Page 10 of The Blue Hour

I thought I had been forgiven for the Douglas incident, but I was wrong. When I got back from London I got the old one-two.

The jab: he is seeing Celia Gray again – and it’snota fling, he says he loves her.

The cross: while I was away he took one of my Italy pictures (‘Naples Seafront’) to ‘a dealer friend of Celia’s’ and sold it.

I can’t describe how I felt; it wasn’t just despair, it was darkness like I have not known before, it was hatred. Sometimes his cruelty takes my breath away – as though his infidelity is not enough, he helps himself to my pictures, too, and the money I have worked for.

I have to be single-minded, I have to put work at the heart of mylife.

And I have to leave because, if I don’t, I think I might kill him. Or he me.

9

Driving back across the causeway, Becker thinks he sees something in the rearview mirror. A flash of blue, not the blue of the sky or the sea but something brighter, unnatural, out of place. A blue like a strobe of light. He stops the car and climbs out. The air is damp, there’s a fog drifting onshore – already parts of the island are obscured from view. There’s nothing at all on the hillside that looks like it doesn’t belong there. He stands for a moment, looking around him, his body vibrating with the faint thrill of fear. Down on the seabed with the haar closing in, he can imagine the horror of getting caught by the tide. He is not a strong swimmer. He climbs back into the car and drives, too fast, bouncing over stones and thumping into potholes, all the way to the mainland.

So, he thinks grimly to himself,that went well.

At the far end of Eris village is a pub. Becker pulls into the car park and sits for a minute, hands on the wheel. He longs to be at home, but he cannot face the drive. The anxiety he felt earlier in the day has returned, a heavy sensation pressing against his temples, against the back of his neck; he is gripped by the certainty that if he starts off now, with dusk falling, he’ll never get home.

He takes out his phone with the intention of calling Helena – she’ll talk some sense into him, she never fails – but three missed calls from Sebastian make his mind up for him. He climbs out of the car and walks into the pub.

It is not quaint. A rectangular room with a dark wooden bar and a few tables, it’s plain, shabby and empty save for a trio of young men at a table in the far corner and a middle-aged woman reading her phone behind the bar.

The woman looks up and beams at him. ‘What’ll you have, pet?’

‘I was actually wondering if you had a room, just for tonight?’

‘Oh, we do!’ she says, turning around to grab a couple of keys from the board behind her. ‘You’ve a choice in fact, the big room or the wee one. Wee one’s cheaper, but no en suite.’

He opts for the larger room, which, like the bar itself, is functional but not welcoming. It seems clean, though, and above the smell of stale beer that permeates the place, he catches a whiff of something tempting. Pastry, he thinks. A pie?

Back downstairs in the bar, Becker consumes a very good steak-and-ale pie washed down with a pint of bitter while he reads through the rest of the notes and articles in his file. He is searching – hopelessly, he fears – for a way back in, for some piece of information, some point of connection that might allow him to get back through Grace Haswell’s front door.

Chapman didn’t give many interviews – perhaps because she was difficult, as the critics said, or perhaps because the critics insisted on devoting quite so many column inches to how difficult she was. Even at the height of her success, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, she rarely spoke about her work in public. After her husband’s disappearance in 2002 and her subsequent withdrawal from the solo show planned at Douglas Lennox’s Glasgow Modern Gallery, she never spoke to the press again.

He closes his laptop and slips it into his bag, picks up his glass and returns it to the bar. The landlady has been joined by her husband, Becker assumes – a skinny man with a pink face who perches at one end of the bar, reading the local paper.

‘That pie really was excellent,’ Becker says to the landlady, who inclines her head graciously. She eyes him for a moment.

‘You looking for a holiday cottage out here?’ she asks.

‘Oh no,’ Becker replies, shaking his head, ‘I came out to see Grace Haswell. On the island.’

‘Oh, Dr Haswell!’ She raises an eyebrow. ‘You’re a pal, are you?’

He shakes his head again. ‘No, no. I’m … uh, a curator, at a museum. Down in the Borders. We – the museum, that is – inherited some of Vanessa Chapman’s art after she died.’

‘Oh, aye. That’s you, is it? We were ever so sad about Mrs Chapman. She was a lovely lady. Kind. Bohemian, wasn’t she? Glamorous. Popular with the gentlemen.’ She gives him a wink.

Her husband glances up from his paper and shoots her a dark look. ‘No trouble to anyone,’ he mutters, scowling at Becker. ‘Neither she nor the doctor. Kept themselves to themselves. No trouble to anyone.’

‘Well,’ his wife says pensively, ‘there was that thing with the mechanic—’

‘Are you not needed in the kitchen, Shirley?’ the landlord growls. Shirley shrugs, smiling sweetly at Becker, and disappears somewhere out back. Becker is about to take his leave when the landlord begins to mutter again.

‘Retired, you know,’ he says.

‘I’m sorry?’

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