by J M Gregson
‘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 cliche.
‘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 excellent 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.’
Brian Jacobs had been concentrating on the round, inquisitive face of DCI Peach. He switched to the very different countenance of the detective sergeant and tried to keep calm. ‘It is a long time since anyone has mentioned my criminal record. I doubt if any of my present acquaintances knows about it.’
‘And there’s no reason why it shouldn’t remain that way — unless of course it turns out to have a bearing on this case.’
‘I can assure you that it doesn’t. But you’re policemen: you won’t accept statements like that.’
Peach gave the blandest of his many smiles. ‘Unless someone is kind enough to confess to us that he killed Dominic O’Connor, we can’t do that. I’m glad you understand the situation. You must have had a good lawyer in 1989.’
‘I did. My father saw to that.’
‘Affray and assault with a knife. Very serious charges.’
‘With mitigating circumstances.’
‘As there always are, in the view of defence counsels. We only have the bare facts of the case in our files. It seemed when I read those that you were lucky that you hadn’t killed the man. You wouldn’t have got away so lightly on a manslaughter charge.’
‘I was attacked. Or rather we were attacked. I was part of a group.’
‘Yes. The only member of the gang who was carrying a knife. Which meant that you’d gone there prepared for serious violence.’
‘We were attacked. We defended ourselves.’
‘That’s not what the witnesses said. Not the majority of them. Especially the ones who knew you best — they said you went there nursing a grudge and were bent on revenge.’
‘This is irrelevant to your present enquiries. It’s all a long time ago. I’m a very different man now.’ Jacobs looked round the pleasant, well-lit office with its expensive furnishings, as if they should take that as evidence of the difference.
‘Perhaps. There is a saying about leopards and spots. It’s very popular in the police service.’
‘I expect it is. You don’t believe people can change.’
‘We’re always happy when they do, providing it’s for the better. We have to pay attention to the statistics of crime, which show us that the overwhelming majority of serious offences are perpetrated by people who have committed crimes before.’
‘Well, I’m happy to tell you I’m one of the reformed sinners. I learned my lesson. That knife incident is ancient history.’
‘I see. I believe the judge said in his summing up that you had a violent temperament which could be your downfall. Temperaments rarely change. Yours meant in 1989 that you retained grudges and tried to get revenge by violent action. Would you say you still have that same temperament, Mr Jacobs?’
Brian Jacobs gripped the arms of his chair very hard. He could feel a vein pulsing in his temple; he wondered if it was visible to this man who was so calmly baiting him. ‘I didn’t expect something which happened when I was twenty-two to pursue me through life. I am an accountant: we’re hardly noted for fisticuffs, let alone murder! I’m sure the people who work with me would regard it as ludicrous that you should e
ven be questioning me like this.’
‘What happened between you and Dominic O’Connor?’
‘He made out that I’d been dishonest. He told the Managing Director that I’d been cheating the firm.’
‘And had you?’
Jacobs glared at Peach, who did not drop his eyes or move a muscle in his face. ‘No, of course I hadn’t. But even the whiff of corruption is enough to finish you, when your business is finance. In effect, it was his word against mine. He was younger and he’d made himself the owners’ blue-eyed boy. I got out and made a fresh start. It tore me apart at the time, but it was the right decision.’
‘The people who worked with you at Morton Industries remember you as feeling very bitter against a man who is now dead. I believe you threatened him with violence.’
Jacobs was silent for so long that Peach thought he was not going to react. Then he said evenly, ‘I told Dominic O’Connor at the time that he wouldn’t get away with what he’d done. I told him that, however long it took, he was going to suffer the consequences.’
‘Thank you. Perhaps you can now understand our line of questioning.’
‘What I said to Dominic O’Connor four years ago was rhetorical. It was said in a red mist of fury. I don’t think he felt threatened by it.’
‘I would have done, if it had come from a man who’d previously almost killed an enemy with a knife.’
Jacobs’ nostrils flared and his face reddened beneath his floppy dark hair, but his voice remained controlled. It was a strangely disturbing combination. ‘I’m no longer violent. You may not wish to believe that, so consider what I had at stake. Common sense would argue against me taking retribution now, however much I might desire it. I’ve got too much to lose.’
‘That is a convincing argument, here in your office. But logic doesn’t always win, when passion takes over. Where were you on Friday night, Mr Jacobs?’
He was shaken anew by the sudden question. He ran a hand quickly through his hair, making it look even more out of control. Then his face brightened. ‘I left work early and went and played a round of golf at Brunton Golf Club.’