So Say the Fallen (Dci Serena Flanagan 2) (30 page)

‘Just up here and around to the right,’ he said.

The houses stood in semi-detached pairs, each block of two separated from the next by an alley, or in terraces of half a dozen. Made with dull beige brick, wooden boards beneath the windows, wire fences suspended between concrete posts to mark out the gardens. None of the houses had garages, and cars were parked bumper to bumper on the pavements leaving barely enough room for Murray to steer his way through. The rags of a Union flag fluttered on a lamp post. The gable wall of one
terrace bore the words
NO FOREIGNERS NO TAIGS
in two-foot-high red painted letters. This place rang with the kind of hatred that only poverty fosters.

‘Here,’ Murray said as they neared the end of a row of semi-detached homes. ‘Number thirty-six.’

With no room to park in front of the house, he pulled around the corner, put two wheels on the patch of stubbly grass and shut off the engine. Flanagan cursed as she stepped out onto the soft ground, narrowly avoiding a mound of dog excrement. Murray thumbed the key to lock the car. He loved the little BMW in the way a child loves a puppy. Cute in a child, slightly pathetic in a grown man. She let him lead her around to the front of the house, a small crowbar in his hand. Single-glazed, paint peeling from the door and window frames, the small patch of garden knee-high with grass and weeds, the chain-link fence long gone.

‘This isn’t the kind of living Mrs Garrick is accustomed to,’ Murray said.

‘Mrs Garrick isn’t real,’ Flanagan said. ‘Hannah Mackenzie lives here.’

A rusted iron gate hung between two concrete posts, serving no purpose that Flanagan could see. She stepped around it onto the cement path and walked towards the house. A step up to the door, and the alley beside it. She cupped her eyes with her hands and peered through the frosted glass by the door into the hall. Nothing to see, only vague shapes and shadows. Her footsteps echoed in between the walls as she walked through the alley, avoiding the puddle from a blocked drain, towards a pair of wooden gates to the rear, each leading to the backyards on either side.

Somewhere to the rear, a dog objected to their presence, its barks high with alarm.

The gate belonging to number thirty-six hung loose on its hinges, the wood rotten and crumbling. It dragged on the cement as Flanagan pushed it inward, leaving fragments and a smear of algae and dirt. A paved yard beyond, grass growing in the cracks, a row of bins against the back wall. Green clung in flakes to the bare wood of the back door, two panes of mesh safety glass. A small square kitchen inside, decades-old fittings, a freestanding electric cooker. A space where a fridge had once been.

Murray picked at the door with his thumbnail, the wood splitting and splintering.

‘Rotten,’ he said.

‘Go ahead,’ Flanagan said.

He wedged the crowbar’s blade between the door and its frame, rocked it back and forth, applying more weight as it burrowed in, until Flanagan heard a dull crack.

‘Almost there,’ Murray said.

Flanagan startled at the sound of a bolt sliding. She spun on her heels and saw the gate on the other side of the alley ease open. A small man with black hair peered out at them. Flanagan reached into her bag, showed her warrant card. The gate slammed shut, the bolt slid back. None of his concern. A perfect place to hide in plain sight.

Murray grunted with effort, another crack, sharper this time, and the door swung inward. Musty odours drifted out to them. The stale smells of a house that had not been a home for many years. Dust everywhere. Spiderwebs in the corners, the carcasses of flies tangled in them, or lying loose on the surfaces. Just
inside the doorway, a space where a washing machine had once stood, the hoses hanging from the pipes to the rear, the withered remains of a mouse curled on the floor.

‘Lovely,’ Murray said.

Flanagan stepped past him, her shoes clicking on the worn linoleum. Murray pushed the door to behind him, followed her into the hall. A concrete floor, patches of carpet liner still stubbornly glued to it. A cupboard under the stairs.

She put her fingertips against the door to the living room, pushed it open.

‘Fuck me,’ Murray said.

Flanagan said nothing.

Thin curtains drawn across the window coloured everything in dim oranges and reds. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of photographs lined the far wall, some framed pictures perched on the mantelpiece above the tiled fireplace. Boys and girls, men and women, all of them with a familiar figure, holding her, smiling with her, dancing with her. Roberta Garrick, Hannah Mackenzie, whoever she really was, young and pretty and bright-eyed. Among the photographs were printed pages, letters and forms. From her place on the threshold, Flanagan recognised one of them as an exam certificate. She stepped forward to look at it, a list of eight GCSE results, As and Bs. Another certificate showing three A-level passes.

A letter of offer from a university. A birthday card to Hannah, with all my love, Granny, a ten-pound note still clipped inside. Boxes all around the floor full of books, letters in envelopes, old cassettes and VHS tapes, ornaments, the kind of worthless bric-a-brac that meant the world to a young woman.

Flanagan turned in a circle, seeing Hannah Mackenzie’s life crammed into this room, her entire existence stowed away for safe keeping. A shrine to the girl left behind. She stopped when she saw the writing scrawled on the wall facing the window. Rows and rows of neat script, arranged in columns, broken up by slashes through the letters, sentences crossed out, words obliterated.

She reached for the light switch, ignited the bare bulb above their heads, then stepped closer to the wall until she could make out the writing. Flanagan took in snatches of it, lucid phrases and rambling ideas colliding against the faded flowers of the wallpaper.

I know she hated me so I that’s why I pushed her . . .

It’s broken I broke it never put it back together now . . .

Can’t stop the crying even when I put her back on the wall again . . .

‘What is this?’ Murray asked, his voice low.

‘It’s where she keeps her madness,’ Flanagan said.

They stood in silence, turning in circles, the ghosts of Hannah Mackenzie glaring at them from the walls. Eventually, Murray spoke.

‘Ma’am, we should call DSI Purdy. Get a proper team up here.’

Flanagan nodded. ‘You’re right. Let’s clear out. We’ll wait in the car.’

Murray was on his way back to the kitchen before she finished speaking. She switched off the light and followed him out into the yard, through the gate and into the alley. A thought occurred to her, and she stopped.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I’ll be out in a minute. I just want to check something.’

He turned and looked at her, then to the house, before saying, ‘Okay.’

Flanagan watched him leave the alley and pick his way through the overgrown grass before she went back to the rear of the house and pushed the door open once more. That musty smell again, and something else, something she hadn’t noticed before. Something low and bitter.

She walked through the kitchen and into the hall, where she stopped at the cupboard beneath the stairs. A small door, waist-high, with a plain plastic handle. She crouched down and pulled it open. Inside, an old-fashioned safe with a dial combination lock. She brushed the scarred surface with her fingertips, felt the cold steel, reached inside, tried to move it. Too heavy.

‘What are you hiding?’ Flanagan asked the air, knowing full well the answer.

Everything in the other room was a memento, a story of a past life. But in here was the proof. In here was whatever Roberta Garrick needed to become Hannah Mackenzie once more.

‘Got you,’ Flanagan said.

She gasped at the sound of the iron gate opening outside, the metallic clank as it closed again. Murray? What had he come back for? The place gave him the creeps, obviously, and he had been glad to leave. She stood upright and looked towards the frosted glass of the door.

A form grew and solidified as it approached. Hooded and dark. Then hands reached up and pulled the hood away.

Red hair blazing through the glass, Roberta Garrick come to take back her true name.

51

Roberta Garrick turned the key in the lock, pushed the door open. As Hannah Mackenzie, she had rented a house on the same street, and kept it after she had changed and married Harry. Then this place came up for sale, priced at a pittance due to the property crash and its poor condition, so she had paid cash and said nothing to her new husband.

She breathed in the air, the stale smell she had grown to love.

Except it wasn’t stale.

Not as stale as it should be. The air had a cool freshness about it, she could taste it, as if a window had been left open. She paused in the doorway, holding her breath, listening.

If they had come for her, could they also have found this place? Did they know about Hannah Mackenzie? Had they come looking for the woman who lived in this house?

‘Stop it,’ she said aloud.

Panic had been threatening to break free ever since she had fled across the fields, and she had kept it in check all this time. She would not let it take her now. Paranoia crept alongside the panic, but it was more slippery, harder to hold. It now whispered in her mind, told her to turn around, get back in the car and go.

Go where?

Without the contents of the safe, she could go nowhere. Fear be damned, there was no choice. She stepped inside, closed the front door behind her. Her shoes, still muddy from the fields, left dark prints on the concrete floor as she moved along the hall.

The living room door stood open, the kitchen door closed over. Had she left them that way? She dredged her memory; it had been only three days since she had been here to retrieve the pestle and mortar. She seldom left long between visits.

Over the month leading up to Harry’s death, she had come to this house more frequently, sometimes spending the night. She had waited for his dose of morphine to shut him down, then she drove to the dealership, took one of the scrap cars, and drove to Ballinroy. Here, the dreadful effort of being Roberta Garrick was left outside. Here, she slept soundly on the mattress upstairs. She always woke in time to drive back to Morganstown, swap cars, and get home to serve Harry’s breakfast.

Sometimes, but not often, she woke in the night, sprawled on the mattress, cold and frightened. She lay in the dark, quiet as the dead, and listened. Sometimes she heard Roberta Garrick outside, trying to get in. Scratching at the doors and windows, seeking entry so that she could eat Hannah Mackenzie whole.

But not often.

The living room open, the kitchen closed. Had it been so the last time? Didn’t matter. She needed to empty the safe, that was all.

Roberta got to her knees in front of the cupboard, opened it, revealing the safe she had found on a second-hand goods website. She remembered the man who delivered it here six years ago, how he struggled to move it with the hand truck, how he
grumbled when she asked him to bring it inside and put it in the cupboard.

The dial clicked as she turned it, listening to the tumblers fall into place. Then the door wheezed open half an inch, and she pulled it the rest of the way. Inside, on the top shelf, one thousand pounds in sterling, another two thousand in euros, and passports in the name of Hannah Mackenzie, one British, one Irish. On the lower shelf, a birth certificate, an envelope full of bank statements, one debit and one credit card.

Everything Hannah Mackenzie needed to get out, get away, start again. Maybe even find another dead girl whose life was lying around waiting to be picked up and used again.

Twelve years ago, Hannah Mackenzie had been shocked at how simple it was to become Roberta Bailey. Death and birth records were easily searchable, and not cross-referenced. She had gone to the library and checked old editions of local newspapers to find any deaths of young girls around a decade or so before. It didn’t take long to find the headlines about a meningitis outbreak in the Magherafelt area. One of the victims a twelve-year-old girl, an only child, taken so tragically young. Red hair, just like hers. Pretty, just like her. Hannah Mackenzie simply paid for a copy of Roberta Bailey’s birth certificate, and the rest was easy.

The new life she had manufactured for herself had, for a time, been glorious. Harry had not been hard to find. The dating website was full of lonely men with money to spend, and she had gone on several dates. But Harry was the best of them all; not only the wealthiest, but the most willing to be drawn in by her. The religion part had been easy, seeing as her mother
had made her go to church and Sunday school every weekend, just to get her out of the house. She bluffed what she couldn’t remember, and Harry was swept away by her, this young attractive Christian woman.

That life only began to crack when the child took root in her belly.

She didn’t want to think about that. Instead, she concentrated on gathering up what she needed, stuffing rolls of cash into her coat pockets, slipping passports and documents into the envelope with the bank statements.

Not far to Antrim from here, and the outlet mall, a complex of shops selling discounted brands. Buy a few changes of cheap clothes and a small carry-on bag, along with a prepaid mobile phone. Call an airline, get a ticket to anywhere so long as it was out of this country. She could find a guesthouse for tonight if need be. This time tomorrow, she would be somewhere far away, somewhere warm where no one knew what Hannah Mackenzie or Roberta Garrick had done, those wicked sisters with their poisonous sins.

She pushed the safe door closed and spun the dial. Done. Time to go.

As she withdrew her hand, she felt air move across the back of it, cool on her skin. She turned her head towards the kitchen door. Again, a draught.

A strange calm settled on her then. The panic should have torn itself loose, crashing through her mind. She should have sprinted for the front door, out to the car, and away. Instead, she got to her feet and reached for the kitchen door handle.