Free Gallows Lane (Inspector Devlin Mystery 2) by Brian McGilloway Page B

and several officers simultaneously rubbed the cramp from their necks, having spent the past half hour looking upwards.
    Webb’s muscles were stiff and his face contorted and rigid. His skin was tinged blue; his tongue swollen. His eyes, wide behind his glasses, were strangely reminiscent of marbles, smoky blue and unfocused.
    ‘That’s strange,’ I said.
    ‘What?’ asked Black, one of our uniformed Guards.
    ‘He’s wearing his glasses. Suicides tend not to.’
    ‘How do you mean? People wearing glasses don’t commit suicide?’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘People committing suicide generally don’t wear glasses.’
    ‘Is this an intelligence thing?’ he asked, looking at the body as if trying to gauge Webb’s IQ.
    ‘He means when someone wearing glasses wants to commit suicide, they normally take their glasses off,’ Williams explained with some impatience.
    ‘Why?’ Black asked, thereby verifying a previous assessment of him I had made which suggested he would never progress out of uniform, despite possessing the inquisitive nature of a child coupled with the attendant propensity for wonder in things newly learnt.
    ‘It’s like going to sleep. You don’t wear glasses when you go to sleep.’
    I waited for him to reply ‘But I don’t wear glasses at all’ but surprisingly he just looked at me, then back at the body.
    ‘Maybe they don’t want them to break,’ he said.
    ‘Maybe,’ I agreed.
    Costello arrived ten minutes later, though he struggled to walk up the incline of the garden to where we were standing. He gripped my arm as I spoke, like an elderly relative who requires support.
    ‘It appears fairly cut and dried, sir: suicide. The ME was here already; said the same thing – pending the autopsy.’
    ‘I’ll never understand suicide, Benedict,’ he said sadly. ‘It’s so . . . unnatural.’ He patted my arm and turned back towards his car. ‘Break the news gently to the wife, Ben. Make sure she knows we’ll do everything we can to help her.’ I nodded. ‘Thank God he didn’t do it when he was in custody,’ he added, shaking his head and walking away.
    Mrs Webb did not cry when we broke the news of her husband’s death. Her entire body stiffened and she sat erect in the hard wooden chair in her kitchen, her mouth a thin white line, nodding curtly as if too much movement would cause her reserve to crack and her tears to flow. She listened while Williams softly assured her that we would do anything we could to help her, and shook her head when she was asked if she needed us to call a friend or relative to be with her. Then her eyes fluttered slightly and she wiped at them as they began to fill.
    ‘I’ll call someone in a while,’ she said, then turned to me. ‘Did he suffer, Inspector?’ she asked.
    I generally believe that people who take their own lives must be suffering so much in life that the pain and fear of death hold nothing worse and I told her this. ‘Can you think what might have caused this distress, Mrs Webb? Did your husband give any indication that something might have been bothering him to the extent that he might harm himself?’
    ‘No, nothing,’ she said, clutching a tissue in her right hand. ‘Though he was very upset about the . . . you know . . . the stuff found on the land. The guns and such. I think he felt bad about that.’
    ‘Why?’ I asked, before I had time to think. Inwardly I cursed myself but at least I’d stopped short of telling her that we suspected the items hadn’t even belonged to him.
    Fortunately, she misread my question. ‘Well, he was racked with guilt. I’d no idea he was doing those things – drugs and that. It’s incredible . . . sometimes you don’t even know the person you’re married to . . .’
    ‘Did he actually say that to you?’ Williams asked. ‘That he felt guilty?’
    Unable to speak, Sinead Webb nodded her head vigorously.
    ‘Do you think that’s why he . . .?’
    Again, she nodded wordlessly. Williams looked at