after all, that would probably at least ensure that their renewed relationship would not become a problem. But it wasn’t a let-down at all.

They soon found the narrow bed too confining. They half rolled on to the floor using the duvet cover as a kind of mattress and the pillows to help them find more imaginative positions. She was a bit surprised they still had the athleticism, but they also spent quite lot of time just lying very still in each other’s arms. And that was sweet too. She felt the sense of belonging she had always felt with him and tried very hard to dismiss it, because it really could not be. She could never belong to Fielding. Not now. Maybe the truth was that she never could have done.

Because of the growing strain between her and Paul it was weeks since she’d had sex at all, let alone sex as good as this. It was just so mind-bogglingly good still — which was disconcerting as well as wonderful.

Perhaps it was because they were older, perhaps because they had both wanted it so much, perhaps because of the almost subconscious desires we all get from time to time to slip back into our own pasts — whatever the reason, to her it seemed better than ever.

She left the room first. He hadn’t told her that he was going home to Exeter that night. That would have given the game away, made her realise that he had booked the hotel specifically for the purpose for which they had used it.

He had wanted her so much, yet, like her, had thought that maybe he wouldn’t mind too much if the sex hadn’t been that good. He really didn’t need any further complications in his life right now and Joanna Bartlett had always been a complication for him. But the sex had been sensational. Like it always used to be. The best he had enjoyed in years. The best since the last time with her, if he were honest. It had always been what had drawn them together. He might have considered himself a bit of a stud in the old days and certainly his enthusiasm had been limitless, but with her it always seemed that sex reached a unique level of excitement and fulfilment. It was them, together, that did it. Something special. Something indefinable. Something undeniable. And it hadn’t changed. It was still there.

He liked the look of her, the feel of her and, by God, he adored the taste of her. He wondered if he were still in love with her — indeed, if he had ever stopped being in love with her. He knew that he wanted to see her again, but just like the first time he was afraid of seeing too much of her.

He comforted himself that geography and both their other commitments, particularly hers, would probably look after that for them. It was unlikely that they would be able to meet very often, even if they both wanted to. He knew that this time it would not be like before. That at best it would be no more than occasional snatched meetings. Never again would they dream of being properly together. That, at least, was over.

In July 2001 Shifter Brown stood trial at Exeter Crown Court. He didn’t stand a chance of leniency. Not under the most intense police pressure, nor in court, would he say who paid him to kill Jimbo O’Donnell. He was sentenced to the mandatory life for murder and the judge recommended that he serve a minimum of twenty-two years. It was even worse than Shifter had expected, perhaps, but he had resolutely refused the one piece of information that could have helped. There was no jury, because Shifter pleaded guilty, and the hearing lasted only two days. Joanna went to Exeter to cover it, arriving the day before the proceedings began and leaving the day after.

Until then, she and Fielding had been together just three times during the four months which had passed since their afternoon in the Southampton Row hotel room. Geography had indeed taken care of it. That and fear.

Joanna had a very practical side to her. She did not want to wreck her marriage or her life. In her mind she had tried to think of Fielding as a failed policeman, a bit of a sad case. But there was nothing failed or sad about Mike when they were making love. She had been forced to admit that regardless of his failings and what she knew he regarded as the failure he had made of almost everything except, most perversely, perhaps his marriage, he remained the love of her life. That frightened her. Perhaps it had been partly curiosity that had led her to that Southampton Row hotel room. She wasn’t sure. Partly anger at her husband, of course, no doubt about that. But she hadn’t really expected the old feelings to be quite as intact and it had been something of a shock.

She couldn’t stop herself sleeping with Fielding whenever the opportunity presented itself, although she was not prepared to take any silly risks. It seemed he felt the same. So they had to settle for very occasional torrid afternoons.

The trial, however, gave them, albeit for such a short time, almost unlimited opportunity.

God knows, she thought, what Fielding told his wife, but he more or less took up residence in her Exeter hotel room for the three nights she was there, slipping in and out via the fire escape, which she opened for him at agreed times, so that he would hopefully not be seen by anyone who might recognise him.

She couldn’t believe the sexual energy they managed to maintain.

‘Not bad for two middle-aged folk,’ she said one night after their lovemaking had been particularly extravagant.

‘I forget what a tired, worn-out old bugger I am when I’m with you,’ he told her. And his eyes went all crinkly as he smiled and reached out for her yet again.

When the trial ended she had not wanted to return to London, even though she did feel guilty whenever she thought about Paul and Emily. Particularly Emily, whom she had found herself phoning much more often from Devon this time than she usually did when she was away.

She realised she was going to miss her lover dreadfully. And yet she knew that something else had not changed with the years: she and Mike Fielding were not going anywhere. Not ever.

Two weeks after his sentencing, Shifter Brown phoned Joanna from jail and asked her if she would visit him. He had something to tell her, he said, something he was sure she would want to know. And he was planning to tell her exclusively. ‘I’ll get a visiting order sent to you, personal, like. You can be my cousin. I wouldn’t want them to know who you really were.’

It would take a bit of getting used to, being Shifter Brown’s cousin, but Joanna was consumed with curiosity.

‘I’ve got a story for you, Joey,’ he said. As ever, it made her want to giggle when he called her that. ‘It’s a corker,’ he went on. But he would give her no clue as to the subject matter.

She could not resist, of course. She accepted his offer with alacrity. Shifter was in the Devon county prison at Exeter, where he had been held on remand before his sentencing and then returned for assessment. It would be another couple of months before he would be despatched to serve out the rest of his term at a maximum-security jail like Parkhurst or Long Lartin.

On the appointed day, less than a fortnight later, Jo set off down the M4 heading west. She was so focused on what she was doing that she did not even arrange to see Fielding, although she was going into his patch. ‘Maybe I’ll call him after I’ve seen Shifter,’ she had thought to herself as she swung off the M5 at the Exeter exit. But her mind was intent on the task at hand. Maybe this was the big exclusive she had been chasing. Certainly any sort of interview with Shifter inside jail had to be a story, whatever he eventually told her. She was hoping, naturally, that he was going to tell her who had hired him, although she couldn’t think what would have changed his mind about that. Shifter didn’t grass, after all.

He was convicted now, though, so sub judice no longer came into it. Shifter would be well aware of that. He was a pro. She wondered about his motive, as well as his intentions.

She was quite preoccupied with the prospect of talking to him, but had decided not to tell anybody else about it. Not even her husband and editor. In fact, particularly not him. She had made sure that her visit to Exeter prison had been arranged on one of the days when she was not expected in the office, and had deliberately delayed leaving home until her husband had already departed for Canary Wharf and Emily was safely despatched to school.

At the grim old county jail on the hill opposite Exeter Castle she was searched and her VO pass inspected before being led to the visiting room. She had been seated first at one of the small wooden tables and then Shifter was led out to her. He was wearing prison denims, which stretched over his huge shoulders. The clothes did not seem quite big enough for him. She thought that would probably offend a man who wore the kind of beautifully tailored suits she had last seen him in. He walked just as he had in the restaurant, however. As he always did, she suspected, with his huge hands hanging like weapons waiting to be loaded and put into action. He did not show the great strain he must surely be under. She had to remember that to the Shifter Browns of this world doing a stretch in prison was just a part of life, he was of the breed who prided themselves on being able to survive it. But twenty-two years! That was some sentence and surely must have shaken even him. If he served the full time recommended by the judge Shifter would be well into his sixties before he got out, even with full remission. She studied him closely as he walked towards her. She had noticed in court that he looked even fitter than when she had lunched with him. His waist was slightly narrower, stomach flatter, jaw a little more squared. He would be spending his days working out she supposed, that was what the old lags did. They believed that if you kept the body in top condition, the mind would stay that way too. The one thing they all feared was losing their minds. Stir crazy, they had called it once.

Shifter loped across the room towards her and beamed a greeting as he sat down. ‘All right, Joey doll?’

‘I’m fine, Shifter. How about you?’

‘Been better, doll, but I can handle it.’ There was something about his expression which made her realise then what an effort he was making, not just with her for this visit, but probably every day of his life inside, determined not to go under, not to let himself be beaten.

‘You copped the big one, didn’t you?’

He nodded sagely. There was not a hint of self-pity in him. ‘Yeah, well, it wasn’t any more than I expected.’

‘You could have done yourself a favour, told them who put out the contract on Jimbo.’

‘But I don’t grass, do I?’ He smiled again.

‘So what have you brought me here today for, then? What is this corker you have for me exactly?’

‘I want to tell you the truth behind Jimbo’s murder, of course. All of it. The works, Joey. It’s yours, doll.’ He paused. ‘At a price, naturally.’

‘Ah,’ she said. So that was it. He was after money. She made no further comment.

He continued almost at once. ‘I’ll give you the lot, everything I know. If the price is right.’

She shook her head. ‘You know papers can’t pay convicted criminals any more, Shifter. You know the way things are as well as I do.’

‘All I want is for you to look after my family,’ he said then.

‘Well, that’s pretty much the same thing.’

‘Leave it out,’ he responded. ‘There’s always ways. You can do it if you want to. You know you can.’

Joanna wasn’t too sure of that, not after the Phillips deal fiasco. She would never forgive herself for that. It had made her wary of deals. But at least the courts had already done their worst with this one. Everybody knew where they stood before she and the Comet had been invited to get involved. ‘Is that why you didn’t speak out before?’ she asked. ‘Because you wanted to do a deal?’

He nodded. ‘Yeah. I knew I was done up like a kipper the moment the police got their hands on my van, that whatever I did I was going down for a long, long time. I figured I couldn’t do a whole lot about that whatever I told them. But then I thought that if I gave the story to a paper, exclusive like, maybe at least I could do something for my family. And I knew it was no good to anybody before the trial because you couldn’t have printed it, could you? So I reckoned the only way was to keep stumm till after I got sent down and then do a deal.’ He paused. ‘It was always going to be you, Joey doll, cos I like you, girl, trust you too.’ He smiled his strangely ingenuous smile.

God, not again, she thought, wishing for the first time in her life that she were not quite so good at getting people to trust her. All except her husband, it seemed. And with justification now, she reminded herself. ‘I’ll do my best, Shifter, but it truly won’t be easy,’ she said.

He reached in his shirt pocket and produced a photograph, frayed around the edges from much handling, of two angelic-looking little blonde-haired girls. ‘That’s Melanie, she’s ten, and that’s Abigail, she’s nine, they’re my little princesses,’ he said, his voice full of pride.

She looked at the picture and then at him. Shifter, a professional much-feared hit man and heavy, was smiling softly down at his daughters, his eyes misty, his whole face suddenly gentle. What was it with these East End villains that they so often had this other side to them, particularly with their children? ‘I have a little girl, too, Shifter,’ she said. ‘Well, not so little, she’s almost twelve now.’ She’d told him that not because she had any desire to share any part of her family life with him, but because it was a knee-jerk reaction for her to seek out common ground with an informant or an interviewee. It was what journalists did. It was automatic.

‘You know what it’s like then, Joey, don’t you, doll? You’ll do anything for them, won’t you, anything at all.’

Joanna nodded. She didn’t think she’d ever been a particularly good mother and her daughter was absolutely the most self-possessed eleven-year-old she had ever encountered, but Shifter was right, of course. She would do anything for Emily. Whatever it took. Then an unwelcome little niggle, stemming from guilt no doubt, flitted into her mind. Even give up Mike Fielding? She pushed the thought away for the time being and focused all her attention firmly on Shifter, who had started to speak again.

‘It’s them I want looked after. I’ve had it, doll, haven’t I? I just want to do what I can for my little princesses now.’

And if you hadn’t gone around topping people for a living you could be doing the one thing they need most, being with them and being a proper father to them, Jo thought. She didn’t say it, of course. She wanted this story dreadfully. And in any case she wasn’t sure she was in a position to make moral judgements, not even on a professional hit man. ‘Look, Shifter, you’ll have to come up with someone you trust, someone unrelated to you we can pay. We’ll set up a trust fund for your kids, how’s that? But we need a third party — and preferably not some villain with a record even longer than yours.’

Shifter grinned ingenuously. ‘I can do that. No problem. I still got some diamond mates. But how much, that’s what I want to know? It’s got to be worth having, Joey doll, worth something to the kids, you know...’

She knew. There was no point in offering a derisory amount, or he just wouldn’t talk. She thought fast. It was that tricky moment. You got nothing unless you offered money, but you didn’t really know what you were going to get until after you had. This one had to be good, though, it just had to be. ‘Ten grand,’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘No way. I want thirty minimum.’

‘You won’t get it, Shifter, not from me, not from anyone. Not any more.’

‘Well, you’ll have to do better than ten.’

She checked her watch. ‘Shifter, there’s less than half an hour left of this visit. I’m not going to waste it playing games. I’ll double my offer. Let’s call it twenty grand. You’ll not do better.’

He studied her closely. He wasn’t a fool. He was streetwise and surprisingly bright. Certainly his grasp of how newspapers worked and how he might best at least get something out of his predicament was quite impressive. As so often with villains, she thought what a shame it was that Arthur Richard Brown hadn’t used what brains and ability he had for something more worthwhile. And in his case, she had to remind herself, something less horrible and violent. Shifter, she knew, justified what he did as a kind of rough justice in the weird underworld in which he moved. It was true that you couldn’t imagine him mugging old ladies. He’d be much more likely to help them across the road or pay their bus fare. Similarly he had the abhorrence of most professional villains for sex crimes and child offences. He’d probably been quite pleased to get the contract on Jimbo, come to think of it. But he was still a thug — albeit a curiously gentlemanly one. And what he had done to Jimbo, much as she thought the bastard had deserved it, was too awful to contemplate and demonstrated all too well what Shifter was capable of.

‘Do you have the authority to offer me twenty grand, girl, just like that?’ he asked astutely.

‘Shifter, I’m married to the editor. You know that. We’re a team. Of course I have the authority. You said you trusted me, didn’t you?’

She was lying through her teeth. But if the story was good enough she reckoned she’d get away with this one. She certainly didn’t want another broken deal. The Phillips fiasco had stretched her credibility to its limit. Shifter might be a villain, but if she made a deal with him she had to ensure it was adhered to or she would have no credibility left at all.

He stared at her for a moment or two. ‘Right, then, it’s a deal,’ he said and he stretched one of his big, ham-fisted hands across the table. She reached out her own, which was promptly enclosed within his impressive grip. She felt her fingers scrunch together and heard one of her knuckles crack. It occurred to her fleetingly that there could be reasons other than her journalistic reputation why she really had to ensure that this deal was not broken.

Sixteen

Shifter did not let her down. His story was every bit as much of a corker as he had promised it would be. It was quite sensational. ‘I don’t know who paid me to do O’Donnell,’ he told her. ‘I got an e-mail, didn’t I?’

Joanna stared at him. ‘You got a what?’ She’d heard him all right. It was a pretty banal response. But she was absolutely staggered.

‘I got an e-mail,’ Shifter repeated very precisely, as if she were a bit on the slow side. ‘I got the contract by e-mail.’

‘And you don’t know who from?’

‘Not a clue. I tried to e-mail back after I was lifted the first time, do a bit of digging, like, but I never got any more answers.’

‘So you got an e-mail from an unknown source asking you to top Jimbo O’Donnell and you just did it?’

‘Only after I’d been paid half the readies.’ He spoke indignantly, as if she were taking him for a fool.

Oh, that’s all right then, thought Joanna. ‘So you’re really into the Net, then, are you?’

‘Gotta be nowadays, you know that, Joey doll. I’m a businessman, see? Same as anybody else trying to make a crust. I just move in a different kind of world, that’s all. The Net’s the future, isn’t it?’

And you’ve not got one any more thanks to it, then, she thought. ‘So how often have you been hired to do a job on the Net then?’

‘Oh, now and then, doll. I had my own website you see.’ Shifter spoke with considerable pride.

‘Did you, indeed? And what form did this take?’

‘Oh, you know, just offering my services, like.’

‘Like what, Shifter?’

‘“Got problems, get Shifter, he’ll shift them.” That sort of thing.’

She couldn’t help smiling. This was extraordinary. ‘And so anonymous people just got in touch and asked you to...’ she paused ‘... shift their problems?’

‘Yeah. That was the idea, see. They didn’t necessarily have to let me know who they were, like. People seemed to find that’ — he stopped as if thinking of the right word — ‘sort of reassuring.’

‘So how did these anonymous folk pay you, then?’

Shifter grinned conspiratorially. ‘Ways and means, girl, ways and means.’ He tapped the side of his nose.

‘All right, how about the O’Donnell job? How’d you get paid for that?’

Shifter grinned even more broadly. ‘That got put into a Swiss bank account for me,’ he said. And the pride in his voice was even more evident. Never mind that he was a convicted murderer doing twenty-two years, Shifter patently thought of himself as a thoroughly modern businessman.

Joanna was momentarily speechless. An East End heavy who got hired to kill someone by e-mail and was then paid via a Swiss bank account. Well, it was certainly original, she thought.

‘Didn’t the police check out your computer?’ she asked.

‘Always killed my e-mails straight after I read them. And I never kept any files to do with the business. Kept it all in my head, see.’

‘Unless you’re a lot cleverer than me, Shifter, it would all still be there somewhere on your hard drive.’

Shifter shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, depends how hard you look, I suppose. Anyway, I don’t reckon the filth even realised I had a computer. I’m just a dumb villain to them, aren’t I?’

‘Isn’t it in your home? The police would have searched the place when they arrested you the first time. That’s standard procedure.’

‘Oh, yeah, all over my gaff like a rash, they were. And it was there all right. Looking depends on what you think you’re going to find sometimes, though, doesn’t it? The only computer in my house was in my kids’ room.’ He chuckled. ‘Kids have all got computers, haven’t they? Switch my girls’ rig on and all you’ll see is a stack of Disney games, a load of girlie stuff and their homework.’

Jo felt her jaw drop. What Shifter was saying was crazily simple. It made total sense. She could see quite clearly how that computer in his children’s bedroom would have been overlooked.

The big man began to talk again. ‘The Simms, that’s my two’s favourite, you know, it’s the game about this family; you get them jobs and houses and stuff, even marry them off. What’s your girl’s favourite game, Joey? I bet she’s a bright one, your kid.’

Jo nodded. Emily was bright all right. Jo also realised that she did not have a clue what computer games her daughter liked best. Paul would know. He often surfed the Net with Emily and said that playing computer games with her relaxed him. But somehow Joanna never seemed to get involved. She was ashamed of herself and experienced another sharp stab of guilt. Could Shifter Brown really be a better father than she was a mother? Surely not. He had got himself banged up for twenty-two years, hadn’t he? But she really did not want to explore that area of her life with him. ‘E-mails can be traced back, Shifter. We could still do that.’

‘Nope,’ said Shifter. ‘Excite address, wasn’t it? I had a Hotmail one. And all the real hooky stuff I just went down the cyber caff for. You pay cash, get online, make up a user name, put any old rubbish on the sign-on. I can’t swear to it, doll, but I’d have a fair old bet that whoever hired me to do Jimbo would have used a cyber caff too. He’d be a mug not to have done.’

‘Look, Shifter, I could get an expert to check out your computer. Maybe your punter wasn’t that careful. Remember the love-bug hackers? Even they didn’t know that Microsoft software has a hidden flag. It’s all traceable.’

‘Not if you buy second hand at a street fair, doll,’ said Shifter, proudly displaying his knowledge again. ‘That’s what I did. You get your rig from a dodgy market and pay cash. The trail ends with the last authorised user.’ He grinned. ‘Anyway, after I was arrested the first time I trashed the lot. Put a hammer through the hard drive and took it down the tip. Then I went down the market again and bought another one.’

Amazingly simple and almost certainly foolproof, thought Jo, reflecting yet again what a pity it was that Shifter hadn’t used his brain for better purposes over the years. She set about prising all the information she could out of him. ‘OK, so how much did you get paid?’ she asked.

‘Fifteen grand. Ten before and five after.’

A fair amount of money for what Shifter would regard as little more than a day’s work, Jo supposed. But a cheap price for a life. Even the life of Jimbo O’Donnell. ‘And where’s that money now, still in your Swiss bank account?’ Even as she mentioned that Swiss bank account Jo had to fight an urge to laugh aloud.

‘’Course not, doll,’ said Shifter predictably. ‘Spent it already, haven’t I?’

Well, he wasn’t going to admit that he still had his ill-gotten gains, was he — even though Jo couldn’t imagine there would ever, in any circumstances, be much chance of British authorities retrieving it from the gnomes of Zurich. ‘How was the money paid into your account?’ she asked.

‘It was transferred from another Swiss account.’

All clever stuff. ‘And I don’t suppose you’ll be revealing the number of your account, or the other account, or authorising anybody to look into it, will you, Shifter?’

‘C’mon, doll. I don’t grass. Do I?’

There was something else that Jo was intrigued to know. But she wondered if Shifter, still operating under his own peculiar moral code, would refuse to tell her. ‘What e-mail address did your...’ she hesitated and continued with a small smile ‘... client use, Shifter?’

‘Contractor@excite.com.’

Well, that was straightforward enough. Shifter was obviously quite confident that his ‘client’ could not be traced. ‘And your address?’

Shifter grinned. ‘Enforcer@hotmail.com.’

Dear God, thought Joanna. There was nothing like being blatant. Shifter had used the most modern technology but his e-mail address was the stuff of gangster legend. Enforcers were traditionally the heavies who did the dirty work for the big gang bosses. Everybody knew that Shifter had always been an enforcer of some kind and she had already experienced his sense of humour. Even now, his amusement at his own wit and daring in labelling himself in such a way was abundantly apparent. ‘And your password?’

Shifter’s grin faded. He looked suddenly sheepish. Perhaps he was not prepared to reveal his password, even now, in spite of his apparent confidence that all tracks were effectively covered. But no, that was not what was causing his hesitation, it seemed. ‘It’s Sinatra,’ he said eventually, adding with solemn reverence, ‘well, Frank was the guv’nor, wasn’t he, doll?’

The drive back to London seemed endless, particularly the last bit across the city. Jo didn’t call Fielding. For once didn’t even think about him for some hours. Not after what she had just learned. She decided to drive straight to Canary Wharf. Only ‘straight’, of course, was hardly the way to describe the journey.

It took her three hours to drive the 200 miles or so from Exeter prison to the Hogarth roundabout at Chiswick, then another hour and a half to crawl across town to the heart of dockland, just fifteen or sixteen miles further. She didn’t have a parking space, like most of the journalistic staff, and Paul was certainly not inclined to arrange anything special for his wife. So she had to find a meter.

It was almost 7 p.m. before she stepped into the lift which would carry her to the twenty-first floor and she was exhausted. She half wished she had simply driven home to Richmond, waited for Paul to return that night and told him all about it then. But it wouldn’t have been a good time to try to discuss something new and controversial with him. And she certainly couldn’t wait until the next day.

She checked her watch and decided to give her husband an hour or so before she went along to his office. She wanted to catch him during that usually quiet period right after the first edition had gone to bed.

Meanwhile there were things she wanted to try to do, although she suspected she would probably be wasting her time. She switched on her computer, logged on to the Net and called up Shifter’s website. It was blank — except for a message telling her the page was no longer available on that site. Shifter had told her he’d killed his web page. Nonetheless she thought she’d check. It might not in any case have taken her much further, but she would have liked to have seen it.

Next came the big one. She called up Hotmail and tapped in Shifter’s user name and his password: ‘enforcer’, ‘Sinatra’. It really was hilarious stuff.

Both user name and password still worked. But as Jo had suspected when Shifter had so freely supplied her with them, all his e-mails, in and out, had been deleted. The only place they could possibly be retained would be on the computer he had used to keep in contact with ‘contractor’. The one in his home had been trashed and Shifter refused to tell her which cyber café he had used for what he referred to as ‘the really hooky stuff’. There weren’t that many cyber cafés around, it would be most likely that Shifter had used one in his own manor, certainly in London, but that sort of detective work was almost certainly one for the pros — a police matter. In any case Jo reckoned she already had all she needed for a major ground-breaking crime scoop, which would be the envy of all the Comet’s rivals.

When she finally decided the moment was right to approach her husband and editor she found him, as she had expected to, alone in his office, leaning back in his chair with his feet on the desk. The door was always open. There was no culture for anyone to knock — which didn’t mean that everybody, including her, wasn’t inclined to be cautious about entering. Only the angle-light on Paul’s desk was switched on, its narrow beam palely illuminating just a part of the room. Mozart played softly on his CD player. Paul’s eyes were closed. She knew he wouldn’t be asleep, but he had a knack of relaxing completely for just a few minutes whenever the opportunity arose. It helped him greatly in getting through the extraordinarily long hours Fleet Street editors worked.

‘Hi, Jo,’ he murmured. His eyes were still closed and she had not seen him open them. It didn’t surprise her, though, that he knew she was there. Maybe he’d peeped, or possibly he really did have that sixth sense his staff sometimes attributed to him.

She sat down opposite him, rehearsing her approach in her head, waiting for him to appear ready to talk.

‘What are you doing here tonight anyway?’ he asked eventually. It wasn’t one of her days in, after all.

‘I’ve got this extraordinary story,’ she began. And she told him all of it.

Paul listened very carefully. He had always been a good listener. By the time Joanna had finished speaking he was almost as excited as she was.

Paul Potter was a newspaperman, through and through. His reaction to news was involuntary, instinctive and overwhelming, just like his wife’s. When something big and special broke he experienced the same burst of adrenalin rushing through his system as she did. As did all the best ones. But he didn’t show it, of course, it wasn’t his style. And in any case it was his job to think the thing through, to be clear on the legal aspects and to work out how to make the most of what they had.

‘Just e-mail a killer.’ It was wonderful. ‘Enforcer@hotmail.com.’ — magic. Pure magic. And so was the idea of a hit man being paid through a Swiss bank account. But the source was a convicted murderer and Joanna had agreed to pay him for the story, albeit indirectly. Jo had jumped the gun and had, of course, had absolutely no authority to pledge the Comet for that sort of money. But this time Paul didn’t blame her. He would have done the same himself. Make the promises. Get the story. Sort the rest out later.

It was a dangerous game, paying money to villains. He had done it before, of course, and so had most editors, even if they wouldn’t admit it. He still didn’t like it. Nobody did. But apart from any other considerations there was always the element of if you didn’t do it, somebody else would. And this time it was just such a big story. But they would have to be very, very careful about paying Shifter in some indirect way. Paul didn’t think he could renege on another of Joanna’s deals. Even though she was his wife, he wasn’t really concerned about her reputation and all that old-fashioned stuff about allowing her to maintain the trust of her sources and contacts upon which specialists traditionally had relied. He was both a pragmatist and a realist as far as newspapers were concerned. And frankly, although he liked it no more than the next journalist, he thought those days were gone. But the Comet’s reputation, such as it was, had to be protected. One journalist was neither here nor there. However, if it became widely believed that the Comet would casually break a deal whenever it thought it could get away with it, the paper could be badly damaged.

No, if they went with this one — and they had to, it was too good to miss — then Shifter would have to be paid. The sum of money Joanna had agreed to did not worry Paul. It was cheap, actually, for a story of this calibre. It was all the other factors that had to be so carefully considered.

‘Shifter was right, it is a corker,’ he said eventually. ‘Well done, Jo. We’ll go for it, of course. Two things. Tell nobody else. It’s “need to know” until we print, right? There’s no question of squeezing it in tonight and you were right not to try to do this one long-distance. It’s a major exclusive and I want it to have all the space and projection the Comet can give it. We’ll run the main story as the splash the day after tomorrow, “Murder on the Net, Jimbo killer hired by e-mail”, something like that, and over four and five. Let it run, too, Jo, every word he said. I’d like the spread as well. “Just e-mail a murder — Is this the future?” that kind of thing. Detailed analysis of how it can work, plenty of graphics and a break-out on just how secure Swiss banking is, all that sort of stuff. Big picture of an old-style villain carrying a bag of swag or something and an even bigger one of some sharp-suited bastard hacking into his laptop. Maybe a computer-enhanced job superimposing Shifter Brown’s face... Yeah! Let’s do that...’ Paul was motoring, warming to his theme. He was always at his best in this kind of situation. That’s why he was so successful.

Joanna nodded enthusiastically.

‘So get busy, Jo. You’ve got a lot of writing to do. I don’t want anybody else involved, not until they have to be. I’ll do the layout myself and we won’t get your copy subbed until the last moment. We’ll need to get pix on to it first thing in the morning but they can work blind — which won’t make much difference. Some of the stuff they put up to me I can’t help thinking that’s what they normally do.’ He grinned. ‘OK?’

‘OK, boss,’ said Joanna and she beamed at him.

They had always worked well together. They might have lurking personal problems now, but that was still the case, he thought to himself.

She got up from her chair as if she were about to leave his office. Then she stopped and spoke in a more hesitant voice. ‘And the deal with Shifter?’

‘We’ll honour it, of course,’ he said and he saw the relief wash across her face. ‘But I’ll want Cromer-Wrong involved — we’ve got to make it watertight.’

She nodded and beamed at him again. ‘I’ll make a start, then.’

She was just like him in so many ways. He had seen when she had entered his office that she looked exhausted. But his response and the promise of all that space in the paper had re-energised her. She was buzzing when she left.

As he watched her go his heart ached for her. She had always been the only one for him, right from the start. She was his and he could not bear it when they were not close. He still loved Joanna so much. He did everything he could for her and yet sometimes it seemed that nothing was enough. He thought his feelings were probably stronger than mere love. She possessed him. She always had. And he just wished he could believe that she felt half as strongly about him.

He also wished he could show her how he felt. For more than eighteen years they’d been married, he and Jo, and he still couldn’t do that. Neither could he explain to himself why not.

The Comet ran its splash, four, five and spread on the e-mail killer almost exactly as Paul had so quickly mapped it out in his office. ‘This newspaper has made no payment to Arthur Brown,’ read the disclaimer at the end of the story. There was no mention, of course, of the pledge to set up trust funds for Shifter’s family.

The police response was instant.

On the morning the Comet’s exclusive dropped Detective Superintendent Todd Mallett called first thing and demanded an interview with Paul and Joanna. He was already on his way from Exeter to London, he told the news desk early man, and indeed he arrived at Canary Wharf shortly after morning conference. He came heavy-handed, accompanied by a detective sergeant and two uniformed boys. Todd was angry. He wanted to show muscle. Unlike Mike Fielding, he had no time at all for journalists.

Paul offered at once to share all the information the Comet had concerning Shifter Brown and his e-mail contract. After all, he had nothing to lose, not now that he had published. The Comet’s big exclusive was already in the bag.

Which was exactly the way the detective superintendent saw it. ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit late, Mr Potter?’ asked Mallett coldly. ‘You should have informed us as soon as you received the information which led to your story this morning — not after it was printed. And you damned well know it.’

‘I’m sorry, Detective Superintendent, but I think this newspaper behaved properly throughout. We don’t work for the police, you know. This country still has a free press — just about.’

‘That is one name for it, Mr Potter,’ stormed Mallett. He looked as if he would like to arrest them both. Joanna knew that Mallett had a reputation for being unflappable. But on this occasion he certainly did not look it. She supposed that to see a major development in a case you had more or less failed finally to crack splashed all over the tabloid press when you knew nothing about it was, to say the least, a little annoying.

She also knew that Paul would have expected a strong reaction from the police and would not be fazed by it. Her husband certainly looked cool enough. After all, this was the kind of argument that was perpetual between the law and the Fourth Estate.

The policeman’s biggest concern seemed to be that there were more major disclosures lurking in Joanna’s notebook. In particular, the identity of the mystery e-mailer who had hired Shifter. There weren’t, of course, although she would have loved there to be. And she had no more idea who the e-mailer was than anyone else — and that included Shifter, she was able to inform Superintendent Mallett. Or so the jailed man continued to insist, at any rate.

The big burly policeman seemed to accept that. But you could see he was still only barely containing his fury. ‘There’s something else, Mr Potter, I know damn well you and your newspaper have paid Shifter Brown for this story, and you know that I know. We both also know that breaks every code in the book.’

‘I can assure you no money has been paid to Mr Brown,’ said Potter.

‘I bet you can. Someone close, aye? Someone handling it for Shifter’s family?’

Uncannily accurate, thought Joanna. But Mallett had been around a few years. It was no surprise that he was spot on.

Her husband obviously thought that too and remained as cool as ever. ‘I can also assure you I am well aware of all the codes of practice that apply and that this newspaper always treats them with the utmost respect,’ he said.

‘Spare me,’ muttered Mallett and he led his team away.

‘I told you we had to be careful, Jo,’ said Potter after the policemen had left. But he looked pretty pleased with himself.

Over the next couple of days there was pandemonium. All the other papers were fighting to catch up. There were questions asked in the House of Commons concerning regulating the Internet and the usual rumblings about the dogged single-mindedness of the gnomes of Zurich who took no notice of any law except their own.

The Mail got to both the O’Donnells and the Phillipses, but neither family seemed able to add anything to the story. Or if they could they certainly weren’t doing so.

Joanna basked in the glory of her scoop. She was more excited than she’d been in years. And, as her husband had noted, with the excitement of her triumph came a great flood of extra energy.

She really wanted to see Fielding. She felt guilty because working on her big story with Paul had somehow brought her and her husband together in a kind of closeness that had been absent from their relationship for months. But that did not lessen her need for her lover — although it was not until four days after her interview with Shifter, when all the possible follow-ups had also been written, that she eventually called Mike on his mobile.

He sounded distant, quite cool. Almost a bit like Paul when he was displeased about something.

And that sent a shiver down her spine. ‘Anything wrong, Mike?’

‘Nope.’ Just the one word. She suspected that he was miffed with her because she’d obviously been in his territory and not contacted him. He had left a message on her mobile on the day after her trip down to Exeter, but she’d been so preoccupied with her big story that it was not until now that she’d even remembered it. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch before; it was just that everything seemed to happen at once,’ she explained a little lamely.

‘Don’t worry about it.’ He still sounded offhand.

She pretended not to notice. Hearing his voice, with an edge to it, heightened her need for him. As usual. She decided to go straight for it. ‘I need to see you,’ she said and she knew she had been unable to keep the desire out of her voice. Hadn’t tried very hard, really.

When he replied, after a short pause, he sounded a little warmer. ‘I can’t get away at the moment, Jo. I’ve swung just about every trip I can to London recently.’

She had been ready for that. ‘That’s OK,’ she told him. ‘Can you steal a couple of hours if I come to Exeter?’

‘You’d come all this way for a couple of hours?’ Now that sounded much more like his normal self.

‘Yep.’

‘I’m flattered. But not Exeter. Look, do you mind cheap and cheerful?’

‘Have we ever had anything else?’

‘Feel free to book the Ritz any time you like.’

She didn’t want to waste time on any more banter. ‘Next time you can get to London,’ she said. ‘Meanwhile I don’t give a damn as long as the place has a bed and a door with a lock on it.’

He laughed.

That was better, she thought.

‘The Lodge at Taunton service station,’ he said. ‘Far enough away from here for me to be reasonably safe and just a ten-minute cab ride from the station for you.’

‘T’riffic,’ she said, striving to maintain the lightness. She hated it when he was off with her. ‘The cabby’ll love it. What on earth could a woman on her own be doing getting dropped off at a service station motel, I wonder?’

‘Get him to drop you in the car park, you silly bitch. That should confuse him. Anyway, what does it matter? I know you’re wildly famous, but not down here, you’re not.’

‘Not as a journalist, I’m damn sure of that. I fear I’ve still made more of a stir through my personal involvement in the Beast of Dartmoor saga than by anything I’ve actually written about it.’

‘Yesterday’s fish and chips,’ he said.

She wasn’t sure which he was referring to, her journalism or the other stuff. Anyway, she didn’t really care. Suddenly she just so wanted to be with him again. Or, to be more precise, in bed with him again.

They arranged to meet the next day.

He was late. She had travelled all the way from London and he was late.

He didn’t even apologise. Didn’t speak. Just jumped on her.

She didn’t mind it like that sometimes but she was taken by surprise. He was usually a man who enjoyed taking his time, savouring every moment and, by and large, she preferred that. She had got to expect it with him. ‘You were in a hurry,’ she said afterwards.

He lay beside her, panting, his eyes tightly closed. He had been far too quick for her. She needed time these days to reach a climax. Time and much more attention.

‘I needed you,’ he muttered.

‘I still need you,’ she said bluntly.

‘Patience,’ he said.

He recovered surprisingly quickly. And the next time he did all the things that so excited her. She didn’t quite know what it was he did with his tongue that nobody else she had ever slept with had seemed to manage. She just knew it drove her mad, made her desperate to have him inside her and that when she did start to orgasm it was more acute, more extreme, with him than it had ever been with anyone else. Just like always.

When she had finished he held her very close. Her body felt weightless. She was in a state of complete relaxation. It was probably only after really good sex that she ever relaxed like that. She closed her eyes and revelled in the moment. Then she must have fallen asleep because when she opened her eyes again he was no longer lying beside her but standing, still naked, with his back towards her, over by the window. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘Uh huh,’ he said, but he didn’t sound very happy.

She propped herself up on one elbow. ‘Are you sure? I thought you were a bit off on the phone yesterday. Is there something wrong?’

‘You don’t even know what you do sometimes, do you?’ he sounded quite tetchy now.

‘Sorry?’

‘This past year, ever since the O’Donnell thing began I’ve given you everything I’ve got. Story after story. Kept you informed. Thought I owed you that. Then you get the e-mail killer stuff and you didn’t even bother to let me know. I read it in your newspaper like all the other cretins.’

So that was it. She had half suspected as much. ‘It didn’t even occur to me until afterwards...’

He interrupted her. ‘And that, Joanna, is exactly my point.’

‘But Mike, I’m a hack — you’re a policeman. It’s different. I didn’t think you’d even want to know about the case any more. It’s over for you, isn’t it? You’ve told me that enough times.’

He turned abruptly towards her, punching the air with his right arm, fist tightly clenched. Involuntarily she flinched back into the pillows. He looked absolutely furious. ‘For God’s sake, Joanna, it will never be over for me, don’t you understand that? I’m never going to be able to let go. I just can’t.’

The vehemence of his outburst took her by surprise. He shouted the words, his features contorted in anger. But his nakedness gave the scene an edge of the ridiculous. Maybe he thought so too.

He turned away, walked across the room, picked up his underpants and trousers from the floor where he had thrown them in his haste such a short time ago, and quickly pulled them on. ‘I’m supposed to be a tough cop. You don’t let on,’ he told her through clenched teeth. ‘You just get on with the next job. Trouble is, I was first on the scene when Angela Phillips was discovered. Everybody knows that. Nobody, but nobody, knows what it was like. I’ll never forget it. Never. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. The second-worst thing was knowing I had the bastard who did it and seeing him walk free out of court twice. I thought you understood that. Didn’t you realise how much it took for me to call you up after all that time, ask you to help me? Didn’t you realise how I felt when it all went pear-shaped yet again? O’Donnell didn’t just get away with murder, he wrecked so many lives — including mine as near as damn it. And he’s even fouled up the remains of my career yet again, twenty years on.

‘Do you think there will ever be anything to do with that bastard that I don’t want to know every spit and fart on? You talk to the man who topped O’Donnell, you get all this new stuff, and you don’t even contact me because it didn’t occur to you? What didn’t occur to you, Jo? That I’d be interested, or that I would care?’

‘Mike, I’m sorry...’ she began.

He had begun to button up his shirt by then. She could tell she was going to get nowhere with him this afternoon. She had known that happen before with him, and with her first husband, come to that — although never with Paul who was too controlled. After lovemaking, just when you hope for tenderness and peace, the truth was inclined to come out. Any lurking resentment or bitterness surfaced.

Fielding interrupted her again. Calm now, but icy cold. ‘Look, don’t worry about it. Why should you understand? Nobody else does. I can’t talk about it now, anyway. I’ve got to go, I’ve already stayed longer than I should have.’

She was hurt, but she realised she had been completely thoughtless. After all, she had always known how much the Angela Phillips case had got to him. He had been genuinely moved by the poor girl’s fate and had wanted desperately to see her murderer brought to justice. But it was more than that. It had become personal for him, as it had for her. Certainly she had already been aware that Mike took O’Donnell’s two acquittals, and all the baggage that had come with them, personally. But maybe she had not realised before just how emotionally affected he still was.

‘Can’t you just stay a few minutes more?’ she asked. ‘I don’t like you leaving like this.’

‘No, I can’t, Jo,’ he said. He was no longer shouting; in fact, his voice was now quite soft, but as he spoke he pulled on his jacket and began to walk backwards towards the door. ‘It’s all right, really,’ he told her. ‘I’ll call you, OK?’

Joanna pulled the sheet up tight to her chin and watched him go. There was nothing else she could do. Maybe another time he would talk to her reasonably about it all. She hoped so. She found that she was feeling very anxious suddenly.

This was yet another side of Mike that, after all these years on and off, she had not really seen before. She knew he could be much softer than he seemed. She had learned that long ago. She knew so much about him. But she was deeply disturbed by the glimpse he had just given her of a level of obsession she had not suspected. She became very thoughtful and she did not like the path down which her thoughts were leading her.

How far would this man, who still had such a hold over her, go to get what he thought was justice, she wondered. He’d know how to fix it, that was for certain. He was computer-literate too. But then, so would she, up to a point. So would many people whose lives had been blighted by O’Donnell and his terrible crime. How far would she go? If it was important enough, if she thought she could get away with it. She made herself think about that too. It wasn’t just Mike. Far from it.

Nonetheless, as she showered and dressed, and prepared to drive back to the husband and child to whom she had given no thought at all during the time she had spent with her lover, she found herself growing increasingly uneasy.

Mike had never liked to be beaten, had he? In order to get his man he had always been prepared to go that little bit further, push that bit harder...

Seventeen

Back in the office in Canary Wharf the next day and right through the following week, Joanna tried to concentrate her mind on her work. And particularly on any developments in the e-mail murder case. She hardly dared contact either the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary or Scotland Yard on this one — she had become a bit of a pariah in those areas, particularly as far as Detective Superintendent Todd Mallett was concerned — so Tim Jones was on the case. And all he could do was assure her that the police had made no further progress at all.

They had, of course, gone back to Shifter’s house and searched it again. The only computer found had indeed been newly acquired and contained no hidden ‘contractor’ and ‘enforcer’ e-mail files and, in fact, nothing at all relating to Shifter’s dubious business.

Shifter was extensively interviewed all over again by the police, but refused to reveal any more information about either the Swiss bank accounts or the e-mail correspondence. He also continued to refuse to reveal which cyber café he had used, but diligent foot-slogging inquiries by officers carrying photographs of the distinctive Shifter resulted in the staff of a cyber café not far from Brown’s home admitting that they were almost sure Shifter had used their computers on several occasions to go on-line. However, they had unfortunately recently upgraded their stock.

‘The police are not going to be able to trace the stuff beyond the dealer the caff traded with, not without a miracle,’ Tim told her. ‘Chances are it’s already been sold on through one of those street markets like the one Shifter bought his rigs from. That’s what usually happens.’

Meanwhile Jo forced herself not to phone Fielding. She knew she should allow him to contact her in his own time. But after eight days she began to wonder if she would ever hear from him again.

On the evening of the ninth day after their tryst in the Taunton motel Fielding finally called.

Joanna felt that familiar physical lurch inside. She was just so relieved to hear from him. The sound of his voice still brought her up in goose bumps.

‘I’m sorry I was such a pig, sometimes everything seems to get on top of me,’ he told her at once.

She reassured him. ‘It’s fine, Mike, honestly.’

‘Look, I can swing a trip to town next week, that’s if you still want to...’ His voice tailed off.

‘Oh, yes, I want to,’ she replied quietly. And she did, too. Deep, deep inside she could already feel the dull ache of anticipation.

Their lovemaking seemed to become more and more urgent every time they were together. It was Fielding who took the lead. Again this time, once more in the downmarket Southampton Row hotel, he had no time for any niceties. There was no finesse. There were no preliminaries. He barely spoke to her and there was no foreplay. He just pushed her down on the bed, not even giving her time to undress properly, and entered her roughly without even taking his trousers off, just undoing his flies and thrusting straight into her. His eyes were fixed on the wall behind the bed, his teeth gritted in concentration, his features distorted in effort. And his face was coated in sweat. He held each of her wrists down above her head. He didn’t hurt her and yet there was a kind of cold brutality in his lovemaking. It couldn’t really have been called that. He just pummelled into her, apparently quite uninterested in how she might be taking it. Again he didn’t give her a chance, didn’t even seem to care. He did not pause until it was over for him.

When he had finished he rolled off her straight away. ‘I’m sorry, next time will be for you,’ he muttered haltingly, his breath coming in great gasps still.

He had never been quite like that before. She didn’t think she liked it very much. In fact, she was quite sure she didn’t like it. And yet — and maybe it was because of his desperation — she was immensely excited by it. Her desire, her need, seemed to increase with his disregard for it. And as in the motel in Taunton her own satisfaction, when he finally concentrated his attentions on her, seemed greater than ever. When she climaxed she thought she had never experienced quite such acute pleasure. Not even with him.

This time it was a snatched early evening meeting. He had a police dinner to go to that night. And he dressed and left her in bed again, although she had to leave shortly afterwards. She was glowing, almost burning inside, and she just wanted a few more minutes luxuriating in the feeling.

He came to the bed and kissed her firmly on the mouth before he left, tantalising her with his tongue. Making her whole body remember what it had just enjoyed. ‘It gets better every time,’ he told her with a smile, and he ran one hand down the entire length of her body lingering for just a few seconds over one breast and between her legs, before stepping back, shaking his head sorrowfully, turning and heading for the door.

At least their parting was more pleasant than the last time, she thought, as he shut the door behind him. He had always been a moody bugger, and his mood the last time they had met had been very disconcerting. As had been the sex they had just had.

Gradually the uneasiness that had been lurking ever since that afternoon at the Taunton motel overwhelmed her, forcing out all those nice warm feelings that came from great sexual satisfaction. She lay there thinking about the way these sea changes came over him, how he had shown that disturbing side of himself to her, and then she noticed his laptop computer on the small table by the window.

She couldn’t stop herself. She dragged the sheet off the bed, wrapping it around herself, grabbed the little machine, sat down on the room’s only chair and switched on. It was password-protected, of course, but she felt she had at least a chance of second-guessing him, given time, which she had a reasonable amount of. She checked her watch. It was just past 7.30. Fielding wouldn’t be back until after midnight, she was sure, and as long as she was at home in Richmond before ten she would easily be there before Paul.

However, she had been trying to break into the machine for only a couple of minutes when the door burst open.

Fielding hurried into the room. ‘I had to turn the taxi round, I forgot my damned phone...’ He saw then that she was working on his laptop and stopped dead. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he asked very quietly, his voice full of menace.

She felt a hot flush rise somewhere around the bottom of her neck, and spread across her throat and face until it reached her temples. She knew she must be bright red. She could think of nothing to say.

‘I asked you what the hell you thought you were doing?’ he enquired yet again, equally quietly.

‘I was just...’ Her mind was suddenly blank. She could think of no excuse. ‘Just looking for something...’ she finished lamely.

He strode across the room and snatched the laptop away from her. He glanced at it, taking in that she had failed to gain access, shut it down and closed the lid. He did it all very quickly. She remained sitting on the chair, still wrapped in the sheet.

He caught hold of her shoulder, his fingers digging into the flesh. ‘And what were you looking for?’

‘I don’t know...’ She stopped, shook her head.

‘C’mon, Joanna, what did you think you were going to find?’ The fingers dug harder into her shoulder. He made her eyes water for the second time that evening. ‘C’mon, Joanna,’ he repeated.

She had to tell him something. It might as well be the truth, she thought, in any case she didn’t have the wit at that moment to come up with anything else. ‘It’s the way you are about Angela Phillips and O’Donnell,’ she began. She saw his eyes narrow. His grip did not slacken. ‘All that stuff you told me the other night. You were right. I hadn’t understood. Not really. I hadn’t realised quite how strongly you felt about him, your job, all of it. Not until now. And I wondered... I wondered...’ Her voice tailed off.

‘You wondered what, Jo?’ he whispered, his lips very close to her ear.

She shook her head again and said no more.

‘You wondered perhaps if I felt strongly enough to do something about it all, is that it?’ He still spoke very quietly.

His grip tightened yet more. His fingers were digging into her so hard it felt as if they were going to meet in the middle. That was something else she had not ever been so aware of before about him — his tremendous physical strength. She had found him physically threatening just once before, in the Exeter motel room, but that was nothing compared with this. She nodded. There was no point in pretending.

‘You wondered if I had hired Shifter, didn’t you? You wondered if I were the mystery e-mailer. And you thought you’d have a sneaky look around in my laptop to see what you could find...’

There was real menace in him, but she supposed she could hardly blame him. She nodded once more.

He snatched his hand from her shoulder. Involuntarily she glanced down and put her own hand there, as if to take the soreness away. She saw that his fingernails had drawn blood.

He backed away from her, sat down abruptly on the edge of the bed and lowered his face into his hands. She still couldn’t think of anything more to say.

When he looked up he seemed more sad than angry. ‘I can’t believe you would think something like that of me,’ he told her.

She removed her hand from her shoulder and rested it against her forehead, took a deep breath and went for it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I started wondering about how far you would go to get O’Donnell. You’ve always been very determined, Mike, always been someone who wants to win. And this case, well, it’s always been the one, hasn’t it? Don’t they say that we all have one great love in life and a policeman has one great case? Good or bad. One case that overshadows all others. This was always yours, wasn’t it, Mike? And it’s always been a can of worms, hasn’t it? I just wondered how far you would go to close that can of worms, that’s all, I just wanted to know...’ she finished lamely again.

‘You could have asked me.’

‘I didn’t know how.’

He grunted derisively. ‘So what about you, then?’

‘What do you mean, what about me?’

He smiled humourlessly. ‘What about you, Joanna?’ he repeated. ‘This case got to you too, didn’t it, from the beginning, and in the end O’Donnell made a fool of you. He mocked you, didn’t he, humiliated you and that apology for a newspaper you work for. God knows, you don’t like being made a fool of. And in front of your peers...’

‘You’re being ridiculous Mike,’ she began.

‘Am I?’ he interrupted. ‘And you, I suppose, are not — ridiculous, offensive, insulting? I’m a police officer, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Yes, and a good one, always — but...’ The weak attempt at flattery proved to be a big mistake.

‘Save it,’ he said. ‘I really don’t want to know. If you can believe, even for an instant, that I’m evil enough to hire a fucking heavy to slice another man’s dick off and bury him alive then there’s not much point in anything any more, is there? Not between us, anyway.’

To her immense irritation she felt tears forming in her eyes. She was suddenly overcome with guilt and remorse. Now that he was talking to her like that, sitting in front of her, the whole thing seemed absurd. Fielding was impetuous, yes. Impatient. Sometimes too willing to cut corners. Over eager to get a conviction. All those things. But a cold, calculated killer, albeit at a distance? No, he couldn’t be that. It was just not possible. ‘I’m so sorry, Mike,’ she stumbled. ‘I don’t know where I was coming from, I really don’t.’

‘Neither do I, Jo. Now you’d better get dressed and go. I’m certainly not leaving you alone in my room again. If you want to go through my pockets you’ll just have to do it while I’m here.’

‘Mike, please!’

‘Just get dressed,’ he told her, in such a way that there could be no more argument, no more discussion. Perhaps, she thought fearfully, not ever. Perhaps this time it really would be over.

She drove home feeling thoroughly ashamed of herself. She had been cheating on her husband without compunction, she had been neglecting her daughter, maybe even endangering Emily’s secure future. She had been carried away by her affair with Fielding, it had taken over her life again just as it had done all those years ago. Hard as she fought against it, his fascination for her, which she had never been able to explain, had become all-consuming. And yet she was still able to believe that her lover could be guilty of arranging such a horrific crime. Able to suspect that of a man for whom she had been putting her marriage and her whole existence at risk.

Joanna’s emotions were in turmoil. She found herself consumed with guilt over her behaviour towards both her family and her lover. She could not wait to get home to Richmond and sneak a look at her hopefully sleeping daughter, and maybe even prepare a late supper for her husband, who she knew loved her — although she wished he wouldn’t always be so self-contained and controlled about it. At the same time she wished she could swing the car round, go back to Fielding, grovel her apologies and shag him rotten for the rest of the night.

She took one hand off the steering wheel and thumped the passenger seat in frustration. What was wrong with her? She had a damned good life, a damned good husband, a lovely daughter, a lovely home, plenty of money. She was indeed the woman with everything. And yet again she had let this bloody case and that bloody man Fielding put it all under threat. The biggest threat, she knew, came from within her own head and heart. Fielding was under her skin again and half of her sincerely did not want him there.

Her thoughts strayed to what he had said to her when she had more or less accused him of hiring Shifter Brown: ‘And what about you, Jo?’

Laughable, of course. But any more laughable than her accusing him? And Mike did have a point, she supposed. There was nothing in the world she hated so much as being made a fool of. Even after all these years it irked her ever to be beaten, to be in any situation which she felt gave the opposition, particularly her rival crime journalists, reason to be able to gloat over her.

She made herself focus on the case. That at least was a safer preoccupation than Fielding. For the umpteenth time she went over in her mind the list of people who might have wanted to take terminal revenge against James Martin O’Donnell.

She knew that Todd Mallett and his team had questioned the Phillipses and the O’Donnells all over again since her e-mail killing story. Modern farming is a highly complex operation and, like so many farmers these days, the Phillipses virtually ran their whole business on computer. Apparently all the family were reasonably computer-literate. But were they streetwise enough to have found a killer on the Net and to know how to cover their footprints? It was also fairly laughable even to consider them coming up with a user name like ‘contractor’. And, at the end of the day, devastated though they had been by all that had happened to them and their daughter, would they really take the law into their own hands in that way?

As for the O’Donnell family — would they hire a killer on the Net? Surely that wasn’t their style? For a start, they still had their own enforcers, didn’t they? Combo was dead, but his son, Little John, that chip off the old block, was, she knew, still in the employ of the O’Donnells. And indeed, would they have the know-how to do so? Tommy O’Donnell probably would, but he was the one trying to lead his family away from the old ways of hit men and the like. Joanna was pretty sure old Sam O’Donnell wouldn’t have a clue about using the Internet, certainly not at the required level.

Nonetheless she wondered about Sam the Man. Just how ruthless was he capable of being with his own flesh and blood? She knew he would have hated the sex angle and the DNA evidence concerning his son must surely have given even him proof of what he had always chosen to deny. Had he finally accepted the inevitable and taken action he would previously not have countenanced? She could not believe Sam would ever put out a contract against his own son, but you did have to consider it.

She knew she would not be welcome, but she decided that the next day she would at least try to get to see Sam the Man.

Emily was indeed already asleep when Jo arrived home and the au pair was in her room watching TV. Very carefully, Joanna opened the door to her daughter’s bedroom. The light from the landing was sufficient for her to be able to see Emily without waking her by switching on any more lights, but it took a moment for Jo’s eyes to adjust. Emily was lying curled on her side, in deep sleep looking younger than her almost twelve years. Jo always reckoned that their daughter resembled Paul more than her; she certainly had his eyes, but she had inherited her mother’s blond hair, straight and grown to well below shoulder-length, just like Jo’s at Emily’s age. At least — that was the way it had been when Jo had last seen her daughter at breakfast that morning. She took a step into the room for a closer look. Yes, she was right. Emily’s hair was now cropped short and spiky with a purple streak running right through it Mohican style — although mercifully not shaven on either side. My God, thought Jo, she really is growing up.

She was smiling when she left the room, which a few minutes earlier she would not have thought possible. Some mothers might freak out at the sight of their young daughter with purple-streaked hair. Jo found it mildly amusing. Perhaps this was the start of the kind of idiosyncratic teenage shenanigans she was so perversely rather looking forward to.

She considered pouring herself a drink, but then realised she was very tired, although, in her own home with her family around her, Jo did not like to think about what had tired her so. She decided to go straight to bed, fell asleep immediately and was not even aware of her husband returning. He must have crept quietly into the bed beside her. He had certainly made no attempt to wake her. He rarely did nowadays. In the morning there was little chance to talk even if either of them had wanted to. They were woken by the phone just after 7.30 a.m. It was the news desk for Paul. Situation normal. Shortly afterwards came the sports editor and then somebody else with a problem only Paul could deal with. She and her husband breakfasted only on tea and orange juice, consumed on the run. Emily always ate a large bowl of muesli with fresh fruit which, in her usual grown-up way, she prepared herself.

It was one of Jo’s days in the office, but she wanted to drive straight over to the O’Donnells so she declined Paul’s offer of a ride in his chauffeur-driven car.

He had raised his eyebrows at his daughter’s hair but said nothing about it at first. Well, he hated confrontation, but Jo knew he wouldn’t approve. Paul was very conventional about appearance. Eventually he reached across the table and touched Emily’s hand. ‘You used to have very beautiful hair,’ he told her mildly. ‘Until yesterday, in fact.’

Emily was not abashed. ‘Oh Dad, it was sooo boring,’ she said.

Paul smiled. ‘Oh, well, we can’t have that, can we?’

Emily shot him a quizzical look. Like her mother, she obviously found it difficult sometimes to work out what her father was actually thinking. She would have known he wouldn’t make a scene, though, and she was right.

Paul passed no further comment. He left just before Jo and kissed her absently on the cheek. He was polite and distant. Same as ever. She couldn’t help comparing him, so self-contained, so controlled, so successful, with the volatile, mixed-up, disappointed man she could not get out of her mind. Then she resolved that she would put Fielding out of her mind. She really would. This stupid affair was doing her no good. When it began again she had known she must regard it as just an occasional roll in the hay and in many ways it still wasn’t much more than that — nor could it be. But with Fielding there was always more to it than that. And, in the cold light of dawn, it just didn’t seem worth it. So maybe the previous day’s confrontation had not been such a bad thing after all. It had jolted her out of a kind of trance. She would not sit waiting for Fielding to call again. And neither would she call him. She truly didn’t want to go on like this, she told herself.

In any case, she had a tricky job to do today. And the guilt was really kicking in.

She offered to drive Emily to school, a duty normally undertaken by the au pair. She was aware of her daughter, still sitting at the kitchen table eating her muesli, glancing at her in mild surprise. Jo stood up and ruffled the remains of Emily’s hair. ‘Well, I quite like the new look,’ she said. She wasn’t at all sure that she did, even though she found it amusing, but she somehow desperately wanted to feel close to her daughter that morning. She might have realised, of course, that the vanity of adolescence, however misplaced, had arrived along with its new spiky purple hairdo.

Emily pushed her hand away. ‘Oh, don’t, Mum, don’t,’ she muttered with a frown.

However, later in the car, just as Jo pulled up outside her school, Emily surprised her mother by leaning across from the passenger seat to give her a big sloppy kiss on the cheek and ask, ‘You are all right, Mum, aren’t you? There’s nothing wrong, is there?’

Jo was inclined to forget that Emily was every bit as perceptive as her father and it made her panic momentarily as she wondered if Paul had also picked up on anything amiss in her behaviour lately. ‘I’m absolutely fine, darling,’ she said, kissing her daughter back and then forcing a big bright smile. ‘Go on. Off with you. And have a really good day.’

Damn, she thought, as she drove off in the direction of Dulwich. She really must stop putting her family at risk.

She arrived at Sam O’Donnell’s house, unannounced again, just before 10.30 a.m.

Tommy answered the door, as before. He stared at her coldly for a moment or two and she quite expected him to slam it in her face. ‘You gotta cheek, I’ll give you that,’ he said eventually.

‘Look, Tommy, I just want to talk.’

‘Yeah, your kind always do,’ he told her coldly. But to her surprise he opened the door and beckoned her in.

She crossed the threshold and stood uncertainly in a chintzy hallway, thick-pile richly patterned carpet, a gilt mirror on the wall to the left of an ornate mahogany hatstand. To the right a gallery of framed family photographs, almost all including Sam and his wife, at their wedding, with their newborn children, their two sons and their only daughter, and at their children’s weddings. It was her first time inside Sam’s home. She had been told that the house was a shrine to Tommy’s dead mother and that seemed about how it was. Apparently all the furnishings and decorations were kept the way Annie O’Donnell had had them. Sam allowed no change. On the wall opposite all the family photographs was a huge framed portrait, maybe four foot by three, of Annie.

‘Right,’ said Tommy. ‘Everything you see and hear in this house is off the record. All right?’

She hesitated. It wasn’t all right. She hated off the record. You never knew what you were going to get and all too often it was useless unless you could use it fully and attribute it.

‘It’s either that or out,’ said Tommy.

Jo sighed.

‘And when I say off the record I mean you can’t print anything. There is just something I want you to know. To be aware of. Yes or no?’

She said yes, of course, unhappy though she was about it.

Wordlessly he showed her into the sitting room. More chintz, patterned wallpaper, deep-pile carpet and family photographs. She barely took in any of it, though, such was the shock of her first sight of Sam the Man.

Arguably the most feared and respected villain in London, he was sitting slumped in a wheelchair in the middle of the room. One rheumy eye seemed to half focus on her. She wasn’t sure. The left side of his face was cruelly distorted and his left arm hung loosely over the arm of the chair. Sam was dribbling. He showed no reaction to her. He did not attempt to speak.

She gave a small involuntary gasp.

‘He had a stroke soon after Jimbo’s last trial,’ said Tommy. ‘Been like this ever since. His left arm and his left leg are paralysed. We don’t know what he can understand.’

Tommy walked across to the chair and stroked his father’s still abundant shock of white hair. More like father to son than son to father. But that’s the way all our parental relationships change in the end, Jo thought to herself.

‘Do we, Dad, eh?’ he murmured, his voice suddenly soft and ripe with affection. Then he patted the old man’s hand, but still Sam did not react.

Swiftly Tommy retreated to Jo’s side. ‘Right, that’s all you’re getting,’ he said, as he ushered her out into the hallway again. ‘I wanted you to see that,’ he went on, once he had closed the living-room door behind them. ‘We’ve kept Sam’s condition a secret. That’s why you can’t print anything. Dad would hate people to know that he had become a dribbling wreck. I mean, he’s still Sam the Man. As long as he’s alive he’ll always be that.’ Tommy spoke with quiet pride, reverence even.

Against her better judgement Jo found that she was moved. ‘I am very sorry, Tommy,’ she said. And in a strange way she meant it, too. She had no illusions about the villainy of Sam O’Donnell or what a nasty piece of work he could be, but there had always been something special about him. He had been big in every way, a character, one of the last of a dying breed. She knew better than to romanticise his sort but with Sam you just couldn’t help doing so just a bit.

Tommy was not interested. ‘I didn’t show you Dad to get your sympathy,’ he told her. ‘I wanted you to see what you’ve done, you and that bastard Fielding. You got that new trial staged against Jimbo and that was what did it. No doubt about it. Dad adored Jimbo. All that DNA stuff. He couldn’t take it. He was ill, really, right from when it all started again. He had a very slight stroke just before the hearing at Okehampton, that’s why you’ve seen him using a stick since then. But he was all right, in his head anyway, until after Jimbo disappeared. Then he had another stroke. And it was a big one. It was all just too much for him.’

Joanna felt suddenly irritated. ‘Tommy, you can hardly blame me and Mike Fielding. If you have to blame anybody you should blame your brother.’

Tommy shook his head stubbornly. Joanna knew that he was a bright, intelligent man, everyone knew of his determination to legitimise the O’Donnell family and how hard he had already worked towards it. The fresh prosecution against his brother couldn’t have helped with that. But apparently, in common with so many of these East End villains, when it came to family Tommy had all the old blind spots. ‘There was no call for it all to be dragged out again,’ he said frostily. ‘It was history. And it didn’t do anybody any good, did it? Not Angela Phillips’s family and not us. We’ve not only lost Jimbo, we’ve as good as lost Dad because of it too. He’s out of it. The only mercy is we don’t even think he knows Jimbo’s dead.’

‘Tommy, Angela Phillips died in the most horrific circumstances possible,’ Joanna responded tetchily, throwing caution to the wind. ‘Your brother killed her. The DNA proved it and if it had been available twenty years ago Jimbo would have gone down then. That’s what the new trial was about, that’s why it was all “dragged out”, as you put it, again. And if it weren’t for some bloody stupid anomaly of the law he would have been locked up and he wouldn’t be dead. He’d be safely behind bars. Where he belonged. He was a murderer and a rapist. You must accept that. I reckon your father did in the end and that’s probably what made him ill.’

‘I accept nothing. Jimbo’s dead, that’s all I know. And he was my brother.’

‘Look, do you mind if I ask you some questions while I am here?’ she ventured recklessly.

‘Yes, I fucking well do,’ he stormed at her. Then he repeated his earlier remark, but his voice was much louder and angrier now. ‘I just wanted you to see what you did to my father. And now you’ve seen it — get out.’ He didn’t take a step towards her. He said nothing that was specifically threatening. He didn’t need to. You don’t argue with an angry O’Donnell.

She opened the door to the house herself, shut it quietly behind her and hurried to her car, parked down the street.

When she put the key in the ignition she noticed that her hand was shaking.

Back in the office, she worked on her column through the afternoon. Just after five Paul called through and told her his deputy was editing that night. ‘I’m taking an early cut,’ he said. ‘If you’re clear, how about an evening at home? Maybe phone for a pizza or something.’

Joanna was pleasantly surprised. The Comet operated a system of duty editors at night. Either Paul, his deputy, or one of three assistant editors edited each night, staying in the office until well after the foreigns dropped, often until one in the morning and sometimes later. But Paul was a hands-on editor, as almost all of the good ones were. Except on Fridays, which was designated as a family evening, he would rarely leave Canary Wharf until ten or eleven even when somebody else was officially editing. She agreed with alacrity and told him she would give him a lift home if he liked and he could give his driver the night off.

They left the office soon after seven, the traffic was as amenable as it ever is at that time, and they made it to Richmond in just over an hour and a quarter. Paul was companionable enough, if a little distant. But she was used to that. It was the way things were. Indeed, he spent most of the journey home talking to the night desk on his mobile phone. That was the way things were, too. Always.

At home he settled down with Emily at the computer in her bedroom while Joanna made drinks and ordered a pizza. Emily was always excited to have Paul home and inclined to monopolise his time when he was there. Joanna didn’t blame her. She saw little enough of the father she idolised. The pizza arrived and all three sat down at the kitchen table together. That was rare enough, too, which was why Emily had been allowed to stay up and eat later than usual.

Paul teased her gently once or twice about the purple hair and Jo suspected from their daughter’s rather sheepish reaction that she might already be regretting whatever whim or peer pressure had led her into yesterday’s drastic hairdo. Paul had the knack of handling Emily, of bringing her round almost always to his way of thinking. He was very good with her, always had been. Indeed, they were like peas in a pod. Emily was a real chip off the old block. Joanna was inordinately proud of her, even if she did sometimes fear that she was old beyond her years. Apart from when it came to that hair!

In spite of the teasing Jo could tell how much their daughter was enjoying the family supper and vowed to try to make it happen more often. Paul promised to take her swimming at the weekend and Emily went to bed happily, although still reluctantly, around 9.45 p.m. Joanna poured the remains of the bottle of red wine she had earlier opened into her and Paul’s glasses, and asked him if he would like her to open another.

‘In a minute,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you. I’ve been waiting for us to have some time alone.’

She noticed that he was looking very serious. She had already stood up and was halfway to the wine rack in the corner. She turned around and walked back to the table. ‘Well?’

‘You should know that I am aware that you are once again having an affair with Mike Fielding,’ Paul announced in an expressionless voice.

Joanna sat down with a bit of a bump. That was the last thing she had expected to hear. Her first instinct was to lie. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about...’ she began.

Her husband interrupted her. ‘Don’t insult my intelligence, Joanna,’ he told her. ‘I said I know. I know about the hotel in Southampton Row; I know that he spent every night with you when you were covering the Shifter Brown hearing in Exeter; I even know about your sleazy trip down to Taunton to the motorway motel. If you would like any more details I can assure you that I do have them.’

She realised at once that he must have had her followed. It was somehow typical of Paul that he could do that over an extended period and actually be able to say nothing, just live with what was going on, until he was ready to make a move. Any normal man would have confronted her long ago, she thought. She had often, by way of attempting to justify her affair, blamed Paul’s absence of passion, his calculating businesslike approach to all aspects of his life and his complete lack of spontaneity, for leading her into another man’s arms. She knew, of course, that was really no justification for her behaviour. She didn’t speak.

Apparently he did not expect her to.

‘It goes without saying that you end this affair immediately,’ he went on. ‘If you do not I will divorce you. Naturally you will lose your job. You will also lose your daughter. I will get custody, I promise you. You may well get access of some kind but I will make sure that it is as little as possible. And I will do my absolute best to turn Emily against you. For ever. I do not envisage that would be too difficult.’

He opened his briefcase, which had been at his feet by the table, and took out a large manila envelope. He waved it at her. ‘This is a very full and detailed account of your recent activities. I think if I showed it to our daughter she would make up her own mind, don’t you?’

Joanna felt very cold. She believed absolutely that he would and could do all he said, including showing such a dreadful dossier to his only child. She knew just how ruthless he could be when it came to getting his own way. And yes, she also knew that Emily would be quite capable of forming her own judgement of her mother’s behaviour and that it would be a damning one. Emily loved her mother, but she was her father’s daughter. Nonetheless, she told him, ‘I can’t believe you’d do that.’

‘Yes you can and do, Joanna.’ He emptied some of the contents of the envelope on to the table. There were even photographs of her and Fielding entering the Taunton motel, albeit separately, and together both entering and leaving the Southampton Row place. She didn’t give her husband the satisfaction of picking them up for a closer look, but as far as she could see there were none of her and Fielding actually in bed. Paul and his representative had mercifully drawn the line at that, it seemed.

‘You have too good a life to allow it to be spoiled,’ he went on. ‘And it will be spoiled, totally, if you don’t do as I tell you. You will be swapping all that you have, all that we have, for life with a failed, near-alcoholic, mid-rank copper. I do not actually think you have any idea what that would be like, Joanna.’

That made Joanna wince. The description of Fielding was accurate enough. She supposed she probably didn’t have any idea what it would be like to live out in the sticks on a very limited income with a disappointed and often angry man who habitually drowned his miseries in alcohol. Nor was she ever likely to — not even without Paul’s ultimatum, as it happened. That was the final irony. At the end of the day she doubted if Fielding would ever have tried to make a life with her, in any circumstances. Such small likelihood as there had been of them being properly together had ended almost twenty years before. And after their last confrontation over her trying to hack into his laptop, there had been barely a chance of the affair continuing, even without external intervention. Strange that Paul had decided to make his move at that moment.

‘I’m sorry, Paul,’ she said. ‘I really didn’t mean for any of this to happen.’

‘And you think that makes it all right,’ he said flatly.

‘No, of course I don’t.’

‘You’ve let me down, your daughter down and yourself down. Do you realise that?’

She nodded. She wished he wouldn’t lecture her but she supposed she deserved it. And he was right, of course. Cool. Logical. Controlled as ever. He sounded more as if he were admonishing a member of staff for some professional misdemeanour or negotiating a business deal than confronting his wife with infidelity. He showed absolutely no emotion at all. But then, he never did.

‘Look, Paul, I think it’s over anyway between Mike and...’ she began to explain.

‘You think?’ He raised his voice almost imperceptibly. ‘Joanna, I will give you twenty-four hours in which to assure me that you know it is over. If you cannot do that then I shall ask you to leave this house and I shall start divorce proceedings immediately. The decision is yours. But do not for one moment think that you can carry on cheating on me. I shall know at once.’

She didn’t doubt it. And she couldn’t understand how she had thought she would ever get away with it in the first place. Not with Paul. He was just too clever. Too astute. She supposed the truth was that she hadn’t thought at all.

Paul had started speaking again. ‘I shall sleep in the spare bedroom tonight,’ he told her almost conversationally.

She found herself once again comparing him with Fielding, that infuriating, emotionally confusing man whom, she had to admit, she had probably half loved for over twenty years. Fielding would have screamed and shouted, ranted and raved, wept, maybe even hit her. He had never actually done that but she had seen his temper, always suspected him capable of violence if sufficiently provoked. He would have confronted her, probably while drunk, the moment he had any suspicion that she had cheated on him. He would have been irrational and illogical and very, very human. He was always that. Human.

Her husband, on the other hand, seemed to be as cold and as matter-of-fact as ever. His behaviour towards her indicated on one level that he loved her very much. The very fact that he was fighting to keep her in the way that he was, that he would be prepared even to keep her in the circumstances, demonstrated that, she supposed. And yet, as ever, there was something about the way he went about things which was barely human at all. Jo would have preferred an explosive no-holds-barred row. Much preferred that. Come to think of it, they had never had one of those throughout their marriage.

She felt overwhelmed with a deep, abiding sorrow. She couldn’t help questioning Paul’s motives, which was terrible. After all, she was the one at fault. Paul wouldn’t want a scandal, of course. His impending knighthood was almost certainly a factor in his determination to keep her.

Her head ached. She did feel guilty about having deceived Paul, but not as guilty as she suspected she should. She did not even know whether she still loved him. In fact, she was not sure whether she had ever loved him, not really, certainly not in the way in which she had loved Fielding. But her husband had left her with no choice. ‘It’s all right, Paul, I don’t need twenty-four hours,’ she said. ‘I will end it tomorrow.’

He watched her leave the room and head upstairs for bed, then he went to the drinks cupboard and poured himself a stiff whisky, which he carried into the garden, shutting and locking the kitchen door behind him. He walked across the lawn, past the copse of young fruit trees, to a small wooden shed at the far end. The night was brightly moonlit and he was able to see his way quite clearly. Inside the shed, however, it was pitch-black. A single electric light bulb hung from the wood-panelled ceiling, but he did not switch it on. He did not need to, and he welcomed the blackness which enveloped him when he closed the door. Paul knew where everything was in this shed. It was as orderly as everything in his mind, in his office, in his home, indeed in his life. The mower was to the left, alongside a couple of neatly folded garden chairs and on the right, carefully stacked, were sacks of fertiliser, plant pots and all manner of other gardening paraphernalia. He felt his way to the little wooden stool he kept in the right-hand corner and sat down.

He was as far away from his house and from the neighbouring houses as it was possible to be. The shed was solid, made of two skins of wood and without windows. He could not be seen and it was reasonable to assume that he could not be heard. He took a sip of his whisky, then lowered his glass to the floor. He threw back his head and let out a kind of howl of anguish. With it came the tears.

He wept and howled, and howled and wept, his arms wrapped round his torso as if he were hugging himself, until he ached from the sheer physical effort of the sobs which racked his body. The tears coursed down his face, burning hot. His throat hurt. But he could not stop, not until he had allowed all the anguish that was inside him to be released.

It was not the first time he had used the shed for this purpose, creeping there in the dead of night. But this was the worst, the very worst.

It was almost twenty minutes before he felt the spasms begin to lessen.

Eventually the howling ceased and so did the tears. When he gave in to these outbursts it was the only time in his life that he did not have total control. He reached down with a trembling hand for the whisky and took a deep drink.

He was not sure he felt any better. How could he, with the knowledge he now had of what Joanna had done? But he was at last beginning to calm down. He wished he had been able to tell her, in the depths of his despair, how much she had hurt him. But that wasn’t his way. His sister, with whom he had long ceased to have any contact, had once informed him that he was emotionally dysfunctional. Maybe he was. But it was more than that. How could he tell Joanna how much she meant to him? How could he, when he knew that he felt so much more for her than she had ever felt for him? He had no illusions. He had been able to make everything happen for him and Joanna. Everything except make her love him. The way he loved her.

He finished the whisky, rose from the stool, left the shed, locking it carefully behind him, and walked back to the house.

He would carry on as usual, of course. He also had too much to lose. Joanna remained the perfect wife for him, from the outside at any rate, as long as she behaved. And he knew he could make sure that she did so. Then there were both their careers. And, most vital, the knighthood. As Joanna had suspected, he didn’t intend to let anything queer his pitch there.

Life was never perfect, but he rather liked the idea that his appeared to be.

Most importantly, he could not imagine even existing without Joanna at his side.

By the time Paul Potter had unlocked and opened the kitchen door and stepped inside his house the episode of the garden shed was over. The moment had passed. It was almost as if it had not happened.

Eighteen

Exactly one week later Pam Smythe, nearly bursting with excitement, rushed through the Comet’s big open-plan newsroom to Joanna’s desk by the far window. ‘Mike Fielding’s been nicked for fixing Jimbo O’Donnell’s murder,’ she yelled.

Joanna felt as if she’d been slammed against a wall. The shock was numbing. Neither her body nor her brain could function for a few seconds. She was incapable of speech.

The news editor didn’t seem to notice Jo’s stunned expression. Pam barely paused for breath. ‘I just don’t believe it,’ she enthused. ‘Christ! What an amazing story. This one is never going to die down. The police have put out a statement on PA. Arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder, that’s the official form. We need all the help you can give us, Jo.’

Still Joanna said nothing. She remained unable to.

‘Jo?’ There was just a note of puzzlement in Pam’s voice now.

Joanna managed a nod. Could Fielding really be a murderer? Even when she had been trying to hack into her lover’s laptop, checking him out, had she actually believed that he could have done such a thing? Certainly when he had confronted her she had felt merely foolish and disloyal. Her hands were trembling. She clasped them tightly together underneath her desk as she struggled to maintain control.

‘Right,’ Pam Smythe continued. ‘Can you get on to Mallett? We’ve got the new Devon area man going round to Fielding’s family house.’

With a huge effort of will Joanna forced herself at least to appear to react and function like the experienced professional journalist she was supposed to be. ‘Of course, Pam,’ she said. ‘I’m on it.’

She immediately picked up her phone and pretended to dial a number until the other women turned away and hurried back to her position at the head of the news desk. Then Jo replaced the phone and slumped back in her chair. Jesus! So had her half-formed suspicions been right all along? She hadn’t seriously considered it again since that disastrous last meeting with Fielding in the Southampton Row hotel and her even more disastrous confrontation with Paul the following day. She had tried a couple of times to contact Fielding since then, leaving messages both on his mobile and on his voice mail at Middlemoor. It had been her intention to follow through her promise to Paul and to tell Mike that their affair must end. Neither call had been returned, and she had come to the conclusion that Fielding had meant exactly what he had said in that dreadful hotel room and that their relationship was over without her having to do anything at all about it.

‘There’s no point in carrying on, Jo, is there?’ She remembered his words well enough, but now she wondered if there had been more to his silence than just that.

All she could do, however, was to go through the motions professionally and do as the news editor had asked. Although she didn’t expect to get much joy from Todd Mallett. One thing Pam Smythe had in common with all the news editors she’d ever known was a selective memory. Pam seemed already totally to have forgotten, or more likely had just chosen to appear as if she had, the breakdown in any workable relationship between Jo and the senior police officer she was expected to contact. A typical desk reaction, that. But she should be grateful for small mercies, she supposed. At least she hadn’t been asked to visit Mrs Fielding. She was pretty sure that nobody in the office had had any idea about the resumption of her affair with Fielding after all these years. Indeed, they might have giggled about the Private Eye story, but she didn’t think there was anybody much around who even remembered that there had ever been an affair. Pam Smythe had certainly given no such indication.

She picked up her phone again and, in spite of her sincere belief that the man disliked and distrusted her, attempted to call Todd Mallett as she had agreed she would. Unsurprisingly, he was not taking press calls. Not from her, anyway.

The following morning Fielding was formally charged at Exeter and Womford Magistrates’ Court in Exeter, and remanded in custody at the city prison. Yet another twist in the tail. Shifter Brown, the man he had allegedly hired to commit a brutal murder, was, of course, still being held in the same jail.

Later that day it was again Tim Jones who came up with the background. Not for the first time Jo found herself thinking what an excellent reporter young Tim was. ‘The rubber heel boys hacked into Fielding’s laptop and uncovered a heap of deleted e-mail correspondence between “contractor” and “enforcer”,’ the Comet’s crime correspondent told her excitedly.

‘Apparently Todd Mallett got an anonymous call from someone claiming to be “an associate” of Shifter, saying Shifter suspected all along that Mike Fielding had hired him. Shifter denied it to the wall, but then he would, wouldn’t he? Todd Mallett’s the old-fashioned sort, of course, particularly when it comes to a bent copper. He’d always stick to procedure with the public, he’s a by-the-book man, but for Mallett cops come under different rules. And anyway there’s always been bad blood between him and Fielding, hasn’t there? Mallett didn’t hang about getting a warrant or anything like that, just walked over to Fielding’s desk out at Middlemoor, apparently, picked up his laptop and said, “Right sunshine, we’d best have a look in this and clear things up once and for all.”

‘Every force has its super-hackers now, computer-born crimes are becoming more and more commonplace. Apparently it didn’t take ’em long to find those hidden files.’

‘And what did Shifter say then?’

‘“Never seen ’em before in my life, guv.” You know Shifter. What else would you expect? That’s his code, isn’t it? Wouldn’t point the finger even at a copper. Although word is he finds it highly amusing that Mike Fielding’s been banged up. But one way and another he’s no help at all.’

Neither would he be. Particularly not with a police officer in the frame. Joanna thought for a moment. So much didn’t quite add up.

‘Shifter did say he was paid fifteen grand for topping Jimbo,’ she said eventually. ‘Mike Fielding wouldn’t have that kind of cash going spare.’

The young man shrugged. ‘Maybe doing Jimbo was so important to him he borrowed, got himself a second mortgage or something. Nobody seems to know yet, but chances are it will come out eventually. In any case there’s plenty of other possibilities. You know Fielding’s reputation. He’s always sailed close to the wind. Maybe some toe-rag owed him, or there’s a face paying him bundles to keep his mouth shut. Coppers can always get cash, Jo, if they’re bent enough, can’t they?’

She winced. She had never thought that Fielding was bent. Overeager. So sharp he could cut himself and frequently did — but actually bent enough to take backhanders from criminals? Surely not. But maybe she’d really never known Mike at all. She made herself concentrate on the job in hand.

Like her, she thought, it was unlikely that Todd Mallett had actually believed Fielding had hired Shifter, not even when he commandeered his laptop, but Mike had already been publicly accused, albeit by the O’Donnells, of doing so. It must have been as obvious to Mallett as it had been to Joanna that in view of the way in which Shifter had been hired and paid, the clues could still be lurking on somebody’s hard drive somewhere. Maybe Fielding was guilty and, not for the first time in his life, had not been quite so clever as he thought he had. Joanna was more confused than ever. All she knew for certain was that she had to do her best to find out the truth. Did Fielding really do it? Could he have been calculated enough to hire a contract killer?

As soon as Tim left her she wrote to Mike at Exeter prison. It was a brief, carefully worded letter fundamentally expressing her sorrow at his predicament and requesting that he would let her visit him.

Paul had so far avoided talking to her about the Fielding development, which suited Jo totally. The editor was relying on Tim Jones for day-to-day handling of the story and left it to Pam Smythe to liaise with Jo. But that night at home there was a discernible tension between Jo and her husband. The extraordinary sequence of events which for almost two days they had both been unwilling or unable to discuss was obviously to the forefront of both their minds.

Paul played jazz even louder than usual and Joanna did her best not to let it show that anything at all was bothering her. Eventually, just before bedtime, Paul enquired casually, ‘What do you think of your boyfriend now, then?’

Joanna thought that was a fairly cheap remark, both unworthy of Paul and unusual for him. ‘I don’t know what to think, and he’s not my boyfriend. I gave you my word.’

‘You gave me your word nineteen years ago when we got married, Joanna.’

‘What happened between Mike Fielding and me is over for good and nothing like it will ever happen again, Paul. There’s no more I can say to you.’

‘That will have to be enough, then.’ He spoke in a rather faraway manner. However, she was used to this distance in him. He was colder than usual, but theirs had never been exactly a warm cosy relationship.

Four days later she received a visiting order to see Fielding. She took it straight to Paul in his office. She had always intended to do this. She accepted now that there was no way she could see the disgraced policeman without Paul knowing. Not ever again, probably. In or out of jail. So she might as well be up front about it.

‘Why do you want to do this?’ he asked in a level voice.

‘Two reasons,’ she responded. ‘First, I want to tell Mike to his face that it’s over between us regardless of the outcome of his prosecution. I tried to phone him before he was arrested but I never got through. Second, professional reasons, of course. He’s not going to talk to any other journalist, is he? And I honestly believe I will learn the truth if I see him.’

Her husband studied her silently for a moment or two. ‘I don’t want you to see him,’ he said eventually.

‘I can hardly fuck him in prison, can I?’ she burst out.

His eyes clouded over.

‘Look, Paul. I haven’t come here to ask your permission. I am going to see Mike. I told you I wouldn’t deceive you any more and I am keeping my word. I will never see Fielding again after this. But I am quite determined to do so this final time. I’ve given you my reasons. If you want to make something of it, you can, but I hope you will accept it.’

‘I could stop you.’ The usual cool voice. The usual unfathomable look.

‘No, you can’t, actually,’ she said, trying to sound equally cool. ‘You can start those damned divorce proceeding if you like, as you threatened you would, although I hope you won’t, but you can’t stop me.’

She left his office then, without waiting for a reply. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t divorce her. He would put up with this. After all, he had put up with far more. He wanted to keep her. He had fought for her. He could have done it in a more human fashion, of course, but Paul was Paul. In a way she was more than ever aware of the power she had over him. She also knew she must never abuse it again. But she could use it. And that was what she had just done. She had been honest, she had been direct and she had forced him to accept something he didn’t like.

Knowing Paul, though, she thought with just a flicker of amusement as she walked back to her desk, he would have started by now to consider the professional aspects of her planned prison visit. It would put the Comet well ahead of the game, no doubt about it. And Paul would like that very much indeed. No doubt about that either.

Two o’clock in the afternoon, the arranged time on the appointed day for Joanna’s visit, had seemed a long time coming to Fielding. He was angry with himself for looking forward to seeing her so much. He felt let down by her, as indeed he felt let down by all of them. He was on remand so he was wearing his own clothes. That at least was something. He wouldn’t have wanted her to see him in prison drabs. He hoped that nobody would see him in those, ever, but things were pretty bleak right now.

He didn’t have a mirror in his cell, which was all for the best, probably. He knew he looked dreadful.

Eventually they came for him. She was already sitting at one of those tables in the visiting room. Her turn to wait. But just for a few minutes, he supposed. He wished he didn’t react the way he did whenever he saw her. His heart leapt. And his body? Well, nobody, not ever, had had the effect on him that Joanna Bartlett had. When they had begun their affair again after all those years he had never thought it would still be like that, at least not quite so extreme.

He saw her glance up as they opened the door and he stepped into the room. She looked good. But then she almost always did. She had never been pretty. Striking, yes. Pretty, no. But she had aged well. She had good bone structure and fine skin. Her body was good, too. She worked at that and it showed. He couldn’t see much of it — she was wearing a loose linen jacket over a cotton shirt buttoned to the neck — but he had learned over the last few months just how good it was. By God he had. His belly muscles tightened slightly at the thought. She could pass for ten years younger than she was, he thought, which was more than he ever would again. Certainly after coping with all of this — if he did cope with it.

He saw the expression of shock that flickered across her face when she first saw him, and then how rapidly she recovered herself. He knew he looked grey and haggard. That famous prison pallor he had so often seen, which developed so astonishingly quickly.

‘Thank you for seeing me,’ she said as he approached her. She did not get up.

He did not attempt to kiss her, not even to touch her hand. Instead he swiftly sat down opposite her. ‘You know I can never resist.’ He actually tried to sound jaunty, he didn’t quite know why, but in any case he failed dismally.

‘Paul knows.’ She blurted out the words, as if she hadn’t intended to begin their conversation like this, but had not been able to stop herself.

He raised his eyebrows. ‘And?’ he asked.

‘He told me that if I carried on seeing you he would divorce me, sack me and turn Emily against me. He would, too. And don’t think he couldn’t.’

‘I’m sure he could. So what are you doing here?’

‘I told him I couldn’t fuck you in the visiting room of Exeter prison.’

He managed a wry half-smile. ‘Anything else?’

‘I also told him that it would be to the advantage of his bloody newspaper. That you wouldn’t be talking to any other journalists and in any case I would be more likely than anybody else to get the truth from you.’

He shook his head almost sorrowfully. He was supposed to have been the ruthless, dedicated career policeman, although that seemed almost like another world now. But Joanna? She was a real piece of work. She never forgot that she was a journalist, not for a second, and her husband, Mike felt quite sure, was of the same stock only more so. ‘You two are incredible, you know,’ he said.

She didn’t seem to understand. She was, as ever, he thought, far too wrapped up in her own curious world. ‘What do you mean?’

‘If you really don’t know, Jo, then there’s no point in my even trying to explain.’

She shook her head in a puzzled sort of way. ‘Look, we don’t have very long. I do need to know the truth, Mike. For myself. Bugger the paper.’

He studied her quizzically. Bugger the paper, he just didn’t believe. Not from her. Not from any of them, really, but particularly not from Joanna Bartlett. Hack through and through. Weaned on hot metal. ‘I told you before, if you need to ask me that question, then I don’t know what we were all about, ever,’ he informed her. And he felt the anger growing inside him. As usual he became angry with her more quickly than with anybody else. It was like that when you really cared for someone. It was for him anyway. ‘You’ve already confronted me once,’ he snapped at her. ‘You tried to hack into my computer yourself. You’ve made it quite clear that you believe I am capable of this. That’s your problem, not mine.’

‘I just want to know what I am supposed to believe...’

‘Do you?’ He was seething inside now, barely able to keep his temper in control. ‘You could start by asking yourself an intelligent question for a change. They found all that crap on my laptop and charged me on the strength of it. I’ve no doubt you know all about that unless you’ve changed beyond recognition. So why didn’t I chuck the damned machine? Throw it out with the rubbish, toss it into the sea at the dead of night at Exmouth or Dawlish Warren? Um? Ask yourself that. Which is more than anybody else will do, it seems. Even Shifter had the sense to trash his rig. Do you really think I would have kept a laptop containing files which could prove that I put out a murder contract, for God’s sake?’

‘Are you saying you’ve been set up?’

‘I don’t know, Jo. What do you think? Do you still think?’

‘Of course I do...’

‘Right, then think about this. Not only have I been set up but could you conceive for one moment I would have been remanded in custody over this if I weren’t a copper? At least I’d be out on bail. What they’ve got on me is never going to stand up in court and the way they got it stinks. Can you imagine the outcry if fucking Todd Mallett had come marching into your office and commandeered your laptop?’

‘Well, yes,’ she began. ‘But you are a policeman and maybe the rules are supposed to be the same but I suppose...’

He interrupted her abruptly. ‘You’d better go, Jo. I’m sick of you and your half-spoken accusations. Just go.’

With one hand he beckoned to a prison officer and with the other he waved her away.

She knew better than to argue. She just stood up silently, turned and walked away from him, head bowed, glancing back at him over her shoulder only when he called out to her.

‘Are you sure you didn’t get into my computer that evening at the hotel, Jo? You’re good, aren’t you? You’re fast. Maybe you had time after all...’ And it had given him some satisfaction to see the shocked expression on her face before he rose wearily from his chair and headed for the door leading back to his cell. The way things were inside his head right now, sometimes it was almost a relief to be locked up.

Jo stared after him for a few seconds. What did he mean? Did he suspect that she had tampered with his laptop, planted the incriminating files? She was more confused than ever. And her emotions were playing ping-pong with each other again. She felt the damned tears he could always arouse more quickly than anyone pricking. How was it he could still do this to her, even when some of the things he had said to her displayed nothing more than contempt? It was bewildering.

Hurrying through the prison gates, she bumped into a small, plumpish, red-haired woman on the way in. Jo had been walking with her head down, trying to hide the tears which were by then starting to run down her face. The collision was entirely her fault. She had not been looking where she was going and she had walked straight into the other woman. Looking up, stumbling her apologies, she recognised with a start that she was Fielding’s wife. She had seen her photograph, on his desk that first time they were together and even in his wallet. It always seemed to fall out every time he removed his credit cards. Her colouring was distinctive, that bright-red hair which Jo, with a sharp stab of incongruous jealousy, thought was probably still totally natural, the freckles.

Ruth Fielding looked her full in the face. She had bags under her eyes and an understandable weariness about her. She was no longer anywhere near as pretty as she had been in the photographs. She showed absolutely no sign of recognition. ‘’S all right,’ she mumbled and said ‘sorry’ herself, the way the English do, even when they are not remotely to blame for whatever it is they are apologising for, then shuffled on through the gates.

Joanna had always suspected that Mike had never told his wife about her, despite all those convoluted stories about Ruth’s breakdown and their daughter’s despair. All of it, even the dying mother-in-law, was probably a load of nonsense. She had always half suspected that was probably the case but confirmation was nonetheless painful. Ruth Fielding had almost certainly never even been aware of her existence, she thought, never known of the affair which her husband had frequently claimed was the most important relationship in his life, more so, even, than his marriage.

Jo was high-profile, pictured regularly in her own paper, occasionally on TV, and had been so long before the notoriety she had gained through the part she played along with Fielding in bringing O’Donnell to trial in that ill-fated private prosecution. She and Fielding had even been pictured together in more than one newspaper, not to mention the innuendoes published in Private Eye. If Mrs Fielding had the slightest inkling that Jo and her husband had had an affair, then Joanna felt sure the woman would have had her features indelibly printed on her mind. After all, she had recognised Mike’s wife quickly enough, even though she had never met her.

She walked slowly towards her car, turning her thoughts back to the events of the last few minutes. What did it all mean? Could Mike really have been framed? He was never short of confidence. His argument about the laptop was deeply flawed. Maybe he had believed he had removed all traces from it and that it was safe. She reminded herself again of how even the love-bug hackers had been traced. Mike had always been inclined to be overly confident. If that was the case yet again then he had had no reason to destroy his computer. Jo still didn’t know what to believe. And that was a nice touch he had added at the end, hinting that maybe she had played a part in framing him. She didn’t think he really thought that, but you never knew with Mike.

One way and another she hadn’t learned very much; indeed, much less than she had hoped for and, in fact, had actually expected. Bugger all, to be honest. The visit had not given her what she had sought in any direction. She was no nearer the truth than she had been before she had seen Fielding. She couldn’t write anything, of course, until the trial was over, but he had told her nothing that would ever make much in the way of copy. Accused man says he’s been set up. Hold the front page.

Her mind strayed to their personal feelings towards each other. Jo wondered if his display of disappointed outrage could be yet another sort of excuse, another way of avoiding even the possibility of any kind of real permanent commitment.

She had told Paul that she had made her decision, that she would end her relationship with Fielding and stay with her husband. And she had meant it, every word of it, even before Fielding had been arrested. Paul had been right. She had too much to lose.

But if Fielding were still a free man, if he had ever pressed her to be with him full time in such a way that she had been able to believe it — well, she just didn’t know how she might have reacted. In spite of everything. Even including her daughter.

God, it was mad. But then, when it came to Mike Fielding she was quite barking. Always had been. Mixed up. Out of control.

She unlocked her car door and slumped in the driver’s seat motionless for a few moments, willing the tears to stop. Eventually they did and she started the engine.

There was no point in rushing back to the office. Instead, she drove, rather slowly for her, home to Richmond. She didn’t phone. Not the news desk. Not Paul. Not anyone. She had nothing to tell them, really. She chose the A303 rather than the M5 and M4. She didn’t feel like belting along at ninety miles an hour the way she usually did, invariably exceeding the motorway speed limit with a kind of studied nonchalance. She got stuck behind a succession of trucks and caravans on the bits of the A303 that were still just two- and three-lane, but she didn’t mind. She stopped at Stonehenge. The sun was just setting and the mysterious prehistoric monument, its giant pillars of stone commanding the sweeping landscape of Salisbury Plain, looked wonderful in the evening light. She parked in the car park, bought coffee from the snack bar and walked out across the access road, where she leaned on the fence and just took in the atmosphere of the ancient place for a little while. Delaying her return, really. God knew, she could do with a few mystic vibes.

At home she and Emily watched a video together. Some teen romance movie. Emily was getting to be disconcertingly into those kinds of pictures. Jo was so preoccupied that she hardly took in at all what the film was about let alone its title or whichever current teen idol it featured. Once it finally ended she agreed without protest that her daughter could stay up much later than usual in order to see her father at least briefly. The presence of a third person seemed like a jolly good idea anyway.

When eventually they were alone she gave Paul an edited account of what had occurred that day. At first, as if by unspoken mutual consent, they discussed only the professional aspects of her meeting with Fielding.

Eventually Paul broached the personal side. ‘So did you tell him it was all over between you?’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. She hadn’t, of course, not in as many words, but it amounted to the same thing. It was all over, she had no doubt about that. Whether she liked it or not, in fact.

‘So you really have come to your senses?’

She wanted to slap him. The man could be so smugly arrogant. And always so cool. But she didn’t have the strength for argument and in any case he was impossible to argue with. He didn’t know how. ‘Yes,’ she said again.

If he thought her reactions curiously monosyllabic, he passed no remark. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then I suggest we never speak of it again.’

Meanwhile Tommy O’Donnell gave the impression of being thoroughly smug. Interviewed by the Daily Mail — he still wouldn’t touch the Comet, of course — he made it quite clear just how delighted he was by Mike Fielding’s arrest. Whether or not the policeman really was guilty of hiring a man to kill his elder brother, which in any case the Mail dared not go into, seemed almost irrelevant, Jo thought when she read the piece.

The Phillips family also made no secret of their satisfaction at Fielding’s incarceration. ‘This man was more than anybody else responsible for O’Donnell’s first trial going wrong and what is happening to him is a kind of justice,’ said Rob Phillips in the Daily Mirror, and he continued in an interview which skated the edge of the sub judice laws: ‘We’ve always believed Fielding is capable of being just as evil as any of the villains he deals with every day. If he was responsible for James O’Donnell’s death, then I and my family can only be grateful to him for that. But he deserves to suffer, too. He has caused us endless heartache.’

Joanna managed to arrange another jail visit with Shifter Brown. It seemed curious to think that Mike was in the same prison, maybe in a cell just yards away from the visiting room. And seeing Shifter got her no further than had her visit there to her former lover. ‘Could it really have been Fielding who hired you?’ she asked him.

‘I dunno,’ he replied unhelpfully.

‘But what do you think, Shifter?’

‘I’ve given up thinking, doll. You do when you’re banged up in here.’

‘OK, Shifter, but what about the e-mails? They showed them to you, didn’t they? Will you tell me honestly whether they were genuine or not? You’d remember the wording surely?’

‘Listen, girl, I already told the Old Bill I’ve never seen ’em before — ’course, they know I probably wouldn’t tell them if I had, would I?’ Shifter grinned. He seemed to be almost enjoying himself. ‘Anyway, the filth always believe what they want to believe. Like a lot of bleeding cannibals, too, when it’s one of their own, aren’t they? Look. I like you, Joey doll, but I’ve given you your story. Our deal’s done and dusted. I’m not saying any more. I’d never have told you what I did if it wasn’t for my little princesses, would I?’

‘Just one thing — and I know its for the umpteenth time. Do you really not know who put the contract out? Have you really not got a clue? You wouldn’t be winding us all up, would you?’

‘Now would I do that, babe?’ Shifter replied. And he treated her to a big, juicy wink, just like he had in the restaurant all that time ago.

‘For God’s sake, Shifter,’ said Joanna, throwing her eyes heavenwards in exasperation.

Shifter smiled benignly.

A Shifter Brown wind-up in order to gain some cash for his family had always been a possibility, of course. He could have come up with the e-mail wheeze just in order to have a story to sell which did not break his precious code of never grassing. But was he that inventive? And could he really have been capable of planting the entire e-mail dialogue which had been found on Mike’s laptop?

Jo was confused. Bewildered. Consumed with agonising doubts.

She and Mike had shared a mutual obsession with the dreadful death of Angela Phillips. If Mike really had hired Shifter to kill Angela’s murderer she wondered when he had made that decision. And if he had confided in her she wondered what she would have done.

Would she have supported him? Would she have stopped him?

She didn’t know. She had no answers to anything. Not any more. And neither, it seemed, did anyone else. Except, perhaps, Mike Fielding.

She hated the very thought. But she feared she might have to come to accept it.

Nineteen

Then it all changed again. This time it was Tim Jones who told Joanna about the new development, calling her on her mobile early one evening while she was driving Emily to a school friend’s birthday party. ‘They’ve found this diary written by Tommy O’Donnell’s daughter,’ he reported. ‘It seems her Uncle Jimbo was a nonce, as well as everything else. He’d been abusing the kid for years and she’d written it all down.’

Joanna swerved to avoid a bicycle. She had reacted slowly to the cyclist, suddenly not concentrating properly on her driving. She was aware of Emily stiffening in the passenger seat beside her and put a reassuring hand on her knee. She was also instantly aware of the huge significance of what she had just heard. ‘Tell me exactly what has happened and how,’ she instructed Tim, struggling to sound calm and in control.

‘The police got another anonymous tip-off,’ the young crime man continued. ‘They searched Tommy’s home and struck gold.’

‘And Tommy?’

‘Nobody can find him. Already helping the police with their inquiries, I reckon. But neither Scotland Yard nor anyone else will confirm anything yet.’

‘So nothing official. How did you find all this out?’

‘I picked it up from a mate at the Yard, the place is crawling with rumours.’

‘Rumours, Tim? How hard is it?’

‘As nails, Jo. My source is that solid.’

He had little more to tell her. There was little more she needed to know. Motive alone never convicted anyone. But, God, what a motive this was. She had not really been able to imagine that an O’Donnell would ever turn on one of his own — until now.

Just as she had been forcing herself to accept that the man who had been so much a part of her life was guilty of arranging a murder, this latest bombshell had dropped. Perhaps Mike Fielding had been framed. Perhaps he was telling the truth after all.

The murder of Jimbo O’Donnell was Todd Mallett’s case and the detective superintendent considered that everything pertaining to the dead man was his territory. So it was Todd who had obtained a search warrant and led the team which descended on Tommy O’Donnell’s home. Todd didn’t like anonymous tips. And this was the second he had felt obliged to act upon concerning the O’Donnell case. It now seemed increasingly likely, however, that the first one, leading to the files lurking in Mike Fielding’s computer, could prove to have been an embarrassing red herring. Like Joanna, Todd began to wonder if Fielding might indeed have been the victim of an elaborate computer frame-up, just as he had always claimed.

Computers were playing their part again, in more ways than one. But then they always seemed to nowadays. The tip had come in the form of a letter, written in Word 97, printed on an Epson Laser printer. About as anonymous as you can get. Gone were the days when you could match up typed words and letters with the distinctive keys of individual typewriters. The postmark had been central London.

‘Go into Tommy O’Donnell’s kid’s computer,’ the anonymous tipster had suggested. ‘You’ll find her diary. Her dad did.’

They had, too, in the recycle bin. Barely hidden at all. The date indicated that it had been put there after her death. Months after her death. But just days before James Martin O’Donnell had disappeared.

Todd had actually wondered if Caroline’s computer would still be at her home. However the girl’s room, with its teen rock idol posters on the walls and CDs in untidy piles on a shelf, had looked to have been exactly how she must have left it when she had decided to kill herself — even down to a pair of jeans and a T-shirt casually discarded on the bed. Todd had heard that Tommy O’Donnell and his wife continued to keep the room as a kind of shrine to their dead daughter, it was pretty much common knowledge, but he found the reality eerily disconcerting.

He was grateful, however, that the diary had still been retained. It made fascinating reading.

There had been mystery surrounding Caroline’s death from the beginning in Todd’s opinion. He had never bought the exam-fever story. The O’Donnells were not that sort of family. They might be villains but they were down to earth, and they loved their children. Tommy O’Donnell believed in education, wanted to take the family legit and into the future, yet it was hard to accept the perceived wisdom that he would have driven his daughter so hard that she did not want to carry on living.

But abuse by her uncle. Harm coming from within this close-knit family. That was different.

The diary, written from when Caroline was eleven until shortly before her death, chronicled in detail the systematic sexual abuse meted out to her by her Uncle Jimmy. It shed a whole new light on why a thirteen-year-old girl should be distraught enough to take her own life. It was quite harrowing.

Another entry read:

Shame. Amazing how the children in child abuse cases so often felt they should be ashamed. This was something paedophiles played upon, of course.

Todd shuddered at the thought of what the little girl had gone through. He did not doubt the authenticity of the diary for one moment. He had worked in child protection. He had taken statements, even seen diaries like this before. It was not that unusual for children to want to write these things down even when they felt unable to talk to anybody about what was happening to them. Maybe it was a kind of release. These sad tragic outpourings were stamped with the unmistakable ring of truth.

The policeman did not doubt either that Tommy would also have instantly accepted the truth of the diaries. Jimbo’s sexual preferences were always suspect. Throughout his life stories had abounded about his perverted sexual activities. There had been the earlier rape conviction and then the Angela Phillips case. However, it had always suited the O’Donnells to cover up for Jimbo, to keep up the pretence that he was a wronged man. Sam might actually have believed that. Todd didn’t reckon Tommy ever had. But it would certainly not have occurred to any of them that Jimbo would ever bring his unpleasant perversions into the family and abuse his own niece. After all, the O’Donnells took care of their own.

Sam himself, of course, was out of the frame. The old gang boss had finally died just after Mike Fielding had been arrested, but Todd knew that Sam had been incapacitated by a series of strokes for months before that. The O’Donnells had kept it quiet for as long as they could, but eventually the news leaked. Sam the Man’s death, when it came, was what Todd’s mother would have called ‘a happy release’ and they gave him one of those extraordinary traditional gangster funerals like the Krays’. A horse-drawn carriage carried his coffin through the streets of London and as many people gathered to pay their last respects as would to say farewell to royalty. More, possibly, nowadays, thought Todd wryly.

Which left Tommy the undisputed head of the O’Donnell clan.

Todd found it very easy to put himself in Tommy O’Donnell’s shoes, to imagine the man’s reaction on reading his daughter’s diary. Todd had kids, bright, well-adjusted, happy young people who, as far as he knew, had never had to endure anything like this. They were alive, moreover. Todd could imagine only too well what Tommy’s feelings must have been.

Todd was a law-abiding, solid citizen. A police officer. But he knew he would have wanted to kill anybody who had harmed his children like this. And if that person were his own brother then his anger would have been even more terrible. Tommy O’Donnell’s brother had done unspeakable things to Tommy’s daughter. And the girl had been so traumatised by it that she had killed herself.

Todd was quite sure that Tommy O’Donnell would have happily killed his brother with his bare hands. That would probably have been his first instinctive coherent thought. But, like his father, Tommy understood the importance of keeping his hands clean. Tommy’s second instinct would have been to seek terminal revenge while protecting himself and the rest of his family. And nobody knew better how to do that than an O’Donnell. Not only would Tommy not have done the deed himself, but he would not have wanted to use a regular O’Donnell enforcer. He would definitely have hired an outsider.

There was considerable significance, too, in the date the diary had been deposited into the recycling bin — just a week before Jimbo had gone missing. Tommy would have made his plan by then, coolly worked out what he was going to have done to the brother who had so terribly betrayed him.

The more of the diary Todd read the more he became convinced that Tommy had hired Shifter. But there was, of course, absolutely no proof that he had done so and neither was there likely to be. He did wonder who, apart from Tommy himself, would have known about the diary to report its existence to the police. But even villains had confidants, he supposed. And sometimes allegiances changed. Another possibility was that whoever appeared to be pointing an anonymous finger at Tommy was actually trying to do Fielding a favour. Somebody close to Tommy who owed Fielding, perhaps. After all, Todd knew the odds were against even being able to charge Tommy with anything, let alone successfully try him. Nonetheless, he brought him in for questioning.

‘Yeah, I found the diary, course I did,’ he said. ‘And once I’d read it I sent it straight to the recycling bin. I didn’t want the missus to see it, did I?’

Tommy made his admission freely and immediately — as far as it went. Todd was not surprised. After all, the computer’s record of the date on which the document had last been read would have made it nonsensical for him to deny that he, or at least one of his family, had found it. And in any case Tommy knew that he did not need to deny it. If there was anybody who understood about circumstantial evidence, it was an O’Donnell. Particularly this O’Donnell.

After that it was downhill all the way. The interview with Tommy turned out to be as much of a waste of time as Todd had feared it would be.

‘Mr Mallett, I can’t describe how I felt when I found Caroline’s diary,’ said Tommy. His voice cracked a bit as he spoke and Todd did not doubt for a second that his emotions were one hundred per cent genuine. ‘I’d probably never have found it cos she had the file tucked away among her homework. Essays, and maths tests and stuff, and then... then... this horrible thing. But there was a printout, you see. It was among her school books. I look through them occasionally. I couldn’t believe I’d missed it before. And then, when I read it, well. Do you know I actually thought it was a story at first? But it wasn’t.

‘The truth is I hated Jimbo enough to kill him. Yes, I did. But I didn’t do it. I didn’t hire Shifter. I’d only just found the diary when Jimbo disappeared. I was trying to work out what to do about it. OK, I wanted to hurt him badly. But there was Dad to think about and the rest of the family. Poor Caroline was dead. I couldn’t help her. I was just working it out — then Jimbo was topped. It was nothing to do with me. Honestly.’

Todd did not believed a word of it. The whole episode had the O’Donnell stamp all over it. Revenge. Rough justice. That was the code they lived by. But Todd couldn’t prove a thing and he knew it.

However, the obvious implication remained — that Fielding was probably innocent after all and that his protestations that he had been set up might indeed be true.

Fielding’s case was further helped by a computer expert called in by his defence lawyer who questioned the validity of the e-mail evidence discovered by the police hackers, pointing out that it was totally feasible to send a virus into a computer memory which could plant all kinds of files there. It was technically quite possible that the e-mail drafts could have been fraudulently placed.

Finally the father of a twelve-year-old-boy in Scotland, apparently even more of a computer whizz than most twelve-year-olds, contacted his local police station. It seemed that the boy had discovered intriguing files buried in the memory of the second-hand hard drive his father had bought him from Glasgow’s famous Burrowlands computer market.

These included e-mail correspondence between ‘contractor’ and ‘enforcer’.

None of the e-mails was the same as the ones found on Fielding’s laptop. Nothing matched at all except the user names. Even the language employed was different. Police hackers were able to trace the origin of the ‘contractor’ e-mails. They had been sent, as Shifter had originally predicted, from another cyber café. And there, once again, the trail ended.

The case against Fielding began to look very weak indeed. A full police report was submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service who promptly applied to Exeter and Wonford Magistrates’ Court to discontinue all charges in view of the changes in circumstances.

Mike Fielding was at once freed from jail.

Joanna followed the progress of events closely. Tim’s contact at the Yard turned out to be as good as he had promised and the young crime reporter acquired far more detailed information than was ever officially released, and indeed far more than could be printed.

Joanna was greatly relieved when the charges against Fielding were dropped. But she found she didn’t know how to deal with it when he called her twice on the day after his release and once more the day after that. On all three occasions she avoided his calls and failed to return them. But, maybe because she reckoned she owed him an apology, maybe because she was curious, or even because she still cared in spite of everything, she did eventually call him a week or so later. ‘I’m so glad you are free, and I am so sorry I doubted you,’ she told him at once.

Fielding’s heart lurched. He was so pleased to hear from her. He had feared he might never see her again. And regardless of all that he had said when she had visited him in prison, he wanted to see her very much indeed. He accepted her apologies. It still hurt, but not as much as being unable to be with her any more would hurt.

‘I suppose it must have been Tommy, mustn’t it?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ he replied. ‘Tommy always had a low opinion of his brother, you know. He wasn’t fooled like his father was. I’ve no doubt he thought Jimbo was a despicable human being. Although he might not have realised Jimbo was a paedophile, Tommy’s got the old-fashioned villain’s abhorrence of all sex crimes. He would have hated what Jimbo did. But that wouldn’t have been enough, of course. Family was different. When he discovered that Jimbo had been abusing his daughter, driven her to suicide probably, his Caroline, the apple of his eye and the whole O’Donnell clan — he’d never let Jimbo get away with that. Never. He couldn’t. It would go entirely against his nature.’

‘You don’t think there’s any doubt, then?’

‘Nope. But I’ll be astonished if it’s ever proved. Tommy knows how to cover his tracks. He’s had enough practice.’

‘Could he have framed you, do you think?’

‘He could have. He doesn’t like me, but I don’t think it would have occurred to him that he needed a scapegoat. And I’m not sure that O’Donnell is that clever. He’s bright enough, but whoever did me would have to be very clever indeed and a real computer whizz. Mind you, I reckon Tommy would probably have known where to find the right person for the job.’ He paused, then added mischievously, ‘Someone a bit like you, Jo, really.’

‘Don’t start that again, Mike. Apart from anything else I don’t have that kind of knowledge and you know it.’

‘No. I’m kidding. I just keep going over and over in my mind who might have done it.’

‘Any ideas?’

‘Nothing definite,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve made a few enemies in my time. There’d be quite a list of people who’d like to see me done up like a kipper. How many of ’em would be capable of doing it, though, is something else.’

‘So what do you think...’

He interrupted her. ‘Jo, when I called I didn’t want to talk about all this, particularly. I’ve just got to live with it now if I want any sort of future. And that’s what I wanted to talk about. My future. Our future. Us.’

‘I didn’t think there was an “us” any more.’ Her voice sounded distant.

‘There could be.’

His temper had cooled, of course. He wanted to see her again. It was always her he had dreamed about in prison. Always her in his thoughts when he woke up in the mornings with an erection, or half a one more often than not nowadays. It had really knocked the stuffing out of him, all this, in every possible way. He couldn’t explain how he felt. He couldn’t explain how mercurial those feelings were either. Maybe it was because the strength and longevity of his desire for her frightened him. One minute he never wanted to see her again and the next he felt that life wasn’t worth living without her. He couldn’t regret that it had all started with her again, there had been too much pleasure involved, even a little bit of joy. But so much bloody pain too. That seemed to be inevitable for them.

‘Sometimes I think you and me will always be an “us”,’ he carried on. ‘I was angry with you because you didn’t believe in me, and particularly when I was in the clink that was very important to me. But it hasn’t affected my feelings for you.’

‘Mike, your feelings change with the wind, I should have learned that twenty-odd years ago.’

Had she read his mind, he wondered. He couldn’t argue with her. He was well aware that she spoke the truth.

‘I met your wife when I was leaving the prison.’

‘Ah.’

‘She never even knew about you and me, did she?’

Typically he avoided the question. ‘Look, can we at least meet and talk?’

‘I doubt it. Talking has never been our strong suit, has it?’ she said, her voice heavy.

No, he thought. They never had time to talk much. Sex and their jobs. That had always been their bond. But it must have been more than that to have lasted all that time, to have been resurrected so easily.

‘We could try. If we are going to end this for good I really don’t want us to do it on the bloody phone.’

He heard her sigh. ‘Mike, there’s no point. Anyway, I don’t dare. For all I know Paul’s still having me followed. If you and I even met he’d find out, I’m sure of it, and if he did he’d divorce me. He’s told me so and I believe him absolutely. He won’t put up with it again.’

‘And would that be such a disaster, then?’

‘Mike, don’t be ridiculous. I have so much to lose. Including my daughter.’

‘Since when has your daughter been so damned important to you?’

‘Mike, that’s a terrible thing to say. Of course she’s important to me.’

‘Really? More important than your job and that flash house and maybe being Lady bloody Potter?’

He didn’t know why he was saying these things. The last thing he wanted to do was alienate her. He wanted to try again and yet he knew he was also doing his damnedest to destroy any chance of that. He was tying himself up in knots. Why was it so often like that with her?

When she replied he thought there was a slight quaver in her voice but she spoke very patiently, as if addressing a wayward child. ‘Mike, I don’t think you listen to yourself sometimes. In any case it doesn’t make any difference. It really is over for us now. It has to be.’

‘Why, so you can stay with a man you don’t love just because he’s a rich cunt?’

He knew he had shouted the last words. He had meant to be vicious but even as he yelled into the telephone he regretted it. Almost at once he began to stumble an apology.

It was too late.

There was a click as he opened his mouth to speak again and he ended up whispering the word ‘sorry’ into a buzzing receiver.

She had hung up on him.

Joanna sat on the edge of the bed in the cream and white bedroom of her Richmond home, staring numbly at the telephone she had just been using. It was typical of Mike to flare up like that. Nonetheless, she was stunned. She had never told him that she didn’t love Paul and in any case it wasn’t as simple as that. It was to Fielding, of course. He always saw other people’s actions in black and white even though his own were invariably anything but.

Joanna had ensured that she was alone in the house before she made the call and she was very glad of that. It was just before six o’clock in the evening. Emily was staying the night at a friend’s. The au pair was also out. Paul wouldn’t be home for hours.

So Jo could weep in private, weep for the end of the love affair of her life. It was the end. She had no intention of going back on her word. But God, it hurt and Mike’s words had hurt more than anything she could imagine. Far more, she thought, than he would ever suspect. She still did not think he truly realised just how strong an effect everything he said and did had on her.

There was no future for them. Maybe there had never been a chance of one. They carried so much baggage now it was impossible. Angela Phillips. Jimbo and Tommy O’Donnell. Shifter Brown. So many images flitted through her mind whenever she thought of Mike. Which was still most of the time. And yet the pair of them were eternally plagued by doubts. In every direction. Their lives together, inasmuch as they had ever been together, tainted with suspicion and betrayal.

Mike Fielding and Joanna Bartlett. An unlikely coupling caught up in a tangled web that was all too often of their own making.

She accepted absolutely now that Mike had not hired Shifter and that he had been framed. But she still didn’t trust him. How could she? She could never be sure of anything about him. He was so unlike Paul in that. You could always be sure of Paul.

She knew damned well that if she had gone along with him on the phone, told him what she suspected he had, at that moment at any rate, wanted to hear, told him she’d leave Paul, her daughter, everything to be with him, by the next day he’d probably have changed his mind.

She knew she had made the right decision. She just knew it. It was the only decision. But that didn’t make it any easier.

The tears came freely pouring down her cheeks. She’d done a lot of crying lately. But it never seemed to help.

She flung herself full-length on the bed and buried her face in the pillows. An era had ended for good. It was over. And so at last was the case of Angela Phillips and James Martin O’Donnell.

Even in her misery it occurred to her that there had finally been a kind of rough justice.

Twenty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She’d heard that Todd Mallett had finally closed down his investigation into Jimbo O’Donnell’s murder and Shifter Brown’s involvement — and the police never did that with an unsolved killing, even a partially unsolved one, unless they were damned sure they knew the truth but could do nothing about it. They obviously didn’t think they were ever going to prove anything against Tommy O’Donnell and that didn’t surprise Jo a bit.

Paul, typically, carried on as if nothing had happened. More or less. The previous week, however, he had axed her column. She assumed it was a kind of punishment and had told him so. That had been a mistake, of course. Her husband didn’t like confrontation or indignation. Emotional outbursts never got you anywhere with him. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Jo, it’s what’s called an editorial decision,’ he had told her. ‘There is no place for that kind of journalism in the tabloid world any more. It’s old-fashioned and you know it. You must realise how out of place “Sword of Justice” is in the Comet, and has been for some time.’

She did realise that, of course. That didn’t mean she liked it any the more. Paul had said she would remain an assistant editor, that he’d find a new role for her, but she really couldn’t see that working out. Her disappointment was far more than just for herself, however. She thought it a tragedy that all the great tabloid traditions were being eroded. The British popular papers she had once been so proud to represent were nowadays often not much different from America’s supermarket tabloids: just full of throwaway trash. She thought it was a shame. And so, she had always believed, did Paul, whom she had admired for at least appearing to try to walk the tightrope between the kind of journalistic standards now almost invariably ignored and the demands of the modern mass market. She was no longer even so sure of that.

Nonetheless she knew she had little choice but to settle for what she’d got. Which was a hell of a lot more than most people had, after all. Paul had been right. And Fielding, too, in an awful sort of way. She liked her lifestyle, she had got used to the luxury home and even Paul’s chauffeur-driven car, to never having to worry about money. She also loved her daughter desperately, even if she had yet to develop the kind of mother — daughter relationship she felt she should have with Emily.

She wasn’t happy, of course. All the old demons had been released. She would not forget Fielding no matter how hard she tried. Not ever. Or Angela Phillips, come to that. All of it would be with her always. And alcohol only ever provided temporary amnesia.

She resolved to cut down on the drinking and to rebuild her life. More than anything else she would concentrate on her family in future. The rest of it was over.

As part of this new resolution Jo made a huge fuss of her daughter over breakfast, drove her to school and promised she would be at home waiting when Emily returned in the afternoon. ‘And at the weekend we’ll do some shopping together, buy you some new clothes, and then maybe go to the cinema,’ she went on. ‘You can chose the film, Em. Would you like that?’

‘Oh, yeah! That would be great, Mum,’ replied Emily, with a level of enthusiasm which quite took Joanna by surprise.

Maybe, if she made a real effort, things would work out after all, she thought.

Marginally cheered, she later set off for St Bride’s in Fleet Street, the famous journalists’ church, for a memorial service for Andy McKane, who had died at the age of sixty-one of sclerosis of the liver. Which was exactly how she’d end up if she didn’t watch it, Jo reflected wryly.

McKane may have been a fearful old sexist, but he had also been an excellent news editor and a fundamentally good-hearted guy, beneath his bombastic chauvinism. In any case the memorial service provided a nowadays rare get-together for old Fleet Street hacks. Certainly she found she was looking forward to the diversion.

The turnout was extensive and across the board, as she would have expected for Andy. After the service there was the usual wake in El Vino’s wine bar during which, in spite of her morning resolution, Jo drank far more house champagne than she had intended to. By the time she decided, three hours or so later, that she really must leave if she were to have any chance of keeping her promise to Emily, she was feeling quite mellow.

Then she bumped into Frank Manners. Literally. The old crime hack who had once caused her such trouble turned abruptly away from the bar just as Jo was heading for the door and they collided. She hadn’t seen him since his enforced early retirement deal nineteen years earlier now and Manners, who must have reached his late seventies, looked to be in far better fettle than he deserved. His complexion was a little more florid, which might in any event have been down to his obviously well-oiled state, but other than that he had changed astonishingly little.

‘Good God, it’s the golden girl,’ he bellowed. ‘Got any other poor sod sacked lately?’

A slight hush fell in their part of the bar. Manners’s attitude hadn’t changed either, she thought. Why did he have to be such a bastard? He must have known he’d been asking for trouble after what he’d done all those years ago, surely. Remembering the shock and distress of it, the anger washed over her. ‘If you’ve got something to say, Frank, say it straight,’ she snapped. ‘If you hadn’t taken to making bloody poisonous anonymous phone calls you’d have kept your job for as long as you wanted it, and you know it!’

Frank stared at her in slack-mouthed bewilderment. ‘Have you finally gone totally and utterly barking mad, woman?’ he enquired. ‘I haven’t got the faintest idea what the fuck you’re talking about.’

She opened her mouth to make a suitably cutting reply. Something in his expression and in the way that he had spoken stopped her in her tracks. Suddenly she knew, with terrible devastating clarity, that he was telling the truth. She pushed past him, desperate to get away from the crush of noisy drinkers.

Outside she took deep breaths of the autumn air. Her brain was spinning. There was an all too clear alternative to the various assumptions she had made so long ago about Manners, which had just never occurred to her before. Now it seemed glaringly obvious. And she was horrified.

‘Oh, my God,’ she thought. ‘Paul!’

For the rest of the afternoon and evening Joanna operated on autopilot. She travelled home to Richmond in a kind of daze, somehow managing both to arrive there as promised before Emily and to go through the normal motions of family life. She cooked them both a meal and forced herself to sit down and eat with her daughter whose chief topic of conversation was Saturday’s planned shopping trip and how her life would be ruined unless, as well as new clothes, her mother bought her yet another trendy new computer game, which of course absolutely everybody else at school already had.

Joanna, totally preoccupied, found she kept drifting off, but after a while a thought struck her. ‘You like playing computer games, and going on the Net and stuff with your dad, don’t you, Em?’

‘Oh, yeah.’ Her daughter’s face lit up. ‘He’s brilliant.’

‘Is he really?’

‘Oh, yeah. Dad can do anything on a computer.’

‘Anything?’

‘Pretty well. Alice Rivers’s father’s a real geek and he doesn’t know half as much as Dad.’

‘Bit of a super-hacker, is he then, your dad?’

Emily looked doubtful. ‘He said I wasn’t to tell,’ she said.

‘Tell what? I can keep a secret.’

Emily still looked doubtful.

‘Anyway, if it’s your father’s secret I expect I know it already.’

Joanna had the grace to feel ashamed of herself. Not only was she pumping her daughter for information about her father, but she was also playing on Emily’s special relationship with him. She thought there was a fair chance that Emily would not be able to resist demonstrating that Paul confided more in her than in his wife. And she was right.

‘Once he let me watch him hack into the Daily Mirror,’ Emily blurted out.

Jo tried not to let her surprise show. ‘Ah,’ she said non-committally.

‘It took him a long time and he said he couldn’t get into the whole system but he was actually able to look at some of their stories for the next day. It was awesome.’ Emily’s eyes shone with pride.

‘Awesome,’ agreed Jo absently, foreboding growing with everything her daughter told her.

After Emily had eventually gone to bed, Jo decided, in spite of her resolution, that she needed another drink. She poured herself her usual half-tumbler or so of Scotch and then, thinking better of it, emptied two-thirds of it back into the bottle. She carried her glass into the living room, dimmed the lights and sat very still on the big, squashy black sofa, waiting for Paul to come home. She needed to think.

She had never before talked much about computer skills with either her husband or her child. Jo was able enough, but her interest in computers was strictly limited to their use as a tool of her trade. She’d had no idea Paul was as adept as Emily had suggested. It had never occurred to her before to ask. And she had only done so now because of her chance meeting with Frank Manners earlier in the day, what she felt she had learned from it and the thoughts to which that revelation had led her.

Frank’s reaction had convinced her totally that he had not been responsible for those poisonous phone calls and her suspicions had somehow switched instantly to Paul. But could he really have made those awful calls to Chris, deliberately setting out to wreck her first marriage, later even pretending that he had received an anonymous call himself? Was he that manipulative, that wicked? If so, could he also be responsible for much more than that?

After a while she heard Paul’s chauffeur-driven car pull up outside and a few seconds later his key turned in the lock. He didn’t seem surprised to see her sitting in near-darkness. He glanced pointedly at her drink. She guessed he thought she was drunk again. Actually, she had barely touched her glass and, in spite of all the champagne at the wake that afternoon, she had never felt more sober.

‘Emily all right?’ he enquired casually, as he too poured himself a whisky. A small one with lots of water.

She nodded. ‘Went to bed an hour or so ago. She was telling me what a whizz-kid you are with computers. I had no idea.’

He sat down in an armchair opposite her, putting the whisky bottle on the low table between them, and shot her a quizzical look.

Oh, God, she hadn’t meant to blurt out anything like that. She’d no intention of confronting him. Not yet, anyway. The last time she had allowed her behaviour to be governed by crazy suspicions it had led to the awful hotel room confrontation with Mike Fielding, the very thought of which still made her cringe.

‘You’ve never shown any interest,’ he told her reasonably. ‘In any case, no doubt Emily was exaggerating.’

‘She said you can hack into the Daily Mirror?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ He grinned easily. ‘I got lucky one night. Impressed Em no end. But I couldn’t get to any of the important stuff, of course, that was far too well protected, just the pre-print.’

That meant non-newsy features and service pages like travel and motoring. She had no idea whether or not he was playing it down, but even what he was admitting to impressed Joanna just as much as it had her daughter.

She let it pass.

‘How was the memorial service?’ he enquired after a bit. ‘I was sorry I couldn’t get away today. McKane could be a pain in the arse but he was a fine newspaperman.’

Joanna nodded. ‘It went well enough. Good turnout. I saw Frank Manners there.’

Off she went again. She hadn’t really meant to start on that either, but now that she had she knew she was not going to be able to stop. ‘He accused me of getting him sacked.’

Paul laughed lightly. ‘Well, to coin a famous phrase, he would, wouldn’t he?’

‘The subject of those moody phone calls came up. He denied all knowledge.’

‘And he would do that, too, wouldn’t he?’ Paul repeated.

‘I suppose so,’ she agreed meekly.

He studied her thoughtfully. ‘Don’t let that old bastard get to you after all these years,’ he told her. ‘I think you’d better have another drink.’ He picked up the whisky bottle and poured a hefty measure into her glass, filling it almost to the brim. Well, she supposed that was the way she had been drinking lately, but he didn’t usually encourage her like this.

She thought she had better back off before she talked herself into a corner. After all, she didn’t really know what to believe about anything any more. ‘I’m tired, I think I’ll go on up,’ she said eventually.

Paul watched Joanna leave the room and head for the stairs, taking the nearly full glass of whisky with her. He was uneasy. Those remarks about his computer skills and the moody phone calls had been distinctly pointed. What was going on in her head, he wondered anxiously.

She was drinking too much, of course, but usually she didn’t let it show. He believed that she would pull herself together sooner or later. She was that sort of woman. The important thing was that she was back in line.

He would have preferred just to have been able to wave a magic wand and make Joanna love him so much she wouldn’t even have wanted to rekindle her old affair with Fielding. He would have settled just for being able to make her see how very much he loved her. He had no idea why he had never been able to do even that, but he knew that he hadn’t.

At least she understood now that he was not prepared to lose her. Men like him didn’t take kindly to losing what they had won with hard work and diligent application. For Paul, the same went for his marriage and his wife as for his job. His world, both at home and at work, would carry on, now, just as it had always done. That was all he had ever wanted, that and to ensure that his prospect of being knighted, almost certainly in the new year’s honours list the following January he had been led to believe, would not be affected by some unseemly scandal.

He didn’t believe that he would face any further problems from Joanna, even though Fielding had been freed. Or at least, he hadn’t until this evening.

Paul had never been remotely under suspicion of organising the e-mail frame-up, as he had known he would not be. For a start nobody, not even Joanna, understood the strength of his motivation. And, of course, no one had ever realised quite how adept he was with computers and with working the Net. It was one of the secrets of his success in newspapers. He could hack into the memories of other people’s computers and hence into their lives, and even into other newspapers, with surprising frequency. His only mistake had been to show off to his daughter. He basked in her pride in him. How he wished his wife would love him half as much and as unconditionally as he was sure his daughter did. He shouldn’t ever have revealed so much of his skill to Emily, of course. He just hoped that Joanna had believed him when he had played down his abilities and achievements. He couldn’t be sure whether she had or not, but even Emily had no idea just how good he really was.

What he had done was complex but certainly not impossible, particularly if you had a leaning in that direction. All the software you needed, and the instructions, were available to anybody, free on the Net. It was called LINUX — a robust, fully featured operating system with a mind-blowing hacking capacity. All you had to do was download it and understand it — then you could make it do pretty much anything you wanted. Even Paul didn’t understand the half of it. He wondered if anybody did except the brilliant software technicians who had written the programme. But he had managed to decipher and understand enough for his purposes.

With the help of LINUX he had written a virus, which he had lodged in Mike Fielding’s computer by attaching it to an inconsequential e-mail. The virus installed the phoney e-mail files, at the same time hiding them from view by burying them deep in the computer’s memory. The phoney e-mails left no footprints because they were only ever files within the virus and the e-mail Paul had attached the virus to was, of course, untraceable — despatched from yet another Excite address, set up and operated from a second-hand laptop.

It wasn’t just East End villains who knew about computer markets and the advantages of their stock. Even before the love-bug hackers had been caught through the codes inside their Microsoft software, Paul had taken no chances. He kept his street-market-acquired laptop locked in a box in a dark corner of the garden shed that was his own secret retreat.

Paul had so far been quite pleased with himself in the circumstances. He supposed it would have been overly optimistic to have expected his ruse to result in Fielding actually being convicted for a crime he had not committed. He’d settled for knowing that he’d wreaked havoc in the policeman’s life, just the way Fielding had wreaked havoc in his. He’d rather the policeman had been convicted, of course, sent down for good. But his plan had proved effective enough. It had ended Fielding’s career and been the final nail in the coffin of the detective’s affair with Joanna. Actually, he’d been quite content to settle for that — and for getting Joanna back.

But now he was not quite sure of her again. For a moment, as they had sat together earlier, he had thought she had been going to level some kind of accusation at him. He couldn’t be certain, but he reckoned he ought to play safe. Joanna must never know what he had done. That would ruin everything.

He finished his drink, put the empty glass in the sink in the kitchen and left the house through the kitchen door. As he headed across the lawn, he glanced behind him up at the window of the bedroom he and Jo shared. The light had been switched off. He’d had an ulterior motive in pouring her that extra large Scotch. She was certain to be deep into a whisky-induced sleep by now. Nothing was going to wake her for several hours.

At the bottom of the garden he unlocked the shed. The second-hand laptop was still safe in its usual hiding place. He knew he ought to have disposed of it before now and wasn’t quite sure why he hadn’t. A kind of arrogance, he supposed. He had always been so far ahead of the game he hadn’t felt the need to abide by the normal rules. But Joanna had rattled his confidence somewhat and he was going to take no more risks.

He picked up the laptop, all its various software and connecting bits, and carried the lot back into the house cradled in his arms. He closed and locked the kitchen door behind him, walked through the house to the front and put the pile on the hall table while he opened the door to the cupboard alongside and rummaged around for the holdall he knew was there somewhere. When he’d found it he transferred everything into it and left the house through the front door as quietly as possible, setting off on foot down the hill. He had considered using either Jo’s car or his own, locked in the garage, but he didn’t know where her keys were and opening up the garage could well make enough noise to wake even Joanna. No more risks. That was his new rule. He’d walk. After all, the river wasn’t far away.

Less than a minute later Joanna slipped out of the house behind him.

She hadn’t drunk the huge whisky Paul had poured for her. She hadn’t wanted it. Neither had she wanted to sleep. She had just wanted to be alone to carry on thinking. She had switched off the bedroom lights and sat, still fully clothed, in the chair by the window overlooking the garden.

It was a clear, starry night and anyway it never got properly dark in London or the suburbs. She had seen Paul padding across the lawn, disappearing past the fruit trees into the dense shrubby area at the bottom of the garden. At first she took little notice, he quite frequently went into the garden when he came home at night. She had no idea what he did down there and had never given it much thought until now. She certainly had no idea of any of the uses he had for the garden shed. He just told her that he enjoyed the fresh night air after a day cooped up in an air-conditioned building and that had always seemed perfectly reasonable. But watching idly as he reappeared, walking back across the lawn towards the house just a few minutes later, she saw that he was carrying something in his arms, although the light was too dim for her to see what it was.

She heard him lock up the back of the house and make his way through to the front, then open the hall cupboard and start rummaging about. On impulse, she made her way as silently as possible out through the already ajar bedroom door to the top of the stairs. Looking down, she could clearly see an unfamiliar laptop computer on the hall table. She backed away on to the landing as Paul emerged from the cupboard clutching a holdall and, peeping cautiously through the banisters, she watched him load the little computer into the bag, sling it over his shoulder and leave the house.

Again acting on impulse, she decided to follow him, hardly believing what she was doing. It was almost one o’clock on an autumn night; there were hardly any other pedestrians about and very little traffic. She was wearing only jeans and a cotton shirt, as she hadn’t waited to grab a coat or a jacket. She shivered in the cool air and was careful to keep well back as Paul made his way down Richmond Hill and into Hill Rise past their favourite Chinese restaurant. Then he turned smartly left towards the river and set off purposefully across Richmond Bridge. Jo ducked into a convenient doorway, realising she would have to wait until he had crossed over before following him if she was to have any chance of avoiding being seen.

But halfway over the bridge Paul paused, glancing briefly around him as if checking there was nobody nearby. Then he moved closer to the bridge wall. His back was towards Jo. The street lighting on the bridge was not as bright as it might have been and Jo’s angle of sight was all wrong. From the doorway she could not quite see what he was doing. She moved out on to the pavement and took a few cautious steps forward in order to get a better view. As she did so, she saw Paul remove the holdall from his shoulder and in one fluent movement toss it into the River Thames.

Joanna gasped and only just stopped herself crying out. She supposed this was what she had been half expecting. It was also what she had been dreading. She went into shock.

Her husband stood for just a few seconds longer, looking down at the water, then turned round and began to walk briskly back towards her. At that moment a car swung over the bridge, its headlights fully illuminating Jo. She felt like a rabbit trapped by a lamper. She just couldn’t move. She froze.

Paul’s stride faltered. She knew he must have seen her, must have realised that she had followed him and what she had witnessed.

Her body was starting to work again. She found she could move her legs, now, and took a step backwards. Paul was still approaching, more slowly, his arms stretched out towards her. She spun round and took off at a run, not up Richmond Hill towards the home she shared with this man she didn’t want near her, the house where their daughter slept unaware, but off to the left along the main street through the town. She didn’t know where she was going. She barely cared. Her body might be functioning once more, but her brain was numb.

‘Jo, Jo, wait...’

She heard him call after her. She ran all the harder.