The Order of Things by Graham Hurley

ever saw in her life, but these days that doesn’t mean anything. Like I say, she was really, really fond of him. A baby ?’ She shook her head. ‘Good God.’

Seven
    T UESDAY, 10 J UNE 2014, 14.47
    Lizzie spent the afternoon at a caravan site on the outskirts of Dawlish, a seaside town south of the estuary. Jeff Okenek occupied a mobile home tucked into a corner of the top field. A line of washing blew in the wind off the sea, and he’d created a small herb garden, carefully netted from pests, on the sunny side of the nearby hedge.
    The mobile home was spotless. Sepia prints of San Francisco in the 1930s hung on the few available stretches of wall, and a fold-up double bed beneath the window at the end served as a sofa. Jeff had a cat he called Ferlinghetti in memory of a beat poet Lizzie had never heard of and a huge long-haired tabby of uncertain age that he treated with something close to reverence.
    Lizzie had knocked on his door an hour or so after a catch-up on the phone with her friend from the Portsmouth Coroner’s office. Dawn had confirmed Lizzie’s Internet findings about death certification post-Shipman. She’d agreed it should now be impossible for any working GP to dispatch his or her more vulnerable patients without raising suspicions among fellow medics – GPs or otherwise – but half a lifetime straddling the no-man’s-land between medicine and law had taught her that legislation in this field was far from perfect.
    Life and death decisions at the end of somebody’s life, she’d pointed out, were famously difficult. If someone was truly suffering, and you had the means to bring all that to an end, wouldn’t it be kinder to put the poor bastard out of his misery? In the world of pets no one raised a peep if Tootsie had to be put to sleep. So how come human beings had to hang on and on because no one had the guts to do anything about it? This was strong stuff, but Dawn made Lizzie laugh when she added a thought about the eighty-pound payment made to a GP for completing the cremation form. This, she said, was known in the trade as ‘ash cash’.
    Lizzie had wondered about sharing this with Jeff, but fifteen minutes’ conversation convinced her it would be deeply inappropriate. Jeff was a serious man, intense, the gauntness of his face hollowed out by an energy you could almost touch. He spoke with a light American accent. He was barefoot. He wore black jeans and a grey vest that hung baggily on his thin shoulders. He must have been at least fifty, but his eyes glittered with the passion and focus of a much younger man. Once he knew she was a friend of Anton Schiller – a fact he took the trouble to check by making a phone call – he was very happy to tell her about Alec, about the way it had been between them, and about what had happened at the end.
    ‘This was a guy you’d give your life for. Me? I was happy to do that, and he knew it. We first met in LA. He was living down the street. Every day I used to watch this guy going off to work. He used to carry a bag, like a sports bag, and I so wanted to know what was in that bag. Then one day I met him coming home. It was in the afternoon. We’d never met, never talked, but right there in the street I asked him about the bag. That was a pretty hot move, right? I mean the guy could have said anything.’
    ‘So what happened?’
    ‘He said to come up to his place. Then he’d show me.’
    ‘And you went?’
    ‘Of course I fucking did. And you know what was in the bag? Ballet tights and a kind of jerkin thing. Turned out the guy was a dancer. He performed with a company downtown. He had the build for it. He was slim but so, so strong. And he had balance like you wouldn’t believe. This was a guy who never walked, this was a guy who glided. No way you wouldn’t fall in love with a man like that.’
    ‘And you did?’
    ‘Big time. And it turned out he felt the exact same way. Me? I’m no ballet dancer, but a body like Alec’s isn’t hard