A Kind Of Wild Justice Read online

  About the Book

  A chance DNA test proves without doubt what DS Mike Fielding has always known - that man tried for the barbaric murder of local Devon girl Angela Philips twenty years before, the man who walked free, was the Beast of Dartmoor. It is a bitter victory. Because the law of double jeopardy means James O'Donnell can't be tried again. He is still a free man. For Joanna Bartlett, the once brilliant but now jaded crime correspondent who covered the case two decades before, the findings stir memories she's tried to forget. Not only of the terrible murder she can't bear to remember - but of Fielding, the maverick detective who shared her obsession with the tragedy. There has been a shocking miscarriage of justice - one that will now torment those who have suffered since the murder. Fielding, his career irrevocably damaged by the case, is determined to see justice done. And Joanna and the media are his means. But will the killer ever be punished?

  About the Author

  Hilary Bonner is a former showbusiness editor of the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mirror. She now writes full time and lives in the West Country where she was born and brought up and where all her books are based. She is the author of eight novels, The Cruelty of Morning, A Fancy to Kill For, A Passion So Deadly, For Death Comes Softly, A Deep Deceit, A Kind of Wild Justice, A Moment of Madness and When the Dead Cry Out. Her new novel, No Reason to Die will be published by William Heinemann in 2004.

  Also by Hilary Bonner

  FICTION

  The Cruelty of Morning

  A Fancy to Kill For

  A Passion So Deadly

  For Death Comes Softly

  A Deep Deceit

  A Moment of Madness

  When the Dead Cry out

  NON-FICTION

  Heartbeat – The Real Life Story

  Benny – A Biography of Benny Hill

  René and Me (with Gorden Kaye)

  Journeyman (with Clive Gunnell)

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781446472187

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published in the United Kingdom in 2001 by Arrow Books

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  Copyright © Hilary Bonner 2000

  The right of Hilary Bonner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2001 by William Heinemann

  Arrow Books

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  Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0 09 941533 X

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Two

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Three

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  This book is dedicated to the remains of Fleet

  Street – wherever they may be

  Acknowledgements

  Grateful thanks are due to:

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

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

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

  ‘Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.’

  Francis Bacon 1561–1626 (Essays – ‘of revenge’)

  Prologue

  Very, very carefully Detective Inspector Mike Fielding put the slim sheaf
of papers back in their plastic folder. He placed it neatly to one side of his desk. Grey metal frame. Standard issue. No clutter. That was the kind of man Fielding was. He didn’t like mess. And he was once again being confronted by the biggest mess of his life.

  He noticed that the folder was not lined up precisely with the edge of the desk and shifted it slightly so that it did. Then, with a great effort of will, he turned his attention back to his computer screen.

  For almost two and a half minutes he attempted to concentrate on the case he was supposed to be working on. Industrial theft. More than £100,000 worth of electronic equipment nicked from a warehouse on an Exeter industrial estate.

  It really didn’t seem to matter much, that was the problem. Nothing mattered much except what was in that plastic folder. He found himself picking it up again, and once more he removed the contents and spread them out before him.

  There were just half a dozen or so sheets of printed foolscap paper, which basically contained two salient pieces of information.

  One was a DNA sample taken from a young woman, kidnapped, raped and murdered twenty years previously.

  The other was the DNA of the man who had stood trial for her murder and been acquitted.

  The two sets matched. Exactly.

  That meant there was around a ten million to one certainty that the acquitted man had been, after all, guilty of the murder. And of the other monstrous crimes committed against the teenager.

  But he could not be tried again. Not for the same crime. Not for as long as he might live. That was British law. It was called double jeopardy and the new scientific evidence, irrefutable as it undoubtedly was, made not a jot of difference.

  Ten million to one. Even the most astute of legal teams, and the bastard had always had access to those, would be hard-pushed to get around that bit of scientific truth. He’d been guilty as charged. And he’d got away with it. But then Fielding had never doubted that, really.

  The policeman glowered at the damning information in front of him.

  After the body had been found the murderer had been dubbed the Beast of Dartmoor, so horrific was the way in which he had tortured and killed that innocent young woman.

  The law would change, of course, eventually. No doubt about it. Britain’s double-jeopardy laws were 600 years old and, in view of the recent extraordinary advances in forensic science, the legal profession had already canvassed the Home Secretary. But the change would not come quickly enough. Not nearly quickly enough. Not for Mike Fielding.

  So that was it, really. Over.

  He opened the bottom drawer of his desk and took out the two photographs which lay there, easily to hand, right at the front. One was of the murdered girl, fresh-faced, dark-brown curly hair and matching eyes, averagely pretty, a sprinkling of freckles, smooth, creamy skin, uncertain smile, young-looking for her age. Seventeen years old. Still innocent. Unusually so, perhaps. She had been a virgin until the Beast had got his hands on her. Strange how you could somehow guess that just from the photograph. She looked slightly uncomfortable in a silky pale-pink dress, cut straight off the shoulders, hemline well below the knee. Obviously expensive, but far too old for her, almost frumpy. She had been a bridesmaid at her brother’s wedding and she was carrying a posy of pale-pink rosebuds, which matched the colour of the dress. It was the last photograph taken of her, just four months before her disappearance.

  Fielding placed it on his desk on top of the DNA reports and put the second photograph alongside it. This was the man he had always believed to be the Beast. A mugshot from when he had been arrested. Glowering at the camera. Arrogant. He had always been an arrogant bastard, but then, when you came from his family, that went with the territory. There he was, staring straight ahead with his mocking watery blue eyes, bleached-white blond hair shaved almost to a stubble, mouth set in a hard line, his chin, also stubbled but darker, tucked into a thick, fleshy neck, overly prominent forehead leaning towards the camera.

  How Fielding would like to get his hands on him in a locked room. Best that he never got the opportunity, though, because he doubted he would know how or when to stop.

  Fielding had been the first police officer on the scene when they found the girl’s body. It remained the worst moment of his twenty-eight-year career, and goodness knew, there had been some down times. He had been a high-flying young detective sergeant then, full of optimism and confidence. Tough, too. It hadn’t occurred to him that he could ever be confronted by something that would really disturb him. And it certainly hadn’t occurred to him that just one case would destroy so many of his aspirations and remain still, he fervently believed, the reason why he had not risen beyond detective inspector. The fact that a lot of it was probably his own fault did not help. Not when he thought about what he had seen up there on the moor. Not when he thought about what might have been for him had none of it ever happened.

  He had learned to live with it all. That’s what you did, wasn’t it? That’s what everybody did who wanted to survive. But now it had all returned to haunt him.

  Abruptly pushing both photographs away, and turning them face down so he no longer had to look at them, Fielding consulted a note he had made on a message pad, picked up the telephone and dialled the first three digits of a London telephone number.

  Then he stopped.

  Then he began to dial again, this time a local Exeter number. His wife answered on the third ring.

  ‘I’m going to be late,’ he told her bluntly. She registered no surprise. After nearly thirty years of marriage to a police detective who liked women almost as much as he liked whisky, there wasn’t much he could do that would surprise her. Fielding replaced the receiver and studied the DNA reports once more. He picked up a red marker pen and encircled the damning data on both sets.

  It had all happened by chance in the end. Not that there was anything strange about that. They only caught the Yorkshire Ripper because of a routine check by traffic cops. Mind you, the Ripper case had been one of the most incompetent criminal investigations of the twentieth century.

  Fielding put the top of the marker pen in his mouth and began to chew it. It was a habit he had indulged in since he gave up smoking. That had been almost ten years ago and he had lapsed only briefly just a couple of times. For once in his life, he had shown some won’t-power, he reflected wryly. Never short of will-power, it was just the won’t-power he struggled with – his father had coined that one about him. His father, Jack Fielding – also in the job, retired as a uniformed superintendent – who had at first been so proud of the bright, intelligent son following in his footsteps, but then, Fielding suspected, by the time of his death three years previously, bitterly disappointed.

  Anyway, Mike had always used the won’t-power line as a kind of running joke, but there was, of course, a lot of truth in it. The top drawer of his desk was full of pens and pencils with chewed broken tops. Occasionally he ended up with ink all over his mouth. And he didn’t work in the kind of environment where some kind soul was likely to obligingly point this out before he made a complete fool of himself. Remembering this, and that the marker pen was a particularly vivid red, he took it out of his mouth and replaced it with a pencil.

  He didn’t really like thinking about incompetent investigations. The whole Beast of Dartmoor operation had been deeply flawed. He knew that. A lot of it had been down to his governor – Parsons had been far too sure of himself, as indeed, Mike was aware, he himself had been back then. He was also certain that at least one of the mistakes which had been made could be laid at his own door. Perhaps the biggest mistake of all.

  He reached behind the pile of files in the bottom drawer of his desk and retrieved a two-thirds empty bottle of supermarket Scotch. Then he rummaged around for the glass he was sure he had replaced there the previous day. He couldn’t find it. In the end he just took a deep swig from the bottle.

  The rough, cheap spirit hit the back of his throat and burned a little as he swallowed. First of the day. It felt
good. It always did. Fielding rarely drank at lunchtimes. He didn’t dare. He kidded himself that as long as he didn’t drink till the evenings he didn’t have a problem. Certainly he knew that the longer he could put off the first taste, the better chance he had of ending the day in a reasonable state.

  He took a second welcome swig. Then he put the bottle back in the desk drawer and closed it. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, still enjoying the warmth of the whisky, and, for just a few seconds, tried not to think. Not about anything.

  It didn’t work. He pulled open the desk drawer again, removed the bottle and took another deep drink. This time he didn’t bother putting it away. Instead, he stood it on the floor next to his chair, where he could reach it easily but nobody coming into the room could see it.

  The Beast of Dartmoor had been involved in a minor traffic accident in London. Proof yet again that even traffic cops had their uses. Mike allowed himself a wry smile at that. It hadn’t even been the Beast’s fault, and he certainly hadn’t been drunk. Far too controlled for that. After all – although Mike didn’t believe his habits would have changed much, and certainly not his sexual perversions – he’d kept out of trouble, somehow, for twenty years, albeit through nothing other than nifty footwork. But the Beast had been given a routine breath test, just standard procedure, and failed. It was also routine to do a DNA test, a buccal swab, a kind of toothbrush scrape of the inner mouth. It had all been routine, in fact. The DNA was run through the computer, standard practice again, and bingo, as Fielding’s old adversary Todd Mallett – with whom he had attended police college, which was absolutely all the two of them had in common – would have said.

  It came up the same as DNA taken from the dead girl’s body, from the body fluids that could only have been deposited by her murderer.