The Order of Things (8 page)

‘No idea.’

‘Did he
say
he was coming back?’

‘He had a car. That’s all I know.’

‘What sort of state was he in?’

‘Pissed. Like us.’ His eyes returned to the same patch of yellowing grass. ‘Shame. He must have gone.’

At the Major Incident Room Suttle shared the news with DI Houghton. Nandy, back from Plymouth, was on the phone. The conversation over, Houghton briefed him quickly. Alois Bentner had evidently spent Saturday night partying with a bunch of vagrants on a cliff top outside Exmouth. This would tally with cell site analysis of the call he’d taken from Reilly’s mobile. In Houghton’s view they should declare the site a crime scene, full bosh.

Nandy didn’t believe it. Time was short. He was due for a live BBC interview down in Lympstone.
Buzzard
was suddenly news.

‘You think Bentner was in Exmouth?’ Nandy was already on his feet. ‘Total bollocks. You’re telling me he goes to an offie? You’re telling me he spends the night dossing with these people? You’re telling me he leaves his car out in the open on some street or other? After doing something like that?’

Nandy, to Suttle’s intense pleasure, had nailed it in one go.

‘Totally right, sir. Unless it wasn’t him who killed her.’

Nine

T
UESDAY, 10
J
UNE 2014, 18.33

The Lympstone murder was the lead story on the BBC’s local magazine programme. Lizzie, still making notes at home on her conversation with Jeff Okenek, lifted her head from the laptop to watch. The reporter was live from the slipway. He gestured towards the nearby terrace of houses. Over there, he said, a woman had died at the hands of an unknown assailant. The killing was so brutal that investigating officers were refusing to release details.

The shot cut to a man in a dark green anorak. Introduced as Senior Investigating Officer Det-Supt Malcolm Nandy, he was slim, early fifties, receding grey hair cut short, his eyes pouched in darkness. He shifted from one foot to another like a boxer pre-fight, and he’d clearly anticipated the reporter’s question. Lizzie recognised him at once. Jimmy’s boss, she thought. She’d met him twice. Nice man if he liked you, but aggression on legs if he didn’t.

‘Progress, Simon?’ Nandy was talking to the reporter. ‘These are early days. We have leads, of course we do, but our priority just now is trying to find a particular person of interest.’

Nandy changed his eye line, addressing the camera direct. Lizzie had no idea whether this was his idea or the reporter’s but it certainly worked.

‘If you see this man,’ he said, ‘please get in touch with us. His name is Alois Bentner. And since the weekend, he seems to have disappeared.’

Lizzie found herself looking at a photo of a forty-something white male. A tangle of greying hair. Full beard. And an expression she could only describe as forbidding. The photograph might have come from a passport booth, she thought, but even so she guessed he rarely smiled.

Back with Nandy, the reporter was wrapping up. A national manhunt was under way for Alois Bentner. His photo was all over Facebook and Twitter. If there was a moment to be thankful for social media then this was surely it. Nandy offered a grim nod and added a final health and safety warning. If you see this man, don’t approach him. Just give us a ring.

Lizzie returned to her laptop. A couple of keystrokes took her into the Devon and Cornwall Police Facebook page. There, on the home page, she found the same face but a different photo. She was wrong about the smile. Alois Bentner was pictured on a beach she recognised as Copacabana, sitting cross-legged on the white sand. His jeans were rolled up to his knees and he was wearing a red singlet and a back-to-front baseball cap. He was lightly tanned, and either the sunshine or the face behind the camera had brightened his mood. He looked relaxed, even radiant. By no means the monster Det-Supt Nandy was so keen to nail.

Lizzie’s phone rang. It was Anton. He needed to sort out his evening. Were they still going to see Ralph Woodman?

Woodman lived in a beautiful Georgian house at the end of a gravel drive near the airport. Anton had rung ahead, and Woodman must have been waiting inside because he stepped out of the front door the moment Lizzie pulled her Audi to a halt. He was a tall man with a slight stoop. Lizzie guessed his age at past seventy. He wore needlecord trousers over polished brogues and a green quilted gilet against the strengthening wind.

The lounge was at the back of the house, a big handsome room, exquisitely furnished. An acre or so of garden filled the view from the big sash windows: freshly mown lawn, flower beds bursting with a palette of colours, a wooden gazebo occupying the far corner. One day, Lizzie thought, my garden might look like this.

‘May I?’

Lizzie turned to find herself offered a glass of sherry. Fino. Dry. Nice. She was trying to work out whether anyone else lived in this glorious house. A view like that was made for sharing.

‘I’m sorry about your wife,’ she said. ‘I understand it was motor neurone disease.’

‘It was, my dear. I’ve been a Christian all my life. We both were. But we were sorely tested, believe you me.’

The merest nod directed Lizzie’s attention to a row of framed photos on the marble mantelpiece.

‘Do you mind?’ Lizzie wanted to look at the photos.

‘Not at all. I understand that’s why you’re here.’

In the car Anton had explained that Ralph Woodman had recently become a major supporter of an organisation called Dignity in Dying and believed that Lizzie was in a position to offer publicity and perhaps PR advice. In his view she needed to understand in some detail the blessings conferred by assisted dying. Hence the invitation to The Old Rectory.

Lizzie was looking at the photos. One pictured Ralph’s wife as a child, sitting on her mother’s knee. Another was more recent. A lifetime later, even in a wheelchair, Julia Woodman had retained a beauty and a presence that Lizzie could only describe as luminous. She sat erect, if a little lopsidedly. Her face was turned to the camera, strong features, a full mouth, a melting smile. She must have been the sunshine in this man’s life, she thought. To lose a woman like that would close the curtains on years of warmth and laughter.

‘You know anything about MND?’ Ralph had joined her at the mantelpiece.

Lizzie shook her head. Mercifully not, she said.

‘Then you’re lucky. It’s the stranger that comes ghosting into your life. For months you don’t realise it’s there. A little stiffness in the legs after a decent walk? Difficulty getting the odd word out? Looking back, you realise what these things meant, but at the time you dismiss it. In the army I’d have called it collateral damage. None of us is getting any younger.’

Julia, he said, had been nearly sixty before the medics could put their finger on what was wrong.

‘That was how many years ago?’

‘Four. She’s always been the younger woman in my life, the one I nabbed when she was silly enough to say yes. I always worshipped her. Nothing ever changed in that respect. Even at the end.’

‘I understand she died recently.’

‘Nearly nine months ago. To tell you the truth it feels like yesterday.’ He took Lizzie lightly by the arm and guided her across to the window. ‘She’s down there by the gazebo.’

‘You buried her in the garden?’

‘I did. In a wicker coffin she designed herself. My daughters wove flowers into it for the celebration.
Very
hippy.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘I visit her every morning. Take little gifts. We talk to each other. I find it helps immensely.’

To be frank, he said, the Church had been a disappointment, and the same was true of their GP. After countless tests, Julia had been diagnosed with a variant of the disease called progressive bulbar palsy. PBP, he said, was something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. It attacked the nerves in your face and throat. You started to drool. You couldn’t swallow properly. You had difficulty breathing. And as it got worse, you lived every day in terror of not being able to breathe at all.

‘Then there was the crying,’ he said. ‘Julia was always the strong one. She could stand pain, disappointment, despair, everything that life throws at you. In that department she always put me to shame. But towards the end she simply couldn’t cope. She’d cry and cry, and that, of course, only made it worse. My poor, poor love. You’ve no idea what that does to a man. There’s a sense of utter helplessness. You’re together day and night. You do your best, of course, but deep down you both know there’s absolutely nothing you can do.’

He turned away from the window, shaking his head.

‘Your GP … ?’ Lizzie asked.

‘Absolutely useless. Nice enough man but wouldn’t begin to entertain what we both had in mind.’

‘Which was?’

‘Ending it. May I call you Lizzie?’

‘Of course.’

‘It wears you down, Lizzie. It wore me down, and dear God it certainly wore my darling wife down. There’s help out there if you want it. Physiotherapists. Reflexologists. Dieticians. You name it. But after a while you realise you’re at a place from which there’s no coming back. The only absolute certainty, the only thing you can rely on, is that this disease, this hideous stranger, is here for keeps. Until one morning he decides to end it all. His decision. Not ours. That’s the moment when you start getting angry, the moment when you realise that both your life and your death are beyond your control.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I’d met this young man.’ His eyes settled on Anton. ‘One of my daughters teaches at the university. She bumped into Anton one day and they started talking. Normally she wouldn’t dream of sharing these kinds of confidences, but it turned out that Anton was something of an expert in the field. His mother had elected to die in Switzerland. You’re aware of the Dignitas people?’

‘Of course.’ Lizzie was looking at Anton. ‘You never told me.’

‘You never asked.’

‘Your mother was ill?’

‘She had pancreatic cancer,’ Anton said. ‘ She was very brave but sometimes courage isn’t enough.’

‘Precisely.’ Ralph reached across and patted his arm. ‘Absolutely right. And so young Anton here became part of our little family for a while, which was wonderful because he started to teach Julia German. Me too, when I could get my brain into gear.’

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.