Chapter 38

38

The storm has hit early; Grace said it wasn't due until Sunday night or the early hours of Monday morning, and yet here he is on Saturday evening and rain is stinging the windowpanes like pebbles flung against glass. The wind is savage; it screams in the trees. All the way across the bay Becker can hear the waves smashing against the harbour wall; it sounds like a bombardment.

Grace has locked herself in Vanessa's bedroom with the paintings. Becker tries, briefly, to reason with her, but she refuses to engage and after a few minutes he can hear her talking to someone else on the phone. A lawyer, perhaps?

He slinks off, back to the kitchen, where he fills a glass with water and checks the tide timetable on the wall. He should be able to cross by around 10.30, although if the weather gets any worse, who knows? Could he be trapped here all night? The idea fills him with dread.

He sips his water; it tastes faintly brackish. Perhaps it is just the salt on his lips, but he suddenly craves something sweet. He makes tea, spooning a generous mound of crumbly brown sugar into the cup. He finds biscuits in a jar on the counter and helps himself to one of those, too, and walks over to the window. The darkness is complete – he cannot make out any light across the bay – but the sea sounds wild; even at this distance he can hear the ferocious boom of waves hitting the harbour wall.

You can't always see what's right in front of you.

Or who is right in front of you. He's thinking of Sebastian, of his disarming smile. How's our girl? Our girl. Could Emmeline be right? Has he been so blinded by love, or by guilt over the way that he and Helena got together, that he didn't see what was playing out in front of him? Perhaps he's been reading Sebastian wrong all along. When he looked at him, he saw stoicism, that stiff upper lip, but maybe what he was really seeing was a smooth operator playing a long game?

But what about Helena? Surely he couldn't have misread her ? He feels his heart rate pitch up again and he checks his phone; he has no missed calls and no messages. For a few moments, he argues with himself, and then he calls her; he listens to the phone ring, the knot in his gut tightening with each beep. He tortures himself for a full minute before ending the call.

He is gasping for a cigarette. He rolls one, and then a second – just in case – and makes his way through the kitchen, noticing, as he does, the key to the padlock on the studio door hanging on the hook next to the kitchen door. He slips it into his pocket with his lighter. Outside, he huddles in the corner of the courtyard to light his cigarette, but even in what is probably the most protected spot on the island, the wind proves too strong and he gives up. He crosses the courtyard, head down and shoulders raised against the wind, and walks up the hill to the studio.

Almost everything has been cleared, though there remains a couple of small boxes on the trestle table and, right at the back of the room, a little whittling knife on a shelf. He slips the knife into his pocket and picks up the boxes to take down to the house. He's rather hoping Grace will see him, that she'll come out to remonstrate with him – right now, he'd relish a confrontation. And it's not like she could prevent him taking anything, she couldn't physically stop him, could she? Although his forearm is still smarting where she grabbed hold of him earlier – for a woman clearly not in peak physical condition, she has a surprisingly strong grip.

Back in the house, he places the boxes on the kitchen table and pauses a moment, listening out for any activity. He hears nothing over the sound of the wind and the gulls, and the ominous rumble-and-crash of waves hitting the rocks below the house. He takes out his phone and tries Helena again, but the wifi no longer seems to be working – perhaps the storm has knocked it out? It hardly matters, he tells himself, he'll be on the road within a few hours. An optimistic forecast, given the state of the weather, but what can he do now but act? He must be decisive. He will pack up the car so he's ready to leave as soon as it's safe to cross. It's still parked down at the bottom of the track, so he'll need to bring it up – he doesn't want to be negotiating the steps while carrying heavy boxes in this weather. He thrusts his hands deep into his coat pockets.

Where did he leave the car key?