by J M Gregson
‘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.