The Order of Things
Dedication
For Daisy and Dylan
and
Mother Earth
Title Page
THE ORDER
OF THINGS
Graham Hurley
.
Contents
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.
M
ONDAY, 9
J
UNE 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?’