So Say the Fallen (Dci Serena Flanagan 2) Page 5

  ‘That woman was in my drawer,’ she said, anger sharpening her words. ‘Where I keep my . . . private things.’

  McKay moved closer to the foot of the stairs, daring himself to speak. ‘They have to look. I’ve seen suicides before, and they always look around the house. They always do.’

  She stepped out of the room, to the top of the stairs. ‘Not my fucking house.’

  He moved back to the door, felt the wood against his shoulders, as the last reverberations of her voice faded.

  ‘No,’ she said, raising a finger as if admonishing a wilful child. ‘She doesn’t go through my private things. I won’t have it.’

  Some foolish part of him wanted to argue with her, to tell her nothing was private until it was all settled. But his rational mind closed his mouth.

  ‘Go and wait in the car,’ she said. ‘I’ll get my things, then I want away from this house.’

  Reverend Peter McKay did as he was told.

  9

  Flanagan missed dinner with her children, which was not a rare event, particularly in recent months. When she let herself into the house by the back door she found Alistair at the kitchen table, stacks of exercise books in front of him, marking homework.

  ‘Everyone all right?’ she asked as she looked in the fridge for a plate covered with foil.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. Barely a grunt.

  She set the plate on the worktop, removed the foil. Cottage pie.

  Mr Garrick’s last meal. Flanagan’s appetite deserted her.

  ‘Actually, do you mind if I don’t?’

  Alistair looked up from a teenager’s spidery handwriting. ‘Do what you like. Chuck it in the bin, whatever you want. I’m not bothered.’

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s just . . .’

  He scribbled a note on the exercise book in front of him, not hearing anything she said. She scraped the cold food into the bin and put the plate in the dishwasher.

  ‘How are the kids?’ she asked.

  ‘You could ask them yourself if you were ever around.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ Flanagan said, surprised more at her own anger than his words.

  Alistair rubbed his eyes as he inhaled and exhaled. ‘Look, I’ve got a lot of work to do here. We can argue another time.’

  ‘All right,’ Flanagan said, and walked to the kitchen door and the hallway beyond. He called after her, but she pretended not to hear. She went to the stairs and climbed, feeling the smooth varnish on the old wooden banisters. Alistair had sanded and finished them himself, and he had been so proud.

  It should have been a happy memory, but instead it made Flanagan mourn for the life they once had. In the quiet hours, when she couldn’t sleep, she promised herself they would get back what they’d lost, maybe something even better. If only they could hold it together a little longer, find their way through this.

  And what, exactly, was this? She didn’t know. How could she fix anything if she didn’t know what had been broken?

  Reaching the landing, Flanagan found Eli’s bedroom door slightly ajar, just as he liked it. But Ruth’s was tight shut. When had she started closing her door at night? She was ten years old; Flanagan had been into adolescence before the need for privacy had outweighed her fear of the dark. Even then, she needed a light on in the room. She’d still have one now if Alistair would tolerate it.

  She knocked on Ruth’s door and listened. After a few seconds, she opened it a crack and peered inside. Ruth stared back from her bed, an open book in her hand.

  Flanagan opened the door fully and said, ‘Late to be up reading, love.’

  ‘I was just finishing,’ Ruth said, folding down the corner of the page.

  ‘Can I come in?’ Flanagan asked, realising this was the first time she’d ever sought permission.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Ruth said, the expression on her face seeming to ask if she was in trouble.

  Flanagan closed the door behind her and approached the bed. Ruth tucked her legs up to make room, and Flanagan sat down on the edge. She reached for her daughter’s hand.

  ‘When did you get so grown up?’ she asked. ‘How did I miss it?’

  ‘Because you’re never here,’ Ruth said.

  ‘Nonsense. I saw you this morning. And last night before bed.’

  ‘That’s not much. It’s not like you hang out with us or anything. It’s always Dad takes us if we’re going anywhere. You never do anything with us. You’re never here, not even just to watch TV.’

  Flanagan tightened her hold on Ruth’s hand. ‘I’ve been very busy with work, love, you know that. But I’ll try to do better, I promise.’

  Ruth nodded her acceptance and looked down at her free hand.

  After a few moments, Flanagan reached out and touched her cheek. ‘What, love? Tell me.’

  Ruth took a breath, her eyes brimming. ‘Are you and Dad going to split up?’

  ‘No,’ Flanagan said, her voice harder than she’d intended, making Ruth flinch. ‘No, not at all. Why would you think that?’

  ‘You and Dad haven’t been talking to each other for ages, not properly. Not even to argue.’

  ‘Course we have,’ Flanagan said, the lie bitter in her mouth. ‘We were talking just now, downstairs, before I came up.’

  Ruth gave her a hard look that said she knew the truth.

  ‘We were, honest.’

  ‘What about?’ Ruth asked.

  ‘You and Eli,’ Flanagan said without hesitation.

  Ruth shrugged and looked down to her hands once more. ‘If you do split up, we’ll be all right. I know lots of kids whose mums and dads aren’t together, and they’re all fine.’

  Flanagan was about to dismiss the idea when a question occurred to her. ‘Did your father say something?’

  Ruth kept her gaze down. She was a terrible liar, always had been, so now she wasn’t even going to try.

  ‘What did he say?’ Flanagan asked.

  Ruth looked to the far corner, biting her lip.

  ‘Tell me.’ The sharpness of the words startled them both.

  ‘Just that, sometimes, if a mum and dad aren’t happy together, it’s better for everybody if they split up.’

  Flanagan felt that anger surface again, the same as she’d felt a few minutes ago in the kitchen. She pushed it away, saved it for later.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘sometimes that’s true. But me and your dad are happy together. We’re just having a bit of a rough patch, like all mums and dads do. We’ll get over it and things will be better.’

  ‘When?’ Ruth asked in the earnest way only children can.

  Flanagan smiled and said, ‘Soon. I promise. Now, it’s time to go to sleep.’

  Ruth lay down, and Flanagan set the book aside. She leaned over and gave her daughter a kiss.

  ‘Light off ?’

  Ruth nodded against her pillow, and Flanagan did as she was told. She stood and went to the door.

  As she stepped through the door, Ruth called, ‘Leave it open. Just a little.’

  Flanagan did so. Then she went to her own bedroom, lay on the bedclothes, and cried in the dark.

  She dreamed of Mr Garrick, dead in his back room, except it was a room in Flanagan’s home and she wondered why and how he had come to be here. And dead Mr Garrick pointed to the photographs in their frames, all lined up on the table, facing away from him, facing Flanagan.

  Turn them around, dead Mr Garrick said, turn them around, I want to see.

  Flanagan reached for the picture of his wife, but he said, no, my baby, I want to see my baby.

  She woke the moment her fingertips touched the frame, confused, at first weightless, then heavy on the bed, her body sinking into the mattress. She wanted to go downstairs to the back room, let poor dead Mr Garrick see his baby’s photograph, but reality untangled itself from her dream and she knew Mr Garrick lay in a mortuary miles away.

  Flanagan moved her arms, felt the clinging of fabric, and realised she had fallen asleep fully dressed. She turned her head on
the pillow, saw Alistair staring up at the ceiling.

  ‘You awake?’ she asked, even though she knew the answer.

  ‘No, I’m spark out,’ he said.

  She rolled onto her side, facing him, and inched closer. ‘Do you want to talk?’

  ‘I want to sleep.’

  She reached for the hand that lay by his side. He did not pull away. ‘Seeing as neither of us is doing that, do you want to try the first option?’

  ‘Go on, then,’ he said.

  She told him what Ruth had said, that their daughter seemed to believe their marriage was over, as if the terrible thing had already been done.

  ‘Is that how you see it?’ Flanagan asked. ‘Are we done?’

  She listened to him breathing for a time before he said, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘We can’t give up just like that. All these years thrown away. We can’t.’

  ‘No?’ he said. ‘You seem to be giving it a bloody good try.’

  ‘Me? What . . .’ She stopped, told herself to not get defensive, it wouldn’t help. ‘I know I’ve not been around as much as you’d like, but you know how work is these days.’

  ‘It doesn’t make much difference if you’re here or there, though, does it? Even when you’re here, it’s obvious you wish you weren’t.’

  ‘That’s not true, and it’s not fair,’ Flanagan said, defensive now whether she liked it or not.

  ‘Really? It’s like you’re a lodger here, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Because you’ve frozen me out. Ever since you were hurt, you’ve kept me at arm’s length.’

  ‘Oh, so it’s my fault.’

  ‘I didn’t say that. But I know you blame me for what happened, and maybe you’re right to, but I can’t change it no matter how much I wish I could.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, spitting the word into the darkness. ‘You’re right. I blame you. It was your fault I got stabbed. It’s your fault those boys came into our home. It’s your fault I still have nightmares about it. And the one thing I asked of you to try and make it better, you won’t do it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know.’

  And she did know, much as the idea horrified her. ‘Quit my job,’ she said.

  He remained silent until she had no choice but to speak.

  ‘I won’t do that. If that makes me selfish, then so be it, I’m selfish. But I do good work, I help people, or at least I try. Sometimes I wonder what I do it for, sometimes all I get is grief for my trouble, but I try. And I’m going to keep trying.’

  Alistair’s hand slipped away from hers. ‘Then there’s nothing more to talk about, is there?’

  He pushed back the duvet and got out of bed.

  ‘Alistair, wait,’ she said as he pulled on his dressing gown and slippers. ‘Wait, darling, please.’

  He closed the door softly as he left, and Flanagan placed her hand on the warm place where he had been. She did not know how long passed before she slept again, but she dreamed once more of dead Mr Garrick and the photographs, turn them, please turn them, I want to see . . .

  10

  As dawn crept in through the cracks in the shutters, Reverend Peter McKay lay quite still beside Roberta and watched her sleep. He had offered her his bed while he took the small spare room, and she had not hesitated in accepting. At some point in the night he had woken with a start, disorientated in the single bed in the room across the landing. Once his senses had aligned, an idea occurred to him, simple and clear: get up and go to her.

  Why not?

  They had slept together before on several occasions. Not through the night, of course, but many times, as the sweat cooled on their tangled limbs, they had each drifted into soft warm nothing. Why should they not sleep together now?

  Decided, he got out of bed, and left the spare room. Wearing his T-shirt and boxers, he crossed the landing to the door of his own bedroom. He thought about knocking, but dismissed the idea almost as soon as it had appeared. Instead, he reached for the handle and opened the door.

  Quiet like a church mouse.

  The image almost made him giggle, and he brought a hand to his lips as he closed the door behind him. He crossed the room, mindful of creaking floorboards, and stood over her for a while. So peaceful there, her hair pooled on the pillow, her cheek resting on the palm of one hand. He eased back the covers and lowered himself into the bed.

  As he drew up the bedclothes, she lifted her head from the pillow, her eyes barely open, her mind clearly far away.

  ‘But you can’t walk,’ she said.

  He realised she was still tangled in a dream about her dead husband, no wall between the real and the unreal.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he whispered. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  She lowered her head to the pillow and closed her eyes. He leaned over and placed a kiss, so soft it wouldn’t have woken a baby, on her forehead. At that moment, as he looked up from her, he noticed the framed photograph of Maggie, turned to face the wall. Even though he could not see her face, he couldn’t bear to look.

  He had slept little in the hours since, stirring every few minutes, roused by the heat of Roberta’s body just inches from his own. Now she lay on her back, one arm curled around her head so that he could see the stubble there where he had kissed her so many times. He watched her eyes move behind the lids, listened to her breathing, took in her heated scent.

  She had promised.

  With his hands clasped in hers, she had sworn on her dead child’s soul that they would be together. One day, they would be together. He did not believe in the soul, but he accepted her oath nonetheless, because he wanted her more than anything in the world. He needed her more than he needed his own conscience.

  And now, surely, Roberta was his. Wasn’t she?

  And if she wasn’t?

  McKay’s mouth dried, his stomach turned. Cold on his forehead as sweat seeped from his skin.

  No, it was unthinkable. To even consider the possibility would strip away the last of him, unman him as brutally as the Aston’s engine had unmanned her husband. So he would not consider the idea. He forced himself, instead, to resume his study of her.

  He had lost Maggie a decade ago. Eight years they had together before that. Happy years. From here, it seemed like some soppy television romance, all hazy sunlight and meadow picnics. There had been some sadness – their inability to conceive a child being the darkest stain on the memory – but even so, those eight years retained a golden glow in his mind.

  Then one morning, at breakfast, Maggie complained of a headache. As she sat at the kitchen table, head in her hands, a mug of tea going cold in front of her, McKay searched the cupboards for ibuprofen or paracetamol. Eventually, he decided to give up and walk the few hundred yards to the filling station at the other end of the village’s main street.

  ‘Don’t be too long,’ she said. ‘It really hurts.’

  Five minutes there, five minutes to buy what she needed, five minutes back.

  Fifteen minutes, that was all.

  He found her on the kitchen floor, the chair toppled over, her face slack, her hands clawed in front of her chest. He wept as he called the ambulance, wept as he kneeled over her, prayed with all his heart.

  She died on the way to the hospital. The paramedics restarted her heart twice before they could get her hooked up to the machines. In the early hours of the following morning, the doctor told McKay she was long gone. They could keep her heart beating, keep her lungs inflating and deflating. But Maggie McKay, who blushed when he touched her, who cried at Audrey Hepburn movies, who was kind and sweet to the very root of her being, everything that she was had ceased to exist. Now she was a vessel of organs and blood and bones and skin and nothing more. When they switched the machines off, he crawled onto the bed beside Maggie and held her as the life wheezed and rattled out of her.

  Anything you need, Mr Garrick had said, anything at all, just ask.

  Mr Garrick’s first wife had left him just the year before,
had run off with one of the salesmen at the car dealership. But Mr Garrick had his faith to keep him strong, and the fellowship of his church. And so did McKay. The congregation gathered around him in his time of need, and he was grateful. And most of all, McKay had prayer, and the knowledge that his wife’s passing had been God’s doing. There had to be a reason.

  Not a leaf falls against His will. Hadn’t he always said that?

  Nonsense. All a lie. His wife’s passing had been caused by a random malfunction of her brain; God had nothing to do with it.

  There is no God, McKay knew. No God, only us and our sordid desires to drive us through our days until we’re too old or too sick to desire anything. And then we are meat in a box, or ash in an urn, nothing more.

  McKay could recall the exact moment he had ceased to believe. It had not been a process, a gradual degradation of his faith. It had been a sudden and total realisation that it was all a lie. The moment had been when she first brought her mouth to his, four months ago. For days and weeks she had been coming to him so that they could pray together, to help her through the terrible time after her husband’s accident.

  And they had grown close, talking together long after their praying was done, and as they talked, he noticed her in ways he hadn’t before. The curve of her upper lip, the long and slender fingers, the toned form of her thigh as she crossed one leg over the other.

  Then one morning, before he knew what was happening, his hands were lost in her red hair, and he felt her warm breath on his neck.

  And his mind screamed, sinner, sinner, sinner!

  But there is no sin. Is there? There is no sin because there is no God.

  And then her mouth found his, her tongue quick and nimble and eager, and he knew beyond all certainty. Later that day, when it was done, he turned Maggie’s picture to the wall.

  The path from there to here had been the only one. There had been no other way but this. No other destination than his bed, the morning sunlight burning in her hair. He reached out, touched the glowing red strands, traced them back to the heat of her scalp.

  She gasped, eyes opened wide, her gaze flitting around the room until she found him, inches away, staring back at her.