A Kind Of Wild Justice (8 page)

On the car seat next to him was a freshly purchased Millet’s rucksack containing £50,000 in used tenners. As instructed. It also contained a signalling device, concealed in the padding in the bottom. It might be discovered at once. Or Angela’s kidnapper might just empty the cash into another container or straight into a vehicle. On the other hand it might just give out a signal for long enough for the police to close in on him. After Angela Phillips was freed, of course. Nothing was to happen until then. That was the priority.

It was all a matter of survival, really. And not just the survival of Angela Phillips, but also that of the senior police officers on the case. Fielding knew the way Parsons’s mind worked. He was unlikely to catch much criticism, if any at all, over loss of the Phillipses’ £50,000 as long as Angela was safely recovered. Indeed, he would be a hero again. So would Fielding himself, he considered with some satisfaction. As Todd Mallett had worked out long ago, he liked being a hero. But if Angela were lost, he and Parsons, already involved in an unorthodox operation, would
both be deeply in the mire, whether or not the money was ever recovered. In fact, probably particularly if it were – if it looked as though any priority had been given to anything other than the safety of the missing girl.

He was also about to wander into a forest at the dead of night in the presence of an undoubtedly dangerous man who could well be a raving lunatic. Fielding licked his dry lips. He drove as instructed to the parking area at the end of the road, which ran round about half the circumference of Fernworthy reservoir. When he switched off the engine the silence was deafening. Fielding didn’t think he had ever really appreciated that expression before. He switched off the Land Rover’s lights too and was instantly swallowed up in pitch-blackness. Nowhere, but nowhere, is darker than a forest at dead of night, he thought.

A map-reading expert had pinpointed the appropriate reference for him. Fielding hoped his own skills were up to it. It should take only a few minutes to walk to the tree, but at night, making your way through a forest was far from simple, he could easily get lost and he would have to be careful not to trip over the undergrowth. He decided to try to find the appropriate tree straight away and then just wait.

With the help of a powerful torch, its beam cutting reassuringly through the darkness, Fielding, taking care to keep the light directed away from his face at all times, picked his way gingerly through brambles and nettles, weaving around the tree trunks. He found the tall conifer marked with the red cross more easily than he expected. It stood alone in a small clearing. He checked his watch. He was tempted to put the
rucksack alongside it there and then, but decided against. The instructions were to make the drop at midnight. He would do it by the book. He switched off his torch, leaned against a nearby tree trunk and wondered if he were being watched. Almost certainly he was. He pulled the peak of his black baseball cap a little further down over his forehead. He was dying for a cigarette, but he didn’t dare light up. As Parsons had pointed out, they had no idea how well the kidnapper knew Rob Phillips, whether personally or just by sight. Either way, it was far too great a risk to allow the flame from his lighter to illuminate his face.

He was standing quite still when he heard the crack of a twig nearby. His eyes were adjusted as well as possible to the darkness now and through the gloom he could just make out an approaching figure. Early, he thought. What should he do now? Should he have made the drop already after all? He was confused. The figure was coming closer. He hadn’t expected the bastard to show himself like this. He passed Fielding within about three or four yards. He was wearing some kind of military-style camouflage jacket – but then, so did almost everybody nowadays, it seemed. The policeman could not see his face. He could see the shape of a gun clearly enough, though: a .22 rifle, by the look of it, fitted with some kind of night sight and a silencer.

The man moved almost soundlessly towards the tree with the red cross on it. Casually he propped his gun against the trunk. Then he undid his flies and had a pee.

Fielding could barely believe his eyes. What was going on? He tried desperately not to move a muscle. But something alerted the other man’s attention. He
could feel eyes boring into him across the clearing, peering through the darkness. Suddenly the man picked up his gun and took off at a run.

Instinctively Fielding called out, ‘Hey, wait.’

The man kept running. Fielding was bewildered. He did not know what to do or think. He glanced at his watch. It was still only ten to twelve. Should he follow? He’d never catch the bastard anyway. The man obviously knew these woods. He’d taken off at a pace. Even with the help of his torch, if Fielding tried to chase him he would be sure to fall over or at the very least run into something.

For a few seconds he could make no sense at all of what he had seen. Then gradually his jumbled thoughts cleared. It only made no sense if the man who had run away was the kidnapper. But what if he wasn’t the kidnapper at all? Of course! The most likely scenario was that sonny was a poacher out hunting, his appearance at the drop spot just a ridiculous coincidence. Poachers didn’t like bright lights or big bangs drawing attention to their presence – hence the rifle with a night sight and silencer. Fernworthy’s three square miles or so of dense forest land would be home to more than one herd of deer, Fielding reckoned. While Dartmoor hosted nothing like the herds of big red deer which roamed Exmoor, there were other breeds in its woodland areas, as there were throughout the West Country, come to that. And although the managed forest of Fernworthy was open to the public, unauthorised shooting was strictly forbidden. That had to be it: a poacher. But Fielding had no idea where that left him – or Angela Phillips, come to that.

He decided that the best he could do was to
continue as if nothing had happened. It couldn’t do any harm, surely. On the dot of midnight he strode across to the tree and dropped the rucksack at its base in a rather theatrical manner. Then he walked back to his original vantage point and waited. He waited and waited, heart thumping in his chest, for what felt like an endless period of time. Now and then he glanced at the luminous hands of his watch. Nobody came to pick up the cash and, if Angela Phillips was nearby, he could neither see nor hear any sign of her. After forty-five minutes he could stand it no longer. He had to try to find out what was going on. He turned and began to make his way back to the Land Rover.

When he got there he switched on the police radio, which had been hastily installed in the vehicle earlier that evening. Straight away a call came through from Parsons. ‘It’s off. Matey’s called the farm already. Says there were armed police in the woods with rifles. Bill Phillips assured him there weren’t. I even talked to him myself. He’d already made it clear he knew I was here. He’s been watching our every move, no doubt about it.’

‘Shit,’ said Fielding. ‘There was a man with a rifle. Night sights and silencer, too. I think he was a poacher. Matey must have seen him as well. I don’t damn well believe it.’

He heard Parsons draw in a deep breath. ‘Right, then, go get the money and come on back,’ instructed the DCI abruptly and only someone as close to him as Fielding would have detected the strain in his voice.

At 8 a.m. the next day, after another sleepless night of recriminations and distress at Five Tors Farm, the kidnapper made a further phone call: ‘You’ve got a
second chance. Same place, same time. But I’m fining you. The price has gone up to £70,000. This will be the last chance. Any hint of police presence this time and the girl dies.’

Fielding, mightily relieved, could see hope flickering over the faces of Angela’s family. They too, he suspected, had begun to believe that Angela was probably already dead. Last night must have been unbearable for them. It had been bad enough for him.

‘But you have to let me go this time, Inspector,’ said Rob Phillips. ‘Maybe he saw the sergeant’s face. We can’t take the risk.’

Parsons dodged the issue. ‘Are you absolutely sure there is nobody you know who you think could be doing this?’ the DCI asked for the umpteenth time.

The younger man shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it’s anyone the family knows, I really can’t.’

Ultimately it was agreed that Rob should make the second drop and secretly Fielding was glad not to have been given the task again. He couldn’t quite stifle the nagging doubt that he might somehow have been responsible for the failure of the first exchange, although he did not really see how that could have been so.

However, Parsons had a plan to keep control. ‘We tried to play it straight,’ he told Fielding. ‘You can’t legislate for something like your damned poacher and that was probably our mistake. This time we take no chances. We get the armed-response boys in. Make ’em look like soldiers on exercise. There’s enough of ’em up at Okehampton camp.’

‘He’ll know, he’ll not fall for it,’ intervened Todd Mallett. ‘He’s been spooked once by a man with a gun in the wood.’

‘If we get ’em in position quickly enough he shouldn’t even see ’em.’

The Phillips family, of course, were not told of the new plan. But at 10.30 p.m., half an hour or so before Rob Phillips was due to leave the farm to follow in Mike Fielding’s footsteps of the night before, the kidnapper called again. ‘Change of plan,’ he said. ‘Make the drop at Hay Tor. Leave the rucksack at the top of the tor itself. The very top.’

‘Shit,’ said Fielding. ‘He’s giving us the run-round. And Hay Tor, too – no cover for him, or the girl, come to that.’

‘Or, indeed, us,’ commented the DCI. Hay Tor was Dartmoor’s highest point, bleak, exposed and at the other side of the moor from Blackstone.

‘Maybe that’s the point. I just don’t know. I wonder what he’s up to …’

He and Fielding were conferring in the main hallway of the farmhouse, out of hearing of the distraught family gathered, as usual, in the kitchen.

‘I’m going to call off the armed-response boys from Fernworthy and see if they’ve got any bright ideas on how they can give some sort of cover at Hay Tor without being seen,’ Parsons said quietly.

Fielding listened uneasily as his boss got on the radio and began to issue fresh instructions. He had no sensible alternative suggestion, but was this really such a good move? he wondered. Within minutes it became clear that it wasn’t.

Just as Rob was about to leave for the new assignation point, the kidnapper called once more. Bill Phillips answered the phone.

‘Tell the pigs I didn’t see the gun boys go into the forest, but I sure as hell saw ’em come out. Oh, and
tell ’em – when your daughter dies I won’t have killed her. That’ll be down to them.’

He hung up at once, leaving a stunned Bill Phillips looking at a buzzing receiver. He turned to Fielding and Parsons. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing,’ he shouted at them. ‘He’s right. The bastard’s right. If my daughter dies it will be down to you lot. All I ever wanted to do was to give him the money and get my girl back. But you couldn’t settle for that, could you, not any of you.’

DCI Parsons looked him coolly in the eye, still the manager, still the chief executive. If he was as shaken by the turn of events as Fielding, he certainly didn’t show it. ‘Mr Phillips, I had to take responsibility for your son’s safety as well as your daughter’s. I’m afraid the kidnapper double-bluffed us on this one. We couldn’t have guessed that.’

‘Then you should have left well alone,’ stormed Phillips. ‘Let me do it my way. He’s been scared off, now, and if we’ve lost him then we’ve lost Angela too. God knows what he’ll do to her.’

If he hasn’t done it already, thought Fielding. Aloud he said, with a confidence he did not feel, ‘Try not to worry, Mr Phillips. He’ll be in touch again very soon, I’m sure of it. He wants your money not your daughter.’

The kidnapper did not call again. Not that night. Not the next morning. Kidnaps were such a rare crime in the UK that there were few precedents. Those that did exist encouraged little optimism among the police team. And in the case of Angela Phillips some of the most important lessons learned in the past did not fully apply. The débâcle surrounding the abduction
and murder of Lesley Whittle by the infamous Black Panther taught the importance of taking the press into police confidence and insuring a media clamp-down over kidnaps for as long as there was a chance of safely retrieving the victim. Parsons and his team had not had the luxury of choosing that option, because following the discovery of Angela’s shoe, they had promptly announced her missing and called for public help. Fielding suspected they would all be criticised for that sooner or later, but it was easy to be wise after the event.

By noon that day – it was already Thursday and five days after Angela had been taken – a kind of restrained panic was setting in. Still no further calls. Still no further clues. Parsons decided to throw caution to the wind and step up the hunt. Territorial Army soldiers on their annual training at Okehampton camp were called in to continue the systematic searching of Dartmoor and the surrounding farmland. After the first ransom demand was received, Parsons had decided to keep the search fairly low-key, in order not to alarm the kidnapper. Now he changed tack and threw everything at it. Angela Phillips could have been taken miles away from where she had been abducted, of course, but nobody had come up with a better game plan than to stick to standard police procedure and to continue to search outwards from the crime scene, gradually taking in a wider and wider expanse of the moor and the surrounding farmland. The vast majority of victims of violent crimes were ultimately found in their own backyard.

But Dartmoor was notoriously difficult to search. Bodies, even after quite a short time, were unlikely to
be discovered. Everyone remembered the nightmare faced by the parents of the children murdered by Brady and Hindley, and buried on the Yorkshire Moors. Without the help of the murderers, their graves could not be found. Even taking the optimistic view that Angela Phillips was still alive and hidden on the moor, the team knew she could be anywhere. There were cairns and old quarries, disused mines with a whole network of shafts, old sheds and storm drains. George Jarvis, who had policed the moor longer than anyone, was fond of saying that he reckoned the results of half the unsolved murders in England could be lying rotting somewhere on Dartmoor and nobody would ever know.