The first thing Becker sees is the gun. Right there in the hallway, leaning against the bench. Grace clocks him looking at it. “Don’t worry,” she says with a wry smile. “It’s just for show. I’ll not be requiring you to shoot your dinner.”
Becker laughs nervously. “Is it the same one?” he asks.
Grace’s brow furrows. “The same as . . . ?”
“The . . . one Vanessa borrowed, you know, from the farmer . . .”
“Oh.” Grace nods, recognition registering in her eyes, face flushing. “You read that part.”
“It’s . . . horrifying.”
Grace nods again. “Yes, it was. A fat lot of use the gun was, too.” She looks thoughtful. “Although I suppose we could have beaten him to death with it.” She turns, leading Becker into the living room, where three boxes of papers sit atop the coffee table. “Those are for you,” she says, waving a hand at them. “That should keep your boss happy.”
It won’t, of course, far from it, but Becker has already decided he won’t broach the subject right away. For the moment, he expresses enthusiasm and gratitude, following her into the kitchen, where she fills the kettle while he stands at the Aga, looking out of the window, toward the mainland.
“Who was he?” he asks.
“Who was . . . oh, we’re back on the gun? Just a man. Stuart Cummins. A lorry driver and sometime mechanic. His wife, Marguerite, used to come into my surgery fairly regularly—broken fingers, split lip, minor head wounds. Some other things, women’s things.” She hands him a cup of tea. Her face is shuttered, eyes cast down. “She never pressed charges. They lived in one of those cottages over at the harbor, you can see it from here.” She points. “Theirs is the last one, on the left.”
“The one on the end?” He remembers the anguished face at the window, the one that wasn’t there. “But they don’t live there any longer?”
“Marguerite does. Stuart’s long gone, thank God.”
So it was her. “Marguerite . . .” he says out loud. “She was married to the man who attacked Vanessa? She’s mentioned in one of the notebooks, she visited Vanessa, she was confused about something . . .”
Grace smiles ruefully. “Marguerite’s been unwell for years. She has Alzheimer’s now, but even before that, her mental state was pretty fragile. Her husband did many cruel things to her, but do you know I think the cruelest of all was never to tell her when to expect him?” They are standing side by side, looking over the water at the cottages. “He’d go off on a job, and she never knew when he’d be back, whether it would be a couple of hours or a couple of days. So she had no peace. For years, she was always waiting, standing at the window, watching out for him.”
There is a break in the clouds, and suddenly the room is filled with warm light. Grace beams at him. “Look at that!” The sands have turned golden, the clouds primrose and pink. They are silent for a while, watching the wind work its magic, whipping green water to white horses. Then a cloud moves in front of the sun and the light is lost. Grace turns away. She sits down at the table with her tea and motions to him to join her.
“What became of him?” Becker asks. “The husband, I mean, the mechanic?”
Grace shrugs. “I’ve no idea. He got a shorter sentence than he deserved. If they’d known about all the things he did to Marguerite . . .” She interlaces her fingers to make a bridge on which she rests her chin. “After he attacked Vanessa, I moved out here. I kept my cottage in the village because I was still on the on-call rota and, in any case, between the tides and my work schedule, I couldn’t be here all the time. But I stayed as often as I could. Vanessa was very shaken up, very afraid. For a time, she stopped walking in the wood on her own; she started stashing weapons all over the place.” Grace gives an odd little laugh. “Knives in the studio, a hammer by the front door . . .”
She shakes her head, pressing her lips into a line. “It made me very angry.” Her dark eyes look black in the flat light. “Makes me angry still. To have a place tainted like that . . . it’s another violation on top of the original one. It happens all the time—you go walking somewhere, or swimming or running—whatever it is, your thing, the thing you enjoy—you go to a place, and it’s beautiful and unspoiled, and you are doing that thing you love, and then someone—not always a man, I suppose, but usually a man—comes along and transforms it into an ugly place. And you never feel safe there again. And you are never the same again. The place is changed and you are changed, and neither for the better.”
She is talking, Becker feels, half to him and half to herself; she sounds angry and bitter and he feels stupid, awkward—he wants to apologize to her, but for what? For casually invoking a traumatic event? For the behavior of men? All men? Some of them? While he’s searching for something to say, her mood changes, her weather. The clouds are blown away and her face brightens. “Would you like to see the studio?” she asks.
It lies in the lee of the hill, its slope a somber green now that the sun has dipped behind Eris Rock. A footworn path takes them up a steep incline that levels out after a couple of hundred yards into a plateau on which the studio sits.
Becker gnaws at his thumbnail, twitching with anticipation as Grace fiddles with the padlock; he holds his breath as she pushes back the enormous metal door, rolling it away like the proverbial stone. And there it is: a cavernous space with shelving running along the wall on the right-hand side and an ancient kick wheel on the left, the kiln at the far end.
Becker steps inside. The air is colder and drier within; it smells of dust and sulfur. Through the long picture window Vanessa had cut into the wall there is a view to the south, over the grassy slope toward the sea and Sheepshead Island.
In the middle of the room stands a trestle table on which yet more boxes are piled. “This is the stuff I’ve still got to sort through,” Grace says. “As you can see, there’s quite a bit.” She motions toward the nearest box. “I found a whole load of photographs, I’m not sure if you’ll want those?”
Of course he’ll want them! They make a fascinating record of Vanessa’s years on Eris; there are dozens and dozens of shots of the house, of works on the roof, the renovation of the barn. And dozens more of the island itself, of its changing landscape, rusty bracken and purple heather, electric yellow gorse. “Did she paint from these?” Becker asks, as he sifts through shots of the sea at every hour in every weather, trees fallen in the wood, piles of seaweed strewn across the sands like bodies.
“Not often. Well, not in the early years anyway,” Grace replies. She is opening and closing the cupboards at the very back of the studio, looking for something. “Though she did later on, when she fell ill, when it became harder for her to work outside. She liked to have them, though, just in case. To remember the light, she said, although then she’d complain that the light never looked the same on film.”
“She’s right,” he says, selecting another photograph, “the light never does.” In the picture he’s holding, two people stand side by side, elbows propped on a railing, against the background of a wild sea. One of the people is Grace—many years younger but essentially the same, with her bowl haircut, her soft, round face, her chin receding beneath a shy smile. The other person is tall, coltish, and leggy in a vest and shorts, dirty blond hair falling over bony shoulders—Vanessa, he assumes, though he cannot say for certain because her face is obscured. No, not obscured, erased. It has been scratched out.
“Oh, God.” Grace appears at his side. “That’s a very old picture, that’s mine.” Becker turns it over: Grace and Nick, St. Malo ’81.
“I thought it was Vanessa,” he says, and Grace shakes her head, taking the picture from him. She studies it a moment. “No, it’s not. It’s Nick. I don’t know why she did that . . .”
“Vanessa did that?” he says. He finds he’s not altogether surprised—she shows her temper in her diaries, with an occasional flash of spite.
“She could be quite funny about things sometimes. Quite possessive,” Grace says quietly, “which I always thought was a bit unfair when you consider that she demanded complete freedom for herself. Nick Riley was a friend of mine, at university. We were flatmates for a while. We went on a camping holiday once, with another girl, Audrey. She must have taken the photo.” She seems uncomfortable, a little embarrassed. “Nick and I were very close for a while. It wasn’t a romantic involvement, but . . . he was special to me. He was quite beautiful. And Vanessa always saw beauty as her purview.”
Grace slides the picture into the pocket of her cardigan. She moves away from him, over to a small wooden cabinet underneath the window, and opens a drawer. “That makes her sound awful, which she wasn’t at all,” she continues. “She had a bit of a temper, that’s all. Ah, there it is.”
She takes something from one of the drawers, a wooden box. “Look,” she says, placing it on the table. “Come and take a look at this.” The box is rosewood, inlaid with mother of pearl. Grace opens the lid: inside are bones. Bones and fragments of bone, broken, discolored things, none so pure as the one in Division II. They all look tiny to Becker, as though they come from some sort of small animal, like a rodent, but really, what does he know?
“Could I take these?” he asks. “I think they might be useful, and in any case, they are . . . they are things she collected to use in her art, aren’t they?”
“Mmm.” Grace nods. “All right.” She turns back to the cabinet. “There’s another box somewhere, filled with pebbles and shells and another with feathers, and oh, look here . . .” She pulls out a little box, a plainer one, and opens it to reveal a tiny bird’s skull. Carefully, Becker takes it between his thumb and forefinger. He turns it over, examining its eye sockets, the neat little beak. “Sparrow, maybe?” Grace says.
Becker shrugs; he has no idea, but it reminds him of something he read in one of the notebooks. “She wrote about finding a bird’s skull . . . or perhaps a skeleton? It was around the same time, in fact, that she wrote about completing Division . . . I think you were away at the time. Have I got that right?”
Grace ignores the question, picking over bits of bone. “Pretty sure none of these are human,” she says. “Feel how light they are.” She hands him one of the larger pieces. “Human bone is much denser than animal. That’s probably from a lamb. I had a feeling there were some larger ones somewhere.” She holds up her fingers to her lips, head tilted backward a little, considering. “She made copies, you know, she’d make molds in plaster and then cast them—that’s how Division II was made; she would find bones, or pieces of bone, and she knitted them together with ceramics, which is rather neat, since it’s actually what you use to repair and replace bones in medicine these days—”
“Grace.” Becker sees an opportunity and takes it, interrupting her. “About the ceramics—I wanted to ask you about the ones she made for the Glasgow Modern show.” Grace turns her attention back to him, her eyebrows raised, expression expectant. “In the back of one of the notebooks you gave me to read, there’s a list, a list of the works that she and Douglas agreed on for the show. Do you remember that? There are around thirty ceramic pieces on that list, but almost none of them came to Fairburn. Do you know where they went? Did she sell them? Are there any records of sales?”
Grace closes the rosewood box. “Did you know that I set her wrist?” she asks. “I told you, didn’t I? That was the first time we met. She tripped over that bit of concrete out there, just to the right of the path, the lid to the septic tank.” She returns the box to its place on the shelf. “We met over a broken bone,” she says, turning to face him, smiling brightly, “and then later she started to use broken bones in her work. I like to think that’s significant.” She pauses for a second, and then her face takes on a serious cast. “Can I trust you, Mr. Becker?”
“Of course you can,” Becker says, hoping that at last she is going to answer the question.
But she doesn’t; she just smiles again and says, “Good. Then I’ll leave you to poke around here by yourself and I’ll get on with dinner. Half an hour, maybe? Lock up when you’re done. There’s a torch there on the right, you can bring that with you so you can see what you’re doing. Watch out on the way down, the ground is pretty uneven.”
He watches her making her way carefully down the hillside until she disappears into the darkness. He hears the front door close.
He is alone.
A fine sliver of moon hangs behind a veil of cloud; the beam from the lighthouse sweeps across the sea. Slack water, the tide turning. A cry, sharp and anguished, makes him jump. A herring gull swoops overhead, and he retreats into the studio.
At last, he has Vanessa to himself.
He sifts through the pages in the box nearest to him, sorting through rough sketches, many of them little more than a few lines on the page. Among the drawings of the islands and the wood, he finds figure sketches, too, a kneeling figure, another lying down, viewed from different angles. Studies, perhaps? Though not for any paintings he has seen.
Looking at these pages, at these boxes, he has the impression that no matter how many of them he sorts through, somehow there will always be more, and more, and more: Grace is like a magician, conjuring letters and sketches and bones out of nothing. Or a cat, perhaps, bringing her treasures to lay at his feet. Only they’re not her treasures, are they? And treasures aren’t what cats bring in any case; they bring kills.
Grace is hiding things from him. The way she ignored his question about the missing ceramics makes that clear. She may literally be hiding things: the house is not big, but there is bound to be storage: a cellar, perhaps, or an attic. Didn’t she mention a storeroom at some point? He will, he supposes, have to give her a chance to deny it.
He walks to the back of the studio, opens up the kiln, inhales the scent of old dust and ash, his skin prickling as he imagines her here, his Vanessa, opening this very door, heart in mouth, to see whether her work had survived the firing. If he could, he would happily stay here all night among her things, despite the cold. But he can’t be rude. And he still has work to do, questions to ask.
He rolls the metal door across and, holding the torch between his teeth, locks the padlock. He has barely turned away when the torch flickers once, twice, and then goes out altogether, leaving him completely blind. He pulls his phone from his pocket and after a few moments manages to turn on its torch. There. The beam illuminates a narrow strip of grass in front of him; outside of that strip the darkness presses in. Becker starts down the path, holding the phone in front of him, noticing as he goes that there is no phone service here at all.
The house is warm and light, the kitchen a fug of smells—roasting chicken, woodsmoke. Grace is opening a bottle of red wine, her pale face flushed, patches of damp under her armpits. “Do you drink wine?” she asks, and hands him a glass before he can answer. “Sit, sit.” She fusses around him, muttering to herself, where did I put, where was that . . . She finds the matches she’s searching for and lights a candle. With the wine and the low light, the candle burning on the set table, the scene appears oddly romantic, and Becker feels a sudden twinge of panic. He thinks of the landlady in the Roald Dahl story, luring young men to her establishment only to poison them and stuff them. He reaches into his pocket for his phone.
“There’s no service here,” he says plaintively.
“Only if you climb to the top of the rock,” Grace says, “and I wouldn’t recommend that in the dark. Do you need to call someone? There’s Wi-Fi. You can use the whatsit.”
He smiles. “WhatsApp.”
“Although”—she frowns—“I’ve no idea what the password is.”
“It’s usually on the router . . .”
“Oh yes—that’s in Vanessa’s room. I’ll just go take a look.”
She disappears, returning moments later with a piece of paper on which she’s written the code.
“Thanks,” he says, getting up from the table. “I just want to check in on Hels. I’ll make the call . . .” He indicates that he’s going to go into the living room.
“Of course.”
Helena doesn’t answer, so he messages her instead, telling her there’s no phone service, that she should WhatsApp if she needs him. He waits for a moment, to see if she’ll reply, but the little ticks remain stubbornly gray and so he returns to the kitchen, sits back down at the table, and takes a long slug of wine. He tries not to imagine Sebastian dropping by to check on her.
“Everything all right?” Grace asks without turning around.
“Everything’s fine,” Becker says. He takes another sip. Now he’s thought of Sebastian, he can hear his voice, telling him to just bloody get on with it. “Grace, I need to ask you about the paintings and ceramics that were on that list, the one I mentioned earlier?”
Grace bends to open the oven, lifting a roasting tin to the stovetop, clattering it down.
“I was always here for Vanessa,” she says.
“Yes,” Becker says, frustrated, “I know that, I—”
“No, you don’t.” She turns around to face him, removing the oven gloves and wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. Her expression is somber. “I was always here for her, from that very first time we met, when she broke her wrist. I was the person she relied on—she’d get lost in her work and forget to eat, so I brought food. I cooked for her. I fixed things when they broke, or if I couldn’t fix them myself, I found someone who could. I fetched and carried for her. I made her life easier. I listened when she talked, even if half of what she talked about was alien to me. I was here when that man attacked her. I protected her. And I was here to pick up the pieces, after everything fell apart. After Julian.” She opens a drawer and takes from it a carving knife and fork, which she thrusts toward him. “Will you do the honors?” she asks, nodding at the bird. “I’ve something I need to show you.”
As Becker hacks inexpertly at the chicken, he steels himself for the dreaded confrontation. He knows what she’s going to say: that for all that she’s done, she deserves some recompense, and there’s a part of him that would agree. It does seem fair that after all she did for Vanessa she should be rewarded, but he knows—just as Sebastian knows and she herself must know—that this isn’t about what’s fair; this is about what Vanessa Chapman stipulated in her will.
When Grace comes back, she frowns at the mess he’s made of the chicken and hands him a bit of kitchen towel. She places a piece of paper on the table in front of him and picks up the carving knife and fork herself. “Read that,” she says, as she sets about finishing the job he has started.
It’s a note, Becker sees, written on paper stained with dark brown smudges, in Vanessa’s now familiar hand.
J, we can’t keep going round and round and round!
I’m going to be back on the weekend and you must be gone. There’s no more money in the pot.
We have loved each other and we have hated each other and now we can be free of each other.
Isn’t that wonderful?
You must find your own way.
Love,
Nessa
“They had been together that week,” Grace says, as she hands him a plate. “Spending time together, sleeping together. They’d argued, too, because as usual he was after money. I left them to it; I went back to my cottage in the village. I didn’t want to be around all that. And to be frank, I didn’t like him.” She serves herself and sits. “In any case, he arrived on the Saturday. They had a few days together, and then Vanessa left on Thursday to drive to Glasgow to see Douglas Lennox, to finalize arrangements for the show—it was just a month or so away at that point. Vanessa took a few of the paintings in the car—the ones you have now. The rest—all the ceramics and the largest canvases—were to follow later, in a van. Most of it was laid out in the studio, ready to be packed.
“So, as I say, Vanessa left that Thursday, early because of the tide. Julian was still asleep, so she left him that note.” Grace takes a bite of her food. She chews, shaking her head as she does. “This cannot come out, do you understand, Mr. Becker? She never wanted any of this to be made public.”
“Yes, all right,” Becker replies impatiently. “But any of what? What are you saying?”
“Vanessa left the note for him next to the bed, and she found it when she returned on Sunday, among the debris in the studio. All the ceramics had been smashed, the canvases slashed. Everything destroyed.”