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 cliche 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.