Chapter 9

9

Driving back across the causeway, Becker thinks he sees something in the rearview mirror. A flash of blue, not the blue of the sky or the sea but something brighter, unnatural, out of place. A blue like a strobe of light. He stops the car and climbs out. The air is damp, there's a fog drifting onshore – already parts of the island are obscured from view. There's nothing at all on the hillside that looks like it doesn't belong there. He stands for a moment, looking around him, his body vibrating with the faint thrill of fear. Down on the seabed with the haar closing in, he can imagine the horror of getting caught by the tide. He is not a strong swimmer. He climbs back into the car and drives, too fast, bouncing over stones and thumping into potholes, all the way to the mainland.

So , he thinks grimly to himself, that went well.

At the far end of Eris village is a pub. Becker pulls into the car park and sits for a minute, hands on the wheel. He longs to be at home, but he cannot face the drive. The anxiety he felt earlier in the day has returned, a heavy sensation pressing against his temples, against the back of his neck; he is gripped by the certainty that if he starts off now, with dusk falling, he'll never get home.

He takes out his phone with the intention of calling Helena – she'll talk some sense into him, she never fails – but three missed calls from Sebastian make his mind up for him. He climbs out of the car and walks into the pub.

It is not quaint. A rectangular room with a dark wooden bar and a few tables, it's plain, shabby and empty save for a trio of young men at a table in the far corner and a middle-aged woman reading her phone behind the bar.

The woman looks up and beams at him. ‘What'll you have, pet?'

‘I was actually wondering if you had a room, just for tonight?'

‘Oh, we do!' she says, turning around to grab a couple of keys from the board behind her. ‘You've a choice in fact, the big room or the wee one. Wee one's cheaper, but no en suite.'

He opts for the larger room, which, like the bar itself, is functional but not welcoming. It seems clean, though, and above the smell of stale beer that permeates the place, he catches a whiff of something tempting. Pastry, he thinks. A pie?

Back downstairs in the bar, Becker consumes a very good steak-and-ale pie washed down with a pint of bitter while he reads through the rest of the notes and articles in his file. He is searching – hopelessly, he fears – for a way back in, for some piece of information, some point of connection that might allow him to get back through Grace Haswell's front door.

Chapman didn't give many interviews – perhaps because she was difficult, as the critics said, or perhaps because the critics insisted on devoting quite so many column inches to how difficult she was. Even at the height of her success, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, she rarely spoke about her work in public. After her husband's disappearance in 2002 and her subsequent withdrawal from the solo show planned at Douglas Lennox's Glasgow Modern Gallery, she never spoke to the press again.

He closes his laptop and slips it into his bag, picks up his glass and returns it to the bar. The landlady has been joined by her husband, Becker assumes – a skinny man with a pink face who perches at one end of the bar, reading the local paper.

‘That pie really was excellent,' Becker says to the landlady, who inclines her head graciously. She eyes him for a moment.

‘You looking for a holiday cottage out here?' she asks.

‘Oh no,' Becker replies, shaking his head, ‘I came out to see Grace Haswell. On the island.'

‘Oh, Dr Haswell!' She raises an eyebrow. ‘You're a pal, are you?'

He shakes his head again. ‘No, no. I'm … uh, a curator, at a museum. Down in the Borders. We – the museum, that is – inherited some of Vanessa Chapman's art after she died.'

‘Oh, aye. That's you, is it? We were ever so sad about Mrs Chapman. She was a lovely lady. Kind. Bohemian, wasn't she? Glamorous. Popular with the gentlemen.' She gives him a wink.

Her husband glances up from his paper and shoots her a dark look. ‘No trouble to anyone,' he mutters, scowling at Becker. ‘Neither she nor the doctor. Kept themselves to themselves. No trouble to anyone.'

‘Well,' his wife says pensively, ‘there was that thing with the mechanic—'

‘Are you not needed in the kitchen, Shirley?' the landlord growls. Shirley shrugs, smiling sweetly at Becker, and disappears somewhere out back. Becker is about to take his leave when the landlord begins to mutter again.

‘Retired, you know,' he says.

‘I'm sorry?'

‘Dr Haswell. Retired she was, and then came out of retirement to work at the hospital during the pandemic. Fifteen-hour shifts, they had them on. Worked to the bone.' He glowers at Becker, as though he is somehow responsible. ‘I'd hate to see her bothered, after everything she's been through. She and Mrs Chapman,' he says again, ‘no trouble to anyone.'

Upstairs in his room, Becker calls Helena.

‘It's weird, you know, the locals seem to have been fond of her,' he says.

‘Why is that weird?' Helena asks.

‘I was just surprised, you know. This incomer – a southerner, an English woman, quite posh – turns up, buys an island, lives out there all by herself; and she's got this reputation for being cold and difficult and unfriendly, and yet the locals here – well, the landlord and his wife, anyway – have only good things to say about her.'

‘Mmmm.' Helena seems distracted, as though she's only half-listening to him.

‘Mmmm? Mmmm what?'

She laughs. ‘Maybe she was a good customer? I don't know, Beck, I imagine she could probably be perfectly charming if she wanted to. And all those things the critics wrote about her – that she was … what was it? – disagreeable and prickly and strident – that's just what people say about a woman who knows her own mind, isn't it?'

‘Is it?'

Helena laughs again. ‘Yes, it is! And really, when you think about it, single-minded and selfish are just synonyms for childless, in some circles.'

‘Are they?'

Helena tuts; he can almost feel her rolling her eyes at him. ‘Look, you need to go back and talk to her – to the friend, companion , whoever she is. Isn't that what you're there for? If you really want to get to know Vanessa, you need to find a way to make this Haswell woman speak to you. She's the one who knows where all the bodies are buried.'

Becker hears a voice, from the corridor outside his room or over the line, he's not sure. ‘What was that?' he asks her.

‘It's the pizza boy,' Helena drawls huskily, ‘he's just getting out of the shower.' Becker exhales loudly. ‘It's the television , Beck. Jesus. I'm bingeing Kardashians in your absence.'

‘I love you,' Becker says.

‘And we love you.'

‘You and the pizza boy?'

‘Or pizza girl.'

He ends the call and scrolls back through his Vanessa archive, reading with a rather more critical eye. Of course she wasn't that disagreeable, of course it was just misogyny! The critics were all men, the interviewers were men, as were most of the interviewees. They were men with agendas, or men who bore grudges.

It is only on this latest pass through the articles that Becker realizes quite how absent Grace Haswell is. She's almost never mentioned – except once or twice as Vanessa's carer in the obituaries – and even then, she's never quoted. It's possible that she didn't want to speak to the newspapers; it's possible that Vanessa asked her not to. But it's also possible that while the journalists were out chasing quotes from Turner Prize winners or prominent critics, no one thought to ask Grace Haswell, a provincial GP, what she thought, how she felt.

Becker closes the laptop. He is dog-tired, his back and shoulders stiff from the drive and from sitting hunched over his computer. He clambers off the bed and then pads over creaking floorboards into the tiny bathroom, drawing himself up, rolling his shoulders backwards and his neck from side to side. He stands at the toilet, his head grazing the ceiling as he pisses, looking out through the Velux window at a solitary light in the distance.

How easy it would be, he thinks, not to see her. How easy to miss her altogether.

Back in the bedroom, he opens up the laptop once more and begins to write.

Dear Dr Haswell,

There are so many things I would like to talk to you about, so many questions I'd like to ask you. That bone – which I never for a single second imagined came from Julian Chapman's body – is the least of them. That's just something I have to do, a problem to clear up, a part of my job as curator of Fairburn's collection.

I'd like to ask you about your life with Vanessa, about the woman behind the work, the woman who only you knew. This is partly about professional curiosity, of course. I wrote my thesis on the development of non-traditional landscape art, and Vanessa's work was central to that. But my connection to her work goes back further, it has deeper roots. Like anyone who is interested in art, I have two sets of memories: personal memories, and art memories. Sometimes, the two cross over.

My mother was a talented watercolourist. She went to art college, but dropped out when she fell pregnant. She intended to return to her studies, but my father – a man I have never met – did not support her. My grandmother, who was already widowed by that point, didn't have the means to support all three of us, so Mum had to work.

She had a job at the supermarket in the centre of Bicester, just down the road from a little art gallery called Harry West Art. It was, I'm sure you know, the first place ever to show Vanessa's work. Mum used to go there often, in her lunch hour or after work, to look at the pictures. At one show, she bought a tiny oil painting, eight inches by five. It cost her a week's wages and an almighty row with my grandmother.

The painting was of a hedgerow, its riotous greens studded with purple and yellow wildflowers, the scent of summer rising off it. The artist had pressed things – grass seeds and petals – into the paint. I remember being startled and delighted to find in it an iridescent insect wing. Small as it was, it was the kind of picture you never tired of looking at, the sort of picture that rewarded you with something different each time you studied it.

My mother hung it on the wall next to her bed.

A couple of years later, when she went into a hospice to die, she took only two possessions with her: a framed photograph of the two of us together, and that little painting. A year or two after that, when finally I found myself strong enough to look through the bag of belongings – her pyjamas, her washbag – that had been returned to me after her death, I found that the photograph was there, but the painting was not.

I began to search for it. I was thirteen by this time, lonely and angry and completely clueless about art, but fortunately my grandmother remembered that the artist's last name was Chapman. This was in the pre-Google 1990s, but I was lucky enough to find in our local library a microfiched copy of an interview Vanessa had given to ARTNOW after exhibiting at the London Art Fair in 1995. Being a teenage boy, I was struck by how beautiful she was, but more than that, I was struck by what she said when she was asked what painting meant to her. I can quote her for you here, because I read these lines so many times I know them by heart:

‘Art is legacy, it is solace. It soothes, consoles, arouses. It's work. It's what you do all day. It's how you work things out, how you understand the world. It's the opportunity to start over, to shed your skin, to take revenge, to fall in love. To be good. To live long.'

I found the little painting (Hedgerow, 1993) at an auction years later; I bought it with my first pay cheque from Christie's auction house. My mother would have been astounded by what it was worth. Or perhaps she wouldn't! Perhaps she always suspected the world would one day value Vanessa's work the way she did. Either way, I think she'd be very happy to see that piece hanging on the wall beside my bed now.

I hope this goes some way to explaining why it would mean so much to me if we could talk again.

Yours,

James Becker

In the small hours of the morning, just before the tide turns, Becker's phone buzzes. He jerks awake, heart thumping, thinking Helena . But when he looks at the screen, he sees an email notification.

Dear Mr Becker,

Thank you for your email. If you are still in Eris, you may come to the island today. Low tide is at eight.

Please understand that I will speak to you only on the condition that you ask your employers to stop pestering me.

If you are prepared to do so, then we can talk further.

Yours,

Grace Haswell