The Order of Things

by Graham Hurley

  Dedication

  For Daisy and Dylan

  and

  Mother Earth

  Title Page

  THE ORDER

  OF THINGS

  Graham Hurley

  .

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Prelude

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Afterwards

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Graham Hurley

  Copyright

  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 s
omething 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?’