The Order of Things (2 page)

‘Crap, skip.’ He nodded back towards the end house. ‘You’re not going to believe this one.’

Suttle got out of the car and limped towards the Crime Scene Manager, who was standing beside the front gate. The CSM was on the phone. He had a pile of bagged forensic suits at his feet and he tossed one to Suttle as he approached. Golding wanted to know why Suttle was limping.

‘Day out with the Public Order lot.’ He was tearing at the polythene around the suit. ‘I did OK with the baton rounds, and the petrol bombs worked a treat. Then a bunch of them caught me. My own fault.’

‘And?’

‘I’m limping. As you noticed.’

‘This was a jolly, right?’ Golding took care of the polythene as Suttle clambered awkwardly into the suit.

‘Right.’

‘You go out to some forlorn bloody place and pretend to be the EDL, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘So the hooligans in the ninja gear can beat the shit out of you? Am I wrong?’

‘Not at all. It seemed a good idea at the time. In fact I was flattered to be asked.’

‘Sure. So can anyone volunteer? Or do you have to be
really
mental?’

Shaking his head, Golding led the way to the open door. A line of treading plates disappeared into the house. A CSI was already at work on the ground floor. Suttle, aware of the smell, wanted to know what Serafin had made of Marmaris.

‘Loved it, skip. Big time. Brought the Asian out in her. Couldn’t get enough of the heat.’

They were climbing the stairs now. Serafin was Golding’s latest trophy acquisition, a tribute to Internet dating. She had a degree in metallurgy and wonderful legs. Suttle had only met her once but knew she had the measure of Luke Golding.

‘This one, skip. The pathologist’s due within the hour. Deep breath now.’ Golding had stopped beside one of the upstairs doors. He had a couple of paper face masks in his pocket. He handed one to Suttle. Suttle put it on, then took it off again.

‘Who’s been wearing this?’

‘Me.’

‘Since when did you smoke?’

‘Last week, skip. I’m blaming Serafin. She drove me nuts, if you want the truth. Never stopped bloody talking. Yak, yak, yak. You need to stop drinking so much. We need to commit to each other. We need to take this thing seriously.’

‘Thing?’

‘Her. Me. Us. Here …’ He pushed the door open with his foot. ‘Help yourself.’

Suttle, on the point of stepping into the room, stopped. A woman’s body lay on the bed. She was naked, her legs splayed, her stomach ripped open. She looked late thirties, early forties. Coils of intestine spilled onto the blood-pinked duvet.

Suttle eased himself into the room. The stench – heavy, viscous, cloying – made him put the mask back on. The woman’s face was battered and swollen, the bruises already yellowing. She was wearing a single gold ring on the third finger of her right hand, and a thin silver chain with a Celtic cross was looped around her left breast. Like Golding, she must have been away recently. Her skin was golden, and beneath the wreckage of her belly Suttle could see the outline of a bikini-bottom tan line.

‘We’ve got an ID?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So who is she?’

‘Her name’s Harriet Reilly.’

‘She lives here?’

‘No. She’s got another place in the village.’

Suttle was circling the body, trying to commit every detail to memory. The sightless eyes. The artfully permed hair. The silver piercings in one ear.

‘Weapon?’

‘Just the knife. There. Look.’ Golding pointed at the floor on the other side of the bed. It looked like a kitchen knife. Serrated blade. Black plastic handle.

‘It was lying there?’

‘That’s the assumption. No one’s touched a thing.’

‘So who owns the house?’

‘Guy called Bentner. Alois Bentner.’

‘So where is he?’

‘No one knows.’

Suttle’s mobile began to ring. It was DI Houghton. She needed a word. Suttle met her out in the street. It was starting to get dark now, and lights were on in the neighbouring properties. Twitching curtains. Faces at windows.

‘Boss?’ Suttle loosened the drawstring at the neck of the suit. He felt sullied, dirty. The fresh air tasted indescribably sweet.

Houghton tallied the actions she wanted him to take care of. Suttle knew the list by heart. Build the intel file on the victim and on the missing Alois Bentner. The latter, for the time being, was prime suspect. Talk to his friends, to his workmates, to anyone who might have crossed his path over the last few days and weeks. Same for Harriet Reilly. According to a woman across the road, she’d been a regular visitor at Bentner’s place. Explore the relationship. Build the bigger picture. Why her? Why here? Why now?

‘So who is she, exactly, boss?’

‘We believe she’s a GP. Word is, she works in an Exeter practice.’

‘Any other leads, boss?’

‘Nothing specific, but Bentner seems to be in some kind of trouble. Drinks too much. Thinks too hard.’

‘Ugly combination.’

‘Exactly. You need to start with the woman who called the job in. Her name’s Sheila Forshaw. She’s his boss. Bentner works at the Met Office. Heads up some kind of unit at the Hadley Centre. Bit of a star, the way we’re hearing it.’

‘Hadley Centre?’

‘They deal in climate change. Ask Forshaw.’

‘Where do I find her?’

‘Heavitree nick. She’s waiting for you. Operation
Buzzard
, by the way. Make a note.’

Houghton’s phone rang. She was a big woman in every respect, but lately a crash diet had taken its toll. Her eyes were pouched in darkness, and in a certain light, like now, she looked ill. She answered the call, the frown on her face deepening by the second. The pathologist had been held up for some reason. Nandy was demanding yet another update. There were staffing problems with setting up the Major Incident Room for Operation
Buzzard
. All the usual gotchas.

‘Take it easy, boss.’ Suttle stepped out of the suit, remembering some advice she’d given him only months ago. ‘Just another job, yeah?’

Two

M
ONDAY, 9
J
UNE 2014, 19.31

Taking the train down to Exeter for a long weekend had been Lizzie’s idea. She’d met him at the station, driven him back to her new house and shown him the wilderness that passed as the garden in the last of the light before they’d spent the rest of the evening in bed. Billy McTierney, she was pleased to discover, still did it for her. The months apart while she attended to all the post-publication rituals had, if anything, sharpened her appetite for his presence, and his body, and for the moments in the middle of the night when she jerked awake to find him propped on one elbow, a smile on his face, just looking at her.

Kissing him goodbye at the station, she’d told him to come back soon. Next weekend. The weekend after. For ever, if he fancied it. He held her for a long moment, told her she was fantasising, promised to stay in touch, and then – with a smile and a wave – he and the train were gone.

Driving back to the white stucco Victorian ruin which had relaunched her life, she felt warm, and wanted, and unaccountably lucky. The house lay close to the city centre, yet retained its privacy. The tall sash windows, golden in the last of the sunset. The huge front door, badly in need of a little TLC. The quarter-acre of garden with its encircling wall, mellow red brick dripping with honeysuckle and clematis.

She’d fallen in love with the property at first sight, undaunted by the years of work it would need to restore any kind of decorative order. The huge kitchen hadn’t been touched for decades, the central heating was a liability, and finding a use for five bedrooms would be a serious challenge. Yet the place had a presence and a quirkiness with which she felt immediately at home. Lizzie Hodson. The author of
Mine
. Praised in the broadsheets. Feted on local television. Already on the must-invite lists of countless literary festivals. And now the proud owner and sole inhabitant of The Plantation. Perfect.

Later that same evening, making the bed she and Billy had abandoned only hours earlier, Lizzie found the note he’d left her. It was tucked under the pillow, sealed in an envelope. She began to rip it open then had second thoughts. Another glass of wine, she thought. Give yourself time. Savour the moment.

Now, curled in front of an electric fire in the draughty sitting room, she laid the envelope on the rug and looked at it. In truth she’d been nervous about the weekend. Billy had helped her through the nightmare months after Grace’s abduction and death. She’d been in pieces, incoherent with grief, but somehow he’d managed to bring her solace and comfort and the kind of undramatic but solid advice that had finally persuaded her that life was worth another shot.

In some kind of vague and wholly desperate way she’d always had a book in mind, but it had been Billy’s idea to write it through the eyes of Claire herself. Claire Dillon had always been the monster in all this. It was Claire who had taken Grace, Claire who had hidden the little girl away, Claire who had silenced her crying with the overdose that had killed her, and Claire who had finally jumped from the seventh-floor balcony with Grace’s limp little body in her arms.

If you were looking for blame then it had Claire Dillon’s name in marquee letters all over it, yet a couple of months of exploring every bend in this girl’s journey had taught Lizzie that life was never as simple as pain and retribution demanded. The woman had become a stranger to herself. Not only that, but as the weeks of writing sped by, and the pile of printed-out pages grew higher, Lizzie had concluded that – one way or another – we all had a bit of Claire Dillon in us.

She’d shared this thought with Billy over the weekend. That could have been me, she said. Given certain circumstances, I might have appointed myself Grace’s guardian, Grace’s best friend, the one good person in a bad, bad world to truly understand why this little girl had to be saved.

Billy had been unconvinced.

‘That doesn’t work,’ he had said. ‘You
were
Grace’s guardian. You
were
her best friend. You were also her mother. And that makes a difference.’

‘But you don’t understand. We’re all closer to the edge than we think we are. And you, of all people, must know that.’

Billy dealt with mentally ill people every day of his working life. He was an expert in the field. In a previous life he’d also been a professional climber, paid well for it, a man on intimate terms with gravity, the science of belays, karabiners and chockstones, the whole shtick. He knew about mountains, about keeping your balance – your sanity – on near-vertical faces of ice and slate, never admitting that there might ever be a problem that guts, and experience, and sheer nerve couldn’t resolve. Billy McTierney had always been his own man, and that was one of the many reasons she’d quietly fallen in love with him. Nothing urgent. Nothing must-have. Simply the comforting knowledge that they were already, in countless unannounced ways, together.

She reached for the envelope. Then came the summons of an arriving email. She got up and settled herself behind her PC, the portal that had taken her to
Mine
and everything that had followed. She owed the PC her new home, her peace of mind and the weekend that had turned out to be such a success.

The email came from one of the handful of local contacts who’d signed up to the investigative website she’d launched.
Bespoken
had grand ambitions, not least to free itself from the tyranny of print media, but these were early days and she wasn’t at all sure where this new adventure – funded on the proceeds of
Mine –
might lead. Were there really enough stories out there to attract a significant readership? And if so, did she have the financial resources and the sheer nerve to bet her investigative instincts against an army of litigious so-called victims? To both questions, on a cosy Monday night, she had no answer, but she bent to the screen, eager to know who might have touched base.

The message was both enticing and blunt. ‘A local GP,’ it read, ‘is supposed to be in deep shit. It seems the woman plays God. Post-Shipman, this shouldn’t be happening. Are we interested?’

Lizzie studied the screen for a long moment. Were we talking mercy killings? Something more sinister? Or what? She didn’t know, couldn’t make up her mind. What was the strength of the evidence? Where might an investigation like this lead? She shook her head. Exeter was a city for the young. So was Portsmouth. But there were places down on the coast that had become warehouses for the elderly.

The last time she’d been down to Exmouth to see her estranged husband, to tell him that the scars they both carried would one day heal, she’d been astonished at the sheer numbers of old folk around. They were everywhere: in the street, queuing at the bus stops, wandering uncertainly through the town-centre supermarket. With budgets squeezed and life getting tougher by the month, might people like these welcome the attentions of a rogue GP?

Back beside the electric fire, still uncertain, she at last opened the envelope. To her surprise, the note inside was typed. Billy hadn’t arrived with a laptop and he’d never asked to borrow her PC. He must have composed it in Portsmouth, she thought. Even before he took the train west.

The note was short, written in the kind of carefully measured prose that clogged the arteries of corporate organisations. He was really glad about the success that the book had brought her. He’d hoped something like this might be on the cards but he’d never expected it to happen so fast. Getting her first book into the
Sunday Times
top ten was a real achievement. She nodded to herself, only too aware that this was the good news. He’d said something very similar on Friday night. What next?

‘You’re free now. You’ve really done it. You’re home safe. You don’t need me any more. It’s been a real pleasure and a real privilege but for both our sakes I suspect we’ve come to the end of the road. Your book will open a million doors. I’ll be thinking of you when I next open a copy of the
Sunday Times
. My fingers are crossed. Go well.’