Brothers ip-17

by J M Gregson

  She’d already said that to Percy and Clyde Northcott on Tuesday, Lucy noted; she’d read the notes on that meeting before coming here today. The woman was nervous, despite her calm exterior and the cold dark eyes above the confident smile. Brendan Murphy said, ‘We’re here in connection with the death of Dominic O’Connor, not that of James.’

  ‘I guessed that. We all know how Jim died, don’t we? But I’ve accounted for all my dealings with Dominic. I haven’t anything else to tell you.’

  Murphy didn’t comment on that. ‘Certain things were found at the scene of the crime. You are probably aware from your own experience that everything in the immediate vicinity of a suspicious death is examined very carefully. Anything which might have significance is taken to our forensic laboratories for detailed investigation.’

  ‘Of course I am aware of that. But you will have found nothing which will connect me with the death of Dominic. I’ve admitted that we had an association, but it was long over at the time of his death.’

  ‘You’ve also admitted to bitter resentment at the manner in which Dominic O’Connor ended your affair.’

  Sarah glanced at Lucy. ‘I was as resentful as any woman would be who’s been ditched cruelly and unceremoniously in favour of a younger model. I then got over it and carried on with the rest of my life. I propose to continue doing that now.’

  Murphy nodded and produced a polythene container which he held out a little awkwardly at arm’s length for inspection by the woman in the simple dark green dress. ‘Do you recognise this?’

  Lisa lifted her hands automatically towards the object, then dropped them back heavily to her sides. It was a sapphire, set skilfully in gold. The very delicate gold chain which had carried it was broken, glittering like an accusation within the drab polythene.

  There was panic suddenly on the face which had been so resolutely calm. ‘That pendant’s mine. Unless you’ve dug up one exactly the same to frame me.’

  That suggestion sounded ridiculous even in her own ears and she wished she hadn’t made it. Now at last DS Peach spoke to her. ‘It’s yours, Mrs O’Connor. It was found in the room where Dominic O’Connor died, by the scene of crime team investigating his death. Can you account for its presence there?’

  ‘No. Perhaps it had been there for a long time.’

  ‘Does that really seem likely to you?’

  ‘No. I knew I’d lost it. Perhaps Dominic kept it.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem likely either, according to everything we’ve learned about him. The likeliest explanation is that you lost it last Friday night, when you were twisting a cable tight round that victim’s neck.’

  ‘I didn’t do that. I was nowhere in the vicinity of that house on Friday night.’ Sarah looked from one to the other of her questioners, searching for some sign that they believed her.

  She found nothing to comfort her in their impassive faces.

  The big hospital in Manchester was busy; on a Saturday afternoon, many families visited patients, so that there were many rather subdued children in the corridors.

  Peach met the tall, grey-haired man from the security services in the reception area as he had been directed. He had expected Jefferson to be a younger and fitter man, but it seemed the terrorist incident was serious enough to involve top brass rather than field operators. His rank was a help when they came to the room where Patrick Riordan had been isolated. Jefferson told the sister who came out to meet them that access to her patient had already been authorised, that state security and perhaps other lives in the future might be involved. The rather grim-faced medic didn’t go through the ritual of protest and the stuff about responsibility to patients which Percy usually met when he sought access to a villain.

  The sister nodded acceptance and said merely, ‘Mr Riordan is very ill. I must ask you to conclude your business in no more than ten minutes.’

  Peach grinned at the fresh-faced constable who sat on a chair outside the door. As a young copper, he had himself endured hours of boredom as sentinel to villains in hospital, all of them less interesting and lower profile than Patrick Riordan. Once inside the quiet room, they worked their way carefully to the bedside through the machine feeding the drip in the arm, the oxygen canister and the heart monitor. The figure beneath them might have been a corpse, for all the movement it evinced.

  The older man, who had seemed so much in control, was suddenly diffident here. The nearness of death in the slight figure beneath the blankets brought its own uncertainties, perhaps even a reluctant respect. Jefferson spoke softly, addressing the shape twice as ‘Mr Riordan’. Receiving no reaction, he then glanced hopefully at DCI Peach.

  Percy set his fingers upon the forearm which was, apart from the thin face, the only unbandaged flesh above the blankets. ‘You listening, Riordan?’

  For a moment, it seemed that he had not been heard. Then the shape stirred fractionally. The eyelids flickered open in slow motion, as if a great effort was being forced into this tiny, instinctive movement. The head turned a fraction, the brown eyes gazed for what seemed a long time into the face of the man whose hand was still upon the sinewy forearm. The bloodless lips moved, framed words, said unexpectedly, ‘You’re Peach.’

  ‘I am. And you’re in trouble.’

  The faintest of smiles moved the narrow mouth for a moment. They could scarcely catch his words as he said, ‘I shot the bastard. I shot that traitor, Seamus Fitzpatrick.’

  Peach glanced at his companion and received a nod of assent from the older man. ‘You didn’t kill him, Pat. He’s going to recover. You might have made Jim Fitzpatrick into a hero.’

  A frown furrowed the forehead for a few seconds, then cleared, as if even the energy involved in that was too much for the stricken figure beneath the sheets. The eyes which had shut opened again, looked for a moment at the ceiling, then swivelled painfully towards Peach’s face. ‘I’m dying.’

  Peach’s fingers pressed a fraction harder on the cold skin of the forearm. ‘I think you probably are, Pat, yes.’

  ‘I did that other traitor, you know. I got Dominic O’Connor. He didn’t live.’

  ‘You’re confessing to murder. Be careful here, Riordan.’

  ‘I don’t need to be careful. I’m a soldier, an avenging soldier. I carried out my orders. Those who matter will remember me.’

  For a brief moment, the vision of glory which had driven his life energised the mortally wounded man and his voice rose above the whisper they had strained to hear. But the effort exhausted his dying brain and he drifted again into unconsciousness.

  Peach spoke to him twice more, shifted his fingers on the wrist to feel the pulse which still moved faintly there, then nodded to the blue-clad figure who had appeared in the doorway of the quiet room. ‘We’ve finished here, Sister.’

  NINETEEN

  Lucy Peach said to her husband, ‘I didn’t much like Sarah O’Connor. But for what it’s worth, I didn’t feel she was a murderer.’

  Percy nodded. ‘We got a confession this afternoon. Patrick Riordan said in Manchester Royal Infirmary that he killed Dominic O’Connor, because he was a traitor to the republican cause.’

  ‘That lets her off the hook then.’

  ‘And Brian Jacobs and Jean Parker. And Ros O’Connor and John Alderson. Unless the confession was the last fling of a dying fanatic.’

  As if to reinforce that idea, the phone rang two minutes later. Patrick Riordan had died twenty minutes earlier, at eight twenty on that Saturday night. Neither Lucy nor Percy spoke for a little while; they were silenced by the finality of death, despite their familiarity with it. Then Lucy said, ‘You’ll get your weekends back — be able to play golf again. You’ve had a busy time with these two murders. I expect Tommy Tucker will want to call a news conference to brag about his efficiency.’

  Percy, who was gazing towards the glory of the clear western sky as the long May day died slowly, gave only an abstracted smile, even at the mention of Tucker. He watched purple infringing on crimson for
another minute before he said quietly, ‘I don’t believe Patrick Riordan killed Dominic O’Connor.’

  On Sunday morning he made a phone call and then collected DS Northcott. They had a brief discussion of tactics in the car, but otherwise little was said. The climax of an important case made even these experienced men a little nervous. You couldn’t afford to get things wrong now. If you did, lawyers would pounce gleefully upon your errors many months into the future.

  The high detached house with its smooth red Accrington brick elevations had stood impressively on this high spot for well over a hundred years now. The metallic grey Ford Fiesta which the CID men recognised as belonging to John Alderson stood in front of the house. Northcott wondered as he parked beside it whether this tranquil, impressive residence had ever before witnessed either a homicide or the subsequent arrest of the murderer.

  The first time they had come here, they had rung the bell repeatedly before moving to the rear of the house and discovering the body of Dominic O’Connor in his self-contained office. Now, on what would be their final visit, they heard the sound of movement in the house in response to Clyde’s first pressing of the bell.

  Ros O’Connor seemed neither dismayed nor surprised to see them here at half past nine on a Sunday morning. She smiled up at Northcott. ‘I’d forgotten quite how tall you are. And handsome with it, too. But I expect the female officers make you well aware of that!’

  Northcott gave her an embarrassed smile but no words. But she apparently didn’t expect any. She said cheerfully, ‘John’s here. He’s been here overnight. Well, we don’t need to make a secret of our relationship any more, do we? I’m planning to see Father Brice this week to discuss the details of our marriage. We shan’t do it for a few months, of course, and we shall have to explain that John’s been divorced from his first wife. But I don’t anticipate that being the difficulty it would once have been for Holy Mother Church!’

  She had delivered all this by the time she had led them down the hall and into the high, square sitting room, where John Alderson rose to meet them. He looked as if he would like to tell Ros she was speaking too much, but he did not know how to do that in front of the two CID men.

  Peach bided his time, waiting for the stream of words from this bright and brittle woman to cease before he spoke. She gave him his cue eventually. When they were all comfortably seated, she said breezily, ‘You must be here about Dominic’s death, I suppose. It’s impressive to see them working like this at weekends, isn’t it, John? Do you have some news for us?’

  Peach watched her for a moment, like a man waiting for a roulette wheel to stop spinning, before he said, ‘A man confessed to the murder of your husband last night. He was a member of the provisional IRA and he considered Mr O’Connor a traitor to the cause of Irish republicanism. Dominic was one of a list of targets Riordan was seeking to eliminate. On Friday night he shot and wounded another man on his list, James Fitzpatrick.’

  ‘I don’t know Mr Fitzpatrick.’

  ‘There is no reason why you should. He is a prominent Labour politician in Manchester. That is where Patrick Riordan shot him twice on Friday night in an assassination attempt. Riordan was pursued by the security services and was severely wounded himself. I spoke to him in hospital yesterday afternoon. He declared his responsibility for the death of Mr O’Connor. Patrick Riordan died at eight twenty last night.’

  Ros O’Connor’s small, perfectly formed features looked as surprised and innocent as those of a kitten whose bed has suddenly disappeared. It was John Alderson who now spoke quickly, as if he feared what she might say if he waited for her to respond. ‘Then that surely concludes your case. It will be a relief to all of us to have it settled.’

  Ros looked at him as if she had for a moment forgotten his presence. Then she turned brightly back to Peach and said, ‘Yes, that’s right, isn’t it? You must be very pleased about that. It’s good of you to come round here so early on a Sunday morning to give us the news.’

  ‘Except that it is hardly news at all, Mrs O’Connor. I don’t believe that Patrick Riordan killed Dominic O’Connor. I believe that he knew he was dying and that he was claiming what his fanatic’s mind considered the glory attached to this murder of a traitor to the republican cause.’

  The silence which fell upon the room seemed profound, after the nervous torrent of Ros’s words before it. It was Alderson who said eventually, ‘Surely a confession is a confession? Unless you have strong reasons to think it false, you cannot simply choose to disregard it.’

  ‘No. But I have those strong reasons, Mr Alderson. I think the person who tightened that cord so mercilessly around Dominic O’Connor’s neck is in this room at the moment.’

  ‘I didn’t kill Dominic. I was in my own house, not here, on that Friday night.’ Alderson glanced sideways at the untroubled face of the woman he planned to marry. ‘And Ros wasn’t here at that time either. She was with her sister in Settle. There is a whole family who can bear witness to that.’

  ‘I accept that. But Mr O’Connor wasn’t killed on Friday night.’

  Ros leaned forward, looking like the naive and excited child she still was in so many respects. She said almost coquettishly, ‘This is intriguing, Chief Inspector Peach. Do tell us more!’

  Peach looked at her with the first signs of distaste he had allowed himself. ‘This death was carefully engineered and planned. Planned by you, Mrs O’Connor.’

  ‘But that can’t be so, Chief Inspector. I wasn’t around at the time. I was forty miles away in Settle.’

  ‘You were around all right. You twisted that cable hard into your husband’s neck, some time around the middle of that Friday afternoon.’

  Ros shuddered theatrically. ‘You’re being very cruel, talking like this, Mr Peach. I still had feelings for Dominic, even though I didn’t love him any more. That’s why I made him the snack meal he liked so much and left it with him when I went off to my sister’s house.’

  ‘You didn’t leave it with him. You watched him eat those sandwiches and fruit and cake at lunchtime. Probably you ate with him.’

  She laughed, a small, tinkling sound which was more eerie because no one else in the room was even smiling. ‘This is silly. Dominic died during the evening. Your post-mortem report told you that.’

  ‘No. The body was not discovered until twenty-four hours after death and it had been subjected to temperatures ranging from not much above freezing to ninety degrees Fahrenheit. The estimated time of death was based on analysis of the stomach contents, which showed that the items we’ve just mentioned were consumed approximately two hours before death. We were foolish enough for some days to accept your assurance that the meal had been consumed at around six thirty. The reality is that it had been eaten five hours or more before that. Two hours after it had been consumed, you returned from the house to your husband’s office, carrying the cable which you used to garrotte Dominic O’Connor.’

  John Alderson began to protest, but Peach’s eyes never left the kittenish face with its untroubled, innocent reaction to this gravest of accusations. Ros spoke evenly, with a strange control. ‘He deserved it, you know. He treated me badly, Dominic did. He took so many other women to bed, when I was available to him. And now, when John and I have got together, he was in the way of what we wanted to do. I worked it out, you see. If I removed him it would be simple justice, and at the same time it would allow John and me to move forward.’

  The detectives had what they wanted now. Peach’s only aim was to keep her talking about this. He felt no need to caution her; he had no doubt that she would sign a written statement of her confession in due course. Murderers like this lived in a private world. It was a world where flattery was often a useful weapon. He said unemotionally, ‘It was clever of you to think of giving yourself an alibi like this. I expect you knew the body was unlikely to be discovered quickly.’

  She nodded eagerly, entranced now by the memory of her own ingenuity. ‘I know about post-mortems and stomach cont
ents. I read a lot of crime novels.’ She looked straight into Peach’s face, for the first time in many minutes. ‘What put you on to me, Chief Inspector?’

  The use of the cliche by this slight, bright-faced figure would have been comic in other circumstances. Peach said wearily, ‘You overplayed your hand. Gilded the lily. Whatever other tired phrase you care to use, Mrs O’Connor. The sapphire pendant you left for us to find was too obvious a device.’

  ‘That belonged to Sarah. She deserved to be involved in this. She’d slept with Dominic, when he was married to me. I found the pendant in his car and I kept it.’ She leaned forward confidentially, anxious to convince them of her cleverness. ‘I thought it might come in useful, sooner or later, you see. And it did.’ She folded her arms and rocked herself gently on her seat, content with this display of her cunning. ‘I put a letter from her to Dominic in there as well. She deserved to be implicated, don’t you think?’

  ‘But the pendant didn’t ring true. You’d already told us that Dominic was careful not to leave around any traces of the liaisons he’d conducted. It didn’t make sense that he’d have kept a sentimental memento of a dead affair. The person most likely to have kept that pendant and planted it at the scene of the murder was you.’

  Ros considered the idea for a moment, her head a little on one side. Then she nodded her acceptance of it. ‘It was me who broke the chain, you know. I enjoyed that. I put it in the drawer of Dominic’s desk when I’d killed him, as though he’d kept it as a memento. It was one of the last things I did in the room, when I prepared it for discovery. I didn’t know at the time who would find Dominic there. I never thought it would be a DCI and his detective sergeant. I wasn’t sure when I heard whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.’