The Order of Things

by Graham Hurley

Genres: Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

D/S Jimmy Suttle is called to a brutal murder in the picturesque Devon village of Lympstone. Harriet Reilly, a local GP, has been found disembowelled in the bedroom of her partner, climate scientist Alois Bentner. Suttle's estranged wife, Lizzie, has abandoned Portsmouth, moved to Exeter and returned to journalism, hearing rumours of a local GP offering mercy killings to patients meeting certain criteria. The name of the GP is Harriet Reilly. So begins two investigations of the same crime. Operation Buzzard, with D/S Suttle at its heart, and Lizzie, piecing together her own version of the events that led to Harriet Reilly's death. The fourth novel in the Jimmy Suttle series is a story of ultimate betrayal, reaching much further and wider than its Devon roots.

Release date: November 19, 2015

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 336

Sample

Prelude

People talked about the jet stream all winter. They said it was too far south and way too violent. Bentner, especially when he was drunk, likened it to a conveyor belt totally out of control, bringing storm after storm crashing in from the Atlantic. People – strangers especially – were a little wary of him but they couldn’t argue with the evidence.

Beachside cafés on the coast reduced to matchwood. Whole streets underwater. Yachts dragged from their moorings and tossed miles upriver. The main line to Cornwall left dangling over a huge breach in the Dawlish sea wall. In nearby Exmouth, storm watchers gathered in the windy darkness as wave after wave burst over the promenade, bringing more ruin. The sea had become an animal, they agreed. Voracious. All-powerful. Terrifying.

Then, in late spring, a big fat bubble of high pressure settled gently over the estuary, consigning a nightmare winter to the history books. The temperatures climbed. Kids paddled. Bird­watchers queued at Exmouth Quay for the morning cruise upriver. There were godwits, oyster catchers and an especially fine gathering of avocets. Nature, after a savage blip, had reset itself. No one, at first, seemed to notice the absence of the salmon.

They’d arrived at this moment in the cycle of the seasons ever since anyone could remember, near exhausted after their long migration from the depths of the Atlantic. A pair of grey seals patrolled the narrows where the river met the sea. Poachers prepared their nets a mile or so further inland. Local restaurateurs made a quiet call or two, reserving the first of the catch. But nothing happened.

The local pubs – in Exmouth, Lympstone, Topsham – were full of speculation. Fishermen blamed the farmers upcountry. Too many nitrates. Too much cow shit. A devout Baptist ­writing to the Journal suspected the hand of God. Only Bentner knew better.

From his precious patch of garden, down by the harbour in the village of Lympstone, he watched the river, listened to his neighbours and brooded. Earlier in the week those same neighbours had noticed the candles he used in his study still burning way past midnight. Then came the morning of his disappearance. It happened to be a Monday.

His line manager at the Hadley Centre, a woman called Sheila, phoned around midday. No reply. His mobile likewise was switched off. Late that afternoon she drove down from Exeter. Lympstone was a small waterside village which she barely knew: picturesque, intimate, not cheap. With the aid of a map, she found the street down by the harbour where Bentner lived.

Bentner’s address had long been a joke at the Centre. Two Degrees. Was there any other climatologist who took his work that seriously? Who’d nailed a prediction about global warming on his front gate? For the benefit of the postman – and anyone else who might be interested in the future of the human race? Sheila, parking her car, thought not.

The house lay at one end of a small terrace. She paused by the gate, realising that the house name had been changed. The sign on the gate looked new, hand-lettered black script against a white background. Five Degrees, it read. She lingered, taking it in. She knew about this stuff. Everyone at the Hadley Centre knew about this stuff. A five-degree Celsius increase in global temperatures would be endgame. Over. Finished. Cooked. Gone.

Sheila knocked at the door. Waited. Knocked again. Nothing. She tried the door. It was unlocked. She wondered about going inside, then had second thoughts.

A path around the side of the terrace led to a scrap of pebble beach. The tiny back gardens of the terrace of houses ended in a brick wall that overlooked the beach. She paused for a moment, gazing out at the view. It was high tide, not a whisper of wind. The sun was still warm in a cloudless sky. Boats sat idly at their moorings. From way out across the water came the liquid cry of a curlew. Beautiful.

Five degrees? Hard to imagine.

On the beach she turned and studied the back of Bentner’s house. A weathered wooden table sat on a scruffy oblong of paving stones. Two ancient camping chairs, the canvas seats bleached and frayed, were arranged for the view. A pair of unwashed plastic plates lay on the table. A wicker basket beside the door brimmed with empty cans and bottles. In the garden next door a line of flags hung motionless.

She eyed the wall, wondering whether she might be able to clamber over, but knew there was no point. If she wanted to get into the house, the door at the front was open.

Sheila retraced her footsteps, knocked a couple more times, then stepped in. A minute hall gave way to the sitting room. Through the window at the far end she could see the table in the garden and the water beyond. The sitting room was narrow and cluttered: threadbare carpet, piles of books, two battered armchairs, a card table with more books, a small TV, plus a couple of house plants that badly needed watering.

‘Alois?’ She called Bentner’s name. No response.

The kitchen lay beside the sitting room. At first she put the flies down to rotting food – the smell too – but on closer inspection there was nothing edible to be seen. A four-ring electric stove blackly caked with ancient spills. A couple of days’ washing-up in the sink. A lopsided fridge with a very noisy motor. Cupboards painted institutional green. She found herself smiling. To no one’s surprise, least of all hers, the world of fitted kitchens had passed the legendary curmudgeon by.

She retreated to the hall, peering up the narrow wooden stairs, wondering just how far her responsibilities extended. Was it her business to check the whole place? Or was this the moment to head back out into the sunshine and phone for help?

Sheila tussled with the decision a moment longer, then came a movement in the darkness at the head of the stairs. Her blood iced. A cat stepped down into the light. It was a tabby. It looked at her and then turned and headed upstairs again.

She followed it, one step at a time, one hand extended, feeling for the scabby plaster on the walls. At the top of the stairs was a narrow landing. She counted three doors. The cat had dis­appeared but the smell, and the insistent buzzing, was stronger.

‘Alois?’ Almost a whisper this time. ‘Are you there?’

She knew he wasn’t. She knew something terrible had happened to him. Over the past couple of months his drinking and his temper had become an open secret. Alois Bentner was brilliant – everyone who knew him agreed on that – but the man had become his own worst enemy: ungovernable, erratic, given to wild explosions of something she could only describe as rage. Last weekend, at a barbecue at a canalside pub, he’d been physically restrained after a younger colleague had made a joke about the Siberian tundra farting methane. In Bentner’s world, superheated or otherwise, there was no longer any room for jokes.

The first door opened on to a bathroom – cramped, dirty, with a dripping tap. The second door belonged to a room empty except for a pile of cardboard boxes and an air bed, semi-­deflated, on the bare wooden floorboards. Through the grubbiness of the window she could see her own parked Astra. Was now the time to go downstairs, close the door and leave? She thought not. The least she owed Alois Bentner was to try the third door, to pursue the smell and the flies to their source. To do anything less would be a betrayal.

Sheila pushed at the door, felt it give under the pressure, let it open. For a second she couldn’t believe what lay beyond. Then she backed away, gasping.

And fled.









One

Monday, 9 June 2014, 18.35

It was Oona who took the call. Jimmy Suttle, in the shower after a day’s recreational stoning of the force riot squad, saw her outstretched hand through the steam.

‘Carole,’ she mouthed.

DI Carole Houghton was Suttle’s boss on the Major Crimes Investigation Team. Thanks to a riotous curry in an Exeter restaurant only weeks ago, the two women had become friends.

‘Boss?’ Suttle was already reaching for a towel.

‘Lympstone, Jimmy. Soon as.’

‘Why?’

‘Murder. Ghastly scene. Truly horrible. If you’re planning dinner …’ She broke off to talk to someone else, then she was back again. The job had been called in by a woman from the Met Office. Scenes of Crime had just turned up and were debating what to do. Det-Supt Malcolm Nandy, meanwhile, was driving over from another job in Brixham.

‘Address, boss?’

‘Down by the harbour. Terrace of little houses. You can’t miss us. Quick time, yeah?’ The phone went dead.

Suttle padded into the bedroom. Oona had retreated beneath the duvet, only her face visible. She’d arrived an hour earlier, bearing gifts, a routine she and Suttle adopted when their shift patterns offered the chance for an evening together.

Now she was watching Suttle as he threw on a shirt and tie. She’d already started on the first bottle of Rioja and was halfway through a bowl of hummus and olives. Suttle eyed her in the mirror. One of the many things he loved about this woman was her talent for hiding disappointment.

Dressed, he stood beside the bed. She extended a hand, gestured him lower, ran her fingertips across his ruined face.

‘Later, my lovely?’

‘Later,’ he agreed.

Lympstone was ten minutes away. Mid-evening, the light was dying over the soft ridge lines of the Haldon Hills as Suttle drove down into the village. Mention of the terrace of houses beside the water took him back a couple of years. Eamon Lenahan, a key witness on another job a couple of years ago, had lived in one of these houses, and Suttle remembered his first sight of the view before he’d rung the bell and brought the little man to the door: the water lapping at the footings of the garden, the way the boats flirted with the tide on their moorings beyond the tiny bay, the broad reach of the river as it gathered and fell back, day after day, year after year.

Wee Eamon had let this rhythm seep into his life. No TV. None of the me-me crap that passed for real life these days. A wandering doctor fresh out of Africa, he’d embraced the silence and the ever-changing fall of light through his window, and now – with a similar view from his rented Exmouth flat – Suttle knew exactly how important that could be.

‘Skip?’ Luke Golding was bent to the driver’s window. He was wearing a grey one-piece forensic suit a size too big.

Suttle wound the window down. Golding was still one of the youngest DCs on the squad. He’d just returned from a week in Turkey, and it showed in the peeling skin across his forehead.

‘Good time?’

‘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



Monday, 9 June 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.’

She sat on the rug, staring at the note. ‘Pleasure’? ‘Privilege’? ‘End of the road’? ‘Go well’? Where did words like these belong in the relationship she thought they’d had? He must have ­carried this news in his head throughout the weekend. He must have known that every smile, every touch, every lingering kiss would end with this.

For a moment she toyed with phoning him. He’d be on the train. He’d probably be deep in a book. She wanted to know whether he was sitting there in an agony of guilt wanting to change his mind. She wanted to be told that everything she’d thought they had was real and true and meant.

She was crying now but she was angry too. Angry that she’d lulled herself into believing in something that would never happen. Angry because – in ways she couldn’t yet voice – he’d taken advantage of her. Bastard, she thought, struggling to her feet.

At her PC she reread the email about the rogue GP. Then she reached for the keyboard.

‘Yes,’ she typed. ‘Let’s do it.’









Three



Monday, 9 June 2014, 20.34

Sheila Forshaw was struggling to put her feelings into words.

‘I expected it to be him …’ she said. ‘Alois. That’s what shocked me.’

‘Alois Bentner?’

‘Of course. It was his house. He lived there. If something bad had happened, something awful … it had to be him on the bed … didn’t it?’

Suttle had met her downstairs, in the Custody Suite at Heavitree police station, where she was nursing a mug of stewed tea. Now they were sharing one of the adjoining interview ro. . .