Chapter 41

41

Becker rises before the sun is up. He makes himself a cup of coffee, and slips out the front door into a world scrubbed clean. The storm has blown itself out, the air is cold and fresh and tangy with salt. He makes his way over to the wooden bench on the hillside which overlooks the channel and there, for a quiet half-hour, he watches the sky above the hills to the east turn from fiery orange to a rich, yolky yellow. When he glances over his shoulder he sees that the sunrise has set the house alight, its glow reflecting in the kitchen windows. Ahead, the tide is high, the channel molten gold. Then slowly, gradually, the colour begins to leach away, the clouds mellowing, now pale orange, now primrose, the sky finally settling on a clear and hopeful blue.

His mug is not long empty when he hears the front door open. A few moments later, Grace appears, holding a steaming pot of coffee. She walks across, refills his cup and sits at his side. ‘Quite a storm,' she says, glancing quickly at him before looking back at the sea. ‘Did you manage to get much sleep?'

‘I slept fine, thank you,' he says tersely. Without looking at her, he asks, ‘I don't suppose you've seen my car key? I couldn't find it last night.'

She frowns at him. ‘No, I don't recall seeing it … Might you have dropped it in Vanessa's room during the kerfuffle with the gull? I'll have a look in a minute, perhaps it's under the bed?' He can feel her stealing glances at him as she asks, ‘I was wondering whether you'd like to walk up to the rock today?'

‘There won't be time,' Becker says. ‘I need to pack up the car, I need—'

‘Oh,' she cuts him off. ‘Pity. We've a good day for it at last.' Becker says nothing and glances at his watch. ‘It'll be a few hours before you're able to cross,' Grace says, ‘and I'm afraid we've still no internet, but if you wanted to call anyone, you might get signal up beyond the wood, you usually can …'

Becker grits his teeth. He's loath to admit it but she's right – he can't leave straight away, and this might be the last time he comes to Eris for a while. He would really like to be able to take some photographs from a few of the places Vanessa loved to paint. And he would also like to be able to talk to Helena.

He looks at Grace, who is smiling up at him, anxious but hopeful, and for a moment he sees her as he did when he first arrived here – a lonely, frightened old woman. He softens, thinks of the lengths he went to to find that little landscape his mother loved so much – what has Grace really done, in the end, other than cling on to all that remains of someone she adored?

‘All right,' he says. ‘I would really love to see the view from the rock.'

‘Wonderful!' Grace says, relief written all over her face. ‘We can take a bit of a tour, if you like, we can visit the vantage point for South and Darkness on the way – that's just up on the bluff there.' She indicates a point on the southern coast of the island, a little way west of the house. ‘The views are quite extraordinary.'

After more coffee and a couple of slices of toast each, they set off. Their pace is leisurely, as Grace has plenty to point out: here was Vanessa's favourite sunbathing spot, over there Douglas Lennox got into a drunken fist fight with one of Vanessa's old boyfriends, just here you can see in the ground the imprint of some ancient habitation.

It's a steady climb up to the bluff. Beyond a thick bank of gorse is a clearing which looks almost as though it were designed as a painting platform: flat-topped and protected from the wind by the gorse bushes, it gives a near-180-degree view of the sea and the islands to the south of Eris.

Becker reaches the clearing first. Grace is still labouring up the path behind him, so for a couple of minutes he has this hallowed place to himself. He is alone with the screech of the gulls and the waves breaking on the rocks hundreds of feet below, and he feels much as he did when he was surprised by the sight of Totem in Vanessa's bedroom the night before: delighted, exhilarated, he is seeing something for the very first time and yet it is so deeply familiar to him it is as though he is returning to a place of childhood. He has never stood here before and yet he has seen the view a hundred times, at sunrise and sunset, in summer and winter, in bright sunshine like today and when the sky lowers over the sea like a threat.

‘Don't go too close to the edge,' Grace says sharply, as finally she joins him. She is breathing heavily, her face pink with exertion, sweat gleaming on her upper lip. She watches while he takes photographs, saying nothing, though Becker can feel tension radiating from her, her eyes following his every move.

When he has taken photographs from every conceivable angle, they move on, making their way back down from the bluff and to the left, following a path which leads through a shallow culvert flanked on one side by a steep bank and on the other by the wood. ‘Some of the pines are more than two hundred years old,' Grace tells him. ‘One or two might be three hundred years old, although the very oldest were lost to storms in the nineties.'

They have been on this steadily ascending path for ten or fifteen minutes when Becker's phone picks up signal and starts to buzz, over and over and over – he's missed calls, has messages. He stops and turns, looking back down the hill; Grace has fallen a few hundred yards behind. He takes a deep breath and calls Helena's number, swearing softly in frustration as he connects immediately with her voicemail. He ends the call and dials in to listen to his messages.

The first was left last night. ‘Beck, darling.' Helena sounds anxious, her voice a little shaky. ‘I really need to talk to you. Can you call me as soon as you get this?'

Blood thudding in his ears, he tries her again, but once again he gets her voicemail – either she's on another call or her phone is switched off.

He listens to the next message, which was left in the early hours of this morning. ‘Hi.' Her voice is small now, and gentle – he's heard her talk to her sister like this, when she's trying to soften a blow, or deliver bad news. ‘I've been trying to get you on WhatsApp but I can't get through and it doesn't look like the message I sent was delivered either, so … Look, something happened.' Becker's heart seizes. ‘It's not me, or the baby, we're fine. It's Emmeline.'

Becker's heart starts beating again. Emmeline? ‘She collapsed, they're not sure what happened, it might have been a stroke or perhaps her heart …' He almost feels like cheering. ‘Sebastian wasn't there when it happened, he was … he came over here to talk to me …' Not so cheerful now. ‘We're at the hospital, in Berwick. The whole thing seems to have been caused by a visit from the police. Apparently they just turned up tonight, or last night I suppose it is now, wanting to talk to her about Douglas. They said someone has been making allegations, saying it wasn't Graham Bryant who fired the shot that killed him … Seb doesn't think they're taking it seriously but still. Look, please just call, OK? As soon as you can?'

A handful of people at Fairburn know the truth about the day Douglas died, but to Becker's mind there is only one person who would have made the call to the police and she is labouring up the path right in front of him.

I could make life difficult for that family.

‘You spoke to the police!' he calls out as she approaches. Grace comes to a halt; she bends at the waist, hands on thighs, trying to catch her breath. ‘Yesterday,' he says, ‘you called them, didn't you? You said something to them about Emmeline Lennox?'

Grace stands up straight. Her face is flushed, but only from exertion; her expression is pure insolence. ‘I told you I didn't believe his death was accidental.'

‘Christ!' Becker yells, hands clenching into fists. ‘Do you have any idea what you've done?'

Grace squares her shoulders, raises her chin. ‘I've done what you should have had the guts to,' she snaps. ‘So Douglas was a snake. Does that mean he doesn't deserve justice?'

Becker turns away from her and starts off up the hill, too angry to respond.

‘I did you a favour,' Grace says, as she follows behind him. ‘You told me that Emmeline was making life difficult for you and your wife. Beck ,' she pleads, plaintive. His flesh crawls. ‘We're on the same side, you and I. We want the same things.'

He wheels around and with all the self-control he can muster, says, ‘I don't think we do. If it's all right with you, I'd really like to carry on alone from here.'

He stomps off up the hill, fuming, furious at himself more than anyone else. He is the one who let slip that Emmeline took that fatal shot, he is the one who has taken so much time to realize that Grace's neediness is pathological, that her loneliness has warped the way she sees him, the way she sees them. As if there were a them , he thinks queasily, as if they have some sort of relationship.

The path climbs gently at first, and then more steeply, and finally becomes a scramble, so that by the time he clambers on hands and knees on to Eris Rock, he is sweating and out of breath. In front of him is a level expanse of granite that extends just a few yards before shearing away in a dead drop to the Irish Sea. He stands, inhaling a lungful of salty air, and takes a few cautious steps towards the cliff edge. The wind is cold and the sky is perfectly clear; in the middle distance he can make out the shapes of small islands, familiar as old friends, and in the distance the horizon is resolutely defined, as though in ink. He feels his face stretch into a smile and his heart lifts in pure elation, everything forgotten but this, this dizzying view, this glorious place, the place that shaped Vanessa's painting, the place in which she confronted her impossible sea, where she embraced her expressionist self! Stand here and you understand why so many of her sea paintings are so small – a slight woman couldn't carry a large canvas and easel up here, and even if she could, the wind would have taken them, and her with them. So she painted glimpses, moments, dense and vibrant, filled with love and desire and terror.

Becker edges closer to the precipice. Very carefully, he lowers himself so that he is sitting with his feet dangling over the rock. He slips his phone out of his pocket and dials Helena's number again. She answers on the second ring.

‘Sorry,' she mumbles, her voice full of sleep. ‘Sorry, have you been calling?'

‘It's all right,' he says gently. He feels calm now, immediately soothed by the sound of her voice. ‘Are you OK?'

‘I'm fine,' she says, ‘it was just such a shock. I only got back here at four, I've been sleeping. Where are you? Are you on your way back?'

‘Not yet,' he says with a smile. ‘I'm sitting on the edge of a cliff, actually, on Eris Rock. Looking out across the sea.'

‘Oh, wonderful.' He can hear the smile in her voice, too. ‘Don't fall in, will you?'

He laughs. There's a little pause. ‘So … what happened with Emmeline, then? You said she was alone in the house when she was taken ill?'

Another pause. He hears her take a deep breath. ‘I asked Seb to come over.' And another. ‘I think you know that, don't you?' Becker doesn't reply. ‘I asked him to come round because I thought it was time I talked to him about our situation.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘It isn't working, Beck.'

‘ Helena. ' He wants to pitch himself forward, into the sea. ‘Don't … please don't say that—'

‘Us living at Fairburn, Beck, that's not working. Not you and me. And you see, this is exactly what I mean,' she rushes on, ‘you're not sure of me! I want you to be sure of me. I need you to be. And you should be. But you're not, and it's not all that surprising, because he's around all the time, and Emmeline's doing her best to make us all miserable. It was a nice idea, the three of us being all civilized and grown up and French about everything, but it's just too hard …'

Becker lies back on the rock, squinting up at the sky. The sun is warm on his face, he can taste salt on his lips. ‘All right,' he says. ‘We'll go.'

‘We don't have to cut all ties, you can still work at Fairburn. Seb and I agreed that—'

‘Seb and you?'

‘I wanted us to be able to present you with a united front,' she says.

Becker laughs again. ‘You're such a schemer,' he says. He listens to her breath, and to the sea, and for a while neither of them speaks.

‘Please come home,' she says at last. ‘I need you here. We need you.'

He feels light when he crawls away from the edge of the rock. He feels as though if he jumped up into the air the wind rushing up the cliff would catch him, blow him clean away. A gull swoops overhead, he ducks and laughs, he wishes Helena were here, to see this, to see him, on Vanessa's island, on her sacred rock. He starts to take photographs again, knowing as he does that they won't come close to conveying the majesty of the place, but he persists anyway, taking dozens of pictures before it occurs to him that he never finished listening to all of his messages.

He dials into his voicemail again. ‘Becker? Are you there?' It's Sebastian this time, calling early this morning. He sounds distracted and slightly out of breath. ‘Yeah, listen … I assume Hels has filled you in on all this, but we've had quite the weekend here. Lady Em's in hospital – on the mend I think, but … we had quite a scare. I'm just waiting for the doc now … but I thought I'd give you a call, because the lab doing the testing sent an email on Friday – with all the drama yesterday I missed it – I'm going to forward it on to you in a minute, but the headline is that this bone, this rib, it comes from a man, they estimate his age to be late twenties, though there's apparently a window of error on that – seven or eight years or something, so … yeah …' There's a pause. Becker can hear Sebastian speaking to someone else in the background, and then he hears something else, something close, and he turns to see Grace, grim-faced, hauling herself up on to the rock. He takes a step back.

On the phone, Sebastian is still talking. ‘Uh … yeah, sorry … they can also tell that it isn't an old bone – they haven't done the full range of tests yet but they can tell from mineralization , I think? Something like that anyway, they can tell that the bone hasn't been in the ground for hundreds of years, it's much less than that, possibly even less than a decade … They're going to do carbon dating, which will give us a more accurate picture of when the person died, and they're also going to extract DNA so they can do a comparison with the sample they have from Chapman's sister. So that's where we are. Look, all in all I would say there's a strong chance we've found Julian Chapman. Things could move pretty quickly from here on in, and if I'm right, this is going to be a very big story. We need to get ready, and we need to do it soon. Give me a call when you can, yeah?'

Becker puts his phone back into his pocket. He is standing in the middle of the rock, around three feet from the cliff, five feet from its opposite edge, where Grace now stands, red-faced, panting like a dog. ‘I couldn't leave you to come up here alone,' she says, wiping the sweat from her face with the palms of her hands. ‘I'd never forgive myself if something happened.' What, Becker wonders, could happen? He could slip and fall, he supposes, but what on earth would Grace do about that?

Now, far from being helpful, she is in his way, blocking the only safe route down from the rock. She peers at him intently. ‘Is everything all right?' she asks. ‘You're not still angry about Emmeline, are you? I was only thinking of you, you and Helena.'

Becker says nothing, but she must read something in his eyes, or perhaps the colour has leached from his face, because he sees it dawn on her. She knows . ‘Oh,' she says. ‘The bone, then?'

He nods. ‘Yes.'

‘It's not Julian,' Grace says right away.

Becker exhales slowly through pursed lips. ‘It is , Grace. They haven't done the DNA testing yet, but they've established that the rib comes from a man, a man who died young, in his twenties or thirties.' Just then, he sees something, or thinks he sees something – a flicker of fear crosses her face. ‘And he didn't die hundreds of years ago, he died in the past few decades.' Grace covers her mouth with her hand. ‘So, it seems pretty likely that it is Julian Chapman.'

He steps to one side, gesturing with one arm, miming excuse me . ‘I need to get going,' he says. ‘I need to get back – there's going to be a lot to sort out. As soon as they get a DNA match, the lab will have to tell the police, and the police will inform Chapman's sister, and once that happens …' He spreads his palms wide. Who knows?

‘It's not Julian,' Grace says again. She no longer looks afraid, she looks sad – resigned almost. Defeated. ‘They won't get a match,' she says softly. She takes a step towards him, and then another.

Becker shuffles backwards. ‘You can't say that for sure,' he says, glancing quickly over his shoulder and taking another step back. She's too close to him, much too close, and she keeps coming.

‘I can,' she says, and she raises her hands, palms facing towards him. Becker shrinks back – what is she doing? – he thinks for a moment that she is going to push him, but instead she brings her hands to her lips, pressing her palms together in front of her mouth as though she were praying. ‘I can say that,' she says, ‘I can say that, you see, because I know where Julian is, and he's not in the wood.'