The Order of Things (27 page)

Suttle wanted to stick with Reilly.

‘She was pregnant,’ he pointed out.

‘That’s true.’

‘Would you like to tell us more?’

For the first time he glanced at his solicitor, but when she shook her head he chose to ignore her.

‘Harriet wanted a child. I said yes.’

‘It was that way round?’

‘Yes.’

‘But it wasn’t her child, was it?’

‘No. She couldn’t have children of her own.’

‘Because she wouldn’t try?’ Suttle remembered Tony Velder on the phone from Australia.

‘Because she had a problem conceiving. Trying was never an issue. Not for either of us.’

‘She liked sex?’

‘She loved sex. It came late to her. Maybe I was able to help in that respect.’

Suttle nodded and made a note. He wanted to know more about the pregnancy.

‘Where did the egg come from?’

‘From my first wife. She had cancer. We had the eggs harvested and frozen when we knew she wouldn’t make it. And thank God we did.’

Suttle checked the date. March 1999. Bentner nodded in agreement. They were in Boulder, Colorado. A fine place to end your days.

‘She died soon afterwards?’

‘Yes.’ Bentner’s face was a mask. ‘A difficult time for both of us.’

‘Her especially.’

‘Of course. And me too. Commitment’s tough. You have to mean it. Commit, and you lose a little piece of yourself. Commit to someone who dies and you lose everything. It’s hard to imagine something like that until it happens to you …’ He nodded, fell silent, sat back, gazed at his hands.

‘And it’s now happened twice? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Twice in a lifetime. After that you’re nothing. It’s all meaningless. I used to think we were just animals. How wrong can a man be?’

Suttle was watching him carefully, trying to decide whether there was any element of performance in his account, but the closer he looked, the more genuine Bentner appeared to be. He missed both women, and their absence first bewildered then diminished him. For a man so short of social graces he had the rare knack of being able to voice his grief.

‘We understand your partner Harriet miscarried a couple of times?’

‘She did. This was our last shot.’

‘You must have been delighted.’

‘We were. We had plans for afterwards.’

‘Afterwards?’

‘After the baby arrived. There’s an island in the Outer Hebrides. North Uist. Just over a thousand people. Perfect if you happened to be us.’

‘You’d found somewhere?’

‘A little croft. No one for miles.’

‘You can prove this?’

‘Prove that we’d had enough?’ For the first time Bentner laughed. ‘Prove that we wanted out? Clean air? Our own company? Somewhere for the baby to become a real child?’

‘We need details, Mr Bentner. Evidence that you were serious.’

Bentner nodded. Said it would be a pleasure. He borrowed a sheet of paper from his solicitor and wrote a line or two before he passed it across to Suttle.

‘Dearcadh is the croft we were bidding on. MacDonald and Co. is the estate agent handling the sale. If you want more I’ll have to have my phone back.’

Bentner’s phone had been seized by the Custody Sergeant. Golding went to the Custody Suite to get it back. When he returned, Bentner scrolled through a collection of photos. Seconds later Suttle found himself looking at a sturdy stone-built cottage with a rusting tin roof and two milk churns by the front door.

‘This is where you’ve been hiding out?’ Suttle had spotted the date on the image: 13/6/2014.

‘Of course. I’m surprised you never turned up.’

‘Our mistake, Mr Bentner. Shit happens.’

‘You’re forgiven, my friend. A man can disappear in a landscape like that. The nearest human being? Two miles away. And he’s normally too drunk to remember anything.’

Suttle wondered whether this was true. More likely Bentner already had friends up there, locals who’d be attracted by this bearded creature, half scientist, half prophet, who so wanted to turn his back on the madness of the world. A man like this, he thought, would seal lips island-wide.

‘We need to talk about the weekend before last,’ he said.

‘Down here, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

Bentner nodded. In essence, he said, it was simple. From time to time he felt the need to get away. Harriet understood this. It was one of the reasons they worked so well as a couple. She was a bit of a solitary herself. And after an especially brutal month at the centre he was ready for a change of scene, something very different.

‘So what did you do?’

‘I drove down to Exmouth on the Saturday afternoon. There’s a guy I know down there, fascinating man, a rough sleeper.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Geordie John.’ He paused. ‘You know him?’

‘Go on.’

‘He’s a great guy, ex-army, a good man, educated, right attitude. We’ve always talked. He’s one of the few human beings I can relate to.’

‘A drinker?’

‘Of course. It goes with the territory. But this guy is wise. Wise in ways most of the world never understands. He had money once, gave it all away. He even had a house and a mortgage. Living rough is a conscious choice. He thinks the world is teetering on the edge and he wants to be there when we all fall off. Good man.’

‘So what happened?’

‘He lives out on the cliffs. I spent the night there.’

Suttle nodded. Glanced at Golding. Made another note.

‘We believe you took a call that evening,’ he said. ‘At 23.47 to be precise.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Who was it from?’

‘Harriet.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She asked me how things were going. I told her they were going fine.’

‘How did she sound?’

‘Fine. Normal.’

‘The call lasted less than a minute. Was that usual for the pair of you?’

‘Yes. She said she was very tired. I told her to go to bed.’

‘Told?’

‘Suggested.’

‘What about the next day? Did you phone her? Check she was OK?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I might have woken her up. In any case I’d be seeing her later. There’d be no point.’

‘You had a tent?’

‘I always have a tent. Back of the car.’

‘And next morning?’

‘I stayed there. Lovely weather. I walked along the beach to the end and then went on to Budleigh. Bought some supplies for Geordie John.’

‘Food?’

‘Drink. Dropped them off on the way back.’

‘And then what?’

‘I went home.’

‘And what did you find?’

‘You know what I found. She was dead. Beaten. Hacked about. Marianne all over again. Except worse.’

‘So why didn’t you phone us?’

‘Is that a serious question?’

‘Of course it is. She’s dead. This wasn’t an accident.’

‘But you’re telling me a call to you lot can bring her back?’

‘Of course it wouldn’t. But that’s not the point. Someone had killed her. That has consequences.’

‘For whom?’

‘For everyone. There’s someone out there. It happens once. It can happen again.’

‘A serial killer, you mean? A serial disemboweller?’

Suttle shrugged. He wasn’t quite sure where this conversation was going. In some respects it was like talking to a child. Time to move on.

‘So you left her there?’

‘Yes.’

‘For someone else to find?’

‘Obviously.’

‘So where did you go?’

‘Dartmoor. I know it well. Not as remote as Uist but not bad if you need to keep your head down.’

‘And then what?’

‘I saw a paper. By Tuesday my face was all over everywhere, and it was obvious you’d made your minds up. I didn’t want any of that. I dumped the Skoda. Bought an old van from a Polish guy. Cash. Five hundred quid. I could sleep in the back. It did the job.’

‘You were carrying that much money?’

‘More. Lots more. Banks are a conspiracy to rip you off, always have been, but it’s much worse these days. Harriet felt the same. We had thousands between us. Primitive, I know, but it works.’

He said he’d driven north, into Scotland. Then the west coast. Then the ferry out to the Hebrides.

‘That was Thursday night. I spent the weekend in the croft – broke in, kipped on the floor. I started south again on Sunday night. Twenty-seven hours. Door to door.’

‘But why? Why did you come back?’

‘Because you’re right.’

‘About what?’

‘I need to know who did it. I need to know who killed her. She’s never coming back. And neither is Marianne. And neither will that poor bloody baby. I need to mark their passing.’ He offered Suttle a thin smile. ‘Life is an act of separation, my friend. It happens to everyone.’

Thirty

T
UESDAY, 17
J
UNE 2014, 14.51

Lizzie had suggested a café beside Exeter Central station for the meet with Michala. She wanted somewhere public where she’d feel safe. Michala, when they’d talked on the phone, was at the university. Early afternoon she’d be taking the train back to Lympstone. The Fountain Café? Perfect.

She was already there when Lizzie turned up, tucked behind a corner table next to the window. She was wearing tight jeans and a white vest with a scoop neck. A tiny silver fish hung on a silver chain around her neck.

Lizzie reached across the table and touched it. ‘That’s really pretty,’ she said. ‘Really unusual.’

‘It’s a salmon,’ Michala said. ‘I had it made. There’s a silversmith in Totnes. It was a present from Gemma. She’s got one too.’

Lizzie nodded. Michala was nervous, which came as no surprise, and Lizzie wondered whether she’d shared the fact of this rendezvous with Caton.

‘You’ve been together long? You and Gemma?’

‘Nearly three years.’

A waitress was hovering. Lizzie ordered a latte. So far Michala hadn’t asked why they were meeting like this and Lizzie was happy to take her time. Play the innocent, she told herself. Build the rapport. Try and gloss over what had happened down in Lympstone.

Michala wanted to know whether Lizzie was in a relationship.

‘No. But I used to be married.’

‘Me too.’

This came as a surprise.
More
, Lizzie thought.
I need to know more
.

‘This was in Denmark? Back home?’

‘Yes. Years back. It feels like another life.’

It turned out that Michala was older than she looked. She’d married a Norwegian guy when she was nineteen. They’d travelled a lot and ended up in Canada. She’d worked for a time in Montreal, and then she and her husband had taken a bus across the prairies to Calgary.

She bent into the conversation, suddenly animated. This was a story she wanted to share. Ludvik, she said, was ten years her senior. He was a geologist. He was taking time off from his job in the oil industry. At his insistence, they’d gone up to the Athabasca tar sands. She’d never seen anywhere more ruined in her life. Ruined wasn’t a word that Ludvik recognised. He knew the stats by heart. Price per tonne for extraction. Price per tonne on the open market. The tar sands had transformed the prospects of millions of people around Calgary and Edmonton. Even the Inuit in the high Arctic had got a little richer. Cheap energy. Fat profits. Win-win.

‘In the end I didn’t even argue with him,’ she said. ‘One look at that place and you knew it was wrong, but what can you do?’

They’d taken another bus through the Rockies to the west coast, then crossed the border into the US. In a tiny village on the Snake River below Shoshone Falls she’d met Gemma Caton.

‘She was just finishing the research for her book. She’d been all over the area, making contact with survivors from the old tribes. She was a woman you could listen to for ever.’

Michala said she’d stayed in the village for nearly a month. After the first couple of days, bored, Ludvik took a bus down the valley towards the coast. Michala stayed on, helping Gemma with her research.

‘I had a laptop. I was happy to type out her notes every night. The people we were meeting were amazing. Two tribes. The Nez Perce and the Shoshone. They lived on the salmon for more than ten thousand years. They worshipped the fish. Then the Europeans came, two explorers, Lewis and Clark. Then more explorers, and fur trappers, and timber people. They saw a sign for the river that the Shoshones had made. It was really a salmon but they thought it was a snake. That’s how the river got its name.’

One hand strayed to the silver fish. Lizzie asked about Ludvik.

‘I never saw him again.’

‘So where did he go?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

In the nineteenth century, she said, the pioneers arrived, leaving the Oregon Trail and plunging into the backwoods. Then came steamboats and railroads, and soon they were building dams for irrigation and hydroelectric power, transforming the lower river, and soon the salmon didn’t come any more.

‘That’s when the old ways began to die. Ten thousand years. Gone. In less than a century.’

It was Gemma, she said, who had made her understand the real implications of everything she was seeing around her. The arrival of a market economy. Processed food. Pickup trucks. Tourism. Nails in the coffin of a world that had disappeared.

‘She was a fine teacher. She still is. You should come and hear one of her lectures. She’d like that.’

Lizzie nodded. Going anywhere near Gemma Caton was the last thing on her agenda.

‘You became lovers?’ she asked. ‘You and Gemma?’

‘Of course. I knew what she wanted. She made me very happy.’

‘And now?’

‘She still makes me very happy.’

‘And last night?’

‘Last night was a shame.’ She looked Lizzie in the eye. ‘You weren’t really sick, were you?’

‘No.’ Lizzie ducked her head and then looked up again. ‘How did you know?’

‘Because there aren’t any soapstone carvings in the lavatory. That made Gemma laugh.’

‘Because I was lying?’

‘Because you were frightened. There’s no need. We like you.’ Her hand closed over Lizzie’s.

Lizzie nodded, said nothing. She realised she was backing herself up the same cul-de-sac. How far was she prepared to take this thing? She didn’t know.