‘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.’