The Order of Things Read Free Page A

arms.
    If you were looking for blame then it had Claire Dillon’s name in marquee letters all over it, yet a couple of months of exploring every bend in this girl’s journey had taught Lizzie that life was never as simple as pain and retribution demanded. The woman had become a stranger to herself. Not only that, but as the weeks of writing sped by, and the pile of printed-out pages grew higher, Lizzie had concluded that – one way or another – we all had a bit of Claire Dillon in us.
    She’d shared this thought with Billy over the weekend. That could have been me, she said. Given certain circumstances, I might have appointed myself Grace’s guardian, Grace’s best friend, the one good person in a bad, bad world to truly understand why this little girl had to be saved.
    Billy had been unconvinced.
    ‘That doesn’t work,’ he had said. ‘You were Grace’s guardian. You were her best friend. You were also her mother. And that makes a difference.’
    ‘But you don’t understand. We’re all closer to the edge than we think we are. And you, of all people, must know that.’
    Billy dealt with mentally ill people every day of his working life. He was an expert in the field. In a previous life he’d also been a professional climber, paid well for it, a man on intimate terms with gravity, the science of belays, karabiners and chockstones, the whole shtick. He knew about mountains, about keeping your balance – your sanity – on near-vertical faces of ice and slate, never admitting that there might ever be a problem that guts, and experience, and sheer nerve couldn’t resolve. Billy McTierney had always been his own man, and that was one of the many reasons she’d quietly fallen in love with him. Nothing urgent. Nothing must-have. Simply the comforting knowledge that they were already, in countless unannounced ways, together.
    She reached for the envelope. Then came the summons of an arriving email. She got up and settled herself behind her PC, the portal that had taken her to Mine and everything that had followed. She owed the PC her new home, her peace of mind and the weekend that had turned out to be such a success.
    The email came from one of the handful of local contacts who’d signed up to the investigative website she’d launched. Bespoken had grand ambitions, not least to free itself from the tyranny of print media, but these were early days and she wasn’t at all sure where this new adventure – funded on the proceeds of Mine – might lead. Were there really enough stories out there to attract a significant readership? And if so, did she have the financial resources and the sheer nerve to bet her investigative instincts against an army of litigious so-called victims? To both questions, on a cosy Monday night, she had no answer, but she bent to the screen, eager to know who might have touched base.
    The message was both enticing and blunt. ‘A local GP,’ it read, ‘is supposed to be in deep shit. It seems the woman plays God. Post-Shipman, this shouldn’t be happening. Are we interested?’
    Lizzie studied the screen for a long moment. Were we talking mercy killings? Something more sinister? Or what? She didn’t know, couldn’t make up her mind. What was the strength of the evidence? Where might an investigation like this lead? She shook her head. Exeter was a city for the young. So was Portsmouth. But there were places down on the coast that had become warehouses for the elderly.
    The last time she’d been down to Exmouth to see her estranged husband, to tell him that the scars they both carried would one day heal, she’d been astonished at the sheer numbers of old folk around. They were everywhere: in the street, queuing at the bus stops, wandering uncertainly through the town-centre supermarket. With budgets squeezed and life getting tougher by the month, might people like these welcome the attentions of a rogue GP?
    Back beside the electric fire, still uncertain, she at last opened the