So Say the Fallen (Dci Serena Flanagan 2) (23 page)

Roaring, roaring, roaring between his ears. The pressure behind his eyes like a balloon inside his skull. Bursts of black in
his vision. He watched her through a shrinking funnel of light, the wildness of her, and she opened her mouth and sparks flew from it and from her eyes and lightning all around her and darkness eating at the edges of everything and all he could think was Maggie, Maggie, forgive me, Maggie . . .

37

Roberta Garrick held on tight to his ankles long after he’d stopped writhing and twitching, even as the foul odour of his body’s expulsions made her gag. Each ragged inhalation brought the smell into her lungs, and she coughed each breath out until she grew light-headed and almost fell. But still she held on.

Eventually, she let go. One easy movement, she opened her fingers, and his body dropped, his back thudding into the door. She watched him for a while, as if the blood would return to his brain, the air to his chest. But he was gone. At last, she stood upright. She rotated her shoulders and cried out as a dagger of pain shot into her neck from the right. She brought her left hand to the offended muscle and massaged it as her heart slowed.

It hadn’t been so bad. Not really.

The fourth life she had taken, if she counted her husband’s, even though she hadn’t actually fed him the morphine herself. The first had been long ago. That other life that seemed so far away now, so distant that she sometimes wondered if it had ever been hers at all. She dreamed about it still, that past version of herself, and she awoke unsure of which life she lived now.

Like that morning when she woke to find Peter in the bed beside her and she didn’t know who he was, who she was, and how she came to be there in a stranger’s bed. So she had shouted
and kicked until he fled, and then she remembered she was Roberta Garrick and he was Peter McKay, the man who killed her husband for her.

A sense of peace settled over her, a sense of having addressed the problems at hand. Now she could proceed unburdened by Peter McKay and his needy whining. She had intended to distance herself from him, in fact had begun to do so, but perhaps this was better. A clean break, over and done with.

Roberta surveyed the room, made sure she’d left nothing of herself behind. Satisfied, she exited the vestry through the side door and went to the car she had borrowed from the dealership. A twelve-year-old Citroën, taken from a customer for a couple of hundred pounds as a token part exchange on a newer vehicle, stored at the rear of her dead husband’s dealership ready to be taken to a scrapyard. An unremarkable car, one that would draw no attention on the road.

She opened the passenger door, reached inside for the plastic bag she’d stowed in the footwell, sending ripples of pain through her shoulders and back. The bag’s contents clinked and rattled as she lifted it and brought it back to the vestry. There, she opened it and set the ceramic pestle and mortar on the desk beneath the lamp. She bundled up the bag and stuffed it into the pocket of the hooded top she had bought in a charity shop in Lisburn.

Roberta closed the vestry’s outer door behind her, went to the car, got in, and turned the ignition. The engine whirred and coughed but did not start.

‘Shit,’ she said.

Again. More whirring and coughing, and a hard grinding.

‘Come on,’ she said.

One more time, and as the engine rattled, she dabbed the accelerator pedal to feed it a little more petrol. The car juddered around her as the engine finally clattered into life. Morganstown’s main street remained as dark and quiet as when she’d arrived here fifteen minutes ago. She eased the Citroën out onto the road, kept the acceleration light, not wishing the engine to grumble too loudly as she left the village. The back roads stretched black and empty ahead. She took the single-track lanes wherever possible, doubling the length of her journey back to Garrick Motors, but the reduced risk of meeting a police car was worth the extra time. Patrol cars had all sorts of technology now, she’d seen it on television; they had computers that could read number plates and trigger an alert if the car lacked insurance or road tax.

A flash of red on the narrow road in front of her, and by instinct her right foot went to the brake pedal, stamped hard. The car shook and hunkered down as it slowed, the spongy brakes gripping as hard as their wear would allow. She hissed through gritted teeth as the wheels skidded, the near-bald tyres barely keeping hold of the tarmac. When the Citroën finally halted, she watched the road to see what had appeared in her path.

A fox sprinted away from the front of the car – she must have been inches from crushing it – and dived into the hedgerow.

A deep laugh erupted from her belly and she covered her mouth with her hand.

I killed a man, she thought, and I saved a fox.

No, not funny. It was good she hadn’t hit the animal. Someone at the dealership would have noticed the damage to
the car, the blood, the fur. Someone would have asked questions. Someone would suspect the Citroën had been taken from the rear yard. There were no cameras back there, but still, she could not have it known that the car had been used for anything more than gathering rust and waiting for transport to the breakers.

She set off once more. Not far now. Within ten minutes she had pulled up at the back of the dealership property and opened the gate; she had left the padlock undone when she’d swapped cars earlier in the evening. She moved the Citroën inside, reversed it into the space where she’d found it, though turning her head to look through the rear window caused a spasm in the muscles of her right shoulder. The door to the back shed where the scrap car keys were kept was seldom locked; she had done this many times before. She dropped the keys into the Tupperware tub where she’d found them among the half-dozen other sets, pulled the shed door closed, and went to her Mini Cooper.

As she drove away from the locked gates, back towards her house –
her
house now, not her husband’s – she began to laugh again. A joyous laugh, like when she was a girl chasing chickens across her grandfather’s yard.

It’s all done now, she thought. Every detail squared away. Free of them all, every hand that had ever dragged at her heels.

All except Jim Allison. But he knew nothing, and she’d freeze him out soon enough. Take it slower than she had with Peter, let him down easier. She’d learned from that mistake.

And the policewoman. Flanagan could yet cause her more problems, but nothing Roberta couldn’t cope with. If the ideas
she had planted in Jim’s mind took root, the next few days would be difficult for Flanagan.

By the time Roberta had returned home, driven the Mini into the garage and entered the house, that feeling of peace had come back. Deeper than before, more complete. She ran a bath with a generous dose of soothing bubbles, soaked herself until the water cooled and her muscles tingled. Then she went to bed and slept a solid black sleep until the telephone woke her the next morning.

38

Alistair was still asleep in bed when Flanagan left the house. They had made love last night, and it had been good. Relaxed, easy, nothing begrudged, nothing withheld. As she had lain awake in the dark, she had wondered at how within a couple of hours she had gone from feeling sure their marriage was over to a sense that it had a lifetime left to grow.

She had looked in on the children before she left; they both dozed on, oblivious to her watching from their doorways. She had resisted the urge to sneak in and steal a kiss for fear of waking them.

A warm autumn sun hung low over the trees as she approached Morganstown. Early morning shoppers parked their cars in the filling station forecourt to buy the Sunday papers. Flanagan made a mental note to drop in on the way back, buy an
Observer
and a
Times
, maybe the makings of a fried breakfast for everybody. As she neared the church, her mind was more focused on whether or not she had the ingredients for eggs Benedict than on whatever had been so urgent for Reverend McKay to have called last night.

She parked her Volkswagen next to McKay’s Ford and got out. A strange quiet about the place, she thought. Even before she knocked on the front door, she was certain no one would
answer. After a wait of a minute or so, and a second knock, she looked across to the church. Maybe he was in there, getting ready for the morning’s service. The front doors had been closed as she entered the car park, but perhaps he didn’t open them until he was ready for the congregation.

Flanagan walked towards the side door, and as she came close she noticed the lamplight through the small window. She knocked on the door, listened for a response. When none came, she tried the handle. The door opened inward.

She saw the bright red ceramic pestle and mortar by the lamp first of all, had only a moment to wonder why such things were sitting there before she looked towards the door leading to the church. Then the smell hit her.

‘Oh Christ,’ she said, her hand reflexively going to her mouth and nose.

She saw McKay there, his head at an unnatural angle, legs splayed in front of him, arms loose at his sides, torso suspended above the floor.

‘Oh no,’ she said.

Flanagan grabbed her phone from her bag and dialled.

DSI Purdy arrived last, pushing his way through the crowd that had gathered at the church gates. A pair of uniformed constables stayed between the people and the church, but the crowd seemed content to watch, concern on their faces. Members of the congregation, most of them, arriving for their Sunday service to find a police line they could not cross. Flanagan recognised some of the faces, saw tears on many.

‘Dr Barr here yet?’ Purdy asked as he approached.

‘He’s in there now,’ Flanagan said, nodding towards the vestry. Flashes of light burst from inside as the photographer recorded the scene.

Light drops of rain spotted Flanagan’s skin, but she still had to shield her eyes against the sun. A rainbow arced above the buildings opposite.

‘Tell me what you know so far,’ Purdy said.

She looked to the ground, felt it drag her down, felt like she wanted to lie there and let the tarmac swallow her whole.

‘I found him hanged just after eight-thirty,’ Flanagan said. ‘A black belt over the door. There’s a belt missing from the cassock that’s hanging up in the closet, so that must be it. No immediate sign of anyone else having been here. Everything points to a suicide.’

‘Just like last week,’ Purdy said.

‘Yes, on the face of it. But there’s something else.’ She indicated the window, the lamp still glowing beyond the glass. ‘There’s a pestle and mortar sitting there, beneath that light.’

‘A pestle and mortar?’

‘I haven’t touched it – no one has – but I could see a residue of white powder in the bowl.’

‘Morphine,’ Purdy said.

‘I’m guessing so,’ Flanagan said. ‘Tests will confirm.’

‘Jesus. So it was him killed Garrick. He couldn’t hack it, so he leaves the evidence out and does himself in. Is that how you see it?’

‘I’d say that’s how I’m
supposed
to see it,’ she said.

Purdy kept his gaze hard on Flanagan. ‘Go on.’

‘It’s too neat,’ she said. ‘Too easy. A week I’ve been chasing after this, and all of a sudden it’s handed to me on a plate. I don’t buy it.’

Purdy looked back to the crowd at the gate. He sucked his teeth, tapped his foot, then turned back to Flanagan. ‘Well, maybe you
should
buy it.’

She squinted at him, the sun bright behind him. ‘Sir?’

‘You’ve had an answer handed to you,’ he said, his voice lowered. ‘Maybe it’s time you just took it and moved on.’

‘Sir, no, I—’

‘Let me finish,’ he said, raising his hands to quiet her. ‘You’ve been grabbing at threads through this whole case, trying to find something other than what was staring you in the face. I’m not saying your suspicions were wrong, we may never know what the truth is, but just think about how much harder you want to push at this. Look at it this way: you suspected this was murder from the start and it looks like you’ve been proven right. You didn’t get the person you wanted for it, I understand that, but maybe you should accept this as a break and have it over and done with.’

Flanagan felt heat in her eyes, shook her head.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t. I just can’t. I know this is a set-up, and you know it too.’

‘I don’t know any such—’

‘Sir, with respect, you haven’t been talking with Reverend McKay or Mrs Garrick. You haven’t looked into their eyes like I have. And there’s something else.’

‘What?’

Flanagan hesitated, then said, ‘He called me last night.’

Purdy raised his eyebrows, pointed his thumb towards the vestry.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Around nine. He asked me to come over, he needed to talk to me. I said I couldn’t. He offered to come to me, and I refused.’

Purdy sighed. ‘I know where you’re going with this, and you’re wrong.’

She kept her voice low, but anger pushed the words out – anger at herself, jagged and bitter. ‘I’m not wrong. If I’d gone to him, if I’d let him come to me, he’d still be alive. Whether he killed himself, or somebody else did it, it wouldn’t have happened if I’d listened to whatever it was he needed to tell me.’

‘Stop it,’ Purdy said, pointing a finger at her, inches from her face. ‘Fucking stop it. It’s bad enough you’re looking for someone else to blame for that man’s death, let alone yourself. Whatever brought McKay to suicide had nothing to do with you, and I don’t want to hear another word on that. Clear?’

Flanagan didn’t answer. Cloud obscured the sun, and the rain thickened. Drops gathered on Purdy’s glasses.

‘Now, I need you to be careful,’ he said. ‘Something’s brewing elsewhere.’

‘Sir?’

‘I got collared by a journalist on the way in, something about allegations made by Jim Allison. Whether it’s to do with what happened yesterday, I don’t know, but he’s been shooting his mouth off to the press. Watch your step.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He pointed to her car, still parked by McKay’s house. ‘Now go on, get out of the rain.’