So Say the Fallen by Stuart Neville
Setting his tale in contemporary Belfast, Stuart Neville turns common mystery tropes on end. The cop is a woman; it’s her husband who complains of her long hours, her preoccupation even when she’s home, and her broken promises to the kids.
The peculiar behaviour of a bereaved widow and a priest plant seeds of doubt in the mind of Detective Chief Inspector Serena Flanagan about an apparent suicide. As her husband pressures her to quit police work and she feels her kids moving out of her orbit, she risks alienating her family still further to prove the death was murder and bring the killer to justice.
Ironically, when she puts her family first. deferring an interview with a troubled priest to spend promised time with the kids, the case blows wide open.
Carefully chosen details portray the legacy of the Troubles. The residents of Belfast have learned to accept a degree of casual violence. “Hijackings had become commonplace in the city, young thugs taking cars—usually from women—simply to race them around the estates before burning them out in some patch of waste ground.” Nor have political marches been left in the past.
When DCI Flanagan tries to persuade her chief of the need to pursue the mysterious suicide she’s convinced is murder, he reminds her with some bitterness, “This is Northern Ireland. How many killers have we got on our streets—people you and I know have blood on their hands—that are walking around free, knowing they’ll never see the inside of a cell?” Even if he agreed with the DCI that a certain person is getting away with murder, he tells her, bringing that individual to justice would “be at the end of a very long list.”
As Flanagan pursues her investigation, she drives past “functional buildings,” noting the “bunting and Union flags still lingering from the dying summer’s marching season.” While interviewing a man in his mid-sixties, she wonders “had he been a reservist, a part-time soldier or policeman,” as had many in his age group during the Troubles. Following this train of thought as she shows her warrant card to a watchful citizen, Flanagan is very aware that “Not very long ago, a strange car pulling up at a reservist’s home meant danger, shots fired through windows, doors broken down, men killed in front of their children.”
The investigation takes Flanagan to a “rough estate,” where most of the homes have been “bought up by investors and rented out to migrant workers.” Many have been “left to rot” in the wake of the property crash, and there have been “problems with…the landlords shoving in as many people as can sleep in shifts.” She is aware that this situation is not unusual, knowing that “Young men and women from all over Europe, and further afield, desperate for a better existence” are commonly “exploited by landlords and gangmasters.” It transpires that one side of this estate is occupied by Protestant loyalists, who “don’t like the new arrivals.” As he drives them past “the rags of a Union flag” fluttering on a lamp post, her fellow officer remarks that police are often called to fights here. Glaring red graffiti says “NO FOREIGNERS NO TAIGS (Catholic nationalists), and the whole estate rings “with the kind of hatred that only poverty fosters.”
The Troubles-era habit of refusing to speak to police is still ingrained. When a gate eases open and a curious man looks out, Flanagan shows her warrant card in the hope of questioning him. But the moment he sees her police ID, “The gate slammed shut, the bolt slid back. None of his concern.”
Flanagan is shocked when she learns about the poor state of record-keeping in Northern Ireland. Discovering that death and birth records are “easily searchable, and not cross-referenced,” she sees how in order to escape a criminal past, her quarry was able to “manufacture” a new life, a new identity.
Stuart Neville’s suspenseful police story is buttressed by important contemporary themes. Through the cowardly inaction of the priest, we are reminded of the perils of privileging group identities and interests at the cost of individual ones. We are also shown the corrupt and unethical behaviour of the press, who peddle “speculation dressed as reportage,” extrapolating a few known facts to make “insinuations far beyond anything …in the public domain.” All too willing to sell papers by attacking the police, they have no interest in printing retractions of inaccurate information they’ve published. Glaringly, they fail to report a public apology made to DCI Flanagan by an MLA whose wrongful vilification they had all-too-willingly included on the front page.
Through the point of view of a conscientious peace officer, we glimpse how frustrating the quest for justice can be. As she takes a rare opportunity to relax over a drink, Flanagan reflects on “the turmoil of the last couple of months, how much her job had cost her, what it cost her family. And yet it came to this. No one saved, no justice served. Another dead man and a hollow feeling in her gut.”
Stuart Neville’s story has much of the noir about it, and there is plenty to criticize in the society he portrays. But this author works with a sure and subtle touch. Even as he keeps his sensitive finger on the very pulse of our troubled era, he offers us a modicum of hope.