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 throu
ghout 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 rooms.
Sheila Forshaw was in her late forties, trim figure, office suit, barely any make-up. The image of the woman’s body in the bedroom, she said, would stay with her for a very long time. On field trips abroad she’d seen plenty of bodies, often bloated in the heat. In Africa she’d watched what a lion could do to an antelope it had just run down. But nothing could compare to this. So raw. So savage. So ugly. So still.
Suttle wanted to know more about Bentner. Was she close to the man?
‘No one’s close to him. He’s a loner, always was. Apparently there was a wife some while back, but I don’t know anyone who ever met her.’
‘Is she still around? The wife?’
‘I don’t know. You could check with HR, but they don’t always keep that kind of information. Maybe she died. Or maybe she just left him and moved on. I know it sounds harsh, but I’m not sure I’d blame her.’
‘So no real friends at work? Is that what you’re saying?’
She nodded. Bentner, she said, had been at the Hadley Centre since it moved down from Bracknell in 2003. He was German by birth but had spent most of his childhood and early adult years in the States. She knew he’d landed a big job at NCAR at a very young age and had subsequently produced the string of papers that had finally brought him to the Hadley Centre.
‘NCAR?’
‘National Centre for Atmospheric Research. It’s the top institute for climate research in the States. Boulder, Colorado. Up among the ski slopes. Lucky Alois.’
‘And the Hadley Centre? How do you rate?’
‘We’re good, as good as NCAR. In fact in some respects we’re probably better. World class, whichever way you cut it.’
‘Is that why Bentner came on board?’
‘Partly, I guess so. The other reason was much simpler. The States had started to piss him off. These are his words, not mine. He thought it was a country full of kids. Press the right button and he’d bang on about them for hours. How greedy they were, how wasteful they were, how they never spared a thought for tomorrow. Huge cars, vast fridges, everyone grossly overweight. Before the drinking got out of hand, some of this stuff could be quite amusing, though we had to be careful about who was listening.’
The Met Office, she said, attracted climatologists from every corner of the planet. Many of them were visiting Americans, aware of the Hadley Centre’s reputation and wanting to find out more. In the early days on the new Exeter site, Bentner would never pass up an opportunity to berate his ex-colleagues. As a nation, he was convinced they’d converted a crisis into a disaster, partly by hogging way more than their fair share of resources and partly by frustrating other countries’ attempts to rein in global warming.
‘He was right, of course,’ she said, ‘but that wasn’t the point. There was always something very biblical about Alois. He wasn’t just a climatologist, he was a prophet. One day, when he was being particularly obnoxious, I told him he belonged in the Old Testament. He loved that. It was one of the few times I heard him laugh.’
‘So what does this guy actually do?’
‘He analyses climate impacts. His big speciality has always been trees. Forest ecosystems are often where you look first if you want to figure out what we’re doing to the planet. Every tree tells you a story, and I guess Alois made a friend of the trees pretty early on. He certainly prefers them to people.’
Suttle smiled. He liked this woman. He liked her easy intelligence, her candour about Alois Bentner and the way the jargon of her trade, lightly Americanised, sat so sweetly on her lips.
‘But Bentner’s good?’
‘The best. That’s partly an issue of standards. He never puts up with bullshit. He can smell a half-baked theory within seconds. He’s truly rigorous, and in our business that matters. In the end we’re scientists not tree-huggers, though Alois always lays claim to both.’
It was a neat phrase. Suttle wondered how many other times she’d used it.
‘And you’re his boss? Have I got that right?’
‘I run his team. Though Alois is a bit of a stranger to the team idea.’
‘So you indulge him?’
‘I cut him lots of slack. Always have done. There aren’t too many Alois Bentners in the world, and that’s maybe a good thing, but we’d struggle to replace him.’
‘And he knows that?’
‘Of course he does. In fact he was probably the first to tell me.’
‘A bully, then?’
‘Without question. With people like Alois you fight or flee. The ones who flee are off his radar. He likes the ones who fight.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m his boss. That’s supposed to make a difference.’
‘But you stand up to him?’
‘When it truly matters. Because that’s the only option. Otherwise I’d be the punchbag.’
Suttle was thinking about the body on the bed.
‘Does he ever talk to you about his private life?’
‘Never. There’d be no point. In his view it wouldn’t be relevant.’
‘He never mentioned a girlfriend?’
‘Never.’
‘A woman called Harriet? Harriet Reilly?’
A shake of the head this time. And then something close to a frown.
‘This is the woman I saw at his place?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’re telling me they were friends?’
‘I’m asking you whether he ever mentioned her.’
‘Then the answer’s no, but that means nothing. They could have been married for years and we still wouldn’t know. This is a man who walls off bits of his life. Maybe it’s a German thing. I’ve no idea.’ She paused. Something else even more troubling had occurred to her. ‘You’re suggesting Alois did that? To the woman on the bed?’
‘It’s a possibility. Of course it is. According to the neighbours, she was a regular visitor. She knew the house. She died in his bedroom. And now we can’t find him.’ He held her gaze. ‘In my trade we call that a clue.’
‘Christ.’ She sat back, shocked. ‘Alois? Are you serious?’
The Major Incident Room, Operation Buzzard’s home for the coming days and weeks, lay in the Devon and Cornwall operational headquarters at Middlemoor, in Exeter. Suttle logged himself in at 21.57.
Det-Supt Nandy had arrived and was in conference with DI Houghton when Suttle rapped on their office door. Nandy, he thought, looked as knackered as Houghton. In a world of ever-deepening budget cuts, keeping the serious crime machine in working order was a constant battle, and a drug-related kidnapping in Brixham hadn’t helped.
‘Son?’ Nandy, sat behind a desk,
wanted an update.
Suttle told him about Bentner’s workplace reputation. Brilliant climatologist. Crap human being.
‘Crap how?’
‘Classic Mr Grumpy. Zero people skills. Hated the rest of the human race and told them so.’
‘Should be here then, with this lot. Sounds very ACPO.’ Nandy barked with laughter. His ongoing feud with the bosses upstairs was common knowledge.
‘Are we thinking he did it, Jimmy?’ This from Houghton.
‘I’ve no idea, boss. He’s obviously in the frame. What’s the scene telling us?’
‘Dodman thinks she was killed in situ. There’s no blood anywhere else.’
‘None at all?’
‘Not that the guys have found so far. She had a key to the house in her bag so access wouldn’t have been a problem.’
‘Prints on the knife?’
‘Two sets. One of them hers.’
‘Hers?’
‘Yes. It means nothing, Jimmy. She could have been using the knife downstairs. We think it came from the kitchen.’
‘And the other set?’
‘We’re thinking Bentner. They match with other prints elsewhere. But again it proves nothing.’
‘Except it might rule out a third party?’
‘Sure, son.’ Nandy was studying his mobile. ‘Unless they were wearing gloves.’
Nandy glanced up. He’d been talking to the CSM. Scenes of Crime had recovered a stash of empty bottles – chiefly wine and spirits – plus a handful of receipts from the convenience store down the road. This was a guy who seemed to be putting away industrial quantities of alcohol. He wanted to know about Bentner’s drinking.
Suttle nodded. He’d asked Sheila Forshaw the same question. ‘He’s always had a thirst on him, sir. That’s the impression I’m getting from his line manager. But lately it got out of hand.’
‘How out of hand?’
‘He’d turn up reeking of booze in the mornings. His boss got worried because he was driving, but there was nothing she could say that would make much difference.’
‘Was he drinking at work?’
‘She says not.’
The Order of Things Page 2
