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When DCI Serena Flanagan is asked to sign off the suicide of a severely disabled local businessman, she finds herself envying the grieving widow’s comfortable life and devoted marriage, until the widow’s close relationship with the local rector starts to sound an alarm. But with a clean crime scene and no evidence to back her up, have Serena’s instincts led her down the wrong path?

With her husband struggling to deal with the aftermath of an attack that nearly cost him his life, and her young children anxious and unhappy, Serena’s determination to unlock the mystery of what happened in that house may cost her her job – and her family.

About the Author

Stuart Neville’s first novel, The Twelve, was one of the most critically acclaimed crime debuts of recent years, winning the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for best thriller. Collusion, Stolen Souls, Ratlines (shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger), The Final Silence and Those We Left Behind (a Richard and Judy Book Club choice) have garnered widespread praise, confirming his position as one of the most exciting crime authors writing today.

Also by Stuart Neville

For Jo, who has given me so much.

‘I can’t just live for the other world. I need to live in this one now.

So say the fallen. So they’ve said since time began.’

The Drop, Dennis Lehane

Detective Chief Inspector Serena Flanagan focused on the box of tissues that sat on the coffee table between her and Dr Brady. A leaf of soft paper bursting up and out, ready for her tears. Just like when she’d been diagnosed with cancer. A box like this one had sat close to hand on the desk. She didn’t need one then, and she didn’t need one now.

Dr Brady had no interest in abnormal cells, growths, tumours. Flanagan’s mind was his concern. He sat cross-legged in the chair on the other side of the table, chewing the end of a biro. It clicked and scratched against his teeth, a persistent noise that triggered memories of exam halls and waiting rooms, and made Flanagan dig at her palms with her nails.

The counsellor pursed his lips and inhaled through his nose in a way that Flanagan found even more irritating than the click-scratch of the pen. Irritating because she knew it preceded another question that she had no desire to answer.

‘He made his choice,’ she said. ‘He set out to kill me that morning. He failed. So I killed him.’

Dr Brady paused, his gaze fixed on hers, a small smile on his lips that might have appeared kindly to anyone but Flanagan.

‘But you didn’t kill him,’ he said. ‘You killed the other one, the gunman. Colin Tandy rode away on the motorbike. You had nothing to do with him winding up under a bus.’

Flanagan saw herself outside the small terraced house on the outskirts of Lisburn where she’d taken a statement from an assault victim. She remembered the street, the graffiti painted white on red brick. She saw the bike, the two men, the semi-automatic pistol aimed at her, felt the Glock 17’s grip in her hand. Something hot splitting the air close to her ear. Then the pillion passenger’s helmet cracked open, the jammed pistol useless in his hand. She felt the empty cartridge, sent spinning from the chamber of the Glock, bounce off her cheek. In her mind she heard the brass hit the pavement, a sound like a Christmas bauble falling from the tree, but she knew she couldn’t possibly have heard it over the noise of the traffic and the screaming.

She saw the passenger – Peter Hanratty, she later learned – lean back on the motorcycle’s pillion seat. Then she put one in his chest. This time the cartridge spun into her hair before falling away, falling like the passenger – except he didn’t. His torso hung over the motorcycle’s back wheel, his arms suspended at his sides, feet caught on the rests.

Flanagan moved her aim to the rider, saw the fear in his eyes as she aligned the forward and rear sights of her pistol.

The thought pushed through the terrible stillness of her mind. She couldn’t shoot him. He wasn’t armed. But still she kept pressure on the trigger; a fraction more and the next round would discharge, sending the bullet through the visor of his helmet to pierce him somewhere between his left eye and the bridge of his nose.

They stayed there, both of them, frozen for a second that felt like a day. He knew he was going to die. She knew she was going to kill him.

Flanagan eased her finger from the trigger, released the pressure. He saw the movement of her knuckle, and the bike launched away, spilling the dead passenger to the ground.

She wouldn’t find out until later that bike and rider wound up under a bus only two streets away.

Tandy didn’t die. Not then. He lived on, if it could be called living, for another five years before what remained of him slipped away. Detective Superintendent Purdy had told her in the canteen at Lisburn station during lunch a few weeks ago. Perhaps he could have chosen a better time and place, but how was he to know? Flanagan herself wouldn’t have dreamed the news would tear her in two.

She broke down there in the canteen, in front of everybody – constables, sergeants, inspectors, detectives, cooks, cleaners. They all saw her collapse, levelled by a desperate grief for a man that deserved none from her.

Six sessions she’d had, now. At the end of the first, as Dr Brady glanced once again at the clock on the wall behind Flanagan, he told her what she’d already figured out for herself: every possible emotion she had about that morning more than five years ago had been wrapped up, tied down, stowed away while Tandy lived the non-life he had condemned himself to. Only when his body followed his brain into death did the memory rupture and every distorted feeling spill out where she could no longer deny it. Guilt at the men’s deaths, fear at almost meeting her own, elation at surviving, sorrow for their families. These things had grown there in the dark, swelling and bloating like the rogue cells in her breast, until the whole of it flooded her at once, drowning her, more emotion than she could hold within.

Flanagan didn’t remember much about the incident now, the initial breakdown, only how frightened DSI Purdy had looked, the shock on his face. Looking back now, weeks later, it seemed as if she had watched herself from across the room, seeing some other woman splinter into jagged pieces. And if she could, she would have told that woman to pull herself together, not to make a spectacle of herself.

A week of leave and three months of counselling had been prescribed. As if that would fix everything, as if this smug doctor could plaster over the fissures in Flanagan’s mind by simply talking about the incident.

She and Alistair used the unexpected break to book a last-minute holiday in Portstewart on the north coast. An apartment near the old golf course, overlooking the sea. It was a good week. Days spent at the Strand, the long sandy beach at the other end of the town, even if the weather didn’t justify it. They ate at the new restaurant between the dunes, a converted National Trust building, little more than a shack on the beach. Glorious breakfasts and lunches devoured before returning to the sand and the water.

One night, as sea spray whispered on the bedroom window, they talked about the proposed counselling. ‘What harm could it do?’ Alistair asked.

More than you can imagine, Flanagan had thought. But she said, ‘All right, I’ll give it a go.’

And Alistair had put his arms around her and they had made love for the first time in months. He had no nightmares that night, had barely any during the week by the sea. But after, when they returned to their house outside Moira, the terrors came back. There had been little intimacy between Flanagan and her husband since.

Flanagan looked over her shoulder and saw that the session was done. She quietly thanked God and left the room with the most cursory farewell she could get away with.

Roberta Garrick walked him along the hall to the rear sitting room of her beautiful house. The room that had been converted to a hospital ward. Reverend Peter McKay followed her, feeling as if she dragged him by a piece of string. Conflicting desires battled within him: the desire for her body, the fear of the room beyond, the need to run. But he walked on regardless, as much by Roberta’s volition as by his own.

Mrs Garrick. After all that had happened, he had only recently stopped thinking of her by that name. Even when he had bitten her neck at the force of his climax, her thighs tight around his waist, she had still been Mrs Garrick to him. She was Roberta now, and the intimacy of using her first name frightened him.

She stopped at the door, snug in its frame, and took the handle in her palm. For the hundredth time, McKay noted the length of her fingers, the smooth near-perfection of her skin, the nails just long enough to scratch. She turned the handle and pushed the door.

Her husband, still Mr Garrick to him in spite of all the hours McKay had spent at this bedside, lay where he’d left him last night. But dead now. Even from the doorway, from the other side of the room, it was obvious a corpse lay there. McKay imagined if he touched Mr Garrick’s forearm the skin would be cold against his fingertips. Like a side of meat.

Bile lurched up into McKay’s throat at the thought, and he swallowed it. Now was not the time to be squeamish. He had been a rector for two decades, presided over more funerals than he could remember, seen hundreds of cadavers lying in a waxy illusion of sleep. This was no different.

Roberta took slow, measured steps from the threshold to her husband’s side. McKay followed, keeping back from the bedside. What had once been a spacious sitting room was now cramped, with a wardrobe and a chest of drawers, a bedside locker, a television on the wall and, facing that, the electric care bed.

A care bed. Not a hospital bed. Mr Garrick had been quite clear about the distinction, though McKay could see little difference between this and the beds that populated every hospital ward he’d ever visited. Cost thousands, Mr Garrick had said. It lay positioned so that he could see through the patio doors, out onto the beautifully tended garden and the trees beyond. Now the curtains were drawn, and the sun would never shine on Henry Garrick again.

McKay put a hand on Roberta’s firm, still shoulder and felt the warmth of her through the fabric of her light dressing gown. Warm skin, not cold, like her husband’s would surely be. McKay swallowed bile once more. He squeezed gently, but if she felt the tightening of his fingers she did not let it show.

Her husband lay like a man in sound sleep, his mouth open, his eyes closed. A snore should have rattled out of him.

What devastation, McKay thought. How Mr Garrick had lived this long was mystery enough. A little less than six months ago he had been driving his favourite car, an early seventies Aston Martin V8 Vantage, through the country lanes that surrounded the village. The investigators had estimated his speed at the time of the accident as approximately fifty-five miles per hour. Charging around the bend, he had managed to swerve past all but one of the cluster of cyclists he had come upon. One of them, a young father of two, had died within moments of being struck, his helmet doing him little good against the force of the impact with the Aston’s bonnet.

Mr Garrick had not been so lucky. As the car swerved then spun, it swept through a hedgerow before barrel-rolling across a ditch and into a tree. The car’s front end buckled, forcing the engine back into the cabin, taking Mr Garrick’s legs.

The fire had started soon after. The cyclists who had such a narrow escape did all they could, one of them suffering severe burns as he dragged what remained of Mr Garrick from the wreck. Another was a nurse, well experienced in trauma surgery. They kept him alive, whether or not it was a merciful act.

Regardless, now he lay dead, drool crusting on his scarred chin. Pale pink yogurt clinging to the wispy strands of his moustache. The same yogurt his nightly sachet of morphine granules was mixed with. Ten empty sachets lay scattered on the table over his bed, behind the row of framed photographs. One of Mr Garrick’s parents, long gone, one of him and Roberta on their wedding day, another of his wife, tanned and glowing, smiling up from a beach towel. Then finally a small oval picture of Erin, the child they had lost before her second birthday.

Reverend Peter McKay had presided over that funeral too. One of the hardest he’d ever done. Grief so raw it had charged the air in the church, made it thick and heavy. McKay had heard every sob trapped inside the walls, felt each one as if it had been torn from his own chest.

Roberta reached out to the picture of the smiling child, touched her fingertips to the face. McKay moved his hand from her shoulder, down her arm, until his fingers circled her slender wrist.

‘It’s maybe best you don’t touch anything,’ he said. ‘For when the police come.’

Then Roberta’s legs buckled and she collapsed to her knees beside the bed. She reached for her husband’s still hand, buried her face in the blanket, close to where his legs should have been. McKay watched as her shoulders juddered, listened as her keening was smothered by the bedclothes. The display of grief quietly horrified him, even though his rational mind knew hers was a natural and inevitable reaction. But his irrational mind, that wild part of him, clamoured, asking, what about me? What about me? What about us?

McKay kept his silence for a time before touching her shoulder once more and saying, ‘I’ll make the phone calls.’

Such a grand place. Mr Garrick had built it for his new wife when they first married seven years ago. Six bedrooms, half of them with bathrooms, three receptions, a large garage that held Mr Garrick’s modest collection of classic cars. An acre of sweeping lawns and flower beds. Enough money to pay for a gardener and cleaner to look after it all.

They should have had a long and happy life together. But that was not God’s will, Mr Garrick had once said after he and Reverend McKay had prayed together.

McKay seldom thought of God any more, unless he was writing a sermon or taking a service. Reverend Peter McKay had ceased to believe in God some months ago. Everything since had been play-acting, as much out of pity for the parishioners as a desire to keep his job.

Flanagan stood at the kitchen sink, a mug of coffee in one hand, looking out over the garden. Rain dotted the window, a lacklustre shower that had darkened the sky as she watched. Behind her, Alistair sat at the table with Ruth and Eli, telling them to eat their breakfast, they’d be late. Flanagan had showered and dressed an hour ago; she had her holster attached to her belt, the Glock 17 snug inside, hidden beneath her jacket, her bag packed and ready for the day. Still half an hour before she needed to go.

Mornings had been like this for months now. She rising early, still tired, her night’s sleep fractured by Alistair’s gasping and clutching. A year had passed since the Devine brothers had invaded their home, since one of them had plunged a blade into her husband’s flank. A year since she had pressed wadded-up bedding against the wound, begging him not to die.

He blamed her. She brought this upon their family. He hadn’t said so after that first night in the hospital, but she was certain he still believed it. Once, he had asked her to think about getting out of the force. Or at least leaving the front line, taking an admin role. Her reaction had been angry enough that he had never asked again.

Last night had been bad. Flanagan had lain silent, pretending to sleep as Alistair wept in the darkness. Choked, frightened sobs. Eventually, he had got up and left the room. She had heard the faint babble of the television from downstairs. At some point she had fallen asleep, only to be disturbed by the bed rocking as he got back in. He lay with his back to her. She rolled over and brought her body to his, her chest against his shoulders. He stiffened as she reached over and her hand sought his.

Words hung beyond the reach of her tongue. Anger rose in her, but the root of his bitterness remained so veiled that she could form no argument against it. Instead, she rolled over and crept to her cold edge of the bed. She did not sleep again, rose with the sun, and set about preparing for another weary day.

So now she stood apart from them, as she did more often every day. Her husband and children at the table, she at the window, no longer even trying to make conversation with her family. An intruder in her own home, just as those boys had been.

Alistair’s voice cracked her isolation. She turned her head and said, ‘What?’

She crossed from the sink and lifted it. Detective Superintendent Purdy, the display said.

Purdy had only a fortnight left on the job, retirement bearing down on him like a tidal wave. He had confided in Flanagan that although it had seemed like a good idea a year ago when he’d first started making plans, the reality of it, the long smear of years ahead, now terrified him.

‘Ah, good,’ Purdy said. ‘I wanted to catch you before you left for the station. There’s been a sudden death in Morganstown. The sergeant at the scene reckons suicide, so—’

Flanagan hated suicides. In most cases, the minimum of investigation was needed, but the family would be devastated. Few grieve harder than the loved ones of someone who has taken their own life. They’d be coming at her with questions she could never answer.

‘You’re closer to Morganstown than you are to Lisburn,’ Purdy said, ‘so you can go straight there.’

‘Take your time. From what the sergeant said, it looks pretty straightforward. You remember that road accident about six months ago? The car dealer?’

Yes, Flanagan remembered. The owner of Garrick Motors, a large used car dealership that occupied a sprawling site on the far side of Morganstown. He had been badly burned, lost both of his legs, if Flanagan recalled correctly. A popular churchgoing couple, good Christians both. Close friends with one of the local unionist politicians. The community had rallied around them. After all, Mr Garrick had contributed much to the area over the years.

‘The wife found him this morning,’ Purdy continued. ‘She phoned the minister at her church first. He went to the house, then he called it in. The FMO’s on scene already.’

Flanagan knew the steps by heart. When a sudden death was reported, a sergeant had to attend to make an initial assessment. Was it natural? Had the deceased been ill? Was it suspicious? If the latter, including a suicide, the scene would be locked down, the Forensic Medical Officer summoned, and an Investigating Officer appointed.

‘What’s the address?’ she asked, pulling the notebook from her bag. She held the phone between her ear and shoulder as she uncapped the pen and scribbled it down.

Alistair looked up at her from his plate of buttered toast. Ruth and Eli kicked each other under the table, giggling.

‘I can be there in ten minutes.’ Flanagan stuffed the notebook back into her bag, then hoisted the bag over her shoulder. ‘I’ll call DS Murray on the way.’

She was halfway to Morganstown, trees whipping past her Volkswagen Golf, when she realised she hadn’t said goodbye to her husband or children.

A uniformed constable opened the door to Flanagan. A beautiful house, inside and out, at the end of a sweeping drive. Not long built, by the look of it, and finished with enough taste to prevent its grandeur straying into vulgarity.

‘Ma’am,’ the constable said when Flanagan showed her warrant card. ‘In the back.’

He looked pale. Flanagan wondered if it was his first sudden death. At least the next of kin had found the body, and the constable had been spared delivering the death notice. Flanagan remembered the first time she’d been given that duty, calling at the home of a middle-aged couple whose son had lost control of his new car. Everyone has to do it some time, the senior officer had said, might as well get it out of the way. Even thinking about it now soured Flanagan’s stomach, and she had done dozens more since then.

She stepped into the hall, past the young officer. ‘Where’s the sergeant?’ she asked.

Wooden floors. A staircase with polished banisters rose up to a gallery on the first floor, cutting the hallway in two. Art on the walls, mostly originals, a few prints. Framed scripture verses. A large bible ostentatiously open on the hall table.

Serious money, here, Flanagan thought. So much money there was no need for another penny, but still you couldn’t help but make more. And yet it didn’t save Mr Garrick in the end.

Flanagan looked to her right, through open double doors into a large living room. A stone fireplace built to look centuries old. No television in this room, but a top end hi-fi separates system was stacked in a cabinet, high quality speakers at either end of the far wall. A suite of luxurious couches and armchairs at the centre, all arranged to face each other. The widow, Mrs Garrick, red-eyed and slack-faced sitting with a man whom Flanagan assumed to be the clergyman, even though he wore no collar. Her hands were clasped in his. The other uniformed officer sat opposite them: a female sergeant she recognised but whose name Flanagan could not recall.

She got up from the couch, and said, ‘Ma’am.’ She carried a clipboard, held it out to Flanagan.

‘Are you my Log Officer?’ Flanagan asked, keeping her voice respectfully low.

‘Good,’ Flanagan said, taking the offered pen. She saw Dr Phelan Barr’s signature already scrawled on the 38/15 form. She signed beneath and handed the pen back. ‘DS Murray’s on the way. When he arrives, send him back, and I’ll come and speak with Mrs Garrick. Then I want you on the door to the room, understood?’

Flanagan looked over Sergeant Carson’s shoulder to see Mrs Garrick and the rector watching from their place on the opposite couch. Flanagan nodded to them each in turn. ‘I’ll be with you in a few minutes,’ she said.

She walked along the hallway to the right of the staircase. On the other side, she saw the dining room with its twelve-seater table, and the kitchen, all white gloss and black granite. And here what had once been another reception room but now was a makeshift care unit.

The Forensic Medical Officer, Dr Barr, stood over the corpse, writing on a notepad. Flanagan looked from him to the bed and the scarred ruin of a man beneath the sheets. She let a little air out of her lungs as she always did at the sight of a body. A tic she had borrowed from DSI Purdy.

Barr heard and turned to her. A small man in his late fifties who always managed to look dishevelled no matter how smartly he dressed. He was known to have a drink problem, had lost his marriage over it, yet Flanagan had never so much as caught a whiff of it on him, he kept it so well hidden.

A small joke they always shared over a body. Neither of them enjoyed the company of the dead, but it was when they most frequently met. Flanagan took a step inside the room, smelled the hospital smell, and the death.

‘I’ll call it suicide,’ Barr said, ‘unless something remarkable turns up. I expect the post-mortem to confirm an overdose of morphine granules.’ He waved his pen at the wheeled overbed table that had been pushed aside, presumably to give Barr access to the body. ‘I count ten sachets of granules. One mixed in with a carton of yogurt would be enough to give him a good night’s sleep. I expect he dumped the lot in and chewed them up. He just swallowed and went to sleep. Simple as that.’

Flanagan saw the pot on the table, and the spoon in Mr Garrick’s hand. And the framed photographs lined up on the table. She couldn’t see them from here, but she assumed they were of loved ones, living and dead. Hadn’t she heard something about the couple losing a child? A wisp of a memory, a conversation overheard in the supermarket in Moira, did you hear about the Garricks? The wee girl drowned when they were on holiday, isn’t it terrible?

Tragedy clustered around some families. Most lived their lives untouched by the kind of sorrow that plagued a few. One child lost, then another years later. Or illness of one kind or another taking a mother while her children were tiny, then a sibling, an uncle, or a cousin. Some families drew such misfortune to them like the pull of gravity.

Flanagan went to ask a question, but something stopped the words on her tongue. She looked again at the table pushed close to the patio door, one end pressed into the drawn curtain.

‘No,’ Barr said, ‘but I don’t think we need to wonder too hard about his motivation.’

Flanagan could not begin to imagine what the last six months had been like for this man, or for his wife. What kind of life could this be? Then she scolded herself. She knew plenty of police officers left mutilated by bombs who had fought back, fought hard, and made new lives for themselves. Painful lives, maybe, but meaningful nonetheless.

Detective Sergeant Craig Murray, still nervous around her despite being her right-hand man for almost nine months. He had worked out well so far. Conscientious, reliable, smart enough to know when to shut his mouth. She’d keep him as long as she could. Good assistants were hard to come by; her last, DS Ballantine, hadn’t worked out, even as capable as the young woman had been. The trust between them had broken down – it couldn’t have done otherwise – and without trust, the relationship would not work. Ballantine would be all right. Flanagan wouldn’t be surprised if she made Detective Inspector within the next few years.

‘Stay here,’ Flanagan said. ‘Help Dr Barr with anything he needs. I’ll be speaking with Mrs Garrick.’

She left them, walked along the hall to the double doors leading into the living room. Flanagan paused there and watched.

Mrs Garrick and the rector, hands still clasped together, staring at some far-off memory. Each looked as battered as the other, as if the rector grieved as hard as the widow. The policewoman noticed Flanagan, stood, and said, ‘Ma’am.’

Flanagan entered the room and said, ‘Thank you, Sergeant Carson, I can take it from here. You know what to do.’

Carson left them, and Flanagan walked to the centre of the room, stood in front of the minister and the widow. ‘Mrs Garrick,’ she said, ‘I’m very sorry for your loss. I’m Detective Chief Inspector Serena Flanagan. Can we have a quick chat?’

The minister stood, releasing Mrs Garrick’s hand, and reached for Flanagan’s. A small and slender man, narrow-shouldered, salt-and-pepper hair, a neatness about him that bordered on prissy. As they shook, he said, ‘I’m Peter McKay, the rector at St Mark’s. Do you have to do this now, or could it wait for another time?’

‘It’s usually best to have an initial conversation as soon as possible,’ Flanagan said. ‘Mrs Garrick isn’t obliged to talk to me, of course, but the sooner we get it out of the way, the better.’

McKay looked down at Mrs Garrick, who remained seated, worrying a tissue between her fingers. She still wore her silk dressing gown over her nightdress, red hair spilling across her shoulders. A good-looking woman, mid thirties. If not beautiful, then at least the kind to make men look twice. The kind teenage boys whispered to each other about, tinder for their adolescent fires.

‘It’s all right,’ Mrs Garrick said, her voice firm despite the tears. ‘Let’s get it out of the way.’

‘Thank you,’ Flanagan said, sitting on the couch opposite. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’

McKay took his place once more beside Mrs Garrick, slipped his fingers between hers. He squeezed, Flanagan noticed, but Mrs Garrick did not return the gesture. Flanagan took her notepad and pen from her bag, readied them.

‘Mrs Garrick,’ she said, ‘can you please tell me, as simply as you can, what happened last night and this morning.’

Mrs Garrick took a breath, held it as she closed her eyes, then exhaled. Her eyelids fluttered, releasing another tear from each. She wiped at her cheeks, sniffed, and then spoke.

‘Everything was normal,’ she said. ‘Or as normal as it can be, I suppose. I made dinner for us both, cottage pie, easy for Harry to eat with a spoon, you see. I ate with him, with the tray on my lap. We do that every evening. Then Harry always has his yogurt for dessert. That’s what he mixes the morphine granules with.’

‘No. I did at first, but Harry insisted on doing it for himself a few days after he came home from the hospital. He hates being waited on. He wants to do as much for himself as he can, whether he’s fit to or not.’ Mrs Garrick’s eyes went distant for a moment. ‘He wanted to, I should say. Everything’s past tense now. It’ll take a while to get used to that, like when –’

She froze there, mouth open, words that would never leave her tongue. Flanagan remembered the photograph of the child and kept her silence.

‘We kept the box of little morphine packets by the bed, where he could reach them. One sachet to get him through the night. The doctor told us he’s not to chew the granules. They’re supposed to be swallowed whole so they dissolve in his stomach as he sleeps. Best way to take them is to mix a packet with yogurt and just eat it with a spoon. So he ate his dinner as normal, then I helped him do his toilet. Then the doorbell rang, and it was Reverend Peter.’

The rector spoke up. ‘I sometimes call by to see Mr Garrick. Just to chat, see how he’s doing. We pray together.’

‘You didn’t look in on him after Reverend McKay had left?’ Flanagan asked.

Mrs Garrick cleared her throat and said, ‘Just to kiss him goodnight. The yogurt was still there, and I told him to eat it up and get some sleep. I didn’t go in after that. Some nights I do, some I don’t. Depends how tired I am. I just cleared up, did the dishes, and went to bed myself.’

‘I woke up before five, before the alarm went off. I usually wake Harry around six-thirty, and I like to have an hour or so to myself. When it’s quiet.’

‘I know the feeling,’ Flanagan said, offering Mrs Garrick a hint of a smile.

‘Anyway, this morning, I don’t know why, but I decided to look in on him earlier than usual. Funny, that, isn’t it? This morning of all mornings. I went to his door and I knew straight away something was wrong. He always snores when he’s on the morphine. You can hear him on the other side of the house.’

Mrs Garrick’s eyes brightened. ‘Maybe that’s why I went in to him, do you think? Maybe I wasn’t conscious of it, but I didn’t hear him snoring when I came downstairs, so that’s why I went to his room. Is that why?’

She looked to Flanagan for an answer, as if being right would make everything better.

This time, Mrs Garrick returned the gesture, but only for a moment before the smile fell away. ‘So I opened the door,’ she said, ‘and I just knew. He hadn’t turned his light off, the one by the bed. He was just lying there, all quiet and still, and I knew he was dead. My first thought was his heart, it’d just given up. Then I saw he’d moved the pictures from the locker, put them in front of him, and I wondered why he did that. And then I saw the spoon, and the box of sachets beside him on the bedclothes. So I knew then what he’d done.’

‘No,’ Mrs Garrick said, now squeezing McKay’s fingers between hers. ‘Maybe I should have, but I suppose I wasn’t thinking straight. Peter’s been with us since the accident, every step of the way – before that, even. He’s always been such a rock for us. Him and the Lord Jesus. So Peter was the first person I thought of.’

The rector spoke up. ‘I came over as soon as Mrs Garrick called. And when I saw Mr Garrick, I called the emergency services.’

Flanagan pictured them both, kneeling, eyes closed, mouths moving, talking to nothing but air. Stop it, she told herself. They need their belief now. Don’t belittle it.

‘How about Mr Garrick’s mood in recent days?’ she asked. ‘Had you noticed any change?’

‘No,’ Mrs Garrick said. ‘His mood was up and down, it has been – had been – since the accident. Good days and bad days, like you’d expect. But he always had God with him. He always clung to that. Didn’t he, Peter?’

McKay nodded. ‘Harry always said God must have let him live for a reason. He wouldn’t leave him to suffer like that if there wasn’t a purpose behind it.’

‘And what did you say?’ Flanagan asked. The question rang more curtly than she’d intended and the clergyman flinched a little, before his expression hardened.

‘I agreed,’ he said. ‘I could never say otherwise. It’s what I believe.’

McKay’s shoulders slumped. ‘Who knows? Sometimes faith isn’t enough, I suppose, no matter how much I’d like it to be. Sometimes faith lets us down.’

Flanagan saw something in his eyes in the moment before he looked away. An image flashed in her mind: a man falling. The image lingered long after her questions were done.

When it came to matters of faith, Reverend Peter McKay had lied so long and so often that he sometimes couldn’t tell the difference himself. And no matter what he believed, or rather didn’t, Mr Garrick had survived this long purely on the certainty that there was some greater reason for his agonised existence. McKay would never have told him otherwise.

He wore his mask with such practised skill, he didn’t think she could see through it, but still, the fear swamped him like cold water. She can’t see, he told himself. She is blind to my sin.

If she knew what he had done, if she knew where his hands had been, what wicked sweetness he had tasted, her questions would not be so cordial. Her tone would not be so sympathetic.

‘I think that’s all for now,’ she said. What did she say her name was? Flanagan, wasn’t it? Yes, Flanagan. ‘I will have more questions for you both once the coroner’s report is done. And I’ll need to get formal statements, but there’s no immediate rush.’

‘Mrs Garrick, there are things we need to do here. For your husband. Things you might not want to see. Things you might not want to hear. Is there somewhere you can go, maybe? Just for the next few hours?’

‘My house,’ McKay said. Perhaps too quick, too eager. As he watched Flanagan’s face for a sign that she’d noticed, Roberta twitched her fingertips against his palm.

‘That sounds like a good idea,’ she said. ‘And I’ll know where to reach you if I need to. If that’s all right with you, Mrs Garrick?’

‘Good,’ Flanagan said. ‘Perhaps you want to go to him. We can give you a few minutes alone, if you like. I’d just ask you not to touch anything.’

Flanagan took Roberta’s hands in hers, saying, ‘And once again, I’m truly sorry for your loss.’

McKay went to follow Roberta, but she turned, put a hand to his forearm, telling him, no, just me. Alone. He watched her leave, a feeling he could not identify biting at the edge of his consciousness.

Startled, he turned back to Flanagan. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Morganstown. At the end of the main street.’

‘I know it,’ she said, scribbling on her pad. ‘I think I’ve been to a couple of funerals there. You probably conducted the ceremonies.’

‘Probably,’ he said, walking away, towards the doorway. He stopped there, one hand against the frame. He watched the medical officer leave the rear room, stand respectfully outside it with his hands folded in front of him, next to the sergeant with her clipboard. Beyond them, Roberta, standing over her dead husband.

But she wept, and for a moment so fleeting he couldn’t be sure it had ever been at all, he hated her.

The photographer had finished his work long ago. Now the coroner-appointed undertakers wheeled the trolley into the room, the black body bag upon it open and ready to receive Mr Garrick. The empty morphine sachets, the yogurt pot, the spoon, had all been bagged up and taken away.

The undertakers rolled back the bedclothes, exposing what remained of the lower portion of Mr Garrick’s body. One of the undertakers, a young man showing his inexperience, hissed through his teeth. A buttoned pyjama top covered Mr Garrick’s torso, an adult nappy enclosed his groin. And the stumps of his legs beneath. Still wrapped in bandage and gauze, still stained brown and yellow with serous fluid. He rested on a layer of medical absorption pads, the kind Flanagan remembered from having her children, one of the indignities of childbirth no one mentions in polite conversation.

The same undertaker who’d hissed a moment before. Flanagan looked up at him, but did not reply. He couldn’t hold her gaze, though she hadn’t meant it as a challenge. But what he’d said …

They counted off, then hoisted the corpse onto the trolley. They folded the body bag around Mr Garrick and zipped it closed, an ugly sound in this quiet room, then wheeled the trolley out to the hall. Dr Barr entered as they left.

‘I was going to ask you the same thing,’ he said, walking to the patio doors. ‘Are you going to close the scene now?’

‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘Everything useful has been packed up. DS Murray’s gathering up any other medication in the house. I don’t think there’s anything more to do here, do you?’

Barr shook his head and pulled aside the curtain, showing the room in natural light for the first time since Flanagan had arrived. Flanagan moved the table back towards the bed, gave him room. As she did so, one of the framed photographs toppled forwards, almost fell to the floor, but Flanagan caught it. She put it back in its place, a picture of a child, in the row of loved ones who’d kept watch over Mr Garrick’s last peaceful breaths.

A strange thought. Flanagan tried to connect it to whatever had started to tug at her mind shortly after Mrs Garrick and the minister had left. Like an itch she couldn’t reach.

Flanagan turned her head, followed his gaze. A well-kept garden, an expanse of healthy green lawn, an assortment of shrubs, a few rock and water features, all bordered by a small wood, leaves beginning to brown, late afternoon sunshine spearing through the branches.

‘A nice view,’ Flanagan said, returning her attention to the photos. ‘But not much of a life.’

Dr Barr buried his hands in his pockets. ‘It would have got better, though. He still had a lot of healing to do. A lot of pain to suffer. I spoke to his doctor earlier. Mr Garrick had lost too much muscle tissue for it to be wrapped over the bone, so healing was slower than below-the-knee amputations. That and a couple of infections had made it an even harder road for him. But given time, he’d have got there. He could’ve been mobile again. He wasn’t going to be locked in here for ever.’

‘With a journey that tough, that painful, maybe he couldn’t see the end of it.’

Dr Barr turned to her, his eyebrows drawing together. ‘I haven’t seen anything here that suggests otherwise. Have you?’

She indicated the photographs, put words to what had bothered her. ‘We’ve both attended suicides before. We’ve both seen something like this. The pictures of family. When people take that step, they often want to see their loved ones.’

‘He couldn’t see them,’ Flanagan said. ‘They were facing away from him. I didn’t realise when I first came in, the way the table was sitting by the patio doors. But when I moved it back …’

Dr Barr looked down at the table, from one framed photograph to the next, a frown on his lips. ‘Maybe he wanted them close, but he couldn’t stand to see them. Or let them see what he was about to do. Who knows? When a person is about to take their own life, rationality doesn’t come into it. Anyway, it’s in the coroner’s hands now. Hope not to see you again too soon.’

She stared at the table and the photographs for a few seconds longer before blinking and shaking her head, chasing the notion away. Another question she could never answer, one of a long list that spanned her career. This was a suicide, and no photograph would change it into something else.

Flanagan turned in a circle, surveying the place where Henry Garrick had spent the last miserable months of his existence. The bible on the nightstand to one side of the bed, the selection of motoring magazines on the other. Above the bed, another framed verse of scripture, like those in the hall. Flanagan whispered the words.

Isaiah 41: 10: Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.

She stared at the verse, suddenly aware of the currents of air around her, warm and cool. The sound of other people in the house. Birdsong outside.

She stifled a gasp as she spun on her heel to see DS Murray in the doorway, a plastic bag full of medicines and pills hanging from his hand, Sergeant Carson behind him.

‘Sorry, ma’am,’ Murray said. ‘Is there anything more you need us to do? We’re all kind of twiddling our thumbs here.’

Carson scribbled on the scene log as she bit her lower lip in concentration, then handed the clipboard to Flanagan. With her signature, Flanagan authorised the closure.

As the sergeant walked away, Flanagan spoke to Murray. ‘I’ll lock up here. Send the uniforms on their way, and you head back to Lisburn. Make a start on the paperwork. The FMO’s going to report suicide, to be confirmed by the coroner. You know what to do.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Murray said. ‘Keys are on the hall table. Two sets, so I’m not sure Mrs Garrick took hers with her.’

Flanagan listened to their muted voices and the scuffing of their boots as they left, the front door closing, two engines igniting, tyres on driveway. Then silence, even the birds outside seeming to have hushed.

This rarely happened, that she was left alone at the scene. Normally, she would come and go from the site of a murder, the body lying in situ for as long as it took to explore every inch of its surroundings. But not today. This is simply a house of the bereaved, Flanagan thought, as if Henry Garrick had died of some illness on a hospital ward.

It had been years since she or Alistair had lost a family member. Before the children, in fact, when Alistair’s father had died. She remembered his going around their home, closing blinds, shutting out the light. She had wanted to open them again, saying no one would see their isolated house. But Alistair had insisted. It’s what you do, he’d said. A mark of respect.

So now Flanagan went back to the patio doors and pulled across the curtain that Dr Barr had opened. Then she walked from room to room, doing the same, the darkness deepening as each window was blotted out. She noted the objects, the artwork, the furniture, the ornaments, the electronics. Wealth she would never know in her lifetime. If the Garricks weren’t millionaires, they must have been close.

Flanagan walked through the kitchen, again pulling down blinds, so the granite worktops changed from glistening sheets of black to dark pools. Through to the utility room, top of the range washing machine and tumble dryer amid more cupboards and a sink. A door leading to the rear of the property; she checked it was locked. Another door, open, a small bathroom. A third door, a key in the lock. She tried the handle, then turned the key, snick-click.

The door opened outward. A step down into a large dim garage. Flanagan felt around the door frame for a light switch, found it, and fluorescent tubes flickered into life.

Glistening metal from one side of the garage to the other. Space for five cars, but only four were lined up here. For a moment Flanagan wondered where the fifth could be. She hadn’t seen anything other than the modest cars of the visitors when she pulled up, but then she remembered: the car Mr Garrick had been driving when he crashed.

Contents

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Stuart Neville

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