The Order of Things

The Order of Things Read Free

Book: The Order of Things Read Free
Author: Graham Hurley
Tags: Crime & Mystery Fiction
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Forshaw.’
    ‘Where do I find her?’
    ‘Heavitree nick. She’s waiting for you. Operation Buzzard , by the way. Make a note.’
    Houghton’s phone rang. She was a big woman in every respect, but lately a crash diet had taken its toll. Her eyes were pouched in darkness, and in a certain light, like now, she looked ill. She answered the call, the frown on her face deepening by the second. The pathologist had been held up for some reason. Nandy was demanding yet another update. There were staffing problems with setting up the Major Incident Room for Operation Buzzard . All the usual gotchas.
    ‘Take it easy, boss.’ Suttle stepped out of the suit, remembering some advice she’d given him only months ago. ‘Just another job, yeah?’

Two
    M ONDAY, 9 J UNE 2014, 19.31
    Taking the train down to Exeter for a long weekend had been Lizzie’s idea. She’d met him at the station, driven him back to her new house and shown him the wilderness that passed as the garden in the last of the light before they’d spent the rest of the evening in bed. Billy McTierney, she was pleased to discover, still did it for her. The months apart while she attended to all the post-publication rituals had, if anything, sharpened her appetite for his presence, and his body, and for the moments in the middle of the night when she jerked awake to find him propped on one elbow, a smile on his face, just looking at her.
    Kissing him goodbye at the station, she’d told him to come back soon. Next weekend. The weekend after. For ever, if he fancied it. He held her for a long moment, told her she was fantasising, promised to stay in touch, and then – with a smile and a wave – he and the train were gone.
    Driving back to the white stucco Victorian ruin which had relaunched her life, she felt warm, and wanted, and unaccountably lucky. The house lay close to the city centre, yet retained its privacy. The tall sash windows, golden in the last of the sunset. The huge front door, badly in need of a little TLC. The quarter-acre of garden with its encircling wall, mellow red brick dripping with honeysuckle and clematis.
    She’d fallen in love with the property at first sight, undaunted by the years of work it would need to restore any kind of decorative order. The huge kitchen hadn’t been touched for decades, the central heating was a liability, and finding a use for five bedrooms would be a serious challenge. Yet the place had a presence and a quirkiness with which she felt immediately at home. Lizzie Hodson. The author of Mine . Praised in the broadsheets. Feted on local television. Already on the must-invite lists of countless literary festivals. And now the proud owner and sole inhabitant of The Plantation. Perfect.
    Later that same evening, making the bed she and Billy had abandoned only hours earlier, Lizzie found the note he’d left her. It was tucked under the pillow, sealed in an envelope. She began to rip it open then had second thoughts. Another glass of wine, she thought. Give yourself time. Savour the moment.
    Now, curled in front of an electric fire in the draughty sitting room, she laid the envelope on the rug and looked at it. In truth she’d been nervous about the weekend. Billy had helped her through the nightmare months after Grace’s abduction and death. She’d been in pieces, incoherent with grief, but somehow he’d managed to bring her solace and comfort and the kind of undramatic but solid advice that had finally persuaded her that life was worth another shot.
    In some kind of vague and wholly desperate way she’d always had a book in mind, but it had been Billy’s idea to write it through the eyes of Claire herself. Claire Dillon had always been the monster in all this. It was Claire who had taken Grace, Claire who had hidden the little girl away, Claire who had silenced her crying with the overdose that had killed her, and Claire who had finally jumped from the seventh-floor balcony with Grace’s limp little body in her

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