The Order of Things

by Graham Hurley

  Lizzie shook her head. Another surprise. ‘And learning German helped?’

  ‘Anything helped. Anything that could take Julia’s mind off it. I’d use the term therapy but that would be misleading. Therapy implies cure, and with MND there’s no such thing. At that stage we were thinking about Zurich, about Dignitas. That’s why learning German made so much sense. But the worse things became the more we agreed that it had to happen here, in a place we both loved so much.’

  Anton, he said, had mentioned a GP he’d heard of through a friend, someone who’d be prepared, at the very least, to visit and to talk to them both, and to listen. Listening, he said, was absolutely key. Very few professionals, very few people, did that any more. They nodded and they smiled and sometimes they even agreed. But they seldom listened.

  ‘This was Harriet Reilly?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She listened.’

  She came for dinner, he said. They decided to treat her like an old friend. He cooked quail that night, with a very thin pasta that Julia could manage. Harriet stayed for most of the evening, and by the time she left they had a plan.

  ‘We ex-army people love a plan, my dear,’ he said. ‘To be honest it was a huge relief. It meant we could take a little time, do it properly. This hideous thing wasn’t going to push us around any more. With Harriet’s help, it would be our decision, on a day of our choosing.’

  By now they’d joined Harriet’s practice. It was early September. The garden had never looked so full, so alive, so wonderful. He’d employed a gardener for a week. He was an older man, working under Julia’s direction, and Ralph was absolutely certain that he knew what was going on.

  ‘Not only that, Lizzie. I think he approved.’

  ‘Did he come to the funeral?’

  ‘The celebration? Of course he did. I made sure his wife came too. And I made sure he took a bow.’ He paused. ‘I understand you’re a supporter of the Dignity in Dying people.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Then I need to tell you about the way it ended. May I do that?’

  ‘You mean Julia? Going?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Lizzie accepted an invitation to sit down. Part of her was wishing she could record this stuff, get it down on disk, but she knew there was no way she’d ever forget a single phrase. In the nightmare months after Grace had died, she’d lost all faith in redemption. Now this.

  ‘We chose the season first. That was tricky. In the view of the consultant, Julia had between six months to a year left. A year would have been an eternity. Autumn was already upon us. And so September seemed something of a blessing.’

  Harriet, he said, insisted that only Ralph be present at the moment of Julia’s death. Until that moment they’d been thinking in terms of a family gathering – certainly their two daughters – but under the circumstances they respected Harriet’s wishes. She, after all, was the one running the legal risk. Proof that she’d killed Julia Woodman could land her in prison.

  ‘Weather?’ Lizzie was beginning to get the drift.

  ‘Sunny, of course. Had to be. There’s a very good chap on the local BBC, David someone, and of course you can look at all sorts of websites.’

  For days he and Julia scanned the weather forecasts. As well as sunshine, they wanted as little wind as possible.

  ‘It was Julia who spotted it first.’ He was smiling now. ‘A huge area of high pressure drifting north from the Azores. It was due over the UK in a couple of days’ time. She said it had her name on it. Sweet, sweet thing.’

  He had baked her a special cake, a recipe he’d acquired in one of their excursions across the Channel. He bought a bottle of Krug and another of Armagnac for afterwards. They spent an entire evening mulling over music and finally settled on Ravel’s G major Piano Concerto.

  ‘Do you know it at all?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Sublime. Utterly wonderful. Upbeat, mysterious, challenging, full of surprises, not a whisper of regret.’

  Not a whisper of regret. Lizzie wanted to hear this music. Share this departure, this take-off, this release.

  ‘Do you have a copy?’

  ‘Of the music? Ravel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of course.’

  He was on his feet in a second. He looked delighted. He went across to the oak cabinet where he kept his player and CDs. He loaded the machine and then disappeared. When he came back he was carrying three glasses and a bottle of what looked like champagne.

  ‘It’s not Krug, I’m afraid, but it’s not bad.’

  Lizzie drained her sherry while he uncorked the bottle. The champagne fizzed and danced in her glass. Then came the music.

  ‘Martha Argerich,’ Ralph whispered. ‘The Krug of performances.’

  Lizzie sat in silence, listening to the first movement while Ralph described the way it had been back in September. The best view of the garden was from their bedroom upstairs. With the help of Harriet, he’d already positioned Julia’s favourite couch in the window with a thick nest of pillows to support her back. The weather, he said, had been perfect since dawn. They’d been up at four, waiting for sunrise, and hadn’t been disappointed. Not a cloud in the sky. Not a breath of wind. Harriet had arrived mid-morning. Julia wanted to die once the sun had come round the side of the house and hit the gazebo. That’s where she planned to rest. That’s where she’d spend the rest of her days.

  ‘So what time was that?’

  ‘Any time after twelve. Harriet set up a cannula. I’ve no idea what she was using and she never told me, but she assured us that it would be painless and pretty much instantaneous. That was important because Julia wanted to judge the moment perfectly.’

  ‘The moment of her death?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The first movement of the concerto, much of it scored for piano and trumpet, was coming to an end. The adagio was next. This, said Ralph, was the music that Julia wanted to take with her.

  Lizzie settled back and closed her eyes. She’d seen the frail courage in the last photograph, the smile for the camera, the tissue balled in one thin hand. It wasn’t hard to imagine this woman on her couch, waiting for the sunshine to kiss the gazebo, waiting for the music to happen, waiting to give Harriet Reilly that final nod of her head, the signal that it was nearly over.

  Ralph was right. The music was truly divine, the theme picked out on the piano, then gathered up by the soaring strings and warmed by an oboe and a flute. It surged on, music to fly by, music for seagulls, music with no respect for either gravity or pain. Then came a particularly poignant passage and Lizzie opened her eyes to find Ralph’s gaze locked on hers.

  ‘Here?’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She didn’t want to listen to the rest of the movement?’

  ‘No. She said she wanted something to listen to on the other side.’

  ‘And the gazebo?’

  ‘Full sunshine. Absolutely perfect.’

  He raised his glass and closed his eyes until his head went down and he started to sob. Anton was first to his side. He wanted to know about the music. Should they turn it off? Might that help?

  ‘God, no.’ His head came up again, tears streaming down his face. ‘Leave it on. That’s the whole point.’

  Ten

  TUESDAY, 10 JUNE 2014, 20.37

  The flat was empty when Jimmy Suttle finally made it home. Among the messages on his answerphone was one from Oona. ‘The Fureys are playing at the Corn Exchange on Friday.’ She was laughing. ‘Lucky old you.’ He stood in the big window while he listened to the rest of his messages. The view across the water, especially at this time in the evening, never failed to speak to him. The rain had cleared, and seagulls hung in the remains of the sunset. Below them a lone sculler was pushing hard against the rising tide, and further away lights pricked the dark mass of Torbay.

  He stood for a moment, savouring the peace. It had taken him a wh
ile to get used to living up here on his own, but now he knew that nothing would shift him. Not the temptations of moving somewhere bigger and more practical. Not the nightmare parking. Not even Oona. Lately she’d started dropping hints about getting a place together or maybe moving in, but he’d kissed her, and held her, and told her that now wasn’t the time. Life would never be perfect, he’d said, but this was bloody close.

  He left the room. A couple of Stellas from the fridge and the remains of last night’s chilli con carne was more than he needed. He readied the chilli for the microwave and then returned to the front room. Harriet Reilly’s travel notes were in his briefcase.

  The notes related to two trips. She was scrupulous about dates and locations. The first trip, back last year, had been to Brazil, Bentner’s idea. In a full page of jottings, evidently done on the flight over, she admitted that she’d had mixed feelings about the trip. Ali wanted to take her to the tropical rainforest, wanted her to see for herself what uncontrolled logging was doing to the planet and its people, wanted to put flesh on the evenings back home when they sank a decent bottle of wine, and he banged on about arboreal respiration rates and the miracles of the carbon cycle. ‘This stuff obviously matters hugely to A.,’ she’d written, ‘so I’m guessing it must matter to me.’

  To Suttle this sounded more like duty than conviction, but the moment they hit Brazil her feelings changed. They’d landed in Rio, where their three-week journey would begin and end, and the city blew her away. The energy. The colour. The beach. The beauty of the people. Even the grimmest of the favelas. ‘These people seem to make light of poverty,’ she wrote. ‘Is that a state of mind? Or should we be looking for a Brazilian gene? A. tells me that these people play football to die for, and judging by the kids on the beach that has to be true. Viva Brazil!’

  Three days later they flew up to Manaus. Here the journey was to start in earnest, and once again Suttle detected a hint of foreboding. ‘Hot!’ she recorded. ‘The sweat’s pouring off me. If I was some horrible virus, then this is where I’d live.’ The following morning they took a riverboat upstream. The sheer breadth of the Amazon she found hard to cope with. Not a river at all. More like a big brown sea pleated with submerged currents that frightened her. Huge freshwater turtles. Crocodiles. Dugout canoes. Indians. A script written in Hollywood, except it was true. ‘A. talks about the lungs of the planet and here they are. Back home you can have no conception of the vastness of this place, which probably makes A. more right than even he knows. Rip this lot out and we’re talking global post-mortem. RIP. Flowers lashed to railings. God help us all.’

  They made a landing at a riverside settlement called Tefe. To Reilly this was the Wild West. Bars full of native loggers, American oil men and local hookers. Much drinking. Noise in the small hours like you wouldn’t believe. A little violence, possibly recreational but scary nonetheless. Not a place you’d necessarily choose for peace and quiet.

  These entries in the diary married with photos in her album, which Suttle had also brought home. As they pushed deeper into the interior of the country, he paused from time to time, trying to read from their faces in the album more than Reilly’s journal might be prepared to admit.

  The first real clue came towards the end of the second week. They seemed to have hired a local guide to take them into an area where logging had yet to start. This was virgin forest. The side trip was scheduled to last a couple of days, and they’d be living under canvas on the forest floor. ‘Normally I’d have run a mile,’ Reilly had written, ‘but camping and A. are made for each other. He’s really really good at it and a total genius at improvisation. He never complains, never despairs, just gets on with it. Even our guide is impressed. Practice, I suppose, plus A.’s usual contempt for the easy way.’

  A.’s usual contempt for the easy way. It was a telling phrase, and Suttle sat back, reaching for the remains of his first Stella, trying to picture Bentner camped out in some secluded spot, living on his wits and maybe fuelled by the knowledge that the days of this wilderness were probably numbered. Was this man really on the run? Was he really aware of the way the manhunt was developing? Or was the real story behind Reilly’s death more complex than the guiding lights on Buzzard were prepared to admit?

  Suttle didn’t know. Back in the text, back in the rainforest, another entry caught his eye. ‘A. bad this morning. D & V plus a determination not to talk to me any more. As a doctor, not good. As his mate and favourite bedfellow, deeply worrying. Am I right about ND? Is she as mad as I think she is?’

  ND? Suttle scribbled the two letters down, then read the entry again. The word ‘worrying’ was key. Was there someone else in Bentner’s life, as Molly Weatherall had suspected? Was this thing more complicated than it looked?

  He read on, alert now for fresh signs of discord, but within a day everything seemed normal again. ‘Back in civilisation,’ wrote Reilly. ‘No hot water and an army of cockroaches but heaven after the fire ants. Where was God in the jungle when I needed him most?’

  Suttle paused again. For the first time it occurred to him that Harriet Reilly might be Catholic. Reilly, after all, was an Irish name. Quite where this possibility might take him, Suttle didn’t know but he wrote himself a note to check it out with Oona. What was the papal line on dealing with competition in your love life? And how might Reilly have felt about getting herself pregnant with nothing as comforting as marriage in the offing?

  Suttle turned the page. For some reason, the last week of the trip shrank to a mere handful of entries, most of them disappointingly factual. They’d taken a battered old car ferry downriver. They’d been lightly mugged in a Manaus backstreet, two urchins with nimble fingers and a knack of vanishing into the night. They’d taken a flight to Belem, then another to João Pessoa, and ended up back in Rio, waiting for the plane home. For the first time in this final week a blush of emotion. ‘Magical night,’ Reilly had written. ‘Why not say yes?’

  Suttle gazed at the question. Yes to what? To a proposal of marriage? Or to something more immediate? Like doing away with birth control? Like binning her pills and giving all those trillions of little Alois Bentners a fighting chance? If so, it hadn’t worked. Not then. Not in Brazil.

  The second expedition started a page or two later. It was March this year. This time they were in Oregon, via a flight to San Francisco, seemingly another busy chapter in Harriet’s crash course on why trees held the key to global warming. In the bitter fag end of an American winter, the contrast in temperatures couldn’t have been starker. From San Francisco, Reilly and Bentner sped north in a hired Ford Mustang, an interesting choice, thought Suttle, for a man worrying about the future of the planet. For a brief mile, on US 5, they had the top down. ‘Christ,’ Reilly wrote. ‘Wind chill factor minus 100? We have to be crazy.’

  After a visit to a clinic in Portland, about which she wrote nothing, they turned inland. Whether or not Bentner had planned a definite itinerary was unclear, but this time there was no mistaking Reilly’s tone of voice. She was in love with this man. She really was. On 9 March, in a rented log cabin beside the Columbia River, she wrote of his warmth and support and his ceaseless assurances that ‘things will work out just fine’. None of this stuff sat easily with either the grimness of his ID photo or Nandy’s conviction that Bentner was squarely in the frame for what had happened later, but the fact that Reilly – a hard sell by all accounts – was besotted with her wild climatologist sounded an important alarm in Suttle’s head.

  Rushing to judgement, as he’d learned on countless occasions, had no place in any detective’s manual. Real life was a trickier proposition as he, above all, knew to his cost. The following week in the diary, the source of Reilly’s passion became abruptly clear. She’d been into the local town. She’d bought herself a test kit. And she was very definitely pregnant. ‘A. over the moon,’ she wrote in bigger script than usual. ‘Me too. ND? Who bloody cares?’

  ND again. Who was this person? And where did she figure in Harriet
’s story? He read on, aware that the pace of travel had slowed for Bentner and his newly pregnant partner. ‘He cossets me. It’s lovely. It’s like a hot bath. A. said it would happen and it has. Something new in my life. More, please.’ Then this from a motel stop in Goldendale several days later. ‘A. nervous about penetrative sex. I tell him it will make no difference. The fetus is always tougher than you think. But he won’t have it and so we look for alternatives. No bad thing as it turns out. Who’d have thought?’

  Suttle sat back again, staring out of the window. It was dark by now, and the wind was beginning to stir in the trees across the road. He got to his feet and drained the second can. The Oregon trip was within sight of the return flight. Once again the entries became sparsely factual. Back down US 5. A couple of nights in San Francisco. A trip out to Alcatraz, which Bentner likened to the moon. And then home. Somewhere over the Atlantic Reilly had written, ‘Why do I feel so happy? And so loved?’

  Good questions. En route to the kitchen, Suttle phoned Oona. She couldn’t believe he was saying yes to the Fureys.

  ‘Blame the Stella.’ Suttle turned the microwave on. ‘Front row, please.’

  Eleven

  WEDNESDAY, 11 JUNE 2014, 05.23

  Lizzie woke early. Automatically she reached for the bedside radio, then changed her mind. At this time in the morning, way before the rush hour brought the roar of traffic into the city, it was deliciously quiet. She lay back, enjoying the spill of sunshine through the half-curtained window.

  After yesterday, for some reason, she felt strangely liberated. She’d been able to share someone else’s grief, someone else’s loss, and the realisation that death could be softened, maybe even tamed, came as both a surprise and a comfort. She’d now listened to two men bearing witness. For both Jeff Okenek and Ralph Woodman, Harriet Reilly had been able to offer a rare and precious service. A death not to be feared but celebrated. A departure all the more memorable for its sweet grace. So why would a woman who’d brought such relief meet such an ugly end? Was this death’s way of getting even? A smack in the face for daring to interfere?