A Kind Of Wild Justice (4 page)

It was almost two in the morning before Lillian and Bill Phillips heard the unmistakable sound of Jeremy Thomas’s customised Escort roaring into their farmyard, followed by the slamming of a car door and some loud laughter.

They even heard their son’s voice: ‘Some night, mate, aye, some bloody good night,’ followed by more laughter.

‘They’re back,’ whispered Lillian Phillips unnecessarily. She knew it was silly, both their children were grown-up now and Rob was a married man, an expectant father even, but she could never sleep properly until they were home. And she was well aware that neither could her husband, though he denied it.

Bill Phillips grunted. ‘Boy’s drunk,’ he stated.

‘First time he’s let his hair down since he was wed, bless him,’ said his wife, her voice indulgent.

Bill Phillips grunted again. ‘How come you’re never that understanding when I’ve had a few?’

‘Because you’re my husband, of course,’ replied his wife, offering no further explanation.

‘And don’t I know it,’ he muttered, softening his words by reaching for her hand.

She sighed in the darkness. ‘We’re so lucky, aren’t we? Two wonderful children, this place. And now we’re going to be grandparents. Do you know, I just can’t make up my mind whether I want it to be a little boy or a little girl. What about you, Bill? I suppose you want a boy, do you, make sure of the farm. Aye? Bill? Bill?’

This time the only reply was gentle snoring.

Carefully Lillian Phillips withdrew her hand from
his and snuggled contentedly into the deep warmth of the bed. Within seconds she had fallen into an untroubled sleep.

In the morning, Bill Phillips was first up as usual. He didn’t do the milking any more, hadn’t for years, the Phillipses employed a dairyman for that, but old habits died hard. He liked to be up soon after five and settled by the Aga with his first cup of tea, listening to the farming programme on the radio.

Rob was usually up not long after him and would come down to his parents’ part of the house for his first morning cuppa knowing that the tea would already be brewed. Bill didn’t expect him very early that morning, though, not after the kind of night he’d apparently just enjoyed.

The farmer smiled to himself. Secretly he was as tolerant of his son’s rare excess as was his wife. Rob was a good, hard-working boy. They could not have wished for a better son and, although Bill had always said that he wanted both his children to have choices and that no son of his would ever be forced into farming the way he had been, he was, of course, delighted when it became clear that all his only son wanted in life was to run Five Tors Farm one day. Rob would be the fourth generation of Phillipses’ to do so.

Sometimes, particularly if the day were bright and sunny, Bill would go for an early inspection tour of his land. But the morning had dawned dull and drizzly, the previous day’s sunshine already proven to have been just a brief respite in a terrible stretch of weather, and it was also Sunday. He poured a second cup of tea, settled himself more comfortably in his
armchair and decided to stay where he was, enjoying the warmth and the radio for at least another hour or so.

Lillian was also an early riser and was up soon after six as usual. Normally, she took Angela a cup of tea in bed to soften the blow of having to get up. Angela liked her bed. The early-rising habit of her farming ancestors seemed somehow to be missing from her genes. On weekday mornings Lillian would wake her daughter at 6.30 in order for her to see to her horses before getting off to school. On Sundays Angela was still expected to be up at 7.30 for her stable chores. But remembering the late night and how much her daughter had been looking forward to the dance and to wearing her new dress, and being escorted there, for the first time, by her very own boyfriend, Lillian Phillips decided to let her have a rare lie-in. And an even rarer rest from her morning routine.

Lillian pulled on her boots and set off to bring in the horses herself. During the summer they were put out to grass only at night. They got too fat otherwise and the daytime flies bothered them.

The job did not take long. As soon as Lillian opened the paddock gate the animals came towards her, expecting their usual morning corn feed. Back in the house just a few minutes later, she made fresh tea and carried a mug of it up the stairs.

It was just before 8.30 a.m. when she paused and listened outside the door to her daughter’s bedroom. Not a sound came from within. Smiling, she pushed the door open. ‘C’mon, lazybones, I just hope you weren’t in the same state as that brother …’ Lillian stopped in mid-sentence. Her daughter’s bed had not been slept in. There was no sign that she had been in
the room at all since the previous evening when she had been getting ready for the dance.

Startled, Lillian quickly put the mug of tea down on the landing floor and hurried into her son’s and daughter-in-law’s part of the house. Passing their bedroom, she knocked on the door and, receiving no reply, ran down the far staircase and into their kitchen.

Rob was sitting at his kitchen table with Mary. He looked more than a little dishevelled and bleary-eyed, but he managed a wan smile as his mother entered the room.

‘Hi, Mum,’ he began. ‘No point in asking you if you heard me come home, cos I know darned well you would have done …’ Seeing the expression on his mother’s face, he too stopped in mid-sentence. ‘W-what’s wrong?’ he asked uncertainly.

‘Rob, where is your sister?’ his mother asked.

‘I dunno. In bed, I suppose. Late night, wasn’t it? Why?’

‘She did come home with you? Surely you brought your sister home with you, Rob?’

Rob was momentarily bewildered. After all, his head was not very clear. ‘What? No. She’d had enough of Jer and me. Got in one of her tempers and stomped off; said she’d walk home. She should have been back more than an hour before us …’

He realised his mother was just staring at him, the shock in her eyes all too clear.

‘Oh, my God, Mum, she’s not here, is she?’ he blurted out.

His mother just shook her head.

The desk clerk on front-office duty at Okehampton police station took the first call at 8.45a.m.

The Phillips family had not waited to make any enquiries of their own. Instead, Rob Phillips looked up the number for their closest police station in the phone book. And when he made the call, although the panic was already rising inside him, not to mention the guilt at his own behaviour the previous evening, Rob spoke quietly and as calmly as he could. Nonetheless he had difficulty getting the words out in a lucid fashion.

In Okehampton, George Jarvis listened carefully. He was that kind of man, a civilian clerk but with a lifetime of policing behind him. And missing seventeen-year-old girls were every policeman’s nightmare. They had minds of their own, did teenage girls. And bodies that were going through all kinds of metamorphoses their parents didn’t usually want to know about. ‘Our Doreen’s not like that.’ How often had George heard that one. He knew better. They were all like that, he had discovered over the years, even the most unlikely ones. Sometimes he was almost glad that he and his missus had never managed to produce any children. George knew more about the pain children caused their parents than he did about the pleasure, of course. That was a policeman’s lot, really.

George had been the solid, old-fashioned sort of copper. He even looked a bit like the actor who’d played George Dixon, Britain’s first famous TV bobby, and he’d been teased a lot about that in his younger days: same Christian name, same looks, same build. He wished he had a quid for every time he’d walked into a pub to be greeted with ‘evenin’ all’. ’Course, it didn’t happen very often nowadays. Nobody remembered George Dixon any more. Like Dixon, George Jarvis had been a uniformed sergeant when he’d retired four years earlier after completing his thirty years, always working a country beat. He’d signed on again immediately as a clerk. George liked being in police stations. His work had always been more of a way of life to him than just a job.

‘Are you sure she didn’t go home with her boyfriend for the night, Mr Phillips?’ he asked, then, remembering himself and the offence such remarks could give, even at times like this when you’d think they had something more to worry about than appearances, ‘I mean, to his family …’

‘No,’ said Rob. ‘I told you. Jeremy gave me a lift back and went home on his own. We both thought Angela was already here at the farm.’

George wasn’t at all sure he had told him that, but he didn’t push the point. ‘Is there any chance that she could have walked to his home and waited for him there, instead of going back to your place?’

‘Well, I suppose she could’ve done. But no, she wouldn’t have. I’m sure of it.’

‘Is the Thomas place also within walking distance of the village?’

‘About the same distance away as our farm, in the other direction,’ said Rob. ‘But I’m quite sure she
didn’t go there. She was angry with Jeremy and, anyway, she wouldn’t have done …’

George Jarvis sighed. ‘Have you phoned the Thomases to check, sir?’

‘No.’

More often than not the relatives of a missing kid would have done that before they called the police, thought George. This lot hadn’t even thought about it, apparently, quite convinced their Angela must have come to harm not to have got home. He’d come across that sort of certainty in the past, only to find that it was misplaced.

He knew the Phillips family, of course, had seen Bill Phillips in Okehampton on market day only two or three weeks before. George had once been the village bobby at Blackstone in the days when villages had their own policemen instead of some anonymous car patrol passing through once a month – if you were lucky. George had known Rob Phillips when he was a nipper at the village primary school – Blackstone had had one of those too, once – but he didn’t expect the lad to remember him. And the policeman had never known Angela at all. He was well enough aware, though, that parents also almost always thought their daughters were sensible. And all too often they were anything but.

‘Right,’ George began patiently. ‘Then may I suggest you do so right away, sir. And try to think of any other friends she might have gone to and get in touch with them. Also, could she perhaps have fallen and hurt herself on the way home, and not been able to continue her journey?’

‘W-w-ell, I don’t know, I suppose she could have done, but Angela knows the lane home from the village like the back of her hand …’

‘You haven’t checked her route?’

‘No, but Jeremy and I came back that way last night …’ The young man sounded uncertain.

‘It was dark, sir, wasn’t it? You could have missed her easily enough. Did your sister have a torch?’

‘N-n-no.’

George thought he detected something in Rob Phillips’s voice. Was it guilt, perhaps? Nothing unusual about that in the case of a missing person. The family and those closest often felt guilty, and sometimes had good reason to. First thing any copper worth his salt checks out is the alleged nearest and dearest. George collected his thoughts. He was getting ahead of himself. There wasn’t even a crime, not yet, anyway. Just a seventeen-year-old girl who hadn’t come home from a dance.

‘Right, sir, you may like to have a bit of a look around. And make those calls. If you find anything, get back to me at once. Meanwhile we’ll start making some enquiries and I’ll get a man over to you soon as I can.’

George Jarvis hung up the phone and sat staring at it for a moment or two. He wasn’t sure how seriously he should take the call yet. But he knew what to do. Stick to procedure. Go by the book.

He entered the call meticulously in the message log. Then he used the radio to contact a constable he knew was not too far from the Phillips farm because he’d recently been despatched in his panda car across the moors to investigate a break-in at a garage near Moretonhampstead. George Jarvis was used to making decisions and issuing instructions. He might be just a civilian desk clerk now, but he was still inclined to behave like the station sergeant he had
once been. ‘We’ve got a missing person, Pete,’ he began, as he redirected the constable to Five Tors Farm.

Then he made himself a cup of tea. No point in notifying the top brass yet; see how it pans out, he told himself. But George had an uneasy feeling about this one, even this early on. The Phillips family weren’t ones to panic. They were a pretty solid bunch. More than likely, the girl was of the same stock. And even if she were the daft, irresponsible sort, at seventeen she was highly vulnerable. Best to share the burden, George thought.

He checked his watch. Still not quite nine o’clock. He knew the recently promoted Detective Sergeant Todd Mallett was on duty in CID that day, but being a Sunday with nothing much on so far, he wouldn’t expect Todd in before 9.30 or so. George liked Todd, one of the best of the younger chaps, he thought. He took a couple of sips of tea and considered his options for a moment or two more. Then he called Todd Mallett at his home in Sticklepath, just a few miles out of Okehampton on the Exeter road.

Todd listened just as carefully as George himself had done when Rob Phillips had called in. ‘I think I’ll take a run out there, then, George,’ he said eventually. ‘Not much point in coming in to the station first; it’s quiet enough otherwise, isn’t it? Young Pete Trescothwick could do with some moral support I reckon, if nothing else.’

Typical Mallett, thought George. Taking it calmly, step by step, but finger on the pulse already. There were those who regarded Todd as a bit old-fashioned and overly thorough. But George approved of qualities like that in a policeman.

At the farm, the whole family gathered in Rob’s end of the big old house. They were unimpressed when Rob told them what George Jarvis had asked him to do.

‘But she wouldn’t …’ began his mother.

‘I know, I know. But look, let’s just do it, shall we?’ Rob replied. His voice came out higher-pitched than usual with just a hint of hysteria in it now.

‘I’ll call Jeremy,’ said his mother, still sounding tearful but also as if she were glad to have something to do.