Chapter 15

15

Holding his cigarette lightly between his lips, Becker rubs his hands together to warm them. He is leaning over the guardrail on the footbridge, the water beneath it covered with a thin layer of ice. His head swims. A black painting! And it wasn't about cancer or Julian Chapman or any of those things Sebastian came up with, it is a painting of the sea. The impossible sea! She found a way to paint it.

He spent much of the night going through the first notebook, luxuriating in it, taking his time, making his own notes. Vanessa mentions bones just once – the wood is thick with finds … teeth and old bones … Why old bones? Did she know they were old? Or is that just a figure of speech? Bones are always old, aren't they? The fact is she might have found the rib on one of those early forays into the wood, right back when she first came to the island, more than twenty years ago. It might have been hanging around in her studio for years before she found a use for it.

(He wonders, briefly, about the teeth. What sort of teeth? Surely those couldn't have been human? After all, you don't have to be a forensic anthropologist to recognize a human tooth.)

In any case, the bone question is moot now, isn't it? The experts have deemed it human, and they're to test it. It's out of his hands.

His cigarette finished, he walks up to the main house, entering at the back as usual. He can see, as soon as he turns into the hallway, that the door to his office is ajar. He strides quickly along the corridor, hands clenched into fists, indignation bubbling up: yes, the house is Sebastian's, but surely he is entitled to some privacy in his workspace? He pushes the door open hard, keen to provoke a reaction.

From the opposite side of the desk, Lady Emmeline looks coolly up at him. Spread over the desk are pieces of paper covered in fine pencil and blue ink – the contents of the folder he brought with him from Eris.

‘Are you planning to put these on display?' she asks.

‘Uh … some of them, yes,' Becker replies. ‘I've not had time to read everything yet. There's a lot to go through and I—'

She holds a hand up to silence him, expression pained; she squeezes her eyes shut for a second. ‘What is it that you find so interesting,' she asks, turning away from him slightly so that her face is hidden, ‘about Mrs Chapman? She reminds you of your mother, Sebastian said, is that right?' Very slowly she turns towards him again, lips drawing back from her teeth. ‘She died of cancer too, didn't she?'

‘Sh … She did, yes.' Becker stumbles slightly over his words. ‘When I was a child—'

‘And was she also a whore?'

Becker is stunned into silence. Emmeline moves around the desk towards the door, but her eyes do not leave his. ‘If in the course of your work as curator here you choose to humiliate me, Mr Becker, I will make certain that you pay for it. Do you understand? And if you think that an elderly woman such as myself is incapable of causing you harm, I assure you you're mistaken.'

She moves past him, a waft of L'Air du Temps and the sound of heels clacking along the marble tiles. For a few moments, he cannot move.

He feels as though he's been slapped; he is ashamed to find himself close to tears. Closing the office door, he crosses quickly over to his desk, pressing his hands down on the desktop, breath coming painfully sharp. He reaches out and takes hold of the letter Emmeline was looking at when he entered the room; he turns the page around so that he can read it.

November 1999

Vanessa,

Since your last visit I struggle to think of anything but you. Right now I would leave my wife and son to perish in a burning building if only I could have you again, spend a night with you, an hour. I think of nothing but your luscious mouth, your delectable cunt.

I have to see you.

Douglas

Becker feels his face grow hot. He tugs at his collar, embarrassed, as though he and Emmeline now share some filthy secret. Rounding the desk, he sits down and starts to gather up the papers she has spread out, shuffling them into some sort of order. Sliding them back into the folder, he spies letters from Vanessa to her great friend Frances Levy, another from a potential buyer, a rough sketch of the studio, and a note, written on headed paper from Douglas Lennox's Glasgow Modern Gallery, in Douglas's spiky hand.

I should cut your fucking throat for what you've done to me