So Say the Fallen (Dci Serena Flanagan 2) (7 page)

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.

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.’