So Say the Fallen (Dci Serena Flanagan 2) Read online

  ‘The morning,’ Flanagan said, looking to Alistair, her eyebrows raised. ‘Eight-thirty?’

  Alistair nodded his assent.

  ‘Yes, eight-thirty.’

  ‘Okay,’ McKay said. ‘Thank you.’

  She hung up and dropped her phone to the table. Alistair drew her down to him, sat her on his lap as if they were a boy and girl, still in love with the joyful newness of it all.

  He kissed her and said, ‘Thank you.’

  Flanagan returned the kiss and tried not to think of Reverend McKay and the terrible things he knew.

  36

  McKay placed the phone on the passenger seat beside him. Tomorrow. He could tell her tomorrow. One more night wouldn’t change things. He got out of the car into the darkness outside his house, the keys in his hand. The glass of the front door showed the black inside there, that cold and hollow house, where his wife had died and he had years later betrayed her with a monster dressed as a woman.

  He looked across the grounds to the church, a spired silhouette against the dark blue. A beautiful building, it really was. He remembered when he had first inherited this parish. He and Maggie had sat inside on that first night, the building dark around them, street and moon light illuminating the stained glass, making strange shadows. They had embraced and thanked God together.

  Do it for me, the woman had said.

  No, he thought. I’ll do it for Maggie.

  He dropped his house keys back into his pocket and found the long spindly keys for the church. His fingers wrapped around them as he crossed to the building, feeling for the familiar lines of the vestry key. He found it by the time he reached the door and let himself inside. Dark in here, a weak orange sheen from the street lights outside. The burglar alarm buzzed until he entered the code: 1606, Maggie’s birthday. He found the small desktop lamp, flicked it on. As he passed the open closet he brushed his cassock and surplice with his fingertips, coarse black fabric and smooth white silk.

  Out into the church where the stained-glass windows rose above and looked like angels come to observe his hypocrisy. Weariness crept into his arms and legs as he crossed in front of the pulpit and into the aisle.

  He chose a pew three rows back, slid down and into the hard wooden seat. Rested his forearms on the back of the pew in front. Lowered his knees onto the padded bench. Clasped his hands together. Closed his eyes.

  ‘Maggie,’ he said. ‘Maggie, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’ve become. I’m not who I used to be before you left me. I’ve changed. Everything’s changed. You would hate me. No. You never hated anybody. But you could never love me. Not the way I am now. I betrayed you. I turned your picture away so you wouldn’t see what I did. I didn’t want you to see me with her.

  ‘Oh, Maggie, I’ve done an awful thing. I’ve done a thing so awful I’m glad you’re not alive to see it. Do you understand? Do you see what I did to myself ? I made myself glad you died.’

  He wept then. Hard choking sobs trapped his voice in his throat. He swallowed, forced the tears back, the words out.

  ‘I want you back,’ he said. ‘I prayed for you not to die and you died anyway. And now I want you back. I want everything back like before. I know it’s not possible, it’ll never be, but that’s what I want. I want it so badly it’s been killing me all these years. And God, I’m so angry at You. You took her from me for no reason at all, You took her just because You could and I’m so fucking angry and I hate You, God, I fucking hate You for doing that to me, I fucking hate You, I hate You, and I want her back, please give her back.’

  A movement in the darkness by the vestry startled him.

  ‘She’s gone,’ a voice said. ‘There is no giving back.’

  He got to his feet and said, ‘Come out where I can see you.’

  She moved into the dim light. Roberta, dressed in a hooded top and jeans.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘To talk,’ she said.

  A quiver in her voice, as if she held back tears.

  ‘We’ve nothing to talk about,’ he said. ‘Go home.’

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I’ve got no one else.’

  He stepped out of the pew and into the aisle, but went no closer to her. ‘You never really needed anyone else, did you? Not unless you had some use for them. Now go.’

  ‘I’m going to kill myself,’ she said.

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘I am. And I want to do it here. Before God.’

  ‘You don’t believe in God,’ he said.

  ‘Do you?’ she asked.

  He went to speak, but realised he did not know the answer to that question. This morning he had certainty, absolute faith in his disbelief. Now the certainty crumbled.

  ‘Everyone believes,’ she said. ‘Even if they say they don’t, there’s always that idea inside them. Maybe they’re wrong. Well, maybe I’m wrong. So I want to do it here.’

  ‘Enough,’ he said, taking a step forward. ‘This won’t work on me. Not any more.’

  ‘I know how to do it,’ she said.

  She raised her hands, and for the first time he saw that she held a belt between them. His belt, the one from the waist of his cassock. Two inches in breadth, thick coarse material, a plain metal buckle at one end. She had fashioned the other end into a noose.

  ‘It shouldn’t hurt too much if I do it right,’ she said, a strange calm to her voice now. ‘I just put the buckle over a door and close it. Put this end around my neck and sit down. Simple as that.’

  ‘You won’t,’ he said, feeling his anger fade. ‘And you certainly won’t do it here.’

  She moved towards the top of the aisle. ‘All you have to do is walk out. You don’t have to have any part in it. I can manage by myself.’

  McKay knew his rage should have burned bright, he knew he should have dragged her by the arm, thrown her out of the church. But instead of anger, he felt something else, something familiar yet strange to him.

  Compassion, if he had to put a name to it.

  She’s right, he thought. Deep down, everyone believes. And I believe.

  The urge to weep came upon him once more, but he resisted it. The urge to pray surged in its place. He stepped towards her.

  ‘You’re confused,’ he said. ‘You’re angry. You’re afraid. I know how that feels.’

  She shook her head. ‘You don’t know how I feel.’

  ‘Maybe not.’ He came close, close enough to see the glittering in her eyes. ‘But God knows. Why don’t you pray with me?’

  She turned away, but he stepped around her, wouldn’t let her avoid his gaze. Her mouth opened and closed, her eyelids flickered.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’

  McKay lowered himself to his knees. ‘Then let’s do it.’

  She nodded and said, ‘All right.’

  Then he saw the movement of her hands, felt the coarse cloth slip across his nose and cheeks and lips, felt the belt settle around his neck.

  Quick, so quick he couldn’t get his fingers between the belt and his throat, she yanked the noose tight. As he grabbed at the belt, she slipped behind him, pulled hard, taking him off his knees. His heels kicked at the floor, the back of his head cracked on the tile. Pressure inside his skull, in his ears, his temples.

  She hauled him across the smooth tiles, crying out at the effort. His jacket whispered on the sheen of the floor as he opened and closed his mouth, trying to vent a scream that could not escape his chest. As she grunted and dragged him across the threshold of the vestry, in the dim light of the lamp, he caught a glimpse of her hands and saw she wore the same surgical gloves as he had the night he killed her husband.

  Amid the crushing pressure in his head, through the clamour of his fear, a thought speared into his mind: scratch her. Get some trace of her under his nails. Get it for the police to find. He reached back over his head, but she kept her hands out of his reach.

  She stopped inside the vestry, kicked the door over. Then she planted
both her feet firm on the floor, tightened her grip on the belt, and hoisted him up by his neck. Somewhere through the storm behind his eyes, he heard her growl. Pain as the fabric cut into his skin, constricted his throat. He scrambled to get to his feet, swung his arms in wild arcs, trying to get hold of her, get hold of the belt, anything at all.

  She gave an animal roar as she threw herself towards the door, dragging him staggering after. Up and up, she pulled up, he could see her arms stretching up, pushing back. She howled and wrestled, and for a moment his heels left the floor.

  Then the door slammed shut behind him, the handle digging into the small of his back, and she stepped away. Feeling the noose loosen a fraction, he lunged forward, but the belt tightened again, yanked him back against the door. He realised she had fed the buckle over the top, closed the door, trapping it in place.

  She stared at him, wide-eyed, her face burning red, panting as he tried to dig his fingertips between the belt and his throat. Then she raised the hood over her head, dropped to her knees, and reached for his ankles. The noose tightened, harder than before, as she pulled his feet from under him, held his ankles in front of her. The belt pulled tighter still, and the storm inside his head swelled into a hurricane. He reached behind to the small of his back, his fingers trying for the door handle, but the weight of his body kept the door closed. He grabbed for her, but his fingers swiped at the clear air between them. His legs kicked of their own accord, but she held her grip firm on his ankles.

  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.