A Kind Of Wild Justice (39 page)

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?’