Eris, summer 2002
When she arrived that Sunday, Vanessa’s car was parked in the courtyard but the house was empty, so Grace set off up the hill toward the studio. As she approached, she heard a strange sound, a scraping sound, like a turning tool against the wheel, only louder, much louder.
When she reached the doorway, she realized that it was Vanessa; she was crying, keening, the noise was coming from her throat. She was on the floor, and she had blood on her: in her hair and on her clothes and on her hands. There was blood on the floor, too.
“Vanessa!” Grace ran to her, falling to her knees. “What happened? Vanessa, are you hurt? What happened?” Vanessa didn’t speak; she just kept making the awful noise, kept squeezing her hands into fists until blood dripped from between her fingers.
“Vanessa! Stop, stop.” Grace was trying to open Vanessa’s hands, trying to prize her fingers apart; she was starting to cry herself, starting to shout. “Where are you hurt? Answer me! Please tell me what happened.”
“All of it,” Vanessa whispered. She swept one hand to the side, opening her fist, shards of bloodied porcelain falling from her hand. “It’s all gone.”
Grace could hardly bear to look. There was debris all around them. Obscene gashes in the paintings against the walls gaped like wounds.
“Your hands,” Grace said. Vanessa opened her right fist, and from it Grace took a scrunched piece of paper, a note. To Julian. “Vanessa, where is he?” Grace said. “Where is Julian now?”
Vanessa shook her head and closed her eyes.
When eventually she opened them again, Grace helped her up from the floor and, with one arm around her shoulders and the other holding tightly to her left wrist, guided her over to the basin. Vanessa did not resist as Grace placed her hands under the running water; she stood silent and unmoving as Grace did her best to remove the remaining splinters of porcelain from her fingers and palm.
Neither of them spoke.
A while later, Grace took Vanessa back down to the house. She sat her on the edge of the bath while she cleaned the blood from her skin, disinfecting and dressing her hands. She gave her a sleeping pill and put her to bed. Then she went back up the hill to the studio. She collected up the larger pieces of ceramic, placing them carefully on the table in groups, trying to figure out which fragments belonged with which. She swept and washed the floor, sluicing the last of the blood and debris out onto the grass, where it soaked into the soil.
It was a beautiful, mild evening, a soft breeze coming off the sea and over the gorse bushes, carrying with it the scent of kelp and coconut, but every breath Grace took tasted of blood and disinfectant. When finally she was done, she sat in the kitchen and drank whisky to purge the taste of metal from her mouth.
She checked on Vanessa, who was still sleeping, and then she phoned the emergency contact for the surgery to tell them she wouldn’t be able to come in the next day. It was the first time in a decade she’d miss a day of work.
She fell asleep at the kitchen table, the whisky bottle open in front of her.
Sometime after midnight she jerked awake. Sitting up, she wiped the spittle from her mouth, rolled her aching shoulders, tipped her head from one side to the other to stretch out the muscles in her neck. She was about to get to her feet when she realized that she was not alone, that in the darkness Vanessa was sitting on the other side of the table, her face white, like a death mask.
“Jesus!” Grace gasped. “You scared me.” She moved to turn on the light.
“Don’t!” Vanessa snarled. Then, more gently, “Please.”
Grace sat down. “How do you feel? How are your hands?” When Vanessa didn’t reply, Grace added, “I’ve taken tomorrow off. I’ll phone the police first thing.”
“No.”
“It’s criminal damage, Vanessa.”
“No.”
Grace exhaled slowly. “Well . . . We need to get in touch with the gallery at least, we—”
“No, Grace. We don’t need to get in touch with anyone. Don’t phone anyone. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t do anything.”
“You have to tell them, you—”
“Don’t tell me what I have to do!” Vanessa snarled. “Everything is gone. Do you understand? Everything.”
“I know, I . . .”
“Please, leave me alone. For pity’s sake, go to bed and leave me alone.”
When Grace rose in the morning, the phone was ringing. Vanessa was sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee, unraveling the bandages from her hands. “Don’t answer it,” she said when she saw Grace move toward the phone. “Could you go to the village and get me some cigarettes?” Her eyes were ringed with circles the color of bruises and her face was puffy, but she was clear-eyed, her voice steady.
“Of course,” Grace replied carefully. “Do you need anything else? Shall I make you something to eat?” Vanessa shook her head. When Grace came over to inspect Vanessa’s hands, she turned her face away, but she didn’t resist. “Keep them clean,” Grace said, “and dry. Don’t try to do too much.”
“Too much of what?” Vanessa asked, and she started laughing, a high, strange sound.
The phone rang all the time. Vanessa didn’t answer it. She did nothing; she barely moved from the kitchen, just sat there and smoked and drank coffee and stared at the sea, at the causeway, as though waiting for someone to come.
And then, after six days had passed, late on Saturday afternoon, someone came.
Grace was relieved, at first. She was walking on the beach when she saw the police car driving slowly along the causeway. At last, she thought, she’s come to her senses. Quickening her pace, she hurried toward the steps: she wanted to be there for Vanessa when she spoke to them.
They were all in the kitchen—two young men in uniform, standing awkwardly near the door, and Vanessa, still sitting at the kitchen table, smoking. Grace bustled in, shoving one of the officers out of the way as she did.
“I’m Vanessa’s friend,” Grace announced. “I also live here.”
“Well, not really,” Vanessa said, squinting at the cherry of her cigarette.
The police officers exchanged a quick look.
“We were asking about Mr. Chapman,” the older of the two said. “About the last time you saw him.”
“He’s missing,” Vanessa said quickly, looking at Grace for the first time since she’d come into the room.
“Missing?” Grace repeated.
“That’s what Isobel says. Apparently he didn’t show up for her birthday.”
Grace let out a short bark of laughter. “So . . . does that mean he’s missing? Because he didn’t show up to a birthday party?”
Vanessa shrugged. “It is odd. He didn’t call her or anything. That’s unusual. They’re very close.”
“I understand that he was here visiting?” the first policeman said.
It took Grace a moment to realize he was talking to her. “That’s right,” she replied. “He was here last week . . . no, the week before that. He left on Thursday. I wasn’t here, I was staying at my cottage in the village, but I saw him . . . I saw his car, that is. I saw it going through the village on Thursday, around lunchtime.”
“You saw his car?”
“Yes, it’s bright red, a sports car—you don’t see many of those round here. And he drives like a lunatic, so he stands out.”
The second policeman, the younger of the two, smirked. “Like a lunatic? He was driving fast, you mean?”
Grace nodded.
The older one turned to Vanessa. “And there was nothing . . . odd about your husband’s visit, no quarrels, nothing like that?”
Vanessa frowned. “Well . . . you know that we’re separated? We’re getting a divorce. But it’s fairly amicable. He came to see me to talk about some money things and—”
“He came all the way up here?” The younger one again. “From Oxford? He couldn’t just have called?”
“We’re still friends,” Vanessa said, her soft, gravelly tones turned hard as glass, “as I said. You do understand what amicable means?” The policeman turned pink to the tops of his ears. Vanessa directed her attention to the other one. “It’s strange, as I said, that he missed his sister’s birthday, but it’s not completely out of character for Julian to go AWOL. He has . . . lots of friends, usually a few girlfriends, no end of creditors, and he drinks quite a bit. He’s not here, as you can see.” She wafted a hand in the air. “Do feel free to take a look around if you wish. As far as I know, he left on Thursday, like Grace just told you, not long after I drove to Glasgow. When I came back here on Sunday around midday, his car was gone, so I assumed he’d driven back south.”
They didn’t look around. They just took her word for it, gave her a card and the usual spiel about if you remember anything, and off they went.
As soon as the police officers were in their car and heading back to the mainland, Vanessa got up and left the kitchen. She walked outside and up the hill, with Grace trailing after her. “Why didn’t you tell them?” Grace called out.
Vanessa ignored her, and when Grace called out again, she whirled around, her expression furious. “Tell them what, Grace? That he destroyed all my work? What if something’s happened to him? If I tell them what he did, they’ll think I did something to him. The press will find out, they’ll be camping on the beach, crawling all over my island. They’ll never leave me alone.”
“But . . . how could they think you had anything to do with it?” Grace protested. “You were in Glasgow, Vanessa, you were at the gallery, how could you have done anything to him?”
Vanessa said nothing; she just stood there, biting her lip, her gaze shifting off to one side. She blinked furiously and then, tossing her hair over her shoulder, she turned and marched off toward the studio.
The phone rang and rang; Grace was forbidden to answer it.
Another policeman came back a few days later, a different one, a man in plain clothes, from down south, who insisted on talking to Vanessa alone. Grace lingered in the hallway; she heard him pose the same questions the other police officers had put to her, plus a few more besides.
What is the precise nature of your relationship to Mrs. Haswell? he asked Vanessa. Where does she sleep? How did Mrs. Haswell and Mr. Chapman get on? Did they argue at all? At the end of the interview, the detective told Vanessa that while a number of people could confirm that the red sports car had been seen driving through the village that Thursday lunchtime, one witness claimed to have seen it heading back across the causeway later on that day, in the evening.
“I wasn’t here!” Vanessa snapped at him. “How many fucking times?”
Grace reentered the room then, quickly stepping in to defuse the situation before Vanessa got herself into trouble. “Thursday evening, did you say?” she asked. “What time on Thursday evening?”
The detective peered at her, eyes narrowed. “Where were you on Thursday evening?”
“Well, I . . . I was at work on Thursday,” Grace said. “I was in the surgery until six, I suppose, or maybe a little after. We’ve got a review coming up and there’s a lot of paperwork, and after that I took Marguerite her Diovan because she forgot to pick it up again, and—”
“Marguerite?”
“She’s a patient.”
“Is it usual for you to make house calls?”
“Not really, no, but Marguerite lives just around the corner from the surgery, in one of the harbor cottages, and she’s . . . well, she’s rather lonely, so I try to drop in on her from time to time. As I say, she’d not picked up her blood pressure medication, so I took that round and then she offered me some supper, which was very welcome as I’d been rushed off my feet and hadn’t got round to doing any shopping, so we ate and—”
“What did you eat?”
Grace shrugged. “Um . . . French onion soup. Salad. We each had a glass of red wine and then coffee.”
“What time did you leave?”
“I stayed a little while, because, as I say, she’s lonely. It was still light, though. Still light, but the water was over the causeway, so . . .” Grace looked at the tide chart on the kitchen wall. “Sometime between eight thirty and nine thirty it must have been.”
“The tide was in?”
“It was coming in.” Grace glanced at Vanessa, who was staring out the window, didn’t appear to be listening at all. “It was just about too late to cross over.”
“Just about?” the detective repeated.
“Well,” Grace said, “if you were in a four-by-four and you knew what you were doing, you could have made it . . .”
“The island isn’t private property, you know,” Vanessa said, suddenly rejoining the conversation. “Anyone could have come across. People do, especially in summer, to walk up to the rock.”
“At night?” the detective asked.
“In the evening,” Vanessa replied pointedly. “Depending on the weather, the sunset can be breathtaking.”
Grace frowned, chewing her lower lip. “Vanessa,” she said quietly, “you don’t think . . . he wouldn’t have tried to get back over, would he? When the tide was coming in?”
Vanessa raised her hand to her mouth, eyes suddenly bright with tears. The detective, though, was shaking his head. “That can’t be it, our witness would have seen that, wouldn’t they? And in any case, his car would have been found by now.”
Vanessa scraped her teeth over her lower lip. “There was an incident a while ago—six, maybe seven years?” She looked to Grace for confirmation; Grace nodded. “It was before I lived here. Someone got into trouble on the causeway, their car was washed away, and it was weeks before it was found.”
“But there was a storm then,” Grace said. “There was a terrible storm.”
The detective looked at her for a long while. “And the day we’re talking about?”
“Calm,” Grace replied. “It’s summer. Most of the time this bay is dead calm.”
The detective nodded slowly, looking back at his notes. He turned once more to Vanessa. “Can you give me the name of the hotel you were staying in while you were in Glasgow?” he asked.
Vanessa tipped her head back, sighed. “I wasn’t in a hotel,” she said, looking him dead in the eyes. “I was staying in Douglas Lennox’s pied-à-terre on Blythswood Square. If you ask him, he’ll probably deny it. He’s frightened of his wife. He thinks if she leaves him, she’ll take him to the cleaners.”
The detective looked from Vanessa to Grace and back to Vanessa again. “You have a sexual relationship with Mr. Lennox?”
Vanessa pressed her lips together, as though to stifle a smile. “He’s a gallerist who shows my work. We sleep together occasionally.”
The detective pushed back his chair and got to his feet. “All right if I take a look around, Mrs. Chapman?”
Two days later, more police came, a dozen of them, roaming all over the island just as Vanessa had feared they would. They searched the house, they went up to the rock and looked over the edge, they hunted through the wood. They found nothing save, in the studio, traces of blood. “Mine,” Vanessa told the detective. “I dropped a vase and cut myself picking up the pieces.” She held up her still-bandaged hand.
In the house, the phone kept ringing, and Vanessa couldn’t afford to ignore it any longer, not with the police hanging around; she had to field angry calls from Douglas, hysterical ones from Isobel.
She glided through it all, glacially detached, her face a mask. She answered all their questions: was he depressed (a little, sometimes, he was grieving, his girlfriend died in an accident six months ago); did he have money problems (yes, yes, yes, I’ve told you, yes); do you think he might have taken his own life (—).
The blood turned out to be Vanessa’s, just as she’d said it was.
A month or so after the police visited, a fisherman in a boat a couple of miles southwest of Sheepshead Island found a black wallet in his nets; it had Julian Chapman’s credit cards inside it.
They found no other trace of him or of his car.
He was gone.