by J M Gregson
‘You believe correctly.’
‘Where you were involved in some unpleasantness.’
Alderson forced a smile. ‘I like that word, “unpleasantness”. It’s very English. The facts are that we were involved in a very nasty industrial exchange. One small firm took business away from another, by means we didn’t like. They undercut us far beyond what you could call fair competition. They were non-union, so we couldn’t even ask the union to help us. We’d no choice but to take matters into our own hands.’
‘With serious injuries resulting.’
‘Broken arms and a couple of broken jaws. Nothing life-threatening. You may have noticed that I walk with a limp. It dates from that time.’
‘But you dealt out more than you received.’
‘How well-informed you seem to be.’ His voice was mocking as he looked from Northcott’s earnest black face to Peach’s round white one. Then his tone hardened. ‘I grew up on a sink estate in Newcastle. I learned to take care of myself early in life.’
Clyde Northcott nodded. ‘So you could have taken care of Dominic O’Connor, when you found that he stood in your way.’
John Alderson looked hard at Northcott. ‘I reckon you could handle yourself, if you needed to. Well, good for you! And yes, I might have harmed Dominic, if it had come to a direct contest between the two of us. But sneaking up on someone the way the papers say this happened isn’t my way. Make a clear note in your little book that I deny all connection with this murder, will you, please?’
Peach said quietly, ‘Where were you on Friday evening, Mr Alderson?’
‘I was here all day on Friday, apart from a visit to my local shop for bread, milk and a paper. And before you ask, I was alone. That’s the way of things, when you’re unemployed and single. Perhaps I would have tried to see Ros, but I knew she was going up to Settle to see her sister.’
‘What car do you drive?’
‘A metallic grey Ford Fiesta. It’s in the garage, if you wish to inspect it. And it was there all day on Friday. I don’t know who killed Dominic O’Connor, but if I have any useful thoughts on the matter I’ll be in touch with you immediately.’
‘The vice squad’s moving in tomorrow on those Asian men who are procuring minors from care homes. We’ve passed on our evidence to them,’ said Lucy Peach to her husband as she dried the dishes.
‘And about time too.’
‘We needed the evidence. We’ve got it now. No one’s going to walk on this one.’
‘Including Linda Coleman, I trust?’ Percy couldn’t get the image of that affluent woman threatening violence to Lucy out of his mind.
‘Including her for certain. She and her cronies have been financing the whole business, setting up the big-money clients and creaming off the best of the profits.’
They watched indifferent television for an hour or so. Eventually his arm stole around her shoulders and she leant contentedly against him, her head on his chest. He loved the clean, outdoor smell of her hair, as well as its softness and its rich red-brown colour. He nuzzled it softly, wishing that he could remove her for ever from all physical danger. ‘How’s your mum?’
‘She’s fine. What brought that up?’
‘Aren’t I allowed to ask after Agnes? She’s my favourite seventy-year-old.’
‘I shouldn’t think there’s a lot of competition for that honour. At least I don’t feel jealous of Mum.’ She ran her fingers along the back of Percy’s hand and up his forearm. ‘Wonder what’s happening to poor old Tommy Bloody Tucker?’
Percy sat upright beside her. ‘Wash your mouth out, Lucy Peach! That name is not to be mentioned in this house. I shall ravish you as a penalty!’
‘Ooer! Am I allowed to join in?’
‘Only if you do that thing you did last week.’
‘All right, then. I’m not sure what it was. I might have to run through my entire repertoire to find the bit you want.’
‘Bloody ’ell, Norah! You know how to turn a man on. Even a man in terminal sexual decline like me.’
He watched from between the sheets whilst she disrobed, producing his usual guttural groans of sexual anticipation as more and more of the delicious flesh was revealed. ‘There’s no call for that!’ said Lucy.
‘It’s expected of me. I can’t let down my audience of one,’ said Percy.
She leapt between the sheets and was immediately enveloped in his arms. She gasped and giggled almost simultaneously. ‘I swear you’ve got more than two hands at times.’
‘Standard issue when you make DCI. But I do appreciate a good handful of buttock.’ He took two handfuls for good measure.
‘Buttock! You make it sound like the fatstock market!’
He kissed her urgently; it seemed the simplest method of shutting her up. Later, much later, he said sleepily, ‘She has some good ideas, your mum. It’s fun trying to produce these grandchildren.’
FOURTEEN
Manchester’s Moss Side is now world-renowned as a dangerous area. Even the police tread carefully there. They do not care to venture into the narrow old streets after dark, unless it be in numbers and on a particular assignment. This raises all sorts of questions about the law of the land and its enforcement. Anarchy is perilously close, when criminal forces control an area and the police tacitly acknowledge it.
Things were different in daylight. Or DCI Peach hoped they were. This was unfamiliar territory for him. He knew all about Moss Side, but it was largely by hearsay. He said to Northcott as the big man drove into the area on Thursday morning, ‘You’ll feel at home here, Clyde. There are more black faces than white ones.’
‘There’s every shade here, sir. And every shade of soul.’ They were silent for the next five minutes, though observant of their surroundings. Percy wasn’t sure whether he was more surprised by the title of ‘sir’ or the mention of soul. Neither was common between the two of them.
There were lace curtains at the windows of number twenty-two, the house they wanted. They were cleaner than they might have expected. ‘My mother had lace curtains at one time. She got rid of them when I was in short trousers,’ Peach told Northcott. The big man didn’t comment. He wasn’t used to seeing Percy Peach nervous: it was almost a first.
Peach decided after close examination that the woman who opened the door was probably around sixty. She looked seventy-five. Her face had the grey pallor of someone who saw little daylight and no open skies; her features carried the shiftiness of a being who kept a constant watch on the other creatures around her. Percy had abandoned his jacket for a sweater and scuffed the usually immaculate toecaps of his shoes to come here, but he was sure from the look in her tired eyes that this woman recognised them as coppers.
But she didn’t comment. She gave them nothing save a few terse phrases. She wouldn’t get involved. You asked only the questions you really needed to ask round here. They told her whom they wanted to see and she said, ‘Up the stairs. Second door on the right on the first landing.’
Northcott tapped lightly on the scratched brown paint of the door. It opened immediately, which meant that the room’s occupant had probably been listening to the exchanges in the hall below. He nodded them inside, then took the single chair whilst they perched uncomfortably on the side of the newly made bed. He was in his fifties, with short-cut, grizzled hair and deep lines in his face. It was two days at least since he had shaved. His narrowed brown eyes watched their every move, as if challenging them to make a wrong one.
‘Patrick Riordan?’ said Peach.
‘Pat to my friends. You can call me Mr Riordan.’ It would have been a small, hostile joke if he’d smiled, but he didn’t.
They showed him their warrants. He held them for a moment under his eyes, as if he wished to retain the information, but his expression didn’t change. Peach studied him in turn for a moment. Silence was a weapon he used to build tension with many of the people they interviewed. It wasn’t going to work with this man. He said, ‘You work for the IRA Provisionals.
’
‘I don’t work for them: I’m a member of the army. I believe in the Cause. We shall have the united Ireland Parnell fought for and Gladstone promised us. It’s almost with us now.’
He’d been watchful and alert since he’d opened his door, but this was the first sign of animation he’d shown. Peach said, ‘May we ask what you are doing in this country?
‘You may ask, but you won’t get a reply. I don’t have to answer your questions. Arrest me, if you fancy it. I still won’t answer and I’ll have you for wrongful arrest.’
‘Oh, I don’t think you’d do that, Mr Riordan. You don’t want a high profile. It wouldn’t help your work and your masters wouldn’t like it.’
The brown eyes looked at him balefully. ‘There’s nothing for you here.’
‘I’ll tell you why you’re in Moss Side, since you aren’t inclined to reveal it yourself. You’re here to kill people.’
‘I would deny that. Of course I would. I’d say you hadn’t got the right man. But I’d agree that the Cause needs revenge. There are people who’ve been traitors to the Cause. They need to be eliminated. That is justice. We kill as an example for others as well as to bring to traitors the punishment they merit.’ He was mouthing phrases he’d used many times before, but his lined, mean face was suddenly alive with passion.
‘And Dominic O’Connor was one of your victims.’
‘Both the O’Connor brothers were traitors. They were in positions of power and they ratted. They failed the Cause.’
‘And now both of them are dead.’
‘They got what they deserved.’
‘We’ve arrested a man for Jim’s murder. We’re here this morning to talk to you about Dominic’s death.’
‘Nothing doing. Someone got to him before us, same as they did with Jim.’
‘You don’t wish to claim the death of Dominic O’Connor as a glorious victory for the Cause?’
Riordan didn’t seem to notice Peach’s contemptuous irony. He looked for a moment as if he would indeed like to claim this success, like a Battle of Britain fighter pilot notching up another Luftwaffe victim. His head lifted and his eyes were raised towards the dusty ceiling for a moment. Then caution reasserted itself and he said, ‘You can’t have me for this.’
Peach looked round the narrow, shabby room, with its chipped sink and its ancient Baby Belling cooker. He looked at the wardrobe with its door askew, at the small attache case on top of it. He was wondering where this man kept his weaponry, whether indeed he had more than one killing tool. A pistol and an Armalite, perhaps? He didn’t know what was standard issue for an IRA avenger. He turned back to the watchful face with its black stubble. ‘You were seen in Brunton last week. You were seen near Dominic O’Connor’s house.’
He was pushing the scanty information Colin Davies had been able to give them as far as it would go, chancing his arm a little on times and places. Riordan said sullenly, ‘I’m a free citizen. I can go wherever I like.’
‘You were making your preparations for what happened on Friday. Dominic O’Connor had arranged to hire a bodyguard. He knew that you were around and were planning to kill him.’
‘I don’t have to tell you what I was doing. This is a free country. It’s just not my country.’
‘You watched and you waited. And when your moment came and he was alone, you twisted a cable around the neck of your target and killed him.’
‘It’s not our way, that. We prefer the bullet through the traitor’s brain. The soldier’s way.’
‘The coward’s way. Soldiers fight face to face. You’d have been happy enough to twist the life out of O’Connor with a cable, so long as you got clear away afterwards.’
‘You’re right! I’d like to have done just that. I’d like to be the patriot who choked the life out of that cheating traitor! But some sod got there before me. I hope you never catch him.’
Patrick Riordan, assassin, was buoyant at last. He was breathing hard, glaring at the men who had come here in pursuit of him, trumpeting his warped form of patriotism rather than troubling to disguise it. But was he indeed the man who had killed Dominic O’Connor, his declared target, or had someone else got there before him as he claimed?
Clyde Northcott said in his quiet, deep voice, ‘It’s much better that you confess to this now if you did it, Pat. You’ll get the glory back in your own country. The men you work for will make you into a hero. You’ll be on rolls of honour. Maybe your name will be remembered a hundred years from now.’
It was a strange prospect to hold out to him in that shabby room in Moss Side, but for a moment it seemed to beguile Riordan. The deep-set brown eyes glittered with the light of military glory. Then he looked at Peach and his face changed. ‘You might get me for a killing at some time, but it won’t be this one.’
The stocky man who sat ridiculously on the edge of the bed was ready for this. ‘That sounds like a challenge, Riordan. I like a challenge. You’re right in the frame for this. We shall go away and set about gathering the evidence for an arrest. Don’t leave the area without letting us know your new address.’
It was a useless instruction to a man like Patrick Riordan, of course. He would move when he wished and where he wished. But the routine instruction seemed to drag him more firmly into the middle of the case. He was a man who would have killed O’Connor without a vestige of conscience. Neither of the CID men could decide as they journeyed the thirty miles swiftly back to Brunton whether he was guilty, but both of them hoped he was.
The police machine had produced a little more information for them by the time they reached the station. Patrick Riordan had hired a car in Manchester for four days, from Wednesday to Saturday of the previous week. It had been sighted in Brunton on Thursday and on Friday and returned to its Manchester base on Saturday.
Job done?
The late Dominic O’Connor’s PA was keeping things going in his section of the firm, as all good PAs seem able to do. The managing director at Morton Industries had his own office staff, but after the death of his Financial Director he needed Mrs Jean Parker to hold the fort in that division, during the confusion which inevitably followed.
The MD said four days after the death of Dominic O’Connor, ‘You’ve done splendidly, Jean. You’ve kept our clients happy and explained things very well to them. But I know it’s a holding operation and that you can’t take decisions. We’ll need to appoint a new financial director as quickly as possible.’
They were the words Jean Parker had been waiting for. Once she was sure she was alone, she made a brief phone call and arranged a lunchtime meeting in the pub by the Ribble where they had often met before. It was a big, rambling place, but there were not very many people there at a wet Thursday lunchtime, and the many nooks and crannies of the place afforded privacy for those who sought it.
Brian Jacobs felt no qualms about putting his palm firmly on top of his mistress’s hand as they sat together at the small round table.
It was curious how that still gave her a thrill, Jean thought. Sex was a strange thing. It was an important — perhaps the most important — part of life. Yet after all the things they had done in bed, after all the intimate things they had muttered to each other and repeated to each other over the years, she still felt that little surge of warmth running through her body when Brian simply put his hand on top of hers. Love was a curious business, at once complicated and very simple.
She said, ‘We’re muddling through. People have been very understanding. I’ve managed to postpone most of the meetings he’d arranged.’ She wouldn’t refer to Dominic O’Connor by name; Brian was still absurdly sensitive about that. He couldn’t bear to hear her pronounce the name of the man he had so hated.
‘Yes. People will be very accommodating, for a while. Then they’ll get impatient. You can’t do without a Financial Director for very long. Not with the scale at which Morton Industries now operates.’ It was the nearest he would come to acknowledging the success of his late rival’s wo
rk with the firm.
Jean Parker smiled at him, then brought up her other hand to clasp his. ‘That’s why I thought we should meet. The MD came in to see me this morning. He thinks as you do that the firm urgently needs to make an appointment.’
Jacobs gave her a small, contented smile. ‘Great minds think alike.’ He had no baggage with the MD at Morton’s, who had been appointed after he had left the firm. He’d met the man on neutral ground and got on well with him. ‘He’s right. You need as seamless a transition as possible, and that means a swift appointment.’
‘It might carry a partnership, if they replace exactly.’
‘Yes, I’d forgotten that. He’d worked himself a partnership in the firm, hadn’t he? He knew how to feather his nest, after he’d done his cuckoo act and tipped any rival out of it.’
It was a good metaphor, she thought, but it was absurd that he wouldn’t even mention Dominic O’Connor. You couldn’t go on hating a dead man; there was no substance in it, nothing left to hate. She said, ‘I think if you applied, you’d stand a very good chance.’
It was an outrageous idea. But he’d known the suggestion was coming, known from the moment he’d received that excited phone call two hours ago. ‘They say you should never go back.’
‘They aren’t always right. Especially if the reason you left no longer exists.’
‘The new man won’t want me. He’ll think I left under a cloud.’ He was ticking off the objections that others, not he, might make.
‘But you didn’t. As far as the records are concerned, you were an ambitious man who wanted more responsibility and sought it elsewhere. You needed to spread your wings.’ After the cuckoo had pushed you out, she’d nearly said. She was pleased to push the bird metaphor along. It seemed to keep them on the same wavelength — or was that a different metaphor? The brain was a strange organ. Why should she be concerning herself with metaphors, at this key moment in her life?
‘I’m not sure that I’d want to put in a formal application. It might compromise my position with my present firm.’