by J M Gregson
In the hours after O’Connor’s death, the door of the room which had been his office had been shut, as had the large, south-facing window. The room temperature had varied from near-freezing overnight to almost ninety degrees Fahrenheit as the sun had poured through that window before the body was discovered on Saturday afternoon. Therefore any deductions from the progress of rigor mortis must necessarily be highly tentative, which made the establishment of a time of death very difficult.
However, analysis of stomach contents indicated that a substantial cold meal of sandwiches, fruit and fruit cake had been consumed some two hours before death. An almost empty flask of coffee had been found in the bottom drawer of the desk. O’Connor had died more than twenty – and anything up to thirty – hours before he was discovered at 16.07 by DCI Peach and DS Northcott. Establishing the time when he had last eaten would pinpoint the time of death.
Forensics had found fibres on the corpse’s person which were from someone else’s clothing, as well as hairs which were quite certainly from someone else’s head. These might of course have no connection with the murder. A locked drawer contained personal letters which had been fingerprinted by forensics and had now been passed to the man in charge of the investigation.
Peach and Northcott immediately found one of these very relevant.
Peach thought Sarah O’Connor looked rather more upset than she’d been six days earlier, when they’d interviewed her about the murder of her husband. Her face was composed but very white beneath the shining black hair; her dark eyes glittered deep in their sockets. She looked as if she had not slept well. There was nothing necessarily significant in that. Shock can be delayed as well as immediate.
James’s widow remembered not only Clyde Northcott’s name, but his detective sergeant rank, which was unusual.
The CID men looked round the big comfortable room with its luxurious furnishings and fittings. As if she read their thoughts, she said quickly, ‘This place is far too big for me. Clare’s off at university and I’m rattling around in this mansion. I shan’t stay here, once Jim is buried and I can feel closure.’
Peach nodded. ‘We should be able to release his body quite soon now. You will have heard that we’ve made an arrest for his murder.’
‘Yes. A man called Peter Coleman, they said on the radio this morning. Not a name I know. But I kept well clear of Jim’s business deals.’ She sounded as if she was deliberately distancing herself from both her husband and his death.
‘You’ve missed nothing by not knowing Coleman. He’s a violent man who’s committed other crimes. We shall get him for this one. He’s going to go down for a long time.’
‘That’s good. You’re used to hearing threats of violence, when you’re married to a prominent Irishman, but you somehow don’t think it will ever happen to anyone close to you.’
‘And now your brother-in-law has been killed as well. Only a day after you’d met him in the Grouse Inn on the side of Pendle Hill. That must have been another terrible shock for you.’
‘It was. A woman officer called Peach interviewed me on Saturday about Dominic. Would she be any relation to you, DCI Peach?’
He smiled. ‘Detective Sergeant Peach is my wife, Mrs O’Connor. We used to work together, but police procedure dictates that partners cannot work together as a pairing. Lucy was excellent at distracting susceptible males, among other things. DS Northcott doesn’t do that; he is able to offer a more physical presence, whenever it is needed.’
Sarah smiled at the big black man, who inclined his head an inch forward in acknowledgement. Then she said, ‘Your wife is quite a looker, DCI Peach.’ She waited unsuccessfully for a reaction. ‘Still, you might be better with your new partner in a crisis.’
‘Yes. It seemed rather a strange time for you to be meeting alone with your brother-in-law.’
She thought of saying that she’d already told his wife her reasons for that. But she decided that it was better for her to be as cooperative as she could be. ‘There were some nasty people around Jim, at times. Dominic thought he knew who had killed him. That’s why we met.’
‘I see.’
‘He wanted to check a few things out with me. Whether certain people who were at Claughton Towers last Monday night were there at Jim’s invitation or mine, for instance. He thought he’d glimpsed the man you mentioned, Peter Coleman, just before Jim was killed. He knew the people Coleman worked for and he wanted to check on one or two of the invitees for that reason.’ She had been so composed that it was a surprise when her voice broke suddenly on her next words. ‘He . . . he knew far more about the people Jim worked with and the people who were his business rivals than I did. Dominic steered clear, but he knew a lot of things about Jim.’
‘Do you think that is what cost Dominic his life?’
She was shaken by the question. ‘I don’t know, do I? I don’t see why – Dominic didn’t fish in the same murky pools as Jim.’
‘But two brothers killed in the same week. It would be amazing if there wasn’t a connection between the two deaths, don’t you think?’
‘I suppose it would. I hadn’t really considered the matter before.’
Peach doubted that, but he didn’t pursue the notion. ‘Policemen have to keep open minds. We’re doing just that.’
Sarah stared down at the elegant navy leather shoes beneath the dark blue trousers which clothed her long legs. ‘You know your own business best. I hope you find who killed Dominic as quickly as you did Jim’s killer.’
‘We shall need to know much more than we do at present about the months before his death. I think you can help us with that.’
If he had expected to startle her, he was disappointed. She continued looking down at her feet and allowed herself no more than a small, controlled sigh. ‘And why would you think that, Mr Peach?’
‘We’re still investigating the victim’s possessions. We found personal letters in a locked drawer in his desk. One of them was from you.’
Now at last she looked at him, with a mixture of fear and resentment on her white face. ‘I had nothing to do with Dominic’s death.’
‘You had been conducting an affair with Dominic. You’ve chosen not to disclose that to us. Secrecy is never a wise policy after a murder. It excites suspicion.’
‘It was all over.’
‘It doesn’t seem so, from what you said in your letter.’
Her eyes had tears in them, but she brushed the moisture away angrily before it could run down her cheeks. ‘This is humiliating.’
‘I appreciate that. But we need the details of this. We need to know when this close relationship with your brother-in-law began, how intense it was, when it finished, if indeed it did end as you claim. It is one strand of our enquiry. There will be many others. If your relationship has nothing to do with this death, what you tell us will go no further.’
Being the wife of a powerful industrialist had brought privileges to Sarah O’Connor over the last decade. It was years since she had been called upon to account for herself, years since anyone had treated her other than deferentially. She folded her arms deliberately and made herself look at this aggressive and insistent man. Then she forced herself to speak slowly and evenly. ‘I slept with Dominic for the first time last summer. That would make it about ten months ago. I expect it seems shocking to you because he was as you say my brother-in-law. That was a mere accident: I don’t think either of us considered it at the time. We were both deserted by our spouses and both lonely. You ask about intensity. The relationship became close and very intense by the beginning of this year – more so than either of us had intended it to be. It ended just over a month ago.’
They looked at each other for a few seconds, with Peach’s inquisitive eyes glittering even darker than hers. He said quietly, ‘Thank you. Who decided to end the affair?’
She resented his second use of that word, but she wasn’t going to react to it. She said between tight lips, ‘He did. Now you’ll want to know why. I
can’t tell you that. Perhaps Dominic had found someone else. Perhaps he just tired of me. I expect if he were still alive he’d tell you that he’d never intended the relationship to last indefinitely. He didn’t tell me that and I didn’t feel like that.’
She felt as if she was stripping away her clothes and exposing herself. That was what she was doing with her emotions, she supposed. Peach, watching her closely, felt he only needed to prompt to learn more. ‘You resented the break. The letter from you which we found was quite threatening.’
‘Dominic was a heartless bastard when it suited him. I knew that, but I never thought I’d see that part of him turned against me.’
The age-old complaint of the lover whose judgement had been blinded by love. I knew he was like this but I never thought it would be applied to me. Along with the idea that you could eliminate vice and change character by the power of your passion, it was the oldest of all love’s illusions. Peach said, ‘It is plain that you were and still are very resentful about the way he treated you.’
‘Yes. I should have just shrugged my shoulders and gone away, shouldn’t I? Perhaps I’ll be able to do that, now that he’s dead.’
‘Who else knew about this liaison?’
She said with a bitter smile, ‘I think I prefer “liaison” to “affair”. No one else knew, as far as I was concerned. Jim was far too busy with his own concerns to notice what I was doing and Dominic’s wife Ros is far too self-centred to follow what he was doing. I know lovers are often too sanguine about what people know, but I’m certain none of the people close to us knew about Dominic and me. We were discreet and we didn’t meet that often; we probably averaged about once a week.’
‘Thank you for being so frank.’ But Peach wondered as always what she had concealed beneath her apparent openness. Clever people told you as much as they chose, and he had already decided that Sarah O’Connor was a clever woman. Capable of murder? Certainly, but that didn’t necessarily mean she had committed this one. He said, ‘The letter from you which we found was threatening. It implied things would be the worse for your late lover if he continued to ignore you.’
‘I expect I did threaten. I felt frustrated and very violent when I wrote that letter.’
‘Sarah, did you kill Dominic O’Connor?’
It was the first time he had used her forename and it distracted her more than she would have expected. ‘No. As you imply, I felt as though I could kill him when I wrote that letter, but I didn’t.’
‘Where were you last Friday, please?’
‘I was here in the house with Clare. She was very upset by Jim’s death. More than I was, as you can now appreciate.’
‘But she can vouch for your presence here at that time?’
Sarah pursed her lips again, as she had found herself doing repeatedly over the last fifteen minutes. ‘Clare went out in the evening. I encouraged her to visit one of her friends. To be honest, we needed time away from each other.’
The three were silent for a moment in the big room, digesting the implications of this, wondering if she would offer any thoughts on the disappearance of her alibi. Then DS Northcott said in his deep, calm voice, ‘What car do you drive, Mrs O’Connor?’
‘A blue BMW Z4.’
‘Did you go out on Friday night?’
‘No. And I had no visitors.’
She saw them out of her house and then came back into the lounge and sat down in the biggest armchair. She spent a long time staring into space and trying to control her racing mind.
He wasn’t happy with telephones. They weren’t secure, in his view. When your employment and sometimes your very existence depended on security, that was important. But he needed to keep on the right side of the law. He took a deep breath and rang the police station.
‘I need to speak to you. It’s in connection with the death of Mr Dominic O’Connor.’
‘What is your name, sir?’
‘It’s Davies. Colin Davies. No one will know it at Brunton police station.’
‘I see. May I ask the nature of your business?’
He pictured the woman on the switchboard, felt his resentment rising at the safe tedium of her job. No doubt she sat there day by day and played it by the book, whilst he was out taking risks. ‘I’ve told you. It’s connected with the death of Dominic O’Connor. That should be enough.’
‘We get a lot of calls, sir, when a crime gets the publicity that this one has received.’
‘You get some odd calls, I know. People who claim to know things they can’t possibly know. Even nutters who want to confess to the crime when they were nowhere near it. I’m not going to confess and I’m not a nutter.’
‘I didn’t suggest you were, sir. I’m merely trying to get a little detail from you to pass on to DCI Peach.’
‘He’s the man in charge, is he? I’ve heard of him. Tell him I was working for Dominic O’Connor until quite recently. Tell him that I know things which might help to pinpoint his murderer.’
‘Thank you, sir. That is the kind of detail I need. I’ll pass it on to DCI Peach as soon as he’s back in the station.’
‘I’m sure you will. And I’m equally sure he’ll want to see me. Tell him I’ll come in to see him at four o’clock this afternoon.’
‘I’ll pass on your message, Mr Davies. I’m not sure that DCI Peach will be available to see you at that time. However—’
But the phone had gone dead several seconds earlier.
TWELVE
‘You should keep me out of this.’
‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to do that.’ Dominic O’Connor’s widow inspected her carefully manicured nails as she held the phone. The varnish on one of them was chipped away at the end. How could that have happened?
‘It won’t help either of us if I get involved, Ros. It will only complicate things.’
She could picture John Alderson at the other end of the line, gripping it like an anxious teenager, looking automatically over his shoulder even when he knew there could be no one there. She said with a smile, ‘I need support, don’t I? You’re always saying I’m not fit to be out on my own.’
‘That’s just me teasing you. You’re perfectly capable of looking after yourself when you need to. You’re my special girl.’ He threw in the familiar phrase, but it sounded out of place now, lame and rather desperate.
‘That’s right, I am! And when this is all over and the fuss has died down, we’ll be special together. We won’t have to skulk about then. We won’t need to be hole-in-the-corner. We’ll be a pair. It’s going to be brilliant!’
‘You mustn’t get too far ahead of yourself, Ros. Live in the present. You’ll need to have all your wits about you, over the next few days.’
‘And why would that be, darling?’ Ros felt in control of things now. She was quite enjoying his apprehension. It was the first time she could remember calling the shots – she rather liked that dramatic cliché.
‘The police will be all over this. They’re bound to be. They’ll question everyone and everything. You mustn’t be overconfident, even though you’re innocent, or it could land you in trouble.’
‘Innocent, yes. You don’t think I killed Dominic, do you?’
‘Of course I don’t! But that’s the kind of thing I mean. You shouldn’t even be voicing the idea. It might set other people thinking.’
‘Did you kill him, darling?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous! And don’t even think that way, Ros. I need to be kept out of this, for both our sakes. You must remember that.’
‘Very well, my darling, I’ll try to remember! Can’t guarantee success, of course, but I’ll try very hard. I always try hard to do what you say, don’t I?’
She rang off before he could react to that. John Alderson stared at the silent phone in frustration and fear.
Brian Jacobs didn’t look like a man down on his luck. He might have been treated badly by Dominic O’Connor, as the latter’s PA suggested, but he seemed to have made an exce
llent recovery.
He was around fifty and looked alert and healthy. He was running a little to fat, but the excellent cut of his dark blue suit disguised that efficiently. His dark hair was plentiful and a little untidy. He welcomed his CID visitors into his office, instructed his PA that they were not to be disturbed, and watched her shut the door carefully behind her. Then he came round his desk and sat opposite the two men he had already invited to sit in armchairs. There were four of these, making what was in fact a large room seem slightly crowded, with the other furniture it contained.
As if he felt a need to explain this, Jacobs said, ‘I like to have flexibility in my office arrangements. Sometimes we have informal exchanges among small groups in here; I find that pushes things along much more quickly than more formal meetings, with agendas and minutes.’
Peach said with an immediate air of challenge, ‘You’ve moved on from the days when you worked with Dominic O’Connor.’
A brief, scarcely detectable flicker of pain flashed across his equable face at the mention of the name. ‘I’ve left him and Morton Industries well behind me. I can’t imagine why you wish to speak to me about Dominic O’Connor.’
‘Because he was callously murdered on Friday, Mr Jacobs. Because your name was given to us as that of a person with good reason to hate Mr O’Connor.’
‘That’s over-dramatic. I didn’t like O’Connor. I had a serious working dispute with him and he treated me badly. I can’t even say that I felt very sorry when I heard that he was dead. That is as far as it goes.’
DS Northcott never looked very happy in armchairs. His tall, lean frame seemed made for more active things. He now said, ‘It’s good that you’re being so frank, Mr Jacobs. Perhaps you’d care to be equally frank about your criminal record and the nature of your dispute with the late Dominic O’Connor.’
