A Kind Of Wild Justice (9 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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