Brothers' Tears

by J M Gregson

  Lucy glanced at Brendan Murphy and the DC seized his cue. ‘I believe DCI Peach told you that we would need to speak to you again after we’d made other enquiries.’ Sarah nodded coolly, assessing this fresh-faced young man and feeling that her considerably greater experience of life would give her the edge on him. As if he felt the stress of her judgement, he added, ‘I should emphasize that you are helping the police voluntarily with this investigation.’

  ‘As a good citizen should.’ A smile spread her mouth wide as she nodded. ‘I am well aware of the requirements of the law and of my duties as a citizen. I caught your name when DS Peach introduced you. You must surely be Irish yourself, with a name like that.’

  ‘I’m afraid not. My roots are certainly Irish, but I’ve never lived outside Lancashire and never even visited Eire.’ It was an explanation it seemed to Brendan he would have to make for the rest of his life. He tried not to show that he was well used to it.

  ‘Don’t be apologetic. I’m thoroughly English myself, but people often assume I’m from Ireland because of my marriage to Jim.’ She stiffened a little as she turned towards DS Peach. ‘I am anxious to have this matter cleared up as quickly as possible.’

  This seemed to Lucy cold and formal phrasing for a woman who should have been stricken by the death of her husband. ‘We know quite a lot more now than when DCI Peach spoke to you on Wednesday. We are moving towards an arrest, but we need to make sure we have the evidence to make a case stick before we prefer charges.’

  ‘A curious expression that, I always think. I expect it’s archaic, like much of the language of the law.’

  She seemed to be demonstrating how in control of herself she was, how free she felt not only from guilt but from other emotions also. Lucy spoke firmly. ‘In the aftermath of a serious crime like this, we have a large team and we follow the movements of many people. Most of this work produces nothing useful, but occasionally we discover something significant. That justifies the measures we take and the resources we allot to them.’

  Mrs O’Connor looked at the small gold watch on her wrist, not troubling to disguise her impatience. ‘I’m sure it does. Is this leading up to something?’

  DC Murphy flicked open his notebook as Lucy said, ‘I’m afraid it is. Forgive me if this sounds impertinent. You were followed last night as you drove out of Brunton.’

  Sarah paused for a moment, determined not to reveal any emotion. ‘A blue BMW is not the most inconspicuous of vehicles, I suppose. Does this mean I am under police surveillance?’

  ‘No. It was a random sighting by one of our officers. It was his own initiative that made him follow you.’

  She nodding, assessing the information and its implications. ‘He was good: I’d no idea that he was following me. That is if it was a he – we all have to be careful about gender nowadays, don’t we? I expect he followed me to the Grouse Inn.’

  ‘It was a he, and he did.’ Lucy tried not to smile at the notion of Clyde Northcott as a female. ‘He saw who came to meet you there.’

  ‘My brother-in-law. Scarcely an unusual meeting, for a woman who lost her husband three nights earlier.’

  ‘But an unusual and remote place to meet. Almost as if you wished to keep the assignation a secret one.’

  The broad brow furrowed as Sarah O’Connor showed her irritation for the first time. ‘This is like living in a police state. Do I have to account for my every movement?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I agree this is unusual and I can’t force you to answer. But a murder investigation is by definition unusual. We are usually given a little more latitude, so long as it is clear that we are in pursuit of the truth.’

  ‘And I would be regarded as obstructive if I chose not to answer your questions. It’s a form of blackmail, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s not intended to be. Try to look at it from our point of view. We want to find the truth about everything. Ninety per cent of it will be irrelevant to the enquiry and will be discarded. You can’t expect us to know which ten per cent will be relevant – even crucial.’

  Sarah looked at the younger woman, wondering if she was more prepared to accept these explanations from a woman than she would have been from a man. Probably, she thought. She was sure she would have been more brusque with DC Murphy if he’d been offering her these thoughts. She said abruptly, ‘I didn’t initiate that cloak-and-dagger meeting last night. It was Dominic who said when and where he wanted to see me.’

  DS Lucy Peach nodded, as if this was exactly what she had expected. ‘And what was the purpose of this conference?’

  She took a deep breath and looked at a point on the carpet exactly between her two CID visitors. ‘Dominic thinks he knows who killed Jim. He wanted to check out a few things with me.’

  Saturdays are quiet in police stations. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, more now than it has ever been, so the law has to be upheld for seven days a week as well as twenty-four hours a day. But coppers like their weekends as much as other mortals, so that there is but a skeleton staff in the buildings on Saturdays and Sundays, even with a murder investigation in full swing.

  The CID section was almost deserted at ten o’clock on this Saturday morning, when Lucy Peach and Brendan Murphy conferred with the man in charge of the investigation and his bagman. There was a little tension between Lucy, who had been at Percy’s side for several years, and Clyde Northcott who had now replaced her. Curiosity rather than tension, Lucy corrected herself; Clyde had been Percy’s best man at their wedding and she had a huge respect for him. So she was merely anxious to see how Clyde was making out. But a small, unworthy part of her did not want him to be successful, did not want him to obliterate the memories of the cases Percy had conducted with her at his side. That was extremely petty, Lucy admitted to herself; perhaps she should get on with creating that baby and making her mother happy.

  Percy said with some distaste, ‘There are all sorts of things going on here as well as murder.’ Peach liked things tidy. When you were investigating the most serious crime of all, you should be able to concentrate on it without the distractions of drugs and gambling and prostitution and all the subsidiary violence which accompanies them.

  Lucy said, ‘There’s going to be a big case coming up about the procuring of minors for prostitution. Asian men have been raiding council homes in search of defenceless girls. Not just here but all over the north-west. These kids have been subjected to unspeakable degradation and repeated rapes. Our team is assembling more and more evidence. We’ll be ready to present the case within weeks. It could happen now, but we want to get the big boys who are financing this as well as the men who’ve been procuring minors and arranging their clients.’

  Percy nodded. ‘The money’s coming from the drug barons. They’re expanding their enterprises, diversifying into other criminal businesses, as if they were legitimate entrepreneurs. They’re dangerous men – and women.’ He couldn’t forget the image of Linda Coleman’s smile as she casually informed him that she knew all about Lucy’s pursuit of the young Pakistanis involved in this.

  Clyde Northcott said, ‘All this is muddying the waters around James O’Connor and his death. We know that he was moving further and further into local crime, but he covered his tracks well. He had successful legitimate businesses. His paper mills supply stationery and packing materials to some very big companies, and his betting shops and casinos appear to be perfectly legal earners. But he liked takeovers and it seems he was quite unscrupulous about what he acquired: so long as it was profitable, he was interested.’

  Peach nodded. ‘We have to be aware of that, because it is what surrounds our crime. But beyond that, we can be blinkered. Other teams are investigating the prostitution of minors and the sale of illegal drugs. Our concern is to determine who killed James O’Connor. Because there is so much other crime around this, questioning suspects is difficult. Too many of the people our team has spoken to have previous dealings with the police and are determined to reveal as little as pos
sible.’

  Lucy said quietly, ‘The victim’s widow says her brother-in-law can help us. She thinks Dominic O’Connor has vital information about James’s death.’

  Northcott said, ‘I’ve been trying to contact him all morning, but there’s no reply from his land line and his mobile’s switched off.’

  Peach frowned. ‘I think you and I had better get out to his house this afternoon and see what he has to say for himself, Clyde.’

  Dominic O’Connor lived on the northern outskirts of the town, not far from the road which ran out into the Ribble Valley and some of the finest country in England. Percy Peach, who had walked and biked through most of the area as boy and youth, was fond of telling anyone who would listen that there was no large town in the two hundred miles between Brunton and Glasgow.

  They moved along an unpaved lane, past humble cottages which had been built here around 1850, well before the grander residences which had followed them. The younger O’Connor’s dwelling was a solid detached house, late Victorian or Edwardian, in the smooth red Accrington brick which characterised the best local buildings of that era. It was less grand than the house of his dead elder brother, but it had a splendid view across the valley, over the once busy railway lines to the steep slopes opposite. There the North Lancs golf course, where Percy took his exercise, stretched away towards the wilder moorland beyond.

  Percy studied the house and its surroundings for a moment before moving to the blue front door, which was flanked by Yorkshire stone bays. They could hear the bell ringing beyond the door, but no other movement. The house sounded very empty, but he pressed the bell twice more before accepting that it was not going to be answered. A man in the front garden of the adjoining house stopped working his border and leant upon his fork, watching them curiously.

  Clyde Northcott went over to the low brick wall between the houses and showed the man his warrant card. ‘We need to speak to Mr Dominic O’Connor. Would you know where he is, sir?’

  ‘Nope.’ The man seemed to find the negative very satisfying. ‘I ain’t seen ’im today. But I’ve only been here since two. I don’t live here; I’m the gardener.’ He lifted his head to look at the high elevations of the house where he was working, as if that should have been obvious to his enquirer.

  ‘And have you seen anyone else coming or going from this house whilst you’ve been working?’

  Their informant gave the question such consideration that they felt he must surely produce something. But all he said was, ‘No. It’s been very quiet all the time I’ve been here. I’ve been round the back part of the time, but I ain’t seen no one. Lady of the house where you are always speaks to me when she sees me. Pleasant woman, don’t know her name. But I ain’t seen no one today.’ He nodded his satisfaction over this glimpse into his social world, then resumed forking the border.

  Peach tried the door to the passage by the side of the garage and found it unlocked. He and Northcott moved cautiously to the back of the house, where there was ample evidence of the era in which it had been built. The house extended a long way back behind the smooth brick of its high frontage. Now that it was obvious that the place was deserted, the two CID men peered through the windows of this rear section of the dwelling. Behind lounge and dining room, there was what had once been called a ‘living kitchen’, with the sort of huge black fire range which Percy’s mother-in-law, Agnes Blake, would have coated with black lead in her youth. The old range, with an oven at one side and its hob for the sooty kettle, had long since been replaced in this residence by an attractive brick fireplace.

  What had been a scullery with stone sinks when the house was new was now a well-fitted small kitchen; what had originally been a large wash-house behind this was now a spacious utility room. And still the buildings stretched backwards, into the garden which climbed away beyond them. Substantial buildings like this needed a lot of heating, but that had not been a major problem in 1900. Coal had been plentiful and cheap and the servants to carry it readily available. The rearmost building of all had once been a substantial coal store, capable of housing two or three tons of the shining black fuel if necessary.

  It was a long time since this section of the house had been used for its original purpose. It now had a fine new entrance door, indicating that it had been converted into an office which could operate independently from the rest of the house. To their surprise, the door opened instantly when Peach turned the handle.

  On this fresh May day of clear skies and high white clouds, their nostrils as they moved out of the clear air and into the room were assailed instantly by a scent both of them had known before and did not seek to smell again. Unnaturally sweet and characteristically foetid: the scent of human death.

  Dominic O’Connor lay slumped over his desk with his head laid sideways upon it. The cord around his neck had bitten so deeply into it that it was scarcely visible beneath the darkening flesh. His eyes were wide and bulging, as if in astonishment at what had happened to him. He looked as if he had been surprised only minutes before they arrived.

  Only the odour announced to them that he had been dead for several hours at least.

  NINE

  Peter Coleman was arrested and charged with the murder of James O’Connor at one o’clock on Saturday. Although a heavy police presence surrounded his house for the arrest, it was surprisingly low key and undramatic in the end. One of the thugs Coleman used to enforce security for the Lennon organisation disclosed the fact that his chief had driven to Claughton Towers with the sole aim of shooting the man at the centre of the evening’s celebration. As Peach had forecast, the rat deserted his sinking master almost eagerly, once his own safety was threatened.

  Chief Superintendent Tucker didn’t like having his weekends interrupted. But Saturday was a quiet news day, so there was every chance that his media briefing would go out unedited on radio and television. When you had good news to impart to the public, you wanted maximum coverage; he always emphasized that to his staff. And it wouldn’t do him any harm if the Chief Constable saw him broadcasting the news of a police triumph to the nation at large.

  He had scheduled the briefing for four thirty, and the cameras and microphones, as well as the crime reporters from national and local press, were in position by then. Thomas Bulstrode Tucker spent a good twenty minutes with the make-up girls, removing his rimless glasses to allow them to powder and groom him before the single large mirror in their improvised set-up in the town hall. Tucker had designated this venue, in the belief that he would make an impressive figure at the top of the wide stone steps, as he announced his victory over the darker forces in society. A civic setting would give him gravitas. Gravitas was a very important element in the armoury of T.B. Tucker.

  He liked to appear in a well-pressed uniform on these occasions, believing correctly that smartness added conviction in the public eye. Both BBC television and ITV microphones were here, he noted with approval. He nodded a friendly greeting to the young woman who was the BBC’s weekend presenter in the north-west. ‘Announce me as the man who directed this successful investigation of a major crime,’ he whispered to her, as the director gave the one-minute warning.

  Tucker had originally thought he would appear sitting behind a table, with lesser mortals in uniform alongside him to emphasise his status. But uniforms were thin on the ground on a Saturday, and he was secretly pleased that that insufferable man Peach had said he was pursuing an inquiry in the Wilpshire district of the town and wouldn’t be around for this PR exercise. PR was emphatically not Peach’s forte and he made Tucker nervous when he was anywhere in the vicinity. Peach might have produced this result, but it needed a man with his chief’s gifts to put the right gloss on it and make the most of the situation. He would appear standing at the top of the town hall steps: that would give a greater sense of urgency.

  The rather nervous presenter announced Tucker as he had requested: as the man in charge of this investigation into the brutal murder of a popular local businessman who
was also a former international sportsman. She followed this with her first question, which Tucker had also set up for himself. ‘We understand that a man is now helping you with your enquiries.’

  Tommy Bloody Tucker smiled urbanely. ‘That is correct, Jenny. But I think this is surely a bit of police jargon which we can dispense with on this occasion. Let us be honest and direct; I am here to tell you that an arrest has been made and that charges will be preferred within the next couple of hours.’

  He paused, smiling modestly through the little flutter of reaction which followed his statement. Then he added, ‘I shall not give you the offender’s name at the moment. That will be released as soon as he has been charged with the crime of murder.’

  He paused. The word still made its impact, even in this violent century. Jenny said, ‘Did you make the arrest yourself, sir?’

  Tucker gave her an avuncular smile. ‘I don’t see any need for “sirs” here. I am a member of the police service who is proud to be a humble servant of the public.’

  ‘Who pay your wages,’ said the presenter, with a rather more acid smile.

  ‘Who pay our wages and I’m sure are pleased to do so, when we produce results like this one.’

  ‘So you led the enquiry and made the arrest yourself, Superintendent Tucker?’

  ‘Chief Superintendent, Jenny. Not that we’re going to stand on ceremony here, are we? Not with a result like this. Rejoice, as a certain fine lady said before me. Rejoice and be thankful for our success!’

  ‘We shall, Chief Superintendent. Did you arrest this man yourself ?’

  Tucker’s noble brow wrinkled a little with irritation at this nit-picking. He said with a lofty smile, ‘I don’t think you appreciate the way in which the system operates, Jenny. You couldn’t be expected to, I suppose. I direct the team. I maintain an overview of order and disorder in the area. I estimate the place this particular crime occupies within that. I direct an efficient and enthusiastic team and ensure that it produces the desired results.’