Chapter 11

11

Carrachan, 1998

It was a slow day. Grace had a fifteen-minute break before the next appointment, so she'd grabbed the opportunity to make herself a cup of coffee she might actually have time to drink. That was when she saw her – saw it , rather – a small, battered green car lurching into the car park before coming to a shuddering halt, angled across two parking spaces. The driver's door swung violently open and a woman climbed out. She was tall and very thin, with hair the colour of pale amber – in dire need of a brush – hanging over her face. She carried herself awkwardly, chin tucked into her chest and her arms wrapped around herself, stumbling a little as she made her way across the car park towards the surgery entrance.

A drunk, Grace thought, gulping her coffee, scalding the roof of her mouth. From the waiting room she could hear the receptionist's voice, quiet at first and then rising slightly. A moment or two passed and then there came a rapping at the door.

‘Sorry, Dr Haswell, could you see a walk-in?'

The woman entered her room with her back straight and her shoulders back, her left hand pinning her right forearm to her chest. ‘I think I might have broken it,' she said quietly when Grace asked how she might help. As Grace moved closer to her, she caught a whiff of something sharp, like nail polish remover, but the woman's eyes were clear and focused. Not drunk, then, but clearly in pain, and wearing a wary expression, the sort you sometimes saw in victims of abuse.

‘What happened?' Grace asked as, very gently, she examined the woman's arm. An ominous bruise was forming just above the heel of her hand. The veins of her forearm stood out against her muscles like ropes. Her fingernails were filthy.

‘I tripped over this bloody … thing , this sort of manhole thing that covers the septic tank up behind my house.' Her voice was soft and pleasantly gravelly, her English vowels rounded. ‘I was running to answer the phone – I'd been working in my studio, which is separate from the house – I just went flying.' She winced, breathing in sharply as Grace turned the wrist. ‘It hurts like buggery.'

Grace smiled. ‘I imagine it does. Mrs …?'

‘Chapman. Vanessa.'

‘Vanessa, I'm afraid,' Grace said, inviting her patient to sit, ‘that you're right, unfortunately. I think it is a break. We'll need to do an X-ray to make sure.'

‘Oh, fucking hell .' Grace flinched at the profanity. ‘How long will that take to heal?' Vanessa inhaled sharply, wincing again as she held her forearm to her chest, squeezing her eyes shut, giving Grace the opportunity to look at her, really look at her: at her dark brows and the firm line of her mouth, her straight nose, just a little too large for her face.

‘That very much depends,' Grace said, ‘on what we see in the X-ray. Did you drive here yourself?' She knew the answer but wanted to ascertain her patient's truthfulness.

‘Had to,' Vanessa replied. ‘I live alone.'

‘You should have called an ambulance,' Grace said. Vanessa smiled, briefly – dismissively , Grace thought. ‘You might have caused an accident,' she said tartly, ‘driving with an injury like that.'

‘I couldn't wait for an ambulance,' Vanessa said. ‘There wasn't time. I live out on Eris Island.'

‘You live on Eris?' Grace's heart tripped, as though she'd heard some sad old song, half-forgotten, transporting her in time.

Vanessa nodded. ‘Do you know it?'

‘I do,' Grace said. She trundled the portable X-ray machine across the room. ‘I used to go walking there often. Such a beautiful spot, so peaceful – and the views from the rock …' Grace moved Vanessa into position, retreating behind a screen while she took the images. ‘I haven't been for a long while. Someone put up a gate at the end of the causeway.'

‘That wasn't me,' Vanessa said. She sounded almost affronted. ‘It was the agent, the selling agent, for the man who owned the place before. I took the gate down, it's not been there for months and months, since the sale went through last year, in fact. There's right to roam in Scotland, isn't there? As there should be.' She closed her eyes again. ‘I think of myself as owner of the house, but I'm only the custodian of the island.'

Behind the screen, Grace smirked. The pretensions of the rich! If Eris were hers, she'd put up barbed wire, or get a fierce dog.

The X-rays done, she fetched Vanessa a couple of co-codamol and a glass of water. ‘Surely if you could drive over, an ambulance could have made it the other way?' she asked.

‘The tide was coming in,' Vanessa said. She popped the pills into her mouth and tilted her head back to swallow them, exposing her pale throat. She had a tiny scar right in the middle of it, as though someone had pressed a knife to her windpipe and then thought better of it. ‘I only had about twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes until the causeway flooded, and I didn't reckon they'd make it in time. I couldn't face waiting six hours.'

Grace nodded. ‘No, quite. Although you probably ought to have called an ambulance from the phone box in the harbour rather than driving all the way up here.'

‘I suppose so,' Vanessa said, chastened. ‘I really wasn't thinking straight.'

‘Pain will do that to you,' Grace said, relenting. ‘The nurse will put a splint on your wrist for now. You may need a plaster cast, but we won't do that for a day or two, we have to wait for the swelling to come down. It will all be dependent on what we see in the X-ray film, in any case.'

When she sat back at her desk to type her notes into the computer, she was suddenly all fingers and thumbs, conscious of Vanessa's gaze upon her. ‘How will you get home?' Grace asked, eager to focus on the practical. ‘It's really not a good idea for you to drive.'

Vanessa pulled a face. ‘Well … I can't get back right away anyway, the tide's in now. I won't be able to cross until around four. I suppose I could get a taxi … I don't know what I'll do about the car, though.'

Grace looked up at her. ‘How very odd it must be,' she said, ‘living at the mercy of the tide.' Vanessa shrugged and smiled and Grace felt irritated, as if she were being somehow mocked for the banality of her observation. And yet despite her annoyance, she found herself offering help. ‘You don't need to get a taxi,' she said. ‘If you have to wait until this afternoon anyway, I can drive you. I'm only here until three on Mondays.'

‘Oh, I couldn't ask you to do that.' Vanessa got to her feet, shaking her head firmly. ‘I wouldn't want to put you out.'

‘It's no trouble,' Grace replied. ‘It's ages since I've been out to the island.'

‘But if you drive me, how will you get back?'

‘I can walk across. It's only a mile or so, and there's a bus from the village back up here.' Even as she was saying it, Grace wondered why she was making this effort, going out of her way for this woman. There was something about her – an air of entitlement, the sort that comes with beauty, perhaps, or money – that both needled and attracted at the same time, and even though she was conscious of it, Grace found herself unable to resist.

That afternoon, there was no wind to speak of. The water in the bay was like glass, and in the generous sunshine of midsummer, Eris Island shimmered green and purple and yellow, its steep hillside, thick with bracken, dappled with gorse and heather. Grace and Vanessa wound their windows down, the salty tang of seaweed filling the car as they approached.

‘When was the last time you were out here?' Vanessa asked.

‘Oh,' Grace exhaled slowly, and it was only in doing so that she realized she'd been holding her breath. ‘Not for a long time. When I first got the job at the surgery in Carrachan, back in 1991, I used to come out here often. I used to cycle across and then walk up to the top of the rock. But then, I think it was ‘93, maybe ‘94, there were these terrible winter storms – I suppose that was before your time?'

‘Oh yes, I only moved last year. I lived in England before that, in Oxfordshire.'

‘Well, the storms were really quite severe. In one of them part of the causeway was washed away, so it was no longer possible to cross. Not safely, anyway. No one was living on the island at that time and it was months before anyone got round to repairing the road. And then not long after that, someone put up a gate, as I said … It's quite a treat to be coming out here again.' Grace glanced over at Vanessa with a shy smile. ‘I've missed it.'

Vanessa told her to drive up the track to the back of the house. No longer the shabby wreck Grace remembered, its pebbledash had been whitewashed and timber window frames painted a sunny yellow. The house formed an L-shape around a courtyard – there had once been a third side at the rear of the yard, a barn probably, but that had long since collapsed. Grace parked the car in the courtyard and followed Vanessa as she walked up the hill behind the house towards an outbuilding.

‘Watch out,' Vanessa called over her shoulder as she strode on ahead. ‘There, you see, that's where I tripped.' She pointed over to the left, where Grace could make out a concrete slab half-hidden by the grass. At the brow of the hill was a barn with an enormous door – a vast, oxidized metal sheet – at its end. It was rolled back to reveal a cavernous interior, a window on the west side of the building letting in a generous slice of the afternoon sunshine. There were sheets of paper pinned to the walls, rough outlines sketched upon them, and in front of the window, towards the rear of the space, a potter's wheel.

‘I thought you were a painter,' Grace said, and Vanessa gave her a questioning look. ‘I mean, I remember reading, when the island was sold, that an artist had bought it. I assumed—'

‘I am a painter,' Vanessa said, smiling, raising her good arm to shield her eyes from the sun. ‘I do paint, although I've not been doing so much of it lately.' She took a few steps back, inviting Grace into the room. They stood side by side looking at the sketches on the wall – little more, as far as Grace could see, than collections of shapes, all jumbled together. ‘Lately I find myself more interested in ceramics. I'm … going through a transitional phase, I suppose. Trying to find my feet. Or my hands.' She looked at Grace with another smile. ‘Though what I really need to do is to develop my eye.' Gently and deliberately, she slipped her left arm into Grace's right. Grace flinched with surprise, a fierce blush radiating from her neck to her face. ‘Shall we have some tea?' Vanessa asked. ‘Or do you fancy a walk through the wood, up to the rock?'

Grace withdrew her arm, stepping backwards and knocking into a bench, sending a stone hammer rolling to the floor with an almighty clang. ‘Oh …' She fell to her knees, scrabbling to pick it up, muttering apologies.

‘Don't worry about that,' Vanessa said. ‘Do you not want to go up?' She laughed her throaty laugh. ‘Perhaps you think I lured you here under false pretences. Like Ted Bundy, feigning injury so that I can have my wicked way with you?' She broke off. ‘Good God, Dr Haswell, I'm joking . You actually look frightened!'

‘Don't be ridiculous,' Grace said, her face hot, a trickle of sweat prickling the small of her back. ‘Of course I'm not frightened.'