Lucy Peach, who had worked for months to secure this outcome, witnessed not only Linda Coleman’s arrest but the preferring of charges which would put her away for a long time.
‘You’ll suffer for this!’ Coleman snarled at Lucy. ‘That face of yours won’t look quite as pretty when it’s had a razor across it a few times!’
‘Record that, please,’ DS Peach said to the custody sergeant, who had just outlined the charges against Linda Coleman at Brunton police station. Lucy spoke more calmly than she felt. But the Lennon criminal group, in which Linda Coleman had been a major figure, had been crippled by this, with its major figures arrested along with her. Lucy said calmly, ‘Your husband’s going to go down for the murder of James O’Connor. You might be inside for almost as long as him, when this comes to court. You wouldn’t like to indicate who killed his brother Dominic, would you, Mrs Coleman? We’re offering no deals, but it might get you a year or two off your eventual sentence, if you were seen to be cooperating.’
‘Get lost, you cocky young bitch! That’s one killing you can’t pin on us. We had nothing to do with seeing off that randy sod!’
That was probably true, from what Percy had told her, Lucy thought. But even negative information had to be useful, when you were narrowing your field of suspects.
John Alderson’s small front garden looked as neat as it had when they had visited it two days earlier. More so, if anything, since its owner was working diligently in it when they pulled up outside the terraced house.
‘It’s as colourful as anything in the street,’ said Peach as they stood on the flagged path beside him.
Alderson looked up and down the long, respectable road, as if testing the verity of that. ‘The trouble with so-called winter pansies is that they’re really spring-flowering. You have to pull them out when they’re still at their best to put in summer bedding plants.’
It was as if he was trying to assert himself as a bona fide gardener; perhaps he thought that would give him a harmless respectability in police eyes. ‘It’s south-facing here, sheltered by the houses. We shall have flowers open on the roses in a couple of days. That’s very early, for Brunton.’ He looked at the police car outside his house, then at the two men who had ridden here in it. ‘I suppose you’d better come inside.’
He limped a little as he led them into the small, tidy bachelor’s living room where he had spoken to them on Wednesday. There were black-and-white pictures of a couple who might have been his father and mother on the sideboard, a nineteenth-century watercolour of Whalley Abbey on the wall opposite the window. There were eight books between the marble bookends, but four of them were reference books and the other four were from an ancient book club. There was nothing contemporary about this room, nothing they could see which might give them a clue to the personality of its occupant.
They sat down, refused the offer of afternoon tea. Peach studied his man for a moment, then nodded to Northcott, as if he hoped to rattle Alderson by the use of a different questioner. The big detective sergeant opened his notebook carefully, then dropped his bombshell as if it were no more than an introductory conversational gambit. ‘Your car was sighted outside Dominic O’Connor’s house on the morning of the day when he was murdered.’
John Alderson smiled hard into the unsmiling face of DS Northcott. ‘My car is a silver metallic Ford Fiesta. There are a lot of them around.’
‘There is only one which has your registration number. Are you denying that it was there at that time?’
‘No. I wouldn’t wish to do that. I didn’t go into the house, though.’
‘Why did you choose to conceal this visit, when we spoke to you on Wednesday?’
‘I didn’t conceal it. You asked me what car I drove and I told you.’
‘And you chose not to tell us that you had used this car to visit a murder victim on the day he died.’
‘Whoa there! I didn’t visit a murder victim. I didn’t even go into the house. If I had done, Dominic O’Connor wouldn’t have been there at the time. I knew that, or I wouldn’t have gone near the place.’
Northcott glanced at the watchful Peach and then returned his attention to Alderson. ‘Perhaps you’d better tell us what the purpose of this visit was.’
‘Perhaps I had. It’s quite simple. I was returning Ros O’Connor to her home. She’d spent the night here.’
‘And Dominic O’Connor?’
‘Dominic had spent the night in Birmingham. Ostensibly on business — whether there was a woman involved or not, Ros didn’t know. And frankly by this time didn’t really care. It was because we knew Dominic was going to be away that I picked Ros up on Thursday and brought her here. You could say that we were taking advantage of an opportunity.’
‘But you chose to tell us nothing of this on Wednesday.’
‘No. It had no bearing on Dominic’s death. And tell me frankly, would you have chosen to tell two curious policemen that you’d been in bed with the wife of a murder victim on the night before he was killed?’
‘I don’t have to answer hypothetical questions, Mr Alderson. When did you last see Mr O’Connor alive?’
The suddenness of the query shook John Alderson, but he strove not to show that. He retreated behind a smile, trying to look as though he had expected this, wondering exactly how he would answer it. He decided that he couldn’t risk trying to deceive them about this. If they’d spotted his car at the other end of Brunton, then they’d probably seen Dominic O’Connor’s much more noticeable red sports Jaguar outside this house. Perhaps the CID men were hoping he’d deny this, so that they could immediately expose him as a liar. He certainly couldn’t afford that.
‘I saw Dominic on that same Friday morning. But much later — about three hours after I’d dropped Ros off. It must have been at about half past eleven. He came here to see me.’
Peach had so far done nothing save study him closely. Now he said, ‘You’d better tell us about this meeting.’
John nodded, trying to look perfectly at his ease. ‘I think that would be best, now that you know that he was in this house. He came here to tell me that he knew about Ros and me.’
Peach nodded, wondering how he was to shake this very cool opponent. ‘You’re taking care to sound very calm about this. I imagine you had a fierce exchange over the matter.’
‘Then your imagination misleads you. It certainly wasn’t a friendly exchange. I didn’t like Dominic because of the way he’d treated Ros. And I don’t imagine he was feeling friendly towards a man who was bedding his wife. But within those limits, what we said to each other was civilised. There was never any prospect of blows being exchanged.’
‘And within a few hours the man who came to see you was killed. It must be obvious to you that we need to know exactly what was said during that late-morning meeting on Friday.’
‘I can see that.’ John was now extremely uncomfortable, though he was trying hard not to show it. He didn’t want to tell them what had passed between him and O’Connor, because it wouldn’t show him in a good light. But he was shrewd enough to know that these men had a large team who were experts at digging out information which people wished to conceal. If he didn’t tell them the truth and they discovered it from someone else, it might land him deep in trouble. He tried to stall them a little whilst he decided exactly what he was going to say. ‘What took place was a private exchange between two men. Dominic wouldn’t have wanted me to talk about it now, any more than I do.’
Peach said with the air of a man whose patience is wearing thin, ‘And Dominic is now dead, murdered by person or persons as yet unknown. That alters things quite drastically, as you are surely aware.’