Page 34 of The Blue Hour

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’sa 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 nothertreasures, 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 mayliterallybe 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 imaginesher 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, wood smoke. 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 wifi. 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 grey 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 tojust 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 sombre. ‘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 shetalked, 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 towards him. ‘Will you do the honours?’ she asks, nodding towards 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.

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