Chapter 35

35

They hear the sound as soon as Grace opens the front door. Something slamming, or falling, and then a cry of pain.

Someone is in the house.

‘The door was locked!' Grace cries out; she turns back, pressing her body against Becker's as she tries to escape. Repulsed by the feeling of her soft belly and breasts pushing into him, he shrinks back, flattening himself against the wall.

Grace is panicking, she pushes past him, she runs back out of the house on to the lawn; she seems terrified. Becker picks up the rifle and, wielding it like a bat, creeps into the kitchen. Empty. He stands very still, listening. Laughter bubbles up inside him – he is ridiculous. He lowers the gun and rests it against a chair, pulls off his jacket and slings it on to the table and – there ! Wait. Someone is in the house. He can hear a muffled sound now, quite definitely, too gentle for footprints, a sort of rustling, as though something is being dragged along the floor.

‘Hello?' Becker cries out, picking up the gun once more. ‘Is someone here?'

He walks back through the hall into the living room, ducking quickly into the back bedroom. It's empty. He comes out again, pauses in the hallway, holding his breath, listening once more. The silence expands, pressing into him. He hears something behind him and jumps: it's just Grace, closing the front door behind her. He wants to giggle again; he's like a child watching a horror movie, waiting for the next jump scare, caught somewhere in that strange limbo between terror and delight.

Grace peers around the door into the living room, her eyes wide and her face white. Becker shrugs at her and shakes his head and then, suddenly, there is a terrible shriek from Vanessa's room, and the two of them start. Grace cries out and Becker runs towards the sound, heart pounding, the rifle raised.

In Vanessa's room a herring gull is sidling back and forth against the wall beneath the window. It's a juvenile, its feathers still dappled, its cry forlorn.

‘A bird, Grace,' Becker calls out, setting the gun down on the floor. ‘It's just a trapped bird.'

Grace edges into the room. Seeing the bird, her shoulders drop in relief, her equanimity quickly restored. At once, she is practical and reasonable, fetching an old sheet from the airing cupboard which she unfolds and casts like a net, flinging it over the gull. Becker steps in, trying gingerly to pick up the creature, but the force of its frantically beating wings takes him by surprise and he drops it.

Grace is not so tentative. She scoops up the bundle, crushing it to her chest. Furiously the bird fights her, its screeches blood-curdling, but Grace is undeterred; she steps quickly to the window and, leaning out as far as she can, flings her arms wide, gripping tightly to the edge of the sheet as she releases the struggling, shrieking bundle into the air.

For a few seconds the gull tumbles, screaming, scrabbling desperately until instinct takes over and it banks hard, soaring upwards into the wind, over the house, out of sight.

Becker helps draw the sheet back through the window. His eyes meet Grace's and they start to laugh with relief, enjoying at last the break in tension between them.

Grace reaches out, catches Becker's hand and squeezes it; he's taken aback, has to make a conscious effort to allow her to hold on to it, but he does so, until he turns towards the bedroom door and notices a canvas leaning against the wall.

He pulls his hand away, inhaling sharply – with surprise and with pleasure, the delight of seeing something beautiful for the first time, something familiar in style and yet, to his eyes, completely fresh. He is so struck by the picture – a portrait of a woman holding a wooden carving of a bird – that it takes a few moments before he processes what it is that he is looking at.

Grace, with bird.

‘ Totem ,' he says at last.

‘That's right,' Grace replies.

She rolls the sheet into a bundle and walks from the room. He watches her go, taking in as he does so a smaller portrait, also of Grace, leaning against the wall next to the larger one, and beyond that, half-hidden behind the bedroom door, a third canvas, something larger and darker. He walks slowly towards it, his heart pounding painfully, and pushes the door to.

It is a black painting, one he's never seen before. Black paint overlaid with greys and damsons, with deep bloody reds and flashes of gold, is applied in wide gestural strokes with a palette knife. A pool of light holds the centre of the painting, as though a searchlight has been turned directly on to the figures at the heart of the scene, catching them in the act. The first lies prostrate, head thrown back; the second person kneels, touching the prone figure around the neck or the face. Behind them stands a third person, a watcher, and on the voyeur's face is a hint of white at the mouth, a flash of teeth, the suggestion of a grimace, or a smile.

Becker hears Grace's footsteps in the corridor and takes a step back from the door. As she pushes it open, she glances to her left, looking at the canvas and then back at him. Her lips are a firm line. Becker stands back, his arms crossed, viewing the three pictures as in a gallery. ‘So,' he says, indicating the first painting, ‘that's Totem . And the smaller portrait?'

‘ Grace ,' she replies. ‘It's just called Grace . It was the first one she did of me. It's dated on the back, 1998.'

‘Are there more like this?' Becker asks.

‘No,' Grace says, standing beside him to look at the pictures. ‘This is everything.'

Becker nods, biting his lower lip. ‘You told me that Julian destroyed Totem .'

‘Well,' Grace says, turning to face him, her chin tilted upward, her expression defiant, ‘I lied.' She exhales. ‘Vanessa gave me the portraits. Years ago, she gave these to me. I've no proof of that, there's nothing in writing. I knew the Fairburn people would contest my claim, so I just kept quiet about them.'

Becker nods. ‘Portraits?' he repeats, indicating the largest painting. ‘That's not a portrait.'

Grace shrugs. ‘It's me,' she says. ‘Me, with Stuart on the ground.'

‘Stuart?'

‘Marguerite's husband,' Grace says. ‘The man who attacked Vanessa. It's me, with Stuart on the ground, and Vanessa behind us. It's not a formal portrait, I'll grant you, but it's still a picture of me.'