A Kind Of Wild Justice (15 page)

As she was driving down the M4 she considered again the grim reality concerning Chris. Their marriage was effectively over. They didn’t have sex any more and could barely be civil to each other. She felt she had tried as hard as she could. For the first time she began seriously to wonder if there was someone else in Chris’s life. He appeared to have come actively to dislike her, which she could hardly believe after all the time they had been together. Sometimes it seemed to her that he was almost inventing problems between the two of them and she couldn’t help wondering if he was doing it deliberately.

Paul Potter was invariably around when she wanted a drink and a chat, but she continued to think
of him only as a friendly face in the office and nothing more – someone who provided very welcome solace in an environment that in her eyes was becoming more and more hostile.

One way and another she found herself relieved by the prospect of being out of London for a bit.

As expected, O’Donnell, who continued to profess his innocence, pleaded not guilty. The historic Crown Court at Exeter lies within the great walls of Exeter Castle, which dates back to Roman times. A forbidding iron portcullis forms the only entrance and Joanna could never pass through it, into a courtyard where a gallows once stood and the old hanging judges ran riot, without a bit of a shiver running down her spine. James Martin O’Donnell, however, seemed totally undaunted. The grim ghosts of other crueller ages clearly did not trouble Jimbo. Imagination was probably not his strong suit, Jo suspected. And the influence of his legal dream team was apparent from the start. Jo was afraid yet again that Jimbo’s lawyers, provided by his doting dad and led by a clever and already highly acclaimed young barrister called Brian Burns, might run rings round the police prosecutors.

Jimbo’s appearance no longer bore any resemblance to the way he had looked at the committal proceeding and his behaviour was also completely different. The thuggish-looking peroxide-blond crew cut had gone. His hair, which was now mid-brown, presumably its natural colour, had been allowed to grow longer while he was on remand and had been neatly cut in conventional fashion with a parting to one side. The offensive tattoo on his arm was concealed. He wore dark suits, crisp white shirts and
sober ties to court, and when he spoke he did so politely and with apparent respect for the proceedings. He no longer seemed to have an arrogant bone in his body. Jimbo had been given a complete make-over and had quite obviously been groomed in every way by people who knew exactly what they were doing.

Most of the evidence against O’Donnell was circumstantial, although some of it was quite strong, including that given by an ex-Territorial the police had called as a witness. He stated with absolute certainty that O’Donnell was among a group of them who had used Knack Mine as a hideout during military exercises. But the prosecution did not get off to a good start.

Jimbo admitted readily enough that he had been on the Phillipses’ land on the day that Angela Phillips disappeared, but claimed this was just coincidence. He had been camping, not for the first time, on a part of Dartmoor not far from Five Tors Farm, and had unwittingly strayed on to Phillips land. When the prosecution claimed that O’Donnell had been keeping the farm under surveillance, checking on the movements of Angela and her family, Jimbo denied it hotly. ‘I was birdwatching, that’s why I had the bins, wasn’t it,’ he said ingenuously. ‘I’m a twitcher, me!’

The very idea was so incongruous that Joanna had to fight against an almost irresistible urge to laugh out loud. However, when she glanced at the jury they seemed to be lapping it up. The concept of judgement by your peers, twelve good men and true and all that, left a great deal to be desired, she thought, not for the first time.

The prosecution barrister, Malcolm Bowman, a
slightly plump, earnest young man with a disconcerting squint, did not give up.

‘You meticulously checked out the Phillips family,’ he persisted. ‘You appraised their property, you knew that they were a wealthy family well able to raise £50,000 in exchange for Angela’s life. You have been obsessed with the military from an early age, have you not, Mr O’Donnell, and you used your Territorial training when you planned this terrible crime, didn’t you?’

Jimbo stared straight ahead. ‘I don’t know what you mean, sir,’ he said.

‘You believed, because of your training, that you could deal with the logistical complexities of abducting and detaining a young woman against her will, did you not?’ said Malcolm Bowman. ‘And you had considerable local knowledge gained during your training at Okehampton camp.

‘We have heard from a reliable witness, Mr O’Donnell, that you had personal knowledge of the mine shaft where Angela Phillips’s body was found. You knew what an excellent hideout Knack Mine was, and I put it to you that when you abducted Angela Phillips it was already your intention to conceal her there.’

‘No, that’s not true, sir,’ responded Jimbo mildly but firmly. ‘In any case, if I ever did go to that mine when I was up at the camp, I just don’t remember it at all.’ He was so well briefed it hurt. Obviously acting under instructions, he just kept on calmly denying everything.

‘You tortured, raped and mutilated Angela there to satisfy your own perverted desires,’ continued Bowman doggedly. ‘And then, when your attempts to
obtain a ransom for her failed, you callously left her in the mine shaft to die.’

‘No, that’s not true, sir,’ said Jimbo again, equally mildly.

Joanna knew that he had not left fingerprints on the little that had been found in Angela’s dreadful tomb and the best forensic had been able to come up with, in the days before DNA, was that the semen found in Angela’s body was from someone with the same blood group as O’Donnell. It was O Positive – the most common of the lot.

Malcolm Bowman was beginning to look frustrated and became even more so when he brought up the collection of knives found in O’Donnell’s apartment, none of which, Joanna already knew, forensic had been able to prove had been the weapon used to maim Angela.

‘They’re military memorabilia, sir,’ said Jimbo.

Bowman looked incredulous. ‘Memorabilia, Mr O’Donnell? You are talking about a selection of potentially lethal weapons, including one almost new army knife of a particularly vicious design.’

‘Well, they’re all memorabilia to me, sir. I’m very interested in the military, you see.’

‘And what exactly do you claim that you have used these knives for, Mr O’Donnell, if not to maim and kill?’

‘I’ve never used them for anything, sir. I just like looking at them.’

It was ludicrous, but once again the jury did not seem to think so.

There did appear, however, to be one irrefutable piece of evidence – and Joanna realised it was this to which Fielding must have been referring when he had
refused to give her the details during their conversation after Jimbo’s arrest.

The prosecution claimed that a gold locket Angela Phillips was wearing when she disappeared had been found in O’Donnell’s London flat. This was not circumstantial. This was hard evidence. This could swing it. Joanna felt her hopes rise. She was aware of a kind of collective gasp from the public gallery behind her, where she knew Angela’s family were sitting, and even the jury looked impressed.

However, Jo’s hopes were quickly dashed again. The defence had an answer – and Mike Fielding was at the crux of it. The locket bore O’Donnell’s fingerprints clearly enough, and that was not in dispute, but it seemed that after claiming to have found it in a drawer in O’Donnell’s bedroom, Fielding had triumphantly brandished his trophy at the accused man and allowed him to take it from him. Jo could see Fielding almost visibly squirming when, having been asked to take the stand, he was confronted with this.

He tried unsuccessfully to fudge the issue. ‘Well, we found the locket, sir, no doubt about that, and whether or not Mr O’Donnell actually handled it …’

‘DS Fielding, you know perfectly well that Mr O’Donnell did handle the locket,’ persisted Brian Burns. He was tall, slim, handsome and authoritative, in brutal contrast to the unprepossessing Malcolm Bowman. ‘I suggest you tell the truth, Detective Sergeant,’ Burns continued. ‘There were other officers with you, were there not, who may not be as evasive as you are trying to be.’

Ultimately Fielding had no choice but to admit that he had allowed O’Donnell to handle the key piece of
evidence. ‘I was excited by the discovery,’ he said.

‘You were excited, DS Fielding? So you allowed a suspect to handle a key piece of evidence and put his fingerprints all over it? Do you really expect this court to believe that?’

There was no answer. Burns did not push the point any further but continued by asking: ‘And what did my client say to you when you handed him the locket, Detective Sergeant?’

‘I didn’t hand it to him, he took it.’

Joanna felt almost sorry for Fielding. Didn’t he realise that everything he said seemed to be making the whole thing appear worse?

‘I see,’ responded Burns casually. ‘So, what did my client say when you allowed him to take the locket from you?’

Fielding looked defeated. ‘He said he’d never seen it before in his life.’

Joanna groaned to herself. This was going seriously pear-shaped. She, too, found it hard to believe that Fielding would have made such a silly mistake. The alternative was that he had planted the locket. He had been the first officer at the scene of the crime. If the locket had been with Angela in the shaft at Knack Mine, Fielding would have had ample opportunity to secrete it away – to have the locket up his sleeve, as it were, just in case a little extra evidence was needed later on. She had known it happen before.

And that was just what Burns went on to suggest. Indeed, he finished his cross-examination by going way beyond suggestion: ‘I put it to you, DS Fielding, that you did not find this locket in my client’s home but that you calculatedly planted it on him. You needed a conviction, didn’t you? You’re a high flyer
aren’t you? You don’t like unsolved crimes, do you?’

Burns was a slick operator and this was devastating stuff. There seemed to be holes in the prosecution case you could drive a bus through – or anyway there did when the dream team were at work.

The trial lasted six and a half working days including the day and a half it took for the jury to agree its verdict. They found James Martin O’Donnell not guilty – which, after the way the proceedings had gone, came as no great surprise to anybody. But it was a dreadful disappointment – to police, prosecution, the family and friends of Angela Phillips, and indeed to Joanna, whom Fielding had quite convinced of O’Donnell’s guilt. She had not realised, in fact, just how much she had wanted to see him brought to justice for his appalling crime until he was cleared.

The jury could not be told, of course, of O’Donnell’s previous conviction for rape, nor of his and his family’s criminal reputations, although most of them must surely at least have heard of the O’Donnells, Jo thought. It was a majority decision, so maybe if the law were different and that kind of information had been made available to them – as many people thought, certainly in the case of sex crimes, it should be – the balance could have been tipped. As it stood, a majority of ten to two was all that was necessary for Jimbo O’Donnell to walk from the court a free man. And walk he did.

Joanna wondered if the clenched-fist salute Jimbo gave when their foreman read out the verdict made any of the jurors question their judgement. Certainly, once he realised the case was won he cast aside his demeanour of quiet respectfulness with alacrity.

She joined the crush to follow him outside the court. His father had been at the trial every day and now Sam the Man stood alongside Jimbo in the middle of the ancient courtyard, smiling for a cacophony of flashing snappers. ‘Justice has been done – for once,’ Sam announced with a big grin. ‘My boy could never have done what they said he did. He’s an O’Donnell. We don’t hurt women or children. I never doubted him for a minute. Never. He’s straight down the middle, my boy, look at him I ask you, look at him …’ Sam the Man reached up and ruffled his son’s new haircut.

The younger O’Donnell did his best to look innocent, endearing and wronged – but he succeeded only in looking smug and pleased with himself. However, inside the court during the trial his performance had been convincing, certainly good enough to convince the jury, and that was all that mattered.

In stark contrast, the Phillips family, accompanied by Jeremy Thomas and escorted by a grim-faced Todd Mallett, tried to slip away quietly into a waiting car. They had no chance at all. The press swarmed on them. Joanna joined in, calling out ‘Mr Phillips, Rob, Jeremy, just tell us how you feel’ – to no avail. They all looked devastated. Reporters needed words to make copy, but snappers always insisted a picture could be worth several thousand of them. Certainly in this instance they were probably right, Joanna thought. Nothing any of the family might say would ever convey their feelings as effectively as their shattered appearance. Bill Phillips glanced towards her at one point, but all she could see in his eyes was the emptiness of a broken man confronting yet another tormentor.

Fielding and DCI Parsons were right behind the family and hurried them through the throng. They also refused to comment to the horde of press who surrounded them, making their passage difficult. Both men looked grave, but Joanna was riveted by Fielding. The normally suave, cocksure detective seemed stricken. His face was ashen.

She supposed he would bounce back eventually, he was that sort. But his career had suffered a potentially fatal blow. Apart from any other consideration it must be a policeman’s nightmare to be accused in open court of having planted evidence. She felt almost sorry for him. His rosy future did not look quite so rosy any more, that was for certain.

She filed an early story and, with Manners under instructions to look after the police angle although nobody was expected to put their head up over the bunker for a bit, set out across Dartmoor and spent most of the rest of the afternoon and evening doorstepping the Phillipses. They continued to refuse to speak to the press, but nonetheless she had to wait until the desk sent Harry Fowler down to take over her watching brief outside the farm before she was allowed to leave at about 10 p.m. She was thoroughly exhausted and there appeared to be little more she could do. All she really wanted was to go back to her Exeter hotel room, order herself a large malt whisky and maybe some sandwiches, and take to her bed.