The Order of Things

by Graham Hurley

Michala was already on her feet. Lizzie reached up to her, squeezed her hand, settled down again, her eyes returning to the TV. Let her take her time, she told herself. She needs to trust me.

  A little later, the game over, Lizzie abandoned the post-match analysis and went upstairs. The bedroom door was half open and the light still on but Michala appeared to be asleep. The book, unopened, lay on the duvet beside her.

  Suttle spent the evening in his Exmouth flat with Oona. She’d driven straight from work, pausing in town to pick up a takeout. She’d copped Australia in the prize draw at work and no way was she going to miss the game. Suttle had already invested in another bottle of Rioja and was on his second tinnie by the time she arrived.

  The game was a classic, the best of the tournament so far. The Dutch were on a roll after demolishing the Spanish, yet – to Oona’s delight – the Socceroos matched them goal for goal. At the final whistle, with the Dutch 3–2 ahead, the crowd rose to salute both teams, little consolation for Oona, who was close to tears.

  ‘But they were so good,’ she wailed. ‘How come they lost?’

  Suttle was still reliving Arjen Robben’s opening goal. The lightning breakaway down the wing. The way he left his marker for dead on the halfway line. The sheer power of the man as he raced towards goal. And the teasing angle of the final shot. Far corner. Goalie? No chance. No wonder Robben got Man of the Match.

  Oona wanted to know whether Suttle also had a prize draw at work.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Algeria. If they get through the group stages they’ll be playing Germany next.’

  ‘Shit.’ Oona pulled a face.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And Golden Bollocks?’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘Germany.’ Oona shook her head. ‘I don’t believe you. That man was born lucky.’

  ‘You think so?’ Suttle rolled over on the carpet and reached for her. Three Stellas and the sheer quality of the game had left him nicely mellow.

  ‘Tell me you love me, big man.’ Oona was straddling him.

  ‘I love you, big man.’

  ‘Right answer, Man of the Match. What can a girl do for you?’

  ‘Somewhere in the kitchen. Maybe top of the fridge. I can’t remember.’

  ‘What am I looking for?’

  ‘A DVD. The Spain–Netherlands game. A mate recorded it for me. I still haven’t see it.’

  ‘More Arjen Robben? He of the haircut and the nice legs?’

  She disappeared into the kitchen. Suttle yelled for another tinnie. No answer. He turned back to the TV. The pundits were previewing tomorrow’s England game against Uruguay. Luis Suarez, he thought. His heart sank.

  Oona was back. No DVD. No tinnie. Just a single question.

  ‘How come you’ve been seeing your ex-wife?’

  Suttle stared up at her. Caught offside. Big time.

  ‘Seeing?’

  ‘You’re telling me she hasn’t been here?’

  She was holding a small leather-bound address book. She threw it at Suttle.

  He picked it up. ‘Where did you find this?’

  ‘Up on the shelf where you keep those recipe books. You’re telling me you didn’t know it was there?’

  Suttle had opened the book. On the first page all the clues Oona would ever want. Lizzie Hodson. Contact details. Address. The lot. Not just the earrings, he thought.

  ‘She called round,’ he said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘The other day.’

  ‘Day? Like when you were at work? You think I’m stupid? It was that evening, wasn’t it? The day you got bitten, that fucking dog. I should have come down. I bloody knew it. Eejit, me. Totally brain-dead. You needed someone.’ She paused. ‘Well, big man?’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘And she stayed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You knew she was coming? When we were talking on the phone? That was all arranged? That’s why you put me off?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So what’s she got? Apart from a trillion pounds in the bank? I thought this thing was supposed to be over. That’s the way you sold yourself, my lovely. Divorce in the offing. All over bar the paperwork. Good, was she? Good as ever?’

  Suttle didn’t answer, mostly because he didn’t know what to say. Maybe he should ask for a lawyer. Maybe he should go No Comment. Or maybe he should find the DVD, settle Oona down and let the storm blow out. Having Lizzie here had been a huge mistake. In the end, come what may, life always finds you out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered.

  ‘Sorry doesn’t cut it, my lovely. We had a good thing going. A great thing going. I was right about Golden Bollocks. Wrong about you. I thought you were better than this. I truly did. And you know what that makes me? One sad fuck. Believe the worst and you won’t be disappointed. Give me that, will you?’

  She nodded at the address book. Suttle handed it over.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘What am I going to do now?’ She was staring down at him. ‘Like I’d tell you? Like I’d trust you? Like you’d be the slightest bit interested?’ Her eyes were moist. ‘If I had a pound for every time you said you loved me, I’d be a rich woman. But you know the truth? What I am just now? Totally skint.’

  Her anorak was on the back of the chair. She put it on and headed for the door. Then she stopped and looked back at him.

  ‘Fuck you, Jimmy Suttle.’ She was on the edge of tears. ‘You know something? You deserve the bitch.’

  Lizzie was drifting into sleep under a blanket on the sofa when she heard the banging at the front door. She got up on one elbow, wondering if it had been part of a dream. More bangs, even louder.

  She got off the sofa, her heart racing, and went through to the hall. The previous owner had fitted a security spyhole in the front door. The outside light didn’t work but Lizzie still peered through. Oona.

  She unbolted the door, took the Yale off the latch. Suddenly Oona was inches away, one foot inside the house. She was taller than Lizzie and she’d definitely been drinking.

  ‘Father Christmas,’ she said. ‘Come with a wee present.’

  She thrust something into Lizzie’s hand. Lizzie found herself looking at her own address book.

  ‘You meant me to find this? Was that your game?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You don’t?’ Oona was looking past her. Through the open door, she could see the shadowed spaces of the living room. ‘Nice place. Did you fuck him here too?’

  ‘We’re talking Jimmy? He’s my husband, in case you’d forgotten.’

  ‘That wasn’t my question. I asked you whether you fucked him here as well.’

  ‘Then the answer’s yes.’

  ‘Like where? In there?’ She nodded at the open door. ‘On the carpet? On the sofa? Or did you take your time? Old habits die hard. I expect you took him to bed.’

  She pushed past Lizzie, heading down the hall, then started making her way upstairs, looking for the bedroom. Lizzie tried to stop her, but it was hopeless. She was fit as well as drunk, and the anger was boiling out of her.

  She’d found the bedroom. She pushed the door open. Michala was standing on the other side of the bed, her toes curling on the bare floorboards. She’d taken off the dressing gown and was trying to get into her thong. Naked, she stared at this stranger.

  Oona returned the stare and then began to laugh.

  ‘You two are a couple? I’m interrupting something?’

  ‘You’re interrupting nothing. I’m downstairs on the sofa.’

  ‘Yeah? Really?’ Oona shook her head in disbelief. ‘My poor bloody man,’ she whispered. ‘What the fuck have you done to him?’

  Thirty-Eight

  THURSDAY, 19 JUNE 2014, 07.31

  Lizzie woke to the sound of Michala being sick. Oona had come and gone. There’d been a scuffle at the door, nothing serious, and Lizzie had managed to survive th
e encounter intact. She’d ducked the half-hearted headbutt and bolted the front door just in case. Now Lizzie made her way upstairs to the bathroom, where Michala was bent over the toilet bowl.

  ‘I’m sorry …’ She wiped her mouth. ‘I’m really, really sorry.’

  ‘It’s nothing. Don’t worry. Something you’ve eaten?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Michala didn’t know, couldn’t say. Lizzie asked whether it had happened before. The way she shook her head, immediately emphatic, told Lizzie she was lying.

  ‘It happens a lot, yes?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘For no apparent reason?’

  ‘Excuse me.’

  She threw up again, gesturing blindly for Lizzie to leave her alone. Lizzie went back to the bedroom. Michala had arrived with a daysack, nothing else. It lay on the carpet beside the bed.

  Lizzie went through it. Beneath a couple of paperbacks and a handful of spare underwear she found a car rental form. Curious, she unfolded it. The local branch of Budget had premises on the Marsh Barton Industrial Estate, to the south of the city centre. On Friday 6 June, at 12.00, Michala had picked up a Ford Focus diesel. The three-day rental had cost her £89.87. The car was returned, with a full tank of fuel, at 11.06 on Monday. Under payment options the Budget clerk had ringed ‘Cash’.

  Lizzie glanced at the open door. There was no sign of Michala. Lizzie’s printer lay beside her laptop on the table downstairs in the living room. She took a photocopy of the car rental form and then went back upstairs and returned it to Michala’s bag. At the very bottom of the bag she found another item, a knitted wristband still in its wrapping. The trademark was Sea-Band. She made a mental note, then left Michala’s bag where she’d found it. The flushing of the loo brought Michala back to the bedroom. She looked terrible.

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘Water, please.’

  Lizzie obliged, fetching a glass of water from the bathroom. Only when Michala was asleep again, curled beneath the duvet, did she return to her laptop. Googling Sea-Band took seconds. According to the website, their wrist bands were medical aids against nausea and vomiting caused by travel. And by pregnancy.

  A phone call from DI Carole Houghton cleared the way for a Buzzard detective to descend on the Exmouth branch of Tesco. The store manager provided a back office and a PC to review the CCTV disc. The officer involved happened to be Colin Myers, the youngster in the squad. An hour and a half shuttling back and forth between midnight and five in the morning on Sunday 8 June produced no sightings of the man whose mugshot adorned the Major Incident Room. Unless he’d disguised himself as the furtive shoplifter in Aisle 3 or one of the noisy lads who’d swaggered into the store at just gone midnight, Alois Bentner was lying.

  Nandy was unsurprised by the news. The duty magistrate had given Buzzard another thirty-six hours to charge or release its prime suspect. What Nandy wanted – needed – now was a full confession.

  He’d summoned a mid-morning meet in the MIR, principals only. Suttle, who’d pulled together the intel file, offered an overview of the case against Bentner. As far as motive was concerned, he said, the jury was out. There was every indication that Bentner’s affection for Harriet Reilly was real. They’d spent a lot of time together. They were fellow solitaries, both a little obsessed, she with a cascade of issues around euthanasia, he with the death of the entire human race. But they were also a jealous couple, sternly possessive of each other. Add Bentner’s drinking, a level of consumption that put him deep into alcoholism, and it was conceivable – just – that he’d been driven to do something physically extreme.

  Nandy wanted to know about opportunity. Suttle said that wouldn’t have been a problem. They could now prove that he’d been away from the rough sleepers on the Saturday night for at least an hour. His alibi didn’t stand up. Harriet was asleep in Bentner’s house and he obviously had a key. He could have arrived, slipped into the house, killed her and then left again. The pathologist had drawn a six-hour window around the time of her death. It all fitted perfectly.

  ‘You don’t sound convinced, Jimmy.’ This was Houghton.

  ‘I’m not, boss. OK, I can see him assaulting her, beating her around the head and face, maybe even suffocating her. He’d be remorseful afterwards, but he’d have meant it at the time. What doesn’t work for me is the rest of it.’ He gestured down at his belly. ‘Especially the baby. That’s bizarre. We’re into serious weirdness.’

  ‘Gemma Caton?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Heads nodded around the table. Luke Golding had been in touch within the last hour. He’d managed to interview the German guy around the corner from Michala’s London flat, and he’d confirmed that Caton’s yellow Nissan Micra had sat in his driveway all weekend. The neighbours in the apartment block were telling a similar story. Two of them had seen Michala and Caton on the Saturday afternoon and stopped for a chat.

  The next-door flat belonged to a young Indian IT worker. He’d returned from an evening out on the Saturday night to find a light under Michala’s door, and the sound of the TV on low. His girlfriend, he said, had woken up at dawn. The TV next door had still been on, but by the time she got back to sleep someone had turned it off. The TV was evidently brand new, a Samsung 32-inch. The Indian guy had helped Michala set it up.

  Suttle, who’d taken the call from Golding, had made a note. Now Nandy wanted his take on Gemma Caton’s involvement.

  ‘For me, sir, she’s the key to all this. If we’re talking obsession, she’s way out front. This is a woman who doesn’t take prisoners. What she wants, she gets – and it has to be on her own terms. For me Bentner is on that list, whether he knows it or not. So is the Danish girl. And so, I suspect, is my ex-wife.’

  ‘You think this is a sexual thing?’ Nandy asked.

  ‘Not necessarily, sir. Rosie nailed it last night when she was in with Bentner. With Caton it’s more primitive than sex. Think dog. This is a woman who lives in a world of lamp posts.’

  ‘And Bentner?’

  ‘A lamp post. Definitely. She wants to own him. To leave her smell on him. Caton’s not a woman for sharing. It’s a territorial thing. I’m not sure we’ve got a form for it.’

  ‘And that’s enough to explain Reilly? The state of her?’

  ‘More than enough. With Reilly, remember, it’s not just one body, but two. Caton wanted them both out of her way, both mother and fetus.’

  ‘So she killed Reilly? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘She may have done. It’s a possibility.’

  ‘But she’s in London. So how does that work?’

  ‘It doesn’t. Not yet.’

  ‘So what next? We pull her in?’

  ‘We put her under surveillance.’

  ‘Like your missus suggested?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’m afraid so.’

  Nandy nodded, glanced at Houghton. Everyone in the room understood the budgetary implications.

  ‘Let’s do it, Carole. I’m not sure we have a choice.’

  Easier said than done. Suttle conferred with the D/S in charge of the force Surveillance Unit by phone. He had an address for the target and a workplace contact number but little else. Golding was scouring the Internet for more details. Caton’s Facebook account offered a gallery of photos, many of them recent, and some remarkably candid hints about the developing shit storm that was her private life.

  ‘Serious grief on the home front,’ she’d posted yesterday. ‘Bummer.’ What hundreds of disappointed students were to make of this self-confessional moment was anyone’s guess, but Suttle emailed the best of the photos to the Surveillance Unit and left them to make their plans. Early afternoon the surveillance D/S came back to him by email. ‘Can’t find her anywhere,’ he’d written. ‘Any clues?’

  Sadly not. Suttle went back to her Facebook page, staring at the photos on his PC. Caton grandstanding behind a lectern, presumably in a lecture hall at the university. Caton in the s
tudent union bar, mobbed by adoring students. Caton knee-deep in water at a bird reserve on the Exe estuary, stooping to collect an armful of eel grass. In every shot the expression on her face was virtually the same: gleeful, slightly manic, untroubled by restraint or anything as worrisome as self-doubt.

  The threads which tied these images together were spelled out in accompanying posts. Nature is giving up on mankind. The Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism has hollowed out the world we once knew. Only democratic protest on a vast scale offers any real hope. We have to be stronger than them, cleverer than them, less greedy than the guys with the boardrooms and the chauffeurs and the shareholders and all the other goodies of an economic system that is cooking us slowly to death. Turn down the gas. Cap the oil wells. Seal the coal mines. Give your kids, and your kids’ kids, a fighting chance.

  Did Suttle sign up to any of this stuff? He wasn’t sure. Like most of the rest of the human race he told himself he was too busy – too stretched – to give it the attention it deserved. Deep down he suspected that the Catons and the Bentners of this world were probably right, that all of us were pedalling fast towards disaster, but whenever he gave it a moment’s proper thought he asked himself what he could really do to make a difference. Take the train instead of the car? Give up meat? Live on lentils and soy milk? None of it was especially appealing, and lentils definitely made him fart, but a couple of months ago – on a snatched holiday on the Costa del Sol – he and Oona had discussed the madness of the world one night in a bar near Marbella.

  Everything around them, for miles and miles, seemed less than a decade old. In certain lights – especially at dawn or at sunset – the effect could be spectacular, but even where the developers hadn’t run out of money, the results looked fake. Fake Moorish arches. Fake marble walkways. Fake haciendas. Inland, beyond the sprawl of developments that would never be finished, lay the golf courses. Keeping these playgrounds green was emptying the aquifers and sucking the rivers dry. The price of cucumbers in the mountain villages was soaring so rich men could make it to the eighteenth tee. Where was the logic in that? How long before the people began to march off the mountains? Camp on all those manicured greens? And chase all the bloodsucking foreigners back to where they belonged? Suttle didn’t know, but the memories of that evening were achingly sweet.