Free A Kind Of Wild Justice by Hilary Bonner Page B

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 abductionand 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 tobe 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.
    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