So Say the Fallen (Dci Serena Flanagan 2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

The cleanliness of the cars, however, suggested Mrs Garrick had continued to enjoy them, even if her husband could not.
    Flanagan turned off the lights and locked the door behind her, leaving the key where she’d found it. Back through the kitchen, out to the hall and its wide central staircase. She climbed up to the gallery landing above. From up here, the hall looked all the more impressive. Facing the top of the stairs, a set of double doors. The master bedroom, Flanagan assumed. For no reason she could grasp, she went to the other rooms first, all blandly decorated spaces for guests, all neutral colours and beech veneers. Once all of them were darkened, Flanagan returned to the master bedroom and opened the double doors.
    This room was not like the others. Her eyes were drawn first to the cherrywood four-poster bed and its silk canopy. Flanagan guessed it cost more than her car. Everywhere else, furniture that at least appeared to be antique. She stepped inside, felt the depthof the carpet underfoot. A scent of perfume hung in the air. On the dressing table beneath the window, a selection of bottles, Chanel, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, and more that she guessed were too expensive to be familiar to her.
    Flanagan looked to the other side of the room, and the two doors at either end of it. One stood ajar, showing the bathroom beyond. She guessed where the other led to, and opening it proved her right: a dressing room. A light flickered on automatically and she saw rows of dresses in cellophane shrouds, drawers of jewellery, racks of shoes. She lifted one of the dresses down from its rail, checked the label. Not only could Flanagan never afford such a thing, she’d also never fit into it. Not now, anyway.
    Something turned inside her, a hard, ugly thing. An emotion she felt so rarely that it took a few moments to recognise it.
    Envy.
    I covet these things. I covet this life.
    No you don’t, Flanagan thought, as she felt a ridiculous blush heat her cheeks. She returned the dress to its rail, backed out of the dressing room, and closed the door. Why had she even entered? She had no business in there. What had begun as a courtesy to the dead man and his widow had turned into a sordid exploration. A familiar sense of intrusion crept into her, the same as she felt when she searched any victim’s home, a house full of secrets revealed to a stranger. Except this time, she was indeed an intruder.
    Time to go, she thought. She went to turn towards the window and its open blind, but something caught her attention on the wall. What? She let her eyes defocus and refocus until they found what had snagged her: a picture hook on the wall,centred over a tall chest of drawers. The dusty shadow of a frame that had once hung there.
    Flanagan’s gaze moved to the chest’s top drawer, and the single brass knob at its front.
    I have no reason to look in there, she thought.
    ‘I have no reason,’ she said aloud.
    Even so, she reached for the knob and pulled. The drawer slid open with no resistance. She took one step closer so she could better see inside. Bundles of papers, brown envelopes, a scattering of hairbands and clips.
    And a large framed photograph of the child, perhaps a year old, held in masculine arms. Bright-eyed, smiling, two small teeth in the lower gum. A wisp of hair on her head.
    Dead and gone, Flanagan thought. And I envied this life.
    She pushed the drawer closed, held her fingertips against the wood as she pictured her own children, at school now. The Garrick child would have been close to six, a year younger than Eli. They might have been in the same playground, chasing and teasing each other.
    The chime of the doorbell made her cry out.

6
    Roberta hadn’t spoken on the short drive to McKay’s house. Her gaze had remained fixed ahead, her face cut from flint. When they arrived at St Mark’s and the adjoining rectory, she waited in the passenger seat for him to open the door. He had offered her his hand to help her