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

  No recognition there, only confusion. Then realisation, and her expression turned from fear to anger.

  ‘Get out,’ she said.

  He reached for her again, his fingertips seeking the soft skin of her cheek.

  She slapped his hand away. ‘Get out.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Get out!’

  A shout now, her voice cracking.

  ‘But we’ve—’

  She struck him, her palm against his cheek, glancing off his nose.

  ‘Get out!’

  He brought his hands up as she swiped at him again. Then she pushed, first with her hands against his chest until he teetered at the edge of the bed, then she curled her legs up, and planted her feet against his stomach and pushed again.

  McKay landed on the floor, shoulders first, the back of his head cracking on the floorboards. His legs followed, bringing the tangled duvet with them.

  Up on her knees now, naked, pointing to the door. ‘Get the fuck out!’

  He scrambled to his feet, fell, got up again.

  ‘Get out!’

  McKay didn’t look back as he crossed the room, opened the door, exited, closed it behind him. He stood on the landing, shaking, shame creeping in on him, a sickly wave of it.

  He went to the spare room and slipped inside, silent, and climbed back into the small bed. Pulled the duvet up over his head, blacking out everything.

  It took an hour for the shaking to pass.

  11

  At eight a.m., the pathologist’s assistant opened the door to the Royal Victoria Hospital’s mortuary and allowed DCI Flanagan and DS Murray to enter. Flanagan had spent several minutes assuring Murray that he could leave at any point if he really needed to. Sooner or later, he would have to attend a post-mortem in her stead, and he might as well break his duck with this one. With no trauma involved, no bullet fragments to seek, no stab wounds to count, this would be about as clean as an autopsy gets.

  The assistant led them to the post-mortem table. The body bag lay on a trolley beside it, Mr Garrick’s remains within. Dr Miriam McCreesh, the forensic pathologist, waited for them. A tall woman, the kind whose girlhood awkwardness turned to grace as an adult, she had an efficiency about her movements and her words. She wore surgical gloves, and a cap that strangely matched the green of her eyes.

  ‘Morning,’ she said.

  Flanagan and Murray returned the greeting.

  McCreesh consulted the clipboard on the wheeled table at her left hand.

  ‘Dr Barr’s initial assessment is death by suicide,’ she said. ‘Do you concur?’

  Flanagan hesitated, then said, ‘I’m undecided.’

  McCreesh looked up from the notes. ‘I see.’ She returned her attention to the clipboard. ‘Going by the liver temperature taken at the scene, the rigor, and the lividity, I’m estimating time of death between eleven p.m. and midnight on Sunday the 4th of October. Dr Barr observed no sign of recent trauma, as well as the presence of ten empty morphine granule sachets. There was an empty yogurt pot, and the spoon with which the yogurt was eaten. I understand the deceased was in the habit of using the yogurt as a means of administering his nightly dose of morphine, correct?’

  ‘That’s my understanding,’ Flanagan said.

  ‘All right,’ McCreesh said. ‘Shall we begin?’

  Murray endured the early stages of the ritual. Flanagan watched him from the corner of her eye. He showed no signs of defeat as the body was taken from the bag, transferred to the post-mortem table using a ceiling-mounted hoist, and then photographed. Nor when the pyjama top was removed, or even the dressings on the stumps of Mr Garrick’s legs. Only when the adult nappy was removed, and the damage to the dead man’s lower abdomen was revealed, did Murray flinch.

  In truth, so did Flanagan.

  They watched as McCreesh took samples – hair, skin, matter from beneath the fingernails. Murray cleared his throat as she swabbed what remained of Mr Garrick’s genitalia. Then she began the slow crawling external examination of the body, starting at the head, working down the left side, then up the right. Occasionally, McCreesh paused to lift her magnifying glass and look closer at some hair or fibre, before nodding and putting it back.

  Eventually, she said, ‘All right. I concur with Dr Barr, no external sign of trauma.’

  She looked to her assistant, who immediately acted on the unspoken command, wheeling a trolley laden with tools to the table.

  Flanagan leaned in close to Murray. ‘How are you holding up?’

  ‘I’m okay, ma’am,’ he said. ‘So far.’

  McCreesh checked Dr Barr’s notes once more. ‘The FMO mentions that the morphine granules were to be swallowed whole, not chewed, so the dose would be released gradually in the stomach.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Flanagan said.

  McCreesh took a small penlight from her pocket and leaned over Mr Garrick’s still open mouth. She shone the light inside, peering into the back of the throat.

  ‘Hm,’ she said and reached for a clear plastic tube containing a swab stick. She removed the stick, and inserted the swab into Mr Garrick’s mouth, moving it around his back teeth. When she was done, she examined the swab with her magnifying glass.

  ‘I’ve got a mixture of a pink substance, the yogurt presumably, and crushed granules. I’d say that’s the morphine he chewed to get it to release more quickly. Tests will confirm.’

  She returned the swab stick to its tube, sealed it, and handed it to her assistant, who wrote on the tube’s side with a permanent marker. Then McCreesh turned to her trolley and selected a scalpel.

  Murray nodded towards her. ‘Is she going to . . .?’

  ‘Yes, she is,’ Flanagan said.

  Murray exhaled and said, ‘I’m okay. I’m okay.’

  His breathing deepened as the Y-shaped incision was made from the body’s shoulders to its groin. He did not speak again until McCreesh began to saw away the ribs and clavicle to remove the breastplate, the grinding noise resonating between the tiled walls.

  Murray leaned in and said, ‘Ma’am, may I be excused?’

  ‘Can’t you stick it out a little longer?’ Flanagan asked. ‘The organ examination’s where the real work gets done.’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Murray said, and rushed past her to the doors, where he slapped at the green button with his palm until they swung open.

  McCreesh looked up from her work. ‘He didn’t do too bad.’

  ‘No,’ Flanagan said. ‘Not too bad at all.’

  Two hours later, Flanagan sat at McCreesh’s desk, opposite the pathologist. She had sent DS Murray back to Lisburn to chase up the searches made of the Garricks’ MacBook and iPad, as well as the notes from the door-to-door inquiries carried out in Morganstown by the two detective constables under his command.

  ‘I’m reporting death by suicide to the coroner,’ McCreesh said. Her blonde hair now flowed free of the cap she’d worn during the autopsy.

  ‘All right,’ Flanagan said, nodding.

  ‘You don’t seem convinced,’ McCreesh said.

  ‘I’m not disputing your assessment.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But there’s something . . . details, really, just details.’

  McCreesh rested her elbows on the desk. ‘Go on,’ she said.

  ‘I spoke with the nurse who came in to help Mrs Garrick with her husband, change his dressings and so on. She thought he’d been doing well, or as well as could be hoped for. She said his mood was generally good, that he had his faith, that he was strong-willed.’

  ‘Is that so unusual?’ McCreesh asked. ‘Haven’t you ever seen a suicide that came out of the blue, that baffled everybody around the deceased?’

  ‘Of course, but this seems . . . different.’

  ‘Different,’ McCreesh said. ‘You’ll have to do better than “different” to sway the coroner.’

  Flanagan swallowed, considered letting it go, then she said, ‘It’s the photographs.’

  McCreesh sat back
. ‘Photographs?’

  ‘That’s the one detail that doesn’t sit right. He had photographs of loved ones arranged around him.’

  ‘Suicides often do.’

  ‘But they were facing away from him. If he wanted to see them as he died, they would have been facing him. Why put them there at all if he couldn’t see them?’

  McCreesh sighed. ‘I don’t know. We probably never will. What I do know is I found what appear to be crushed morphine granules on his teeth and the rear of his tongue, which is consistent with him chewing them before swallowing. The stomach contained exactly what we expected to find there, the mass spectrometer tests on the liver and blood samples will confirm the lethal morphine levels. All of it adds up. This was a suicide. I can’t see it any other way, and I’m going to advise the coroner accordingly. I expect him to sign the interim death certificate, Mrs Garrick will put her husband to rest, and until the inquest, that will be that.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Flanagan said. ‘But I can disregard your findings, and the coroner’s report, if I so wish.’

  McCreesh bristled. ‘That’s your prerogative. But you’re just making grief for yourself.’

  A sudden smile burst on Flanagan’s lips, in spite of everything, surprising her. ‘Oh, I’m good at that.’

  McCreesh returned the smile. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Anyway, enough business. How’ve you been?’

  ‘Okay,’ Flanagan said. ‘Still on the tamoxifen for the foreseeable future, still having the check-ups, still terrified I’m going to find another lump. You?’

  McCreesh’s eyes glistened. She blinked. A tear threatened to spill from the lower lid. ‘I found something. I have an appointment at the Cancer Centre first thing on Friday.’

  Flanagan reached across the desk, took McCreesh’s hand in hers.

  ‘It’ll be a cyst,’ Flanagan said. ‘Just like the last time.’

  ‘That’s what I keep telling myself,’ McCreesh said. ‘Over and over. But I can’t drown that other voice out. You know what it’s like.’

  ‘I know,’ Flanagan said, squeezing McCreesh’s fingers tight.

  ‘All I can think of is, how will I tell Eddie, what will I say to the kids? What if it’s worse this time? What if it’s not been caught soon enough? What if it’s spread to the lymphatic system? What if, what if, what if ?’

  Now McCreesh squeezed back, sniffed hard, blinked again.

  ‘But I won’t be beaten now,’ she said. ‘Six years clear. I’m not fucking letting it get the better of me after six years clear.’

  ‘Good,’ Flanagan said.

  They embraced, and Flanagan walked from the mortuary wing out to the car park. She paid at the kiosk and found her car. Before she inserted the key into the ignition, she closed her eyes and said a small prayer for Miriam McCreesh.

  12

  Reverend Peter McKay left Roberta Garrick alone in his draughty house and crossed the grounds to the church. The morning prayer service, a daily tradition few parishes maintained. But McKay opened the chapel two mornings a week for the handful of parishioners who still wanted to commune with God on a Tuesday or Thursday morning.

  Mr McHugh waited at the vestry door, a folder full of sheet music under his arm. A retired schoolmaster, he’d taught music and religious education at a grammar school in Armagh for forty years. Now he turned up at each service to play organ for the faithful.

  ‘That was a bad doing, yesterday,’ Mr McHugh said. ‘How’s Mrs Garrick?’

  ‘She’s coping,’ McKay said.

  ‘Well, tell her Cora and I are thinking of her.’

  ‘I will, thank you.’

  Mr McHugh touched McKay’s sleeve. ‘We had the police at the door last night. Asking about it. A fella and a girl, I think they said they were constables. They were asking all sorts. Made me and Cora uncomfortable, if I’m honest.’

  ‘I suppose they have to do these things,’ McKay said.

  ‘Well, I didn’t like it,’ Mr McHugh said. ‘It’s not respectful. To us or the Garricks.’

  McKay gave no response. He opened the door and allowed Mr McHugh into the vestry and through to the church beyond, before entering the code to disable the burglar alarm. Over the next half hour, while McKay donned his black cassock and white surplice, while he scribbled notes on loose sheets of paper he took from the old printer in the vestry, a scattering of people, more women than men, mostly elderly, sat in the pews. More of them than usual. Death brings out the God-fearing.

  And there, near the front, Jim Allison, MLA. Forty-something, tanned and well-dressed, owner of a print business on the outskirts of Moira. He’d been an elected Member of the Legislative Assembly at Stormont since the re-establishment of the devolved Northern Ireland government in 2007. A man of influence who’d fought battles for many in the parish, from denied benefits claims to planning refusals, Allison had tackled bureaucrats in every government department on behalf of his constituents.

  Although the MLA and his wife were regular attendees on Sundays, McKay struggled to remember a time when Allison had bothered with a weekday service, save for funerals or weddings. But he knew why Allison was here this morning. The parish had suffered a terrible tragedy and the local politician had come to show his solidarity with his people.

  Such a cynical thought, but McKay had been given to cynical thinking over the past few months. Since his own faith had left him, he had questioned the belief of every other person who stepped inside his church. We’re all just playing along, aren’t we? Just going through the motions, doing what’s expected of us.

  And so McKay worked his way through the service, point-by-point as prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer: the gathering of God’s people, the sentence of scripture, the opening hymn, the exhortation, the confession, the Lord’s Prayer. Like an actor who’d performed the same lines every night for twenty years, he recited each segment with detached authority.

  But today was different, wasn’t it?

  Today, they listened harder. This morning, every word he spoke carried the weight of Mr Garrick’s death. He had chosen the hymns and readings carefully to reflect the sombre mood the congregation expected from him. And this morning, he would go further. A sermon, a rarity in a weekday service. After the canticles and the psalms were done, he turned over two pages of scribbles that would carry him through the next ten minutes.

  He heard the door open, felt a cool breeze, and looked up from his own barely legible scrawls. The policewoman, Flanagan. McKay’s throat dried. She slipped into the second to last pew, exactly where Roberta Garrick had sat all those months ago. Her eyes met his, held his stare.

  Start talking, he told himself.

  Start talking now.

  ‘My friends,’ he said, or at least he tried. The words came out as a crackling whisper. He cleared his throat, looked down at his notes, and tried again.

  ‘My friends, this morning we come into the Lord’s house carrying the great weight of tragedy. You all know the Garrick family, and you all know they have endured more heartbreak than any family should. First, with the loss of little Erin Garrick, not even two years old, in a terrible accident four years ago. Back then, Mr and Mrs Garrick sought the solace of their faith, their Lord God and His son, Jesus Christ. And they sought the support of the congregation of this church, they turned to their friends here, and with your help, and the Saviour’s, they survived the loss of their only child.’

  McKay glanced up once more. Flanagan still watched him.

  And why shouldn’t she? Everyone else watched him too. That’s what they’re here for. Stay calm, he told himself. She can’t see inside you. She can’t read your thoughts. She doesn’t know the terrible things you’ve done.

  And still she watched him.

  He coughed once more, and recommenced his sermon.

  ‘Then six months ago, another accident almost took Mr Garrick’s life. He survived, but with the loss of his legs, and the cost of a lifetime of pain. And still, Mr and Mrs Garrick turned to the on
ly ones who could help them through such a torturous time: their God and their church.

  ‘Now, if Mr Garrick had reacted to this life-changing accident with anger, all of us would have understood. Wouldn’t any one of us have been angry? We’d have had a right, wouldn’t we? But Mr Garrick was not angry. He and I talked and prayed together many times over the last few months, and not once did he speak a word of bitterness. What he did say was that if it was God’s will that he should survive, there had to be a reason.’

  McKay looked once more to the back of the church. Now, at last, Flanagan did not stare at him. Instead, she looked up to the vaults of the ceiling, around at the commemorative plaques, the stained-glass windows, the military standards hanging at intervals along the side walls, the harvest displays of pumpkins, root vegetables, sheaves of wheat, all arranged around the church by Miss Trimble and the other elder ladies of the congregation. He guessed Flanagan seldom visited a church unless someone needed burying. He returned his attention to his notes.

  ‘And this morning, we gather here knowing yet another tragedy has struck the Garrick family. All indications are that, on Sunday evening, Mr Garrick took his own life. I want you all to know that he died peacefully, without pain. We’ll never know what brought Mr Garrick to this final decision, but we understand that six months of tremendous suffering have taken their toll. But I want to believe that when Mr Garrick closed his eyes for the last time, he did so with his faith as strong as it had been four years ago when he lost his daughter, and six months ago when he came so close to death. Because without faith, what do we have left?’

  McKay knew the answer to that question.

  Nothing. Without faith, we have nothing.

  13

  Then I have nothing, Flanagan thought.

  She felt a piercing spike of self-pity, an emotion she detested above all others. Get out of me, she thought, I’ll have no more of you.

  Reverend McKay wrapped up his sermon and said, ‘Let us pray.’