Brothers' Tears (29 page)

‘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.'

L
ucy 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 naïve 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 contents. 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 cliché 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.'

At a nod from his senior officer, Clyde Northcott stood up and set his hand gently on the shoulder of Ros O'Connor. They half-expected her to interrupt the words of arrest, to respond to the notion that it might prejudice her defence in court if she withheld information which she might wish to use there. But she said nothing, listening carefully with her head still tilted a little, as if she comprehended her role as the silent, central figure in this police ritual.

It was only when Northcott had finished delivering the familiar rigmarole that she looked suddenly at the horrified face of John Alderson. Perhaps she had for a time forgotten his presence here as she acted out her own central role in this drama. ‘John had nothing to do with this. I wish to state that to you. He is not even an accessory after the fact.'

Peach wondered how much this strange, deadly, childlike woman understood of the law, how much she knew about the part played by an accessory after the fact. The lawyers would have to consider how much if anything Alderson had known about this crime and how far he had contrived to conceal it.

They took her out to the police car which Peach had instructed should follow them here and installed her carefully on the back seat of it. Ros O'Connor sat very upright beside the female officer in the rear of the car as they journeyed sedately back into Brunton. She turned once to check that her nemesis in the shape of Peach and Northcott was following in the car behind her. She looked sharply to her left for ten seconds as they passed the building where her husband had worked.

Otherwise, Ros O'Connor kept her head very still and gazed directly ahead, as if looking forward eagerly to the next interesting stage in her progress as an arrested murderer.