A Kind Of Wild Justice (31 page)

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.