Chapter 1

1

In the chastening chill of a dazzling October morning, James Becker stands on the footbridge, hip hitched against the handrail, rolling a cigarette. Beneath him, the stream runs black and slow, the water close to freezing, oozing like treacle over rusty orange stone. This is the mid-point of his daily commute, which takes a full twelve minutes from the Gamekeeper's Lodge, where he lives, to Fairburn House, where he works. Fifteen minutes if he stops for a smoke.

Coat collar up, glancing quickly over one shoulder – he might appear furtive to an outsider, though he's no need to be. He belongs here, astonishing as that may be. Even he can barely credit it. How can he – fatherless bastard of a supermarket checkout girl, state-school boy in a cheap suit – be living and working here, at Fairburn, among the bluebloods? He doesn't fit . And yet somehow, through hard work and dumb luck and only a minor bit of treachery, here he is.

He lights his cigarette and checks over his shoulder one more time, looking back at the lodge, warm light spilling from the kitchen window, turning the beech hedge golden. No one is watching him – Helena will still be in bed, pillow clamped between her knees – no one will see him breaking the promise he made to quit. He has cut down – to just three a day now – and by the time the water freezes, he thinks, he'll pack them in altogether.

Leaning back on the rail, he draws hard on his cigarette, looking up at the hills to the north, their peaks already dusted with snow. Somewhere between here and there a siren wails; Becker thinks he glimpses a flash of blue light on the road, an ambulance or a police car. His blood rushes and his head swims with nicotine; in his stomach he feels the faint but undeniable tug of fear. Smoking quickly, as though it might do less damage that way, he flicks the dog-end over the rail and into the water. He crosses the bridge and crunches his way across the frosted lawn towards the house.

The landline in his office is ringing when he opens the door.

‘'Lo?' Becker jams the handset between his shoulder and chin, turns on his computer and pivots, reaching across to flick the switch on the coffee maker on the side table.

There's a pause, before a clear, clipped voice says, ‘Good morning. Am I speaking with James Becker?'

‘You are.' Becker types in his password, shrugs off his coat.

‘Right, well.' Another pause. ‘This is Goodwin, Tate Modern.'

The phone slips from Becker's shoulder; he catches it and presses it to his ear once more. ‘Sorry, who?'

The man on the other end of the phone exhales audibly. ‘Will Goodwin,' he says, his cut-glass vowels exaggerated by enunciation. ‘From Tate Modern in London. I'm calling because we have a problem with one of the pieces on loan from Fairburn.'

Becker stands to attention, his fist tightening around the handset. ‘Oh, Christ , you haven't damaged it, have you?'

‘No, Mr Becker.' Goodwin's tone drips restraint. ‘We have taken perfectly good care of all three of Fairburn's pieces. However, we have had cause to withdraw one of the sculptures, Division II , from the exhibition.'

Becker frowns, sitting down. ‘What do you mean?'

‘According to an email we received from a very distinguished forensic anthropologist who visited our exhibition this weekend, Division II includes a human bone.'

Becker's burst of laughter is met with bottomless silence. ‘I'm sorry,' Becker says, still chuckling, ‘but that is just—'

‘Well might you apologize!' Goodwin sounds murderous. ‘I'm afraid I do not share your amusement. Thanks entirely to your curatorial incompetence, in my very first exhibition as director and the gallery's very first post-pandemic show, we find ourselves in the position of having inadvertently displayed human remains. Do you have any idea how damaging this could be for us as an institution? It's this sort of thing that gets people cancelled .'

When finally Becker gets off the phone he stares at the computer screen in front of him, waiting for Goodwin to forward him the email. This complaint – if you can call it that – is obvious nonsense. A joke perhaps? Or possibly a genuine mistake?

The message appears at the top of his inbox and Becker clicks. He reads the message twice, googles its sender (a well-respected academic at a major British university – an unlikely joker) and then clicks on ArtPro, Fairburn's cataloguing software, to search for the piece in question. There it is. Division II , circa 2005, by Vanessa Chapman. Colour photographs, taken by Becker himself, illustrate the listing. Ceramic, wood and bone, suspended by filament, float around each other in a glass case fashioned by Chapman herself. The ceramic and the bone are identical twins: fragile spindles of pure white, fractured at their centres and bonded together with lacquer and gold.

The first time he saw it, he thought it must have been sent by mistake. Sculpture? Vanessa Chapman wasn't a sculptor, she was a painter, a ceramicist. But there it was, beautiful and strange, a delicate enigma, the perfect puzzle. No explanatory note, only the briefest mention in a notebook, where Chapman talked about the difficulties she'd had putting together its skin , the glass box encasing the other components. Indubitably hers, then, and now his. His to research, to catalogue, to describe and display, to introduce to the world. It was shown, briefly, at Fairburn House and since then has been viewed by thousands of people – tens of thousands! – on loan at galleries in Berlin and Paris and most recently in London.

A human bone! It's absurd . Pushing his chair back from his desk, Becker gets to his feet, turning to face the window.

His office is in the public wing of the house, looking out over the east quad. At the centre of a lawn as neat and green as baize stands a Hepworth bronze, its curves burnished by morning light, the sloping convex walls of the hollow at its heart shimmering green. Through that oval space, Becker spies Sebastian striding quickly across the grass, his phone pressed to his ear.

Sebastian Lennox is the heir to Fairburn – once his mother shuffles off, Sebastian will own this house, the lodge Becker lives in, the quad, the Hepworth and the fields beyond. He is also director of the foundation, so not only Becker's landlord, but his boss, too.

(And his friend. Don't forget that.)

Becker watches as Sebastian skirts the bronze, his smile a little too wide, his laugh audible even at this distance. Becker turns slightly and the movement catches Sebastian's eye; he squints, raising one hand in salute, and spreads his fingers wide, indicating five . Five minutes. Becker steps away from the window and sits back down at his desk.

Ten, fifteen minutes later, he hears Sebastian's footsteps in the hall, and a moment after that Sebastian bounds into the office, a golden retriever in human form.

‘You're not going to believe the call I just had,' he says, pushing a hank of blond fringe from his eyes.

‘It wasn't from Will Goodwin, was it?'

‘God, yes!' Sebastian laughs, collapsing into the armchair in the corner of Becker's office. ‘Wetting himself about getting cancelled. He called you too, then?'

Becker nods. ‘They're withdrawing the piece from the exhibition,' he says. ‘It's … it's a total overreaction—'

‘Is it?'

Becker spreads his palms wide. ‘Of course it is! It has to be. The piece has been viewed by God knows how many people, including experts. If the bone were human, I think someone would have spotted it by now.'

Sebastian nods, his mouth turning down at the corners.

‘You're disappointed ?' Becker asks, incredulous.

Sebastian shrugs. ‘It might have escaped your notice, Beck, but the great British public haven't exactly been beating down our doors since we reopened … I thought maybe the suggestion of a mystery, a whiff of scandal …'

‘Scandal? Oh, I like the sound of that.' The two men turn to see Helena standing in the doorway. She is clad from her chin to her ankles in black cashmere, a ribbed dress which hugs her neat bump. Wisps of chestnut hair have escaped her ponytail and there are bright spots of colour across her cheekbones. She's slightly out of breath.

‘Hels!' Sebastian leaps to his feet, embracing her, kissing her gently on both cheeks. ‘Radiant one. Did you walk over? Come in, sit!'

Helena allows herself to be guided to the armchair Sebastian has just vacated. ‘I fancied a little walk,' she says, smiling at Becker, who's regarding her quizzically. ‘It's so beautiful out, what I'd really love is to go for a ride, but,' she wafts a hand in the air, pre-empting Becker's objections, ‘I'm obviously not going to do that . So tell me, what's all this about a scandal?'

She listens attentively as Becker explains, interrupting when he gets to the punchline. ‘But that piece was on display at the Berlinische Galerie! It was in the Twenty-One show at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris!'

Becker nods. ‘That's exactly what I said.'

‘So … what are you going to do?'

Sebastian perches on the edge of Becker's desk. ‘No idea,' he says. ‘To be honest, I'm not entirely sure I see what the fuss is about. Say the bone is human. It's not likely she robbed a grave, is it? Does it really matter?'

Becker bites the inside of his cheek. ‘You can't just display human remains, Seb.'

‘The British Museum is full of them!'

‘Well, yes.' A smile breaks across Becker's face. ‘But I think this is a bit different.'

Sebastian turns to him and scowls. ‘Well, Goodwin agrees. He's having kittens, he wants to send the piece to a private lab for testing, on the QT, you know—'

‘Absolutely not !' Becker leaps to his feet, jolting the desk as he does so, knocking coffee on to its fine green leather surface. Sebastian and Helena watch as he frantically mops up the spill with a handful of tissues. ‘To test the bone, they have to break the glass case and the case is part of the piece. She made it herself. If you break the glass you … well, I should think you invalidate the insurance at the very least, but more than that you damage the work. They're not sending it off to some … random laboratory with no knowledge of its history and no expertise in this area.'

‘OK,' Sebastian says, shrugging extravagantly. ‘Well. What, then?'

‘We could start by asking someone else, some other expert, perhaps even a couple of experts, to take a look at it. Just a look , through the glass. And while that's going on, we could talk to our insurers, explain the situation, explain that there might be need for …' He doesn't want to say testing , doesn't want to concede that point, ‘for further investigation somewhere down the line.'

‘And in the meantime,' Helena says, crossing and uncrossing her legs, ‘you could go and talk to Grace Haswell.'

‘No,' Becker says, stifling a thrill of excitement, ‘I can't. I don't want to leave you …'

‘In my enfeebled condition?' Helena laughs. ‘Yes, you can. Come on, Beck, you've been dying to get out to Eris, you talked of nothing else during lockdown. And now here's the perfect opportunity. The perfect excuse.'

‘I suppose,' Becker says carefully, ‘I could leave early, nip up and get back in a day …'

He glances at Sebastian, who shrugs. ‘I don't mind. Go if you think it'll be helpful. Not sure how the Wicked Witch of Eris Island is going to help with this, though? Unless you think she'll know something? Perhaps the bone's the last remains of one of the children she's lured to her gingerbread house?' Sebastian laughs at his own joke. Helena winks at Becker. Idiot . ‘No, it's a good idea. It is. You could kill two birds with one stone – clear up this bone business and let her know in person that we're sick of her foot-dragging. It's time she handed over Chapman's papers, along with anything else that belongs to us. You can remind her that the artistic estate was left to Fairburn, and that she doesn't get to decide what to give us and what to withhold—'

‘Well, technically,' Becker cuts in, leaning back in his chair, ‘she does. She's the executor.'

‘Don't try to be fucking clever.' Sebastian's playfulness evaporates like spit on a hotplate. Becker does his best not to flinch. Helena looks down at the carpet. ‘She's been holding things back, hasn't she? Papers, letters and quite possibly some works of art. It belongs to us. All of it . Every canvas, every sketch, every porcelain bowl she threw on her wheel, every fucking pebble she picked up on the beach and arranged just so . It's ours. Anything related to the artistic estate is ours.'

Becker bites his tongue. He is desperate to get his hands on Chapman's papers; a couple of notebooks found their way to Fairburn along with the main consignments of art, but there is a great deal more material that no one has ever seen. Becker knows from interviews that she kept process journals, that she corresponded with other artists about her work – if and when Grace Haswell hands these over, he will be the first to read them. He will have the power to shape how the world sees Vanessa Chapman, how it sees her work, how that work is valued. The thought of it is enough to make him light-headed.

But Becker is cautious by nature, and kind, too. If there is a way of accessing those papers without threatening and bullying Chapman's executor – and dear friend – he would rather take that route.

‘I'm not trying to be clever ,' he says eventually. ‘You know as well as I do that it has not yet been determined what constitutes the artistic estate and what makes up the rest—'

‘Boys.' Helena gets to her feet, waving away Sebastian's offer of help. ‘This is all fascinating, but I think you might be missing the bigger picture. Say this bone does turn out to be human, then what? What are you going to do? How are you going to play this?'

‘ Play? ' Becker repeats.

‘Beck, Fairburn could end up on the front page of every newspaper in the country, on The One Show , on …'

Sebastian's face has lit up, but Becker is sceptical. ‘I'm not sure it's that much of a big deal, Hels,' he says. ‘It'll be an oddity, sure, but—'

‘Beck.' Helena smiles at him, shakes her head. ‘Sweetheart, be serious. You don't think the press might be interested in the fact that a human bone has been found to form part of a sculpture made by the late, great, reclusive, enigmatic Vanessa Chapman? The same Vanessa Chapman whose notoriously unfaithful husband went missing nearly twenty years ago? His body never found?'