So Say the Fallen (Dci Serena Flanagan 2) (13 page)

‘Thank you,’ Flanagan said. ‘You’re a good man.’

Something flashed across his face, something quick and furtive, gone before she could fully see it.

‘A good man,’ she said again.

He nodded, smiled, squeezed her hand, then left her alone with the God she did not believe in.

22

McKay closed the vestry door behind him, leaned his forehead against the wood.

Shakes erupted out from his core, to his hands, to his legs. His knees buckled and he collapsed into the door, then staggered across to the desk beneath the window.

A good man.

The words clawed at him.

‘I am not,’ he whispered. ‘I am not.’

A good man.

Maybe once. But not now.

I killed a man so I could have his wife.

Go back out. Go back out and tell her.

Tell her there is no God, that she is praying to air and stone and glass and nothing else.

Tell her this good man is a killer who deserves hellfire for his sins.

But McKay went nowhere. Instead, he remained at the desk, wishing he had a God to pray to.

23

Flanagan spent the next two days in prayer. An hour in the silence of the church before the stillness of the air seemed to press against her, squeezing her chest tight. Then in the car. Then in her office with the door locked. Then in the bed in the spare room, duvet pulled up to her mouth.

On the second night, she left the spare room, climbed the small flight of stairs to the master bedroom. She knocked lightly on the door. After a few moments, Alistair opened it.

‘Can I sleep with you tonight?’ she asked.

‘It’s your bed,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to ask. And you don’t need to knock.’

She followed him to the bed, climbed in beside him, into his open arms. Warm and familiar and shocking. She rested her head on his chest.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

A few seconds passed before he asked, ‘What for?’

‘For not being here for you and the kids. And for the distance I’ve put between us.’

She felt his chest fall as he exhaled.

‘I’m as responsible for that as you are,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all day. I’ve been pushing you away since
before what happened last year. I think I need to talk to somebody about it. Get some counselling.’

She almost told him about the prayer that had brought her back to their bed, but felt suddenly shy. They did not believe in such things, she and her husband. And anyway, her prayers were between her and whatever listened.

‘Maybe we should both talk to someone,’ she said. ‘As a couple, I mean.’

‘Maybe,’ he said.

‘But listen.’ She moved her head so she could see the profile of his features in the darkness. ‘You have to understand, I need to do my job. It’s what I’m good at. It’s what I’ve worked for my whole adult life. You can’t ask me to choose between my job and my family, because it’s not really a choice. I need both. I’m not me without them. Both of them.’

Quiet, the only sound their breathing in the dark.

Then Alistair spoke. ‘All right. But you have to leave your work outside. When you come into our home, all that other stuff, it stays outside.’

‘Says the man who spends his evenings marking homework,’ she said, smiling.

‘I’m serious.’

‘I know. And I promise I’ll try. And you have to promise not to push me away.’

‘I promise,’ he said.

They kissed and slept hard into the morning.

Flanagan arrived early at the church, but still she had to park a hundred yards down the road, wheels up on the kerb. She
had known it would be a big funeral – Henry Garrick had been a well-liked man in the community – but even so, she was surprised. Before she got out of the car, she sent a text message to Miriam McCreesh, wishing her luck with the appointment at the Cancer Centre.

Before she pressed send, she checked her watch, realised the test might have already happened. She knew the routine: the probing, the scanning, the sting of the biopsy. The hours between being sent away and coming back for the results. A long and lonely day, even if you had someone to hold your hand.

Flanagan walked towards the church, buttoning her black jacket. Groups of men and women, some younger, most older, moved in the same direction, and Flanagan found herself part of the tide. She listened as people exchanged greetings, their polite laughs, their remembrances of past encounters. A strange comfort in these voices, and she recalled funerals she’d attended in the past, the coming together of family and friends, aunts or uncles seldom seen, cousins she barely recognised.

The farewell to an elderly relative often had a muted joy about it. If their time was due, and the suffering and indignities of their withering years were at an end, then wasn’t that a good thing? Sad, yes, but wasn’t life itself ?

But this kind of funeral was different. Mr Garrick had not been taken by heart failure after days wired to machines in a hospital side ward. There had been no long and slow decline to be endured. True, Mr Garrick had spent his last months in terrible pain, but even so, it was not his time. Flanagan had gone to enough suicide funerals to know there was no joy or gratitude to be found here.

Police cones at the gates to the grounds to keep them clear for the hearse and the family cars. As Flanagan walked towards the church, she checked her watch. Quarter past eleven. The service was to start at noon. As she entered, an elderly gentleman handed her an order of service printed on folded A4 paper. He smiled and said good morning as he did so, and Flanagan couldn’t help but return the smile.

Inside, she found a place in a pew two rows from the back. Soft organ music played, sending warm waves of sound through the church. It was already two thirds full. With the first two rows reserved for family, the place would be packed tight.

As she let her gaze wander the congregation, Flanagan noticed a middle-aged man, slender, well dressed. Mid fifties, or perhaps younger but prematurely grey. It was difficult to tell from this angle. He sat across the aisle, two rows forward. Flanagan watched as he bowed his head, rested his knees on the prayer stool, and clasped his hands together. She could just make out the movement of his jaw as he spoke to his God.

Right there in front of everyone. As if it was the most natural thing in the world.

And wasn’t it?

It is a church, after all, Flanagan thought. If he can’t do it here, where can he?

She looked around. No one paid him any attention. No one cared.

Flanagan put her hands on the back of the pew before her, brought them together, twined her fingers. Then she slid forward until her knees rested on the padded bench. She took one more
look around, saw no one watching, then bowed and closed her eyes.

‘Dear God,’ she whispered in a voice so low only the Creator could possibly hear. ‘Thank you for my blessings. Thank you for my children, for my husband, for keeping them well, and for keeping us together. Thank you. And please help Miriam with her test this morning. Please let it be good news.’

She raised her head and said aloud, ‘Amen.’

When she got back up onto the seat, she looked back towards the middle-aged man whose prayer had inspired her own. He sat turned in his pew, watching her. Flanagan froze as if caught in some misdeed. She saw now that the man was older, perhaps near sixty, and his eyes were tearful and hollow. He nodded to her, and she returned the gesture, realising his features were familiar. The man turned away, and Flanagan studied the back of him, digging for a memory, anything to reveal his identity.

She spent the next forty-five minutes wondering about him as the church filled. By the time the coffin arrived, shoulders pressed against hers at either side. The hum of chatter faded as the widowed Mrs Garrick arrived, walked up the aisle to the reserved seats, arm-in-arm with another woman.

Then Flanagan heard Reverend McKay’s voice behind her, coming from the vestibule. She turned her head, but she could not see him.

‘We receive the body of our brother Henry Garrick with confidence in God, the giver of life, who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead.’

When he finished the verse, the congregation said, ‘Amen.’ Flanagan said it too.

She watched as McKay led the group of six men along the aisle, the coffin resting on their shoulders. Two undertakers guided the coffin onto the waiting trolley at the front.

McKay went to the lectern and said, ‘We meet in the name of Christ who died and was raised by the glory of God the Father. Grace and mercy be with you all.’

The congregation said, ‘And also with you.’

Flanagan said it too, beats behind everyone else. As she said the words, McKay’s eyes met hers, and from the back of the church, even over this distance, she saw despair in them.

24

McKay recited the words with no awareness of their meaning. They were only shapes in his mouth, movements his tongue had made hundreds of times over the years.

He looked out to the people, his gaze finding Flanagan.

Save me, he thought.

She stared back, and she saw it on him, he was sure. He looked away, looked anywhere but at her. Then he found Roberta in the front row, and she did not look at him.

She had barely looked at him the day before, during the wake. All the same people, the congregation of this church, milling around the house. Cups of tea, small sandwiches, biscuits, cakes, sausage rolls. The kitchen a production line of kindly women, the hall lined with folding chairs, borrowed by the vanload from the old school hall across the road from the church that served as a community centre, now bearing the weight of middle-aged men holding cups and saucers.

The chatter of voices and the clink of china, this was the sound of a wake to Reverend Peter McKay. The smell of tea and sweat.

Roberta had the coffin put in the back room where Mr Garrick had spent his last weeks. McKay didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to look at the face of the man he’d killed. But such was his duty. When he arrived at the house in the early afternoon he
lingered in the hall as long as he could, shaking hands, patting shoulders, refusing cups of tea.

Soon there was no more avoiding it. He walked to the room at the rear of the hall, paused in the doorway. A small cluster of men greeted him, and he stepped inside. They moved out of his way, allowed him space. As fear pushed up from his belly and into his throat, threatening to choke him, McKay approached the coffin. Varnished oak, gold-plated handles, glistening in the light from the window. McKay swallowed and looked inside.

Silk covered the body to the waist, disguising the missing legs, the gnarled hands powdered to hide the scarring. And the face, waxen and hollow, like a doll.

I’m sorry, he wanted to say. I wish I could take it back. I shouldn’t have done this terrible thing, and I’d give anything to take the poison from your mouth.

And every unspoken word was true. As he fought the urge to weep, McKay startled at the sound of a voice at his shoulder.

‘Sure, you’d think he was sleeping, wouldn’t you?’

He turned to see Mr McHugh staring into the coffin.

‘They can do wonderful things, these days, the undertakers. I remember when we buried Cora’s mother it looked as if they’d made her up as a clown.’

McKay knew he should have replied, perhaps enquired after Cora’s health, was she getting out at all lately? Instead, he walked away, out of the room, and struggled through the kitchen full of trays and steam and gossip until he found the door to the utility room and the small bathroom off that.

Had he still believed in God, McKay would have thanked Him that the bathroom was unoccupied. He closed and locked
the door, leaned against it. A small space, no more than six feet by four, the toilet at one end, a washbasin at the other, lit by a narrow frosted window.

For the first time in a decade, he felt the craving for a cigarette. That dry need at the back of his throat, in his lungs, waiting for tarry blue smoke. He had never smoked more than ten a day, even as a young man, but still the desire was great.

Later.

Later, he would go to a shop in some other town and buy a packet of cigarettes and smoke them until he hacked up grey phlegm, until he was dizzy and nauseous. But now he had to pull himself together. Get through the next forty-eight hours. That was all.

Last night she had given him hope.

Roberta still hadn’t wanted him to come over – discreet, she’d said – but her voice had been warm and kind. Loving, even. Enough to let him think there might be an after, a beyond. If he survived, there could be a future for him and Roberta, as tainted as it might be.

His thin surface of calm restored, McKay left the bathroom, back out through the kitchen, into the hall, avoiding every hand that reached out for him, every seeking face that wanted to snare him in banal conversation. He kept his focus on the door to the good sitting room, where he knew Roberta would be, the queen on her throne holding dominion over her subjects.

She did not look up as he entered the room. A cup of tea on a saucer held on her lap. Black skirt, white blouse, minimal make-up. A beautiful young widow mourning her husband. McKay crossed the room, swerving between the feet and knees of those
seated here, towards the one narrow space on the couch, opposite her.

‘Excuse me,’ he said to Miss Trimble, the aged spinster who always insisted on giving him a critique of his sermons. She moved sideways, leaving him just enough cushion to squeeze onto.

Now the widow saw him.

‘Reverend Peter,’ she said.

‘Mrs Garrick,’ he said. ‘How are you holding up?’

A gentle smile. She tilted her head. ‘Not too bad.’ She shared the smile with the people all around. ‘Everyone’s been very kind.’

With that, she turned away from him. A clear instruction. Don’t talk to her.

And he wanted to slap the cup and saucer from her hand, grab her shoulders, shake her. And tell her what? He loved her? He hated her?

He said nothing. Sat with his hands on his knees, exchanged greetings with the good people as they came and went, while magnificent fury burned inside him.