Chapter 34

34

The sky ahead is slate-grey, the pines along the roadside bristling in the wind. A storm is coming – it's due to hit the west coast on Sunday night, according to Grace, which gives Becker forty-eight hours, though he's hoping to be in and out by the end of the day, or by tomorrow morning at the latest.

On the radio, they're discussing Don't Look Now . Du Maurier again! The film adaptation will be fifty within a couple of years, there's talk of a rerelease. The man on the radio is talking about mesmeric horror, about the tricks played by a tortured mind, about recurring patterns and motifs that remind the viewer that some griefs are inescapable, some destinies inevitable.

Becker turns the radio off.

Just before he gets to the coast road, he stops for petrol. He fills up the car and goes into the little shop to pay the cashier, holding his phone against the card reader to feel its reassuring haptic buzz. On his way back to the car, he feels the buzz a second time: checking his phone, he sees he has a message, from Helena.

Hey, can you come over? We need to talk x

He stops in the middle of the forecourt, staring at the screen. Come over?

The driver of the Volvo station wagon attempting to leave the garage toots his horn and Becker jumps out of the way. He looks at his phone screen again.

This message has been deleted.

Fumbling for the key in his pocket, Becker unlocks the car and climbs into the driver's seat. Every time you leave this estate, my son goes running over to see your wife. His hands are trembling a little as he presses the ignition button and puts the car into drive. Don't worry about Hels, I can keep an eye on her. He pulls away from the petrol pump. You could go and talk to Grace Haswell, go on, I know you've been itching to get out there.

It was Helena who suggested he go to Eris in the first place. They were in his office, the three of them, that first day when they found out about the bone – it was Helena who told him to go. His heart is thumping fit to burst, he feels a little light-headed. He checks the rearview – there's no one behind him. He picks up his phone again. He could call her. And say what? He could turn left into the road ahead, drive all the way back to Fairburn, arrive home unannounced. He pictures himself, opening the front door of the lodge, quietly making his way up the stairs.

He switches the phone off and turns right, towards Eris.

Grace is waiting for him at the end of the track, in front of the chain, arms folded across her chest.

‘Shall I bring the car up?' he asks as he climbs out, and she shakes her head.

‘No, I don't think so.' She looks at him, unsmiling. ‘You had something you wanted to talk to me about?'

He exhales loudly. Jesus Christ. ‘Yes, Grace, I have things I need to speak to you about. I've been running back and forth up here to try to finalize Vanessa's estate and we really need to get this done now, we—'

‘Oh, I see,' she cuts him off. ‘And there I was thinking that maybe you'd come to apologize. Or perhaps to return the letter you stole?'

Wrong-footed, he starts to mumble an apology but she is already walking away from him, not back up towards the house, but on to the beach.

Becker follows her over the sands, his hands thrust deep into his coat pockets and his eyes narrowed against glare and grit. A couple of paces behind her, he has to strain to catch the words snatched from her mouth by the wind.

‘It was a betrayal of trust!' she shouts. ‘You promised me that we would work together and then you took that letter, you left without a word, you—'

‘You're right,' he says, annoyed with himself for ceding the moral high ground. ‘I shouldn't have done that. I saw the word Division , and I couldn't resist … I was in such a state, I wasn't thinking—'

‘Of me? Of my wishes? Of how I would feel about you taking a letter I'd told you was private? You certainly were not. I saw that article in the newspaper. Anyone reading that wouldn't know I existed at all. I'm just an obstacle to you, aren't I? An inconvenience .'

‘That's not true,' Becker says, breaking into a jog to keep up with her, feeling ridiculous and wretched at the same time. ‘Please don't think that. I've never wanted to make you feel that way, I've never wanted to make the loss of Vanessa's work harder for you.'

‘It's not a loss ,' Grace retorts, wheeling around to face him. Her face is blotchy, her cheeks wet with tears. ‘I didn't lose anything, she gave it all away. As you said in the newspaper, she had no one else to leave it to, did she? She had no one in her life.'

Becker shakes his head vehemently. ‘I did not say that, the journalist did and he was wrong. Had he put it to me like that, I would have set the record straight.' Even as he's saying this, though, he's remembering what Sebastian said: how was it that Grace was left with so little when she and Vanessa had been so close? Why was that, do you think?

This far out, Becker can see that the sea is wild, the wind-whipped waves crested with poisonous-looking yellow foam. ‘You left Eris, didn't you?' he says to her. ‘At the time of that letter, you were living somewhere else, somewhere in England—'

‘Carlisle.'

‘That's it, and Vanessa wrote to you, she said—' He is interrupted by a cacophony of screeches – gulls overhead banking into the wind, diving and whirling like fighter planes in a dogfight.

Grace folds her arms and starts to walk, more slowly now, towards the sea. ‘Vanessa didn't want me around any longer,' she says. ‘After Julian … she changed.' Becker lets her lead the way; he walks at her shoulder, careful not to crowd her but desperate to hear every word. ‘She became difficult. Secretive, watchful … she was like someone with post-traumatic stress.' She glances quickly at him. ‘Do you know what that's like? She was hypervigilant, fearful, she lost her temper easily … When I suggested she get help – proper help, you know, from a psychologist – she became enraged.'

Becker is struck by the similarity with Emmeline's situation – also suspected of having PTSD, also infuriated by the idea that she needs professional help. Discomforted by the thought of similarities between Vanessa and Emmeline, he bats the idea away. ‘Did anyone help her?' he asks. ‘Did anyone help you with her? In the later notebooks, she doesn't talk about people much, there's barely a mention of Frances or—'

‘She cut everyone off,' Grace says. ‘She wouldn't see a soul. I walked about on eggshells for months. Then, just after Christmas, about six months after it all happened, she asked me to leave. She was' – Grace exhales forcefully through puffed-out cheeks – ‘rather cruel about it.'

She turns towards him, face stretched into a strained smile. ‘I was terribly upset, but I did as I was asked. I got myself a locum job in England and off I went. I thought … I assumed that she needed to grieve, to be alone, to deal with … whatever guilt she was feeling.' Their eyes lock and Becker startles at the implication. ‘I wrote to her often, but for months she didn't reply. Eventually I got that letter, the one you took.'

‘When you say she had to deal with her guilt,' Becker says, ‘do you mean …? What do you mean?'

Grace lifts her hand to shade her eyes; she squints at the sea. ‘We should go back,' she says, ignoring his question. ‘The tide is turning. We don't want to get caught out.' To Becker, the water still looks to be a safe distance away, and he says so. ‘You'd be surprised,' Grace says, ‘by how quickly it comes in, how quickly you can lose your footing, even in shallow water.'

They turn their back to the water. Scraps of sea foam skitter like birds across the sand in front of them, and the sky ahead threatens rain, but with the wind at their backs, it's easier to talk.

‘You said Vanessa felt guilty?'

Grace nods, glancing behind her, towards the sea. ‘About Julian,' she says.

‘About Julian?'

She nods again, impatiently. ‘ Yes , about Julian. I suppose she thought she could have done more for him.'

‘More? How do you mean?'

‘Given him more time, or more money, I suppose, which is what he always wanted.' She shakes her head. ‘We never really spoke about it. After I left, we didn't really talk about him again.'

‘But you came back?' She gives him a look. ‘I mean, obviously you came back.'

‘She found a lump,' Grace says. ‘She was frightened, so she asked me to come back. She begged me to come.'

They walk towards the island quickly and in silence, Becker's eyes trained on the damp grey sand beneath his feet.

At the bottom of the steps, Grace stumbles, falling heavily on to her left knee. Becker tries to help her up but she waves him away furiously, struggling back to her feet, pink-faced and breathless.

‘What else is it you've done?' she snarls at him.

‘I'm sorry?'

‘You've been skulking like a kicked dog since you arrived. You owned up about the letter, we've talked about that interview. What else do you have to tell me?'

For someone with so few social skills, Becker thinks, Grace can be remarkably astute. All the time they've been talking, he's had in the back of his mind Helena's disappearing phone message and all the scenarios, all of them painful, it conjures up. But he's certainly not about to confide in Grace about that.

Instead, he tells her about the sculpture. ‘They opened the case to Division II ,' he says flatly. Before she has time to react, he gets it all out. ‘They haven't done any tests yet, but there's no question the bone is human.'

Grace turns away from him. Dusting sand from her knees and thighs, she starts to climb, her knuckles whitening as she grips the rusted handrail. ‘Did I ever tell you about the wolves?' she asks.

‘The wolves?'

‘They used to bury the dead out here. For hundreds of years, the people who lived on this coast brought their dead to the islands to bury them, to keep the bodies from being dug up. To keep them safe from wolves.'