Chapter 43

43

Becker can feel the wind on his back, he can hear the waves crashing against the rocks at the bottom of the cliff, unnervingly clear. ‘What do you mean,' he asks Grace, ‘he's not in the wood? Are you saying you know where Julian's body is?' He feels as though Eris Rock is tilting, as though it's about to tip them both into the sea. He steps to one side, but Grace comes with him, mirroring him; she reaches towards him, beseeching. He shifts his weight back again, adrenaline surging through him; he feels dangerously close to the edge, his legs starting to tremble. A blast of wind catches him, throwing him off balance, and Grace lunges, grabbing hold of his arms, pulling his body towards hers in an awkward embrace. Despite himself, he leans into her, away from danger. ‘Self-defence,' she says, her breath hot against the base of his throat, ‘it was self-defence.'

Still clutching his arms, she starts to tell him what happened: that Vanessa returned from Glasgow to find Julian still on the island. He'd left, just as Grace told the police, but then he came back, there was some story about a wallet. Vanessa and Julian argued, they were up in the studio when it happened, and he lost his temper. The argument became violent, he started smashing things up. ‘She was just trying to stop him,' Grace says. ‘It wasn't her fault …'

This isn't true , Becker thinks, it doesn't sound true. In reality, he can barely process what she is saying because all he can think is that he wants to get away from here, off the rock, away from her . He pulls his arms from her grasp and takes hold of her shoulders, pushing against her, hard . She stumbles backwards, mouth open in shock. ‘What are you doing?' she gasps. Relief courses through him as, at last, he manoeuvres his way around her bulk and on to safer ground. ‘You need to hear this,' Grace says sharply, ‘before you go running back to Fairburn, before you pass judgement on us. You have to understand … she was almost catatonic when I found her. Covered in blood, beyond reason. She wouldn't let me call the police. I had to clear up after her. I had to clear up her mess.'

Some of what she says has the ring of truth, some of it sounds like lies; Becker is having trouble telling one from the other. He hesitates at the top of the path, feeling exhausted, bereft: with every new revelation Vanessa slips away from him, she becomes something different, someone violent, destructive.

‘How,' he asks, turning back to look at Grace, ‘how did she—?'

‘I had to wait,' Grace interrupts him, ‘until the early hours of the morning before I could drive his car across the causeway. There was no moon, and I didn't want to turn the lights on … I was terrified I was going to veer off the track on to the sand and get stuck.' She looks up at him, animated now, like a child telling a ghost story. ‘I put my bike in the boot of his car and I drove north – there's a quarry about ten miles from here. The pool is terribly deep, it's very dangerous, you hear all kinds of stories, about children falling in, about suicides. There was a padlock on the gate, but I was expecting that so I took bolt cutters from the storeroom. I drove off the road, up a bank to the north side of the pool … it wasn't difficult, I just had to give the car a push, start it rolling …' She blinks slowly. ‘I was very frightened cycling back. I didn't want to use a light, you see, I didn't want to attract attention to myself … those roads are deathly quiet, especially at night, but still … it would only have taken one van, one car going too fast … but I made it, eventually, though it was just getting light as I crossed the causeway.' She leans closer to him. ‘By the time the police came asking questions,' she says, her voice almost a whisper, ‘I had an alibi. Marguerite. French onion soup with Marguerite! I knew that if I told her what he was – that he was a bad man, like her husband, like Stuart – she'd understand. I knew she wouldn't betray me.'

Becker hugs himself; between the story she's telling and the rising wind, he feels the cold creep into him. ‘He's in the quarry?' he says. ‘Is that what you're telling me? Julian's body is in the quarry?'

‘Oh, no.' Grace shakes her head, frowning at him as though he's an idiot, as though he hasn't been listening to a word she's said. ‘I couldn't get him all the way down to the car, not on my own, he was much too heavy.'

Becker exhales, a short huff. ‘So then …?'

‘I put him in the septic tank.'

Sadder and sadder. Vanessa's idyll, her sanctuary, this hallowed place – it is nothing like: it is a place of unhappiness, of horror.

‘You …' Becker's teeth are starting to chatter, ‘you—' He breaks off – he can't bring himself to repeat it. Jesus Christ . ‘And Vanessa? Where was Vanessa when this was happening?'

She ignores his question again. ‘You mustn't tell anyone,' she insists, taking hold of his forearm. ‘Please, promise me you won't tell anyone.'

He stares at her, mouth open in disbelief. ‘All right,' he says at last, because what else is there to say? ‘I promise.'

Grace's eyes search his face; he doesn't for a second imagine he's convinced her, but she nods. ‘Thank you,' she says, shuffling past him. ‘It's cold, isn't it?' She climbs carefully down on to the steepest part of the path, using her hands to steady herself. ‘I think we should go down now.'

Becker sits at the top of the path for a while, waiting for Grace to descend. He watches her walking away towards the wood – back straight, head high – as though nothing terrible, nothing seismic, has just happened. His hands thrust deep into his jacket pockets, he grazes the pad of his thumb back and forth over the blade of Vanessa's whittling knife.

What to do? If he tells the police what Grace has told him, they will send detectives, and forensics people, they will drain the tank. Grace will be charged, presumably, with being an accessory, possibly with other crimes, too. And Vanessa will become a killer, will be known as a killer.

And if he doesn't tell them? What then?

He calls Helena again, but the phone rings out. She's turned the sound down, probably, gone back to sleep. He leaves her a message. ‘I'll be leaving soon,' he says, checking his watch. ‘I should be back … late afternoon I think. I'll see you in a few hours. I love you.'

He scrambles quickly down and follows the path that Grace took, the most direct route back to the house, through the wood. The wood where Vanessa found that bone, picked clean.

If it isn't Julian's body in the wood, whose is it?

Who is the man in the wood?