Page 1 of The Blue Hour

1

In the chastening chill of a dazzling October morning, James Becker stands on the footbridge, hip hitched against the handrail, rolling a cigarette. Beneath him, the stream runs black and slow, the water close to freezing, oozing like treacle over rusty orange stone. This is the mid-point of his daily commute, which takes a full twelve minutes from the Gamekeeper’s Lodge, where he lives, to Fairburn House, where he works. Fifteen minutes if he stops for a smoke.

Coat collar up, glancing quickly over one shoulder – he might appear furtive to an outsider, though he’s no need to be. He belongs here, astonishing as that may be. Even he can barely credit it. How can he – fatherless bastard of a supermarket checkout girl, state-school boy in a cheap suit – be living and working here, at Fairburn, among the bluebloods? He doesn’tfit. And yet somehow, through hard work and dumb luck and only a minor bit of treachery, here he is.

He lights his cigarette and checks over his shoulder one more time, looking back at the lodge, warm light spilling from the kitchen window, turning the beech hedge golden. No one is watching him – Helena will still be in bed, pillow clamped between her knees – no one will see him breaking the promisehe made to quit. Hehascut down – to just three a day now – and by the time the water freezes, he thinks, he’ll pack them in altogether.

Leaning back on the rail, he draws hard on his cigarette, looking up at the hills to the north, their peaks already dusted with snow. Somewhere between here and there a siren wails; Becker thinks he glimpses a flash of blue light on the road, an ambulance or a police car. His blood rushes and his head swims with nicotine; in his stomach he feels the faint but undeniable tug of fear. Smoking quickly, as though it might do less damage that way, he flicks the dog-end over the rail and into the water. He crosses the bridge and crunches his way across the frosted lawn towards the house.

The landline in his office is ringing when he opens the door.

‘’Lo?’ Becker jams the handset between his shoulder and chin, turns on his computer and pivots, reaching across to flick the switch on the coffee maker on the side table.

There’s a pause, before a clear, clipped voice says, ‘Good morning. Am I speaking with James Becker?’

‘You are.’ Becker types in his password, shrugs off his coat.

‘Right, well.’ Another pause. ‘This is Goodwin, Tate Modern.’

The phone slips from Becker’s shoulder; he catches it and presses it to his ear once more. ‘Sorry, who?’

The man on the other end of the phone exhales audibly. ‘Will Goodwin,’ he says, his cut-glass vowels exaggerated by enunciation. ‘From Tate Modern in London. I’m calling because we have a problem with one of the pieces on loan from Fairburn.’

Becker stands to attention, his fist tightening around the handset. ‘Oh,Christ, you haven’t damaged it, have you?’

‘No, Mr Becker.’ Goodwin’s tone drips restraint. ‘We have takenperfectly goodcare of all three of Fairburn’s pieces. However,we have had cause to withdraw one of the sculptures,DivisionII, from the exhibition.’

Becker frowns, sitting down. ‘What do you mean?’

‘According to an email we received from a very distinguished forensic anthropologist who visited our exhibition this weekend,DivisionIIincludes a human bone.’

Becker’s burst of laughter is met with bottomless silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ Becker says, still chuckling, ‘but that is just—’

‘Well might you apologize!’ Goodwin sounds murderous. ‘I’m afraid I do not share your amusement. Thanks entirely to your curatorial incompetence, in my very first exhibition as director and the gallery’s very first post-pandemic show, we find ourselves in the position of having inadvertently displayed human remains. Do you have any idea how damaging this could be for us as an institution? It’s this sort of thing that gets peoplecancelled.’

When finally Becker gets off the phone he stares at the computer screen in front of him, waiting for Goodwin to forward him the email. This complaint – if you can call it that – is obvious nonsense. A joke perhaps? Or possibly a genuine mistake?

The message appears at the top of his inbox and Becker clicks. He reads the message twice, googles its sender (a well-respected academic at a major British university – an unlikely joker) and then clicks on ArtPro, Fairburn’s cataloguing software, to search for the piece in question. There it is.DivisionII, circa 2005, by Vanessa Chapman. Colour photographs, taken by Becker himself, illustrate the listing. Ceramic, wood and bone, suspended by filament, float around each other in a glass case fashioned by Chapman herself. The ceramic and the bone are identical twins: fragile spindles of pure white, fractured at their centres and bonded together with lacquer and gold.

The first time he saw it, he thought it must have been sent bymistake. Sculpture? Vanessa Chapman wasn’t a sculptor, she was a painter, a ceramicist. But there it was, beautiful and strange, a delicate enigma, the perfect puzzle. No explanatory note, only the briefest mention in a notebook, where Chapman talked about the difficulties she’d had putting together itsskin, the glass box encasing the other components. Indubitably hers, then, and now his. His to research, to catalogue, to describe and display, to introduce to the world. It was shown, briefly, at Fairburn House and since then has been viewed by thousands of people – tens of thousands! – on loan at galleries in Berlin and Paris and most recently in London.

A human bone! It’sabsurd. Pushing his chair back from his desk, Becker gets to his feet, turning to face the window.

His office is in the public wing of the house, looking out over the east quad. At the centre of a lawn as neat and green as baize stands a Hepworth bronze, its curves burnished by morning light, the sloping convex walls of the hollow at its heart shimmering green. Through that oval space, Becker spies Sebastian striding quickly across the grass, his phone pressed to his ear.

Sebastian Lennox is the heir to Fairburn – once his mother shuffles off, Sebastian will own this house, the lodge Becker lives in, the quad, the Hepworth and the fields beyond. He is also director of the foundation, so not only Becker’s landlord, but his boss, too.

(And his friend. Don’t forget that.)

Becker watches as Sebastian skirts the bronze, his smile a littletoowide, his laugh audible even at this distance. Becker turns slightly and the movement catches Sebastian’s eye; he squints, raising one hand in salute, and spreads his fingers wide, indicatingfive. Five minutes. Becker steps away from the window and sits back down at his desk.

Ten, fifteen minutes later, he hears Sebastian’s footsteps in thehall, and a moment after that Sebastian bounds into the office, a golden retriever in human form.

‘You’re not going tobelievethe call I just had,’ he says, pushing a hank of blond fringe from his eyes.

‘It wasn’t from Will Goodwin, was it?’

‘God, yes!’ Sebastian laughs, collapsing into the armchair in the corner of Becker’s office. ‘Wetting himself about getting cancelled. He called you too, then?’

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